Denouncing the party he head for all of three months as “a Kremlin puppet,” Prokhorov complained that Surkov was the “puppeteer” who “long ago privatized the political system, who has been misinforming the country’s leadership for a long time, who is putting pressure on the mass media and trying to manipulate the citizens.” In this vein, he insisted, the Kremlin had orchestrated a plot to get the oligarch kicked out of the party.

Created in 2008 as a Kremlin-backed merger between the Union of Right Forces and two other parties, Right Cause has long been dismissed as a “marionette” that, despite its general loyalty to the center, garners almost no votes during elections. The introduction of Prokhorov as party leader gave rise to speculation that the billionaire’s unlimited financial resources could raise the party’s profile and give it a tint of legitimacy as an opposition movement. Unlike the vast majority of actual opposition parties, Right Cause has already been granted official registration by the Russian Justice Ministry, thus allowing it to field candidates for elections.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Kremlin may have been motivated to shut Prokhorov out of Right Cause out of fear that he was truly stepping out of line. As the Moscow Times reports:

The real reason that the Kremlin sacrificed the Right Cause party was because its former billionaire leader Mikhail Prokhorov had wanted to organize Orange Revolution-style tent camps in a faux opposition drive to win seats in the State Duma elections, a senior party official said Tuesday.

Right Cause, a pro-business party whose popularity hovers around 2 percent, needed a massive injection of support to clear the 7 percent threshold in the December vote, so Prokhorov planned for followers to camp out in the streets in tents, like during the 2004 Ukrainian protests that eventually toppled the regime of President Leonid Kuchma, the official told The Moscow Times.

Another party official confirmed his remarks. They both spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal from the Kremlin.

But the idea could not have appealed to the Kremlin, which ardently opposed the Orange Revolution and spent years ensuring that no such public protests took place in Russia.

The Right Cause official said Surkov was pleased that Prokhorov left the party last Thursday, citing him as saying during a private conversation: “It was good that we got rid of him before he was elected to the Duma.”

Surkov’s office had no immediate comment about the claim Tuesday.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Whistleblowing blogger Alexei Navalny has sued the Investigation Committee for failing to officially notify him of its decision to reopen a fraud case against him.

Navalny, who has stepped on many toes with his corruption exposés, said he took legal action because he has not been presented with details of the charges against him, as required by law. The court has scheduled the first hearing for June 22 to evaluate Navalny’s claims against the Investigation Committee.

“A suspect has the right to know what he’s being suspected of exactly,” Navalny said on his LiveJournal blog Thursday, adding that he can’t defend himself without an official charge. “Nevertheless, the only information I got about the case was from the media.”

The 2-year-old case alleges that Navalny forced Kirovles, a state-owned timber company in the Kirov region, into a harmful contract in 2009 that cost the company 1.3 million rubles ($46,000) in monetary damages. It relies solely on the testimony of former Kirovles head Vyacheslav Opalyov.

Navalny, who plans to cancel his trips and conferences abroad until the case is settled, said his lawyer tried repeatedly to request details about the case but was ignored. He said he did receive a two-sentence letter from the Investigative Committee on Wednesday, but it was hardly the official document he was supposed to receive.

Navalny has suggested that state-owned bank VTB, state pipeline monopoly Transneft or the ruling United Russia party might have fabricated the case against him, allegations they deny.

The Moscow Times provides a thorough account of the festivities:

Gays crashed a Communist rally, ultranationalists protested migration and the president’s Twitter account, the mayor got pelted with eggs, and hipsters rallied for raccoon power during unusually colorful celebrations of the May Day holiday in Moscow.

Police said only several of the 40,000 people to rally in Moscow on Sunday were briefly detained, Interfax reported. But about 50 anarchists were held in St. Petersburg.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was targeted with eggs and mayonnaise while addressing the city’s biggest rally of 25,000 people gathered in front of City Hall on Tverskaya Ulitsa for a joint event by the ruling United Russia party and trade unions, The Other Russia [political party - theotherrussia.org ed.] said on its web site.

