Opposition leader Garry Kasparov comments on mass anti-government protests in Russia this past weekend. While police estimate attendance to be 40,000 people, most independent analysts put the figure between 80,000 – 100,000.

Freedom Never Freezes Over
By Garry Kasparov
February 6, 2012
Kasparov.ru

The success of the February 4 protest exceeded even our greatest expectations – the number of participants surpassed our most optimistic predictions several times over. So it’s strange to hear such intense discussions about how the birth of civil society in Russia is only just beginning now.

Tens of thousands of people who came out into negative twenty degree Celsius weather to an organized opposition march put forth concise political demands to the current government and demonstrated unwavering decisiveness in insisting on their constitutional rights. Between the two rallies on Bolotnaya Square, more has passed than simply eight weeks – an entire historical epoch has passed. The protest against mass falsifications during the State Duma elections on December 4 has precipitously turned into a categorical rejection of Putin and a demand for his unconditional withdrawal from Russia’s political scene. All the talk about the danger of overpoliticizing the protest movement has been refuted by the dynamic growth of the number of participants and the heightened energetic fever pitch of the demonstrations.

February 4 also gave us an answer in the argument of whether or not there can realistically be constructive cooperation between disparate political forces in organizing mass anti-Putin demonstrations. The organizational committee’s fears that there could be possible conflicts between activists from leftist, liberal, and nationalist-patriotic wings were dispelled during the rally on Bolotnaya, where a singular stream of people merged under different-colored flags without breaking down into any chaotic clashes. We can say for certain that civil society has passed the test of political maturity. Ideological differences were relegated to the back in the face of a shared enemy, fatal for our country and for all of us.

The Putin regime, steeped in lies and corruption and having legalized complete lawlessness, has now brought together millions of Russian citizens who, under the slogan of “Russia without Putin,” see the possibility of having their social and political demands fulfilled. For leftists, this means the battle against oligarchic capitalism and for social justice. For the nationalists who have joined the protest movement, it’s the prospect of creating a united political nation that will put the interests of Russia above partisan ones. For liberals, the main issue is creating fully-working democratic institutions and establishing effective protection for civil rights, which in principle is a general demand of today’s entire protest movement on the whole.

This national agenda is not strictly bound to March 4, since it’s already obvious that none of the “opposition” candidates allowed by the Kremlin to run for president are in any state to take upon themselves even the most minimal commitment to dismantle the Putin regime. Those who refused to participate in the February 4 march and rally, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov, thereby signed statements attesting to their political impotency, and Prokhorov’s activeness boiled down to intentionally placing a column of his own supporters at the front of the march, giving off a promotional effect to show he participates in anti-Putin demonstrations. However, unsurprisingly, Prokhorov’s own quasi-political activities are no departure from the typical ethics of Russian oligarchs, who are accustomed to leeching off the fruits of other people’s labor.

The effect of the unbelievable burst of civil activeness in the center of Moscow was only highlighted by the crippled pro-Putin rally on Poklonnaya Hill, which combined the worst qualities of Soviet formalism and Putinist corruption. In comparison with the harsh but essentially nonviolent rhetoric used on Bolotnaya, Putin’s fans devolved into hysterics, spewing verbal abuse and curses against dissidents and openly calling for violence and bloodshed. A photo of Sergei Kurginyan with saliva running down his chin couldn’t be a better illustration of what the watchdog of the regime really looks like.

But there’s no need to pay attention to the Kremlin’s ideological epileptics. We already know that there are many of us, and with considered, concerted actions we can make the agony of the Putin regime as painless for our country as possible. To save our country, a large, diverse crowd of people came out to demonstrate on February 4. And regardless of the biting cold, they stood on Bolotnaya Square under Russian flags, imperial tricolors, red flags, and orange banners, and, putting all that aside, listed to the voice of Yury Shevchuk, who sang a song about a homeland…

Dear friends and compatriots! I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year in 2012. It is not just one of those New Years when we traditionally wish each other happiness, good fortune, and success. It’s the kind of New Year when we will have the power to effect a great deal of change. We are living at a unique historical moment, one when we have the opportunity to determine our fates, the fate of our country, the fate of the entire world. People often get opportunities to achieve real change, but we too often thoughtlessly pass them up. I want us not to miss these opportunities in 2012.

Separately, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to my friends and comrades from the United Civil Front, Solidarity, and the National Assembly, those who have already spent many years defending the ideals of freedom and justice, fearlessly standing against all the power of the repressive apparatus of the Putin regime. I wish you courage and resilience, my friends! I believe that, joined together in 2012, we can end these twenty years of turmoil and lay down the foundation of a new, free Russia. A Russia where the words “this is our country” will become an opposition slogan and an element of pride for everyone who live here.

And, despite how traditional it is, I want to say again – I wish all of you good fortune, health, success, and happiness!

In light of continued mass protests calling for new elections in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he is willing to meet with opposition leaders – but cannot identify who they actually are or what they want. In response, Georgy Satarov, a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin and the current president of the InDem Foundation, writes this rebuttal.

Putin’s Deceit
By Georgy Satarov
December 29, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

On Tuesday, December 27, Putin made an official statement with the essential point that the protesters don’t have a positive program. While the candidate for president has recently separated himself from the protesters to the most extreme extent possible, I, by contrast, am allowing myself to speak out, albeit delicately. What Putin said was deceitful to the fourth degree.

First of all: It is difficult to imagine a more positive program in today’s Russia than what’s been formulated on Moscow’s city squares: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t violate the law.

Secondly. The government itself is not in any condition to propose any sort of sensible or well-reasoned program that adequately reflects the situation in the country. Moreover, it isn’t even in any condition to carry out the mediocre programs that it actually does propose. A typical example would be the war on corruption.

Thirdly. The protesters on Moscow’s squares constitute our civil society. Their diversity is their resource. And a singular program does not suit its nature. Programs are usually presented by separate fragments of civil society – parties, public associations, etc.

Forth. If something sensible, cohesive and positive has come about in the form of a program, then it has been proposed precisely by civil society. There are so many examples of this that I’m afraid to try and number them. The fact that candidate Putin doesn’t know this is not a problem of society, but a defect of the candidate in question, who, on one hand, organically does not see society, but on the other hand does not need any real actual programs, aside from a program to refine its own ranks.

A lie repeated over and over can feign to be the truth, but will never become it.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

Sergei Udaltsov, one of the most quintessential and tireless figures of the Russian opposition, has been ill from a hunger strike in a Moscow jail for nearly a month. His supporters, who were denied a permit to rally in his support tomorrow, are adamant that the charges against him are fabricated and politically motivated. Concerned about his deteriorating condition, fellow opposition leader Garry Kasparov writes this address in his support.

Hold On, Sergei!
By Garry Kasparov
December 28, 2011
Kasparov.ru

In response to the demands of the rallies that took place on Sakharov Prospekt, the Russian government has decided not to mobilize the press services of the Kremlin or White House. Sergei Udaltsov’s ten-day jail sentence on more fabricated charges for administrative legal violations speaks to the fact that the government does not plan to give in to the first demand of both rallies – to free political prisoners. The dishonorable Judge Borovkova, aptly referred to by someone in the courtroom as “Your Evilness,” is using her ruling to try and to paint Sergei Udaltsov as a malicious hooligan who is constantly committing crimes.

In fact, in this situation the government is demonstrating the behavior of a street gang, accustomed to attack defenseless people in alleyways and then crawl away like a coward when someone strong, cool and collected shows up. In trying to hide its fear before the growing protest movement, the Putin camarilla is plotting a reprisal against the courageous oppositionist, languishing already for an entire month behind bars and now a de-facto hostage. The fight to free Sergei Udaltsov – which, considering the deteriorating condition of his health brought on by a lengthy dry hunger strike, is already becoming a fight for his life – is a test of the ability of Russian citizens to have their demands met while protesting authoritarian despotism.

The slogan “One for all and all for one,” familiar to us since childhood, is often heard on Sakharov Prospekt and should serve as a rule for action today.

I would also like to address Sergei Udaltsov.

You’ve shown everyone – friends and foes – your unbending will and courage, so now your main task is to preserve your health and life. Never before has Russia’s left movement needed a young, charismatic leader capable of replacing these self-important Communist Party elders, who have taken on the disgraceful role of the Kremlin’s political indentured servant. So start eating again, Sergei, and next year we’ll drink at the funeral of the Putin regime!

One of the conclusions that can be reached from the December 4 elections is that the “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has, once again, brilliantly lived up to its name. Cheating and thievery have ceased to even be an open secret, and it involved not only the massive falsifications that the party of power needed in order to hold on to their crumbling power vertical, but also the sharp rise in civil activeness, with large number of people unexpectedly refusing to play the role of silent viewers in the Kremlin’s marionette theater.

Experts in electoral math will soon undoubtedly be able to show us graphics of United Russia’s actual results. The unnatural vote spread across the various regions of the country, along with the numerous violations documented by observers at polling stations and in electoral commissions, will provide irrefutable evidence that Churov’s agency worked to over-fulfill their plan at the rate of a Stakhanovite.