The sole successful strike saw an egg grazing Sobyanin’s pant leg, the statement said, adding that, to the mayor’s credit, he did not interrupt his speech. The incident went ignored by state-owned media covering the rally.

A brief scuffle broke out at the second-biggest rally, staged downtown by the Communist Party, when about 100 gay rights activists unfurled rainbow banners and attempted to join the main crowd of 4,500 people, Interfax said.

Riot police separated the two groups and held two gay activists for questioning, Interfax said.

Hundreds of ultranationalists staged a rally in northern Moscow, waving black, yellow and white banners associated with imperial Russia and chanting slogans such as “Migrant, time to go home,” “Down with the Yiddish yoke” and “Twitter! Medvedev! Lies!” — the latter a reference to President Dmitry Medvedev’s fondness for blogging.

Police did not intervene with the sanctioned rally, which was accompanied by a car with loudspeakers, anti-xenophobia watchdog Sova said. The banned Movement Against Illegal Immigration said on its web site that some 2,000 protesters attended the rally, but Sova put their number at 600, unchanged from last year.

The liberal Yabloko party marked the holiday by staging a picnic on the artificial isle Fantasy Island in western Moscow, which houses luxury real estate owned by tycoons and senior officials.

Critics have long accused developers of illegal construction on the island, and Sunday’s event protested the fact that cottages block free access to the coastline, which is a violation of environmental legislation, the party said on its web site. It said activists had to use boats to reach the isle’s coast.

In St. Petersburg, police detained some 50 anarchists who tried to join a sanctioned trade union rally, the news web site Fontanka.ru reported. Many detainees wore masks imitating the anarchist vigilante from the graphic novel “V for Vendetta” and carried knives and brass knuckles.

Among the more unusual events were flash mobs called Monstratsia — a play on the Russian word for rally that comes to roughly mean “monsterization.” The event, initiated by performance artist Artyom Loskutov in Novosibirsk in 2004, spread this year to cover Moscow and some 20 cities in Russia and abroad.

Monstratsias, usually timed to official holidays, require participants to carry nonsensical banners and chant meaningless slogans. This year’s crop in Moscow included offerings such as “Yummy,” “Gas, Oil, May,” “We could be working instead” and “Power to Raccoons.”

During the concert, star rock critic Artemy Troitsky presented anti-awards to police officers (in absentia, of course) for epitomizing the very worst of their profession. Now, he’s facing up to two years in jail for just that.

As the Moscow Times reports:

The country’s most prominent music critic faces two years in jail for crossing into public activism and handing an “anti-prize” to a policeman he named the worst cop of the year.

Artemy Troitsky, who was also hit with a fine of 130,000 rubles ($4,600) on Wednesday, told The Moscow Times that he views the case as punishment for his activism but promised not to back down.

The case was opened on a complaint by former traffic policeman Nikolai Khovansky, who was the first to arrive at the site of a fatal road accident involving a LUKoil vice president in February 2010.

Khovansky was also the first to put the blame on the two women killed in the accident, Olga Sidelnikova and Vera Alexandrina, whose Citroen collided with the car of LUKoil vice president Anatoly Barkov on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt.

The case sparked much outrage, with media and many citizens accusing the police of covering up for Barkov and his driver. City police, nevertheless, ultimately cleared Barkov and his driver.

Troitsky targeted the police officer during a November show by the rock band DDT, naming him among the recipients of a prize for the worst police officers.

Interestingly, Khovansky’s daughter attended the show, during which DDT frontman Yury Shevchuk also named the year’s best cops.

Khovansky, who has since retired, filed a defamation lawsuit against Troitsky and won the case Wednesday in Moscow’s Gagarinsky District Court.

Troitsky also faces a separate criminal case for insult over the same incident, with a hearing scheduled for May 3, Interfax said. The offense is punishable with prison time.

The 55-year-old critic, known for his ties to Russian rock greats, did not attend the Wednesday hearing, saying he was ill, but he promised to appeal.