By all accounts, United Russia’s objective results even across the entire country aren’t above 30 percent, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg the party in power suffered a crushing defeat, loosing not only to the Communist Party, but even, most likely, to A Just Russia. This casts doubt upon the professional integrity of our so-called sociological services, whose “public opinion polls” predicted just a week ago that United Russia would have the support of 53 percent of the population. But if the Foundation for Public Opinion and the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion aren’t ashamed of their Kremlin-provided roofs, then one would hope to hear from the Levada Center, which holds its reputation more dear, an explanation as to why their predictions turned out to be even more optimistic than the final results of Mr. Churov’s agency.

Another result of December 4 is that we can be certain that the period of social apathy that Russian society succumbed to ten years ago is now a relic of the past.

But today’s main question, of course, is about the readiness of the systemic opposition to begin a fight against United Russia’s dictate. It would be naive to say that the Communist Party, LDPR, or United Russia together with Yabloko are going to achieve a full nullification of the falsified elections, but the people who voted for them have the right to expect, at minimum, a demand to hold a recount where mass violations are uncovered, and the criminal prosecution of officials guilty of committing and hiding these crimes.

In addition, the systemic opposition is going to have to resolve the question of fielding candidates for president. Now that it’s been spooked, the government is going to try to minimize its risks and prevent the rise of any notable figures who are capable of uniting the protest electorate, which is exploding in front of their eyes. It’s not worth waiting for any revelations from the Communist Party or LDPR. Although, the Communists are completely capable of finding a more suitable candidate than Zyuganov, who feels at home in his comfortable role as the government’s sparring partner. But for A Just Russia, if it is, contrary to expectations, prepared to challenge the Putin regime, one potential solution comes to mind. Oksana Dmitrieva, whose success in a presidential election is something out of a science fiction novel – at least in the two capitals – could become the candidate whose presence makes a second round entirely plausible.

The events of the forthcoming week will put an end to the dispute that the nonsystemic opposition has been having for the past several months. The various plans of action for December 4 rested on one key point of disagreement: whether or not conditions exist where the Kremlin-fed systemic opposition could agree upon a bunt against Putin. A more favorable situation than the present is impossible to imagine.

If Mironov and Ko demonstrate their readiness to begin a fight to dismantle the regime by unleashing a real pre-electoral campaign attacking the national leader with the same principles with which they were ready to “flush the Party of Swindlers and Thieves down the toilet,” then I will be ready to publicly admit my mistake in judging the ineffectiveness of existing electoral mechanisms.

But if the actions of the systemic opposition lead to the emasculation of popular protest and turn out to be just a storm in a teacup that ends with the redistribution of Duma portfolios and financial flows, then I expect that my opponents will publicly admit that it is impossible to change the Putin regime within any sort of framework of electoral procedures and will begin to join in with our collective efforts to create an alternative list of voters. Incidentally, this is one of the very rare cases where I’d like to admit that I’m wrong…

In light of this past Friday’s Russian March, noted political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky examines the growing Russian nationalist movement and its origins in the Second Chechen War and ongoing conflicts in the North Caucasus.

The Russian March to Nothingness
By Andrei Piontkovsky
November 3, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In a country where the political regime is made up of a longtime diarchy of bandits, Putin and Kadyrov, the popular slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” cannot be seen as something nationalistic or patriotic. Regardless of all its apparent radicalism, it is a deeply ingratiating, slavish, plebeian exhortation.

It means “we want to feed all of our own crooks and thieves: Putin and Abramovich, Sechin and Chemezov, Medvedev and Fridman, Deripaska and Timchenko, the Rotenburg brothers and the Kovalchuk brothers.

It means “we want to return Kadyrov’s criminal offshore accounts here to Putin’s domestic “lawful” arena, even if it requires an third, even bloodier, Chechen war.”

“We want an empire, but without black-assed people” – this is the fatal contradiction of the Russian national consciousness, decisively entangled in its own complexes.

Russians do indeed feel humiliated, offended, and robbed within their own country. As do Russian citizens of other nationalities.

Kadyrov’s palaces, motorcades and parties with Western and Russian superstar-prostitutes of both genders that cost millions in budget money are just as disgusting as the even more extravagant bells and whistles of Mr. Botox. But they have the same attitude towards the “feeding” of the overwhelming majority of North Caucasians as Abramovich’s yachts have towards ocean cruises for participants of the Russian March.

Russian laws definitely don’t operate in Chechnya. But does anybody really still believe that they operate in Russia?

The problem of the North Caucasus is much deeper and more catastrophic than the ratio of the amount of budget transfers to different regions.

What’s going on in the North Caucasus is increasingly surpassing the bounds of a serious regional conflict and is turning into a central existential problem for the Russian Federation. All of the mistakes, failures, and crimes of Russia’s post-communist government in the realms of security, economics, national policy, and federative organization have become entwined in the Caucasus.

Why did we fight two wars in Chechnya? For Russia’s territorial integrity. But territorial integrity does not imply scorched, unpopulated earth. We fought to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. But we simultaneously destroyed their towns and villages with planes and salvo rocket systems (and the “Grad” system in open fields, with Putin and Stalingrad behind us) and kidnapped innocent people whose corpses were later found bearing signs of torture.

We have constantly proved to the Chechens the very opposite of what we proclaimed – we proved to them with all of our behavior that they are not citizens of Russia and that we have not considered them to be citizens of Russia for a long time already – but their towns and villages are Russian. And we proved this convincingly not only to the Chechens, but to everyone in the Caucasus. They were good at memorizing the visual lessons we taught them.

And this is the fundamental, tragic absurdity of the war that determined its inevitable result.

We lost the war against the Chechen separatists. One of the most brutal field commanders, Ramzan Kadyrov, won. He has such a degree of independence from the Kremlin that even the Soviet officers Dudayev and Maskhadov would never even dream of.

Having had to choose between the very bad and the monstrous as a result of his pre-election policies, Putin, I have to give him credit, chose the very bad. Admitting his defeat, he gave all the power in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his army and paid him compensation. In response, Kadyrov formally declared not so much loyalty to the Kremlin as his own personal union with Putin. The monstrous choice would have been to continue the war to the point of total destruction – in the spirit of Shamanov and Budanov.

Ms. Latynina, with her poetic nostalgia for the romantic times of the Circassian genocide, clearly sees this choice as a shameful rejection of the white man’s burden and a cowardly capitulation before the liberal-leftist dictatorship of multiculturalism. Oh, how wonderfully those shining Russian aristocrat officers butchered the natives back then, and even wrote in their journals – the Yezhednevny Zhurnals of the time – such intoxicating lines: “I f… and cry!”

War on Chechen separatism in the North Caucasus has been replaced by a different war, one generated by the first – the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

Over that time , Islamic terrorism has crept over the entire North Caucasus, where its number of followers has grown and the structures of its Jamaats have strengthened. And just like during the Chechen wars, we are increasing the number of Islamists with our policies. Take, for example, the rhetoric of our (at least for the time being) supreme commander, who is apparently experiencing a certain syndrome of a lack of brutality compared to Uncle Volodya. The entirety of his reaction to the terrorist attacks on Russian territory consists of uninterrupted calls to “utterly destroy” and punish everyone, even “those who do laundry and cook soup for the terrorists.”

Knowing the moral integrity of the counter-terrorism soldiers from Khanty-Mansiysk, sent off to the Caucasus as if on a temporary work assignment, Mr. Badminton, or at least his groomers, can’t be unaware that the only result of these calls is going to be a marked rise in the number of extrajudicial murders of people who are in no way involved with militants and reprisals against relatives of suspected terrorists. And this, in turn, increases the number suicide bombers and leads to new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

This is the twelfth year we’ve been fighting this war without understanding the scale of ongoing tragedy – the entire country is sliding into a civil conflict between nationalities – which the government’s policies are entirely responsible for creating, having long burned this wick from both ends.

In the Caucasus, having unleashed and lost the war, the Kremlin is paying compensation in exchange for a sham submissiveness not only to Kadyrov, but to criminal elites in all other republics. This is used to purchase palaces and the golden pistols that dangle off the rumps of local leaders. But the young, unemployed residents who have lost touch with their communities take off to join in Allah’s wars or are squeezed out of the Caucasus onto the streets of Russian cities.

But that is where a generation of children whose parents have utterly and forever lost out because of the failed economic reforms of the past twenty years has already grown up.

Televised cultural rulers and other masterminds have explained to them that all of their problems have been caused by “uncles in pith helmets” and “non-indigenous criminal gangs” who want to break them apart. Gangs of teenagers from working-class backgrounds who have been deprived of their future have a hard time getting to “uncles in pith helmets” or the heavenly residents of Rublevka, and so they unleash their accumulated fury by beating to death “persons of a non-indigenous skin color.”

And today the two armies of desperados, deceived and robbed by, as it were, the exact same people, have been thrown at one another.

Mentally, there is a growing gap between Russian and Caucasian youths, who have grown up in the midst of a brutal war, first Chechen, and then Caucasian in general.

Young Muscovites march around the city with cries of “f… the Caucasus! F…!” and the young mountain youths walk around the streets of Russian cities in a demonstrably defiant and aggressive fashion. They have developed the psychology of the victors. In their minds, Moscow has lost the Caucasian war.

In mind and in spirit, the Caucasus and Russia are vastly separate entities. Although neither the Kremlin nor the North Caucasian “elites” are prepared to make a formal separation.

The Kremlin is still living with its phantom imperial illusions of wide zones of privileged interests that lie far beyond Russia’s borders, and local leaders, starting with Kadyrov, don’t want to turn down the transfers from Russia’s budget.

The Islamists don’t want to separate, either. They have dreams of a caliphate that includes quite a large part of the Russian Federation.

A situation so humiliating for Russia cannot go on forever.

But there is no easy way out. In today’s political system, with this government, there is no way out in general.

An attempt to put an end to Putin’s “Kadyrov project” by force, as is openly advocated by the professional Russian – poor Zhirinovsky – and therefore by default the majority of demagogues in the Russian March, would mean a full-scale third Chechen war that would become a military, political, and moral catastrophe for Russia. Even those who hate Kadyrov and the Chechens who suffer because of him, and moreover his personal army, would never agree to submissively return to the times of the total tyranny of the federations. To make the same mistakes three times in a row would be total lunacy. Even Putin, the most obstinate about the Chechen issue, understands that.

But that wouldn’t stop the “party of blood,” which hasn’t managed to come to terms with the loss of Chechnya as a zone to feed off of and, perhaps more importantly, as a zone to exercise its drunken power over the lives and deaths of any of its inhabitants. The Kadyrov project has stripped many federal siloviki of these two basic pleasures, having made them exclusive to Kadyrov, and they are genuinely hateful because of this.

They say the price of their support is possible allies in the clannish, inter-Kremlin dismantlement – Kadyrov.

The siloviki who have an infernal desire to work again in Chechnya, of course, are mentally closer to Putin and his gang than to anyone else. But they understand perfectly well that Putin will never purge Kadyrov.

Putting an end to the Kadyrov project would be an official admission of Russia’s defeat in the second Chechen war and the proclamation of a third. This would be a return to 1999 from a much worse starting point. It would mean the total political delegitimization of Putin as “the savior of the fatherland in 1999.”

Our best political publicists have equally convincingly and passionately explained to us that our children were burned in Beslan and the hostages suffocated in Nord-Ost for the sake of the greatness of Russia and the triumph of her geopolitical interests. And where now is this greatness or this triumph?

Putin will definitely become one of the first political victims of the third Chechen war. During all twelve years of his rule I have said repeatedly that the Putin regime is not compatible with the life of the country. But God forbid we escape from Putin at such a price. Moreover that it wouldn’t let us escape from Putinism and its roots.

In 1999, the most notorious Kremlin blackguards (their names are well-known) who lead Operation “Heir” entered into an alliance with siloviki who were thirsty for revenge and, after Basayev’s campaign to Dagestan and the apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and the failed one in Ryazan, unleashed the second Chechen war in order to bring their own, as they thought at the time, obedient marionette to power. It is they who are they real murderers of Kungayeva, Budanov and the other tens of thousands of people, Chechen and Russian, who fell during their small triumphant war.

Several days ago I spoke at a conference in Washington on the subject of the reset in relations between Russia and the US organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which traditionally represents the interests of the Republican Party. The fact that the main presenter was Speaker of the House of Representatives and Republican John Boehner shows how seriously the Republican Party is going to look at this issue during the upcoming electoral cycle. And there is nothing shocking about this. Every other foreign policy issue, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq, is linked in one way or another with the actions of the Bush administration, while the idea for the reset in relations with Russia and the bets that were hedged on Medvedev – or, more specifically, on a split within the tandem – was thought up and materialized by the Obama administration. Putin’s imminent return to the post of president makes obvious the failure of Obama’s attempt to support “liberal modernizers” in the Kremlin, which the Republicans will undoubtedly remind him of before the next election.

What was more unexpected was the attention this conference got within the Kremlin. As quickly as the next morning, Foreign Minister Lavrov advised the House speaker to use more traditional lines of communication with the current government and interparliamentary contacts. There were more than a few Russian journalists in the auditorium, who usually don’t indulge their attention in events like this that lack official status. The first question to presenters is always posed by the head of the Washington bureau of ITAR-TASS, Andrei Shitov. He did not entertain any particular notions of variety. I, for instance, was asked a question from the traditional Kremlin propaganda arsenal: why are the views of the opposition not popular among the Russian people? When asked my counter question – when is the last time he saw me on federal television – he shrugged his shoulders and said he couldn’t remember. Interestingly, this dialogue was preserved in the official ITAR-TASS report, where my presentation was noted in totally correct fashion. But two days later the news resource Infox released a piece of Kremlin agitprop about how bloodthirsty Kasparov is calling on the US to make war against Russia.

The Kremlin’s reaction is completely understandable, because the main stress of my presentation was on the need to pass a law on sanctions against particular Russian civil servants. This piece of legislation, already looked at by the Senate, proposes introducing sanctions against figures involved in the persecution and killing of Sergei Magnitsky, and could be expanded to include the list of those involved in persecuting the company Yukos and another bunch of high-ranking civil servants who have violated both Russian federal law and our country’s international obligations.

The Russian government reacted extremely severely to the threat to their financial interests – they warned the Americans of retaliatory measures that would include an end to transit to Afghanistan (the penetration of the Taliban into Central Asia, inevitable in the event of an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, is fraught with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in this volatile region – a factor, of course, that is not remotely significant compared to the ability for Russian bureaucrats to purchase foreign property unhindered). As could be expected, the Obama administration, having made the reset in relations with Russia one of its primary foreign policy trump cards, is doing everything possible to keep this bill from passing. That’s why we have this secret list drawn up by the State Department that the Americans hastened to trumpet and which immediately received a rebuff from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which announced that a retaliatory Russian list will be worse than the American one.

It’s obvious that no secret lists are going to have any effect. The Putin regime is afraid most of all of the publicity of this issue. But the bill has a chance of being passed, as it is already supported by many prominent Republicans and Democrats. Paradoxically, the top-priority issue of the reset – having Russia accepted into the WTO as soon as possible – prevents the White House from disrupting the consideration of the Magnitsky Act in the US Senate. Completing negotiations over the WTO issue makes it necessary to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, without with the US cannot ratify Russia’s entrance into this organization, and despite the anachronistic character of the amendment, which was adopted back in 1974, many senators and congressmen continue to see it as the singular link between the observance of human rights and bilateral relations. In such a situation, it is totally probable that there will be an exchange of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which prejudices the commercial interests of the entire country, for Bill S1039, which affects the concrete interests of unbridled civil servant thieves.

Leaders who have been stripped of democratic legitimacy know that their power is based on the absolute loyalty of their apparatus and on maintaining an image of toughness and invincibility. Putin’s inability to protect the interests of bureaucrats and oligarchs on such key issues like visas and foreign bank accounts will inevitably lead to a collapse of the entire system.

That is why the Kremlin feels that an attack on Putin’s clique is comparable to declaring war on Russia – an attempt to pass off the interests of Putin and his cronies as the interests of the entire country has become the de-facto cornerstone of all current Russian foreign policy. In all of my presentations abroad I have called on representatives of Western countries to learn to separate the interests of Putin’s oligarchy from those of the Russian people. At the conference in Washington I specially noted that banks, not tanks, need to be used in the battle against the Putin regime. A regime that grows on unlimited corruption and made control over financial flows the goal of its existence, vulnerable most of all precisely on the banking front.

P.S. The full text of my presentation was already published the day after the conference and anybody who wants to can read it and look for any calls to war against Russia. I also hope that the editors of the generally quite serious news resource Infox.Ru will soon find some translators and publish a retraction of Nikolai Petrov’s article “Kasparov Calls for War on Russia.”

“We are asking Americans and Europeans not to send observers,” Kasparov said in an exclusive interview. “You understand Putin will get whatever he wants. What is the point of pretending this is an election? It’s a charade. Don’t interfere with it, just don’t pay respect to the charade.”

The opposition leader had similar words about the reset itself:

Kasparov, a former world chess champion, was critical of both presidents and blunt about the reset. “It’s a disaster,” he said. “From day one they bet on Medvedev as a counterweight to Putin. The whole idea of reset was founded on the false assumption Medvedev was an independent politician. He is not.”

Later in the interview, Kasparov acknowledged that his views on Obama’s Russia policy has not won him any friends at the State Department. “They have no interest in hearing my very specific views,” he said. Kasparov spoke Tuesday at the conservative Heritage Foundation for a conference critical of the reset with Russia.

…

Kasparov did not limit his criticism of U.S.-Russia policy to Obama. He said the Bush administration had failed to account for Putin as well. “This is not a problem of this administration. To a certain degree they inherited it from the Bush administration,” he said.

Kasparov said Bush largely ignored Putin’s consolidation of power during his term because the Russian had promised considerable counterterrorism cooperation after the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush and his first national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were naïve in “betting on this so-called liberal wing in the Kremlin and expecting Putin to walk away quietly,” he said.

A new memoir out by Condoleezza Rice indicates that the Bush administration at least realized that the Putin they thought they knew was not the Putin they found at the end of his term:

Kasparov said he largely agreed with Rice’s take. “That is the right assessment,” he said. “But the mistake was made in the first meeting. Putin was looking around and testing the water and he quickly discovered the West was weak.”

Kasparov said Putin is a master of psychologically exploiting Western leaders in order to get the freedom of action he desires in his own sphere of influence, the Soviet Union’s former republics and satellites.

“Since Hitler there was no leader as successful at playing the psychological games with leaders in the Western world,” Kasparov said. “The difference is Hitler used tanks. Putin is using banks.” Kasparov later clarified that he was not accusing Putin of launching a genocide against an ethnic minority and that his analogy only applied to how two authoritarian leaders played Western leaders off each other.

Read the full interview at the Daily Beast.

The interview is also available in Russian here.

The president’s supporters were hard pressed to maintain their illusions after September 24, when Medvedev announced that he would not be running in the 2011 presidential elections: the gauntlet would instead be passed back to Putin, now likely to remain in office until at least 2024. Some, like Arkady Dvorkovich, were vocal in their disappointment. Others continue to invest their faith in the president’s purported agenda of modernization. It is the latter that opposition leader Garry Kasparov confronts in this new op-ed.

Turning the Chessboard
By Garry Kasparov
October 7, 2011

After the public humiliation of Medvedev on September 24, one would think that even his most devout followers, the ones who tried in vain to find the reform-minded characteristics of a “liberating tsar” in the pale image of Putin’s shadow, had ought to have turned their backs on him. The first one to emerge from their stupor was Sergei Aleksashenko (naturally, the people with the most direct connections to money will react to the operative changes of a situation quicker than others), who decided to refute our image of Medvedev as a weak leader without any willpower. After that, Igor Jurgens told us unabashedly that, regardless of the apocalyptic predictions that he and Yevgeny Gontmakher have been eagerly feeding the Russian press over the course of the past year, life is not going to end after Putin’s return to the Kremlin. “We will continue modernization, because there’s no other option,” – with this phrase, one of the main ideologues of systemic Russian liberalism has once again confirmed that the members of the Institute of Contemporary Development saw the campaign in support of Medvedev as a purely tactical measure related to additional opportunities to influence the situation in the country. Whereas it is impossible for liberals of the court to have strategic differences with the Putin regime.

Today, Ekho Moskvy Editor-in-Chief Aleksei Venediktov also spoke to both the country and the world about Medvedev’s grandiose reforms that we have failed to notice, reforms that do no less than begin to dismantle the Gulag. Medvedev, it turns out, has begun deep reforms in the sphere of human and civil rights, a sphere that not Khrushchev, nor Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin were able to take a stab at. Nikita Sergeyevich, of course, did not have enough of Medvedev’s polish, and he had a proletarian disdain for bourgeois civil rights and freedoms, but it’s his name that’s associated with the release of millions of Gulag prisoners – and, by the way, the denouncement of the cult of personality (Stalin’s, not Putin’s).

Venediktov writes that “the time has come to flip the chessboard and try to see all of this from white’s point of view.” First of all, I don’t understand at all why the Kremlin government is a priori given the white pieces, and, moreover, chess analogies are unlikely to be appropriate when talking about the Putin regime. Chess has clear rules that are obligatory for both sides, and the Kremlin, as we known, are always free to change whatever rules don’t fit into their Procrustean bed of political expediency. In fact, Aleksei Alekseyevich, I would like to note that “flipping the chessboard” is a term from the movie Gentlemen of Fortune, where it became customary to wipe the pieces off the board and smash it over the head of one’s opponent. When talking about chess, we usually say that the board is “turned.” And so, having turned the board, we see the position from white’s side. I see the Yukos case; I see the deaths of Magnitsky and Aleksanyan; Taisiya Osipova, who is being bullied by jailers and prosecutors with impunity; I see a tightening of so-called anti-extremist legislation; there’s a monstrous growth of corruption alongside the total lawlessness of the security services, I see that; I see a political space that has been completely paved over – but deep reforms in our system of rights, excuse me, I don’t see. Obviously, I lack the proper qualifications…

A Case of Misoperation

The terrible tragedy at the Yaroslavl airport has given new relevance to the discussion about the deterioration of Russia’s air fleet. Indeed, statistics eloquently testify to the fact that the number of airplane catastrophes in Russia even outstrips those in African countries. Affairs in our aviation industry are in a deplorable state – the ruling Russian regime, having freeloading off of deteriorated Soviet infrastructure for the past two decades, has turned out to be incapable not only of developing the only branch of industry that could easily compete in the global market, but even of keeping it afloat. Costing it an incredible amount of strain, the arms race forced the USSR to maintain parity with the US in the aerospace industry, which allowed Soviet aviation, in addition to high-class military technology, to produce fully reliable civilian aircraft. While they do have clearly inferior-quality engines, avionics, and, of course, interior, the aerodynamic characteristics of Soviet planes nevertheless frequently surpassed their foreign colleagues.

On a recent episode of the Polny Albats radio show on Ekho Moskvy, Rector Konstantin Sonin of the Russian School of Economics disdainfully dismissed my mention of the successes of the Soviet aerospace complex – there was no place for the support of the domestic aviation industry in Gaider’s macroeconomic model. In lock-step behind his spiritual advisor Yevgeny Yashin, who tirelessly insists on triumphantly establishing a market economy in Russia, Sonin can only throw up his hands and lament the fall of domestic airplane construction.

The market, you know, regulates supply and demand on its own, and any interference by the state in this delicate process only disturbs the harmonious work of the market mechanisms that have been set up in our country. I would like to ask our homegrown liberal economists how the existence of AvtoVAZ figures into this harmonious scheme, since it continues to release its antiquated products as if nothing had happened and survives only thanks to various forms of state protectionism. In the company of refined British gentlemen, the invisible hand of the market does its work, but everything in the Russian “market” economy is governed by the avaricious paw of administrative resources, always followed by the muzzle of a civil servant grinning in anticipation of some new tasty morsel.

But the cars coming off AvtoVAZ’s conveyor belts have always brought a certain immediate advantage to the people controlling the production process, whether it be the mobsters of the tumultuous ’90s or Putin’s cronies of the stable ’00s. But investment in airplane construction has, as we know, the longest period of returns, stretching far past the limit of the commercial accounts of Russian civil servants and oligarchs. No major infrastructure projects in Russia can begin without the state’s direct involvement, and civil servants, depraved by quick and easy gas and oil dollars, see no reason to authorize long-term investment.

Because of its inextricable natural defects, the oligarchic and bureaucratic capitalism that has been established in Russia under the guise of “liberal reforms” has been incapable of providing the country with a model of sustainable economic development. Mikhail Prokhorov’s bravado-filled monologue has demonstrated once again the complete creative impotence of the Russian billionaires who flood the Forbes lists.

However, externally, the catastrophe in Yaroslavl differs markedly from other similar cases. First of all, the flight was far from typical, which, considering the very high social status of the passengers, presupposes a heightened level of attention to the quality of the flight. And the plane itself was built not so long ago – in 1993, and its last technical inspection was on August 16.

The initial speculation about the reasons for the catastrophe, which had to do with a defective motor or poor-quality fuel, have been refuted, which leaves the remaining possible explanations as either a mistake by the flight crew or a mistake by the ground crew that regulate flights at the airport. Of course, it is too early to come to any conclusions, but the basic circumstances at the airport on the day of the tragedy allow us to speculate that it was precisely the chaos caused by the arrival of the high-level leadership to the World Economic Forum that was the main reason for the catastrophe.

The plane crashed when it failed to gain enough height after takeoff, which almost certainly was caused by an insufficiently long time on the runway or something that appeared in its way. Either of those causes would be directly connected with the work of the airport’s ground crew responsible for takeoffs and landings. There’s no doubt that, on that day, the dispatchers were accompanied by Federal Protective Service officers called upon to ensure the safety of the flight of the state’s highest-ranking figures. We can also recall the crash of the Polish leadership’s plane in Smolensk, when the Russian dispatcher evidently acted on the orders of the leadership, which gave him orders based on political expediency and not aviation security.

By the way, it is not likely to be anytime soon that we will learn the name of the security services officer who probably gave the fatal order to shorten the length of time before takeoff for the Yakovlev-42 that crashed on the runway at the Yaroslavl airport. In today’s Russia, investigations of catastrophes that are in one way or another connected to the high-level leadership are never resolved. Or, the guiltiest parties are always said to be those who, by the will of fate, got in the way of the definitively unrestrained “bosses of the country.” And we can already see how the barometer of the investigation, which is subject to the inexorable laws of the pull of Russian politics, is indicating that the actions of the deceased pilots to supposedly “incorrectly choose the mode of engine operation” was the main reason for the tragedy…

P.S. This cover for Profile magazine can be wholly qualified as a frightening prophecy. The Yakovlev-42 was indeed unable to take off in Yaroslavl, and it very much seems that, even if only indirectly, Dmitri Medvedev had a hand in it. Medvedev himself continues to soar in the political skies all the same, although he doesn’t look much like an eagle. He’s more of a hummingbird – a tiny bird with beautiful wings who buzzes loudly, is extraordinarily greedy, and most importantly, is capable of flying backwards.

Translated by theOtherRussia.org.