He said Khovansky was used by “puppeteers” who sought to punish him. “I believe they are people who don’t like my public activities,” he said by telephone, without elaborating on who might be behind the lawsuit.

“I am not a politician, but I am not the kind of guy who is going to surrender,” Troitsky added. “The more they pressure me, the more I will resist.”

In addition to the campaign against Barkov, Troitsky participated last year in protests against the partial destruction of the Moscow region’s Khimki forest, slated to go in order to make way for a state-backed highway. The protests ended in failure, with the government authorizing the road’s construction in December.

In a recent article, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov argued that the country’s ruling regime is degrading faster and faster every day. Indications of this, he wrote, include the government’s work to persecute lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny and the unscrupulous behavior of backtracking police Sergeant Artem Charukhin. The overall picture is one of a government spiraling hopelessly into the abyss.

Kasparov isn’t alone in his assessment of the state of Russia’s regime. Writing in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, columnist Yulia Latynina remarked that Kasparov’s story of his 2007 arrest was a wake-up call for her: “The cops brought him coffee and asked: ‘So when’s it going to collapse?’ As I recall, it was only at that moment that I understood clearly that even the paid-off cops that the oppositionists hate and Russian citizens fear are in no way defenders of the government. They envy their bosses and hate them for zipping around in Mercedes while they do the hard work that has to be done.”

In this version of the same article written for the Moscow Times, Latynina offers a scathing assessment of “Russia’s extraordinarily weak leaders.”

It Smells Like February 1917
By Yulia Latynina
March 2, 2011
The Moscow Times

The smell of February is lingering in the air — February 1917, that is.

I am not talking about the revolutions in the Middle East but about Russia’s extraordinarily weak leaders and the growing contempt that the leading public figures and ordinary citizens are showing toward them.

Look how quickly the seemingly ironclad vertical power structure can evaporate into thin air. For example, Bolshoi prima-turned-celebrity Anastasia Volochkova had no qualms about publicly thumbing her nose at United Russia when she quit the party after revealing that she was “tricked” into signing a group letter in support of prosecuting former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the 1970s, no Soviet citizen would have even thought about snubbing the Communist Party.

Then there was Natalya Vasilyeva, spokeswoman to Judge Viktor Danilkin in the second criminal case against Khodorkovsky, who revealed that the verdict was written by the Moscow City Court and forced on Danilkin. Certainly Vasilyeva would have never dared such a move if she thought that her life were at risk.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities are worried about their loss of control over citizens who blatantly display insolence and contempt toward the current regime. Pressed to the wall, the only thing President Dmitry Medvedev could say to deflect attention from these embarrassing weaknesses was his Putin-like bluster in Vladikavkaz last week, when he implied that foreign powers are conspiring (again) to disintegrate Russia.

Let’s not forget Russia’s courts. Billionaire Gennady Timchenko filed a libel lawsuit against opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, and Nemtsov turned around and filed a slander case against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Timchenko sued Nemtsov for writing that Putin’s old friends — himself, Yury Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers — were “nobodies” before Putin came to power but quickly became billionaires during his reign.

Nemtsov responded to the charges by presenting documents to the court showing that, before Putin came to power, Timchenko had a yearly income of 326,000 euros ($450,000) in 1999, while Forbes estimated his fortune at $1.9 billion in 2010. Nemtsov also presented a document showing that Timchenko had flown gymnast Alina Kabayeva along with Putin’s friend Nikolai Shamalov, the nominal owner of Putin’s $1 billion Black Sea palace, in his private jet.

Nemtsov filed a lawsuit against Putin for stating during his annual televised call-in show that Nemtsov and others had embezzled billions of dollars along with tycoon Boris Berezovsky in the 1990s.

The only thing Putin’s lawyers could present as evidence in court was a Wikipedia article about Berezovsky that made no mention of Nemtsov but did state that Berezovsky financed and organized Putin’s presidential election campaign in 2000.

The notion that Putin is a leader who instills fear and discipline among bureaucrats and citizens is a myth. One WikiLeaks diplomatic cable revealing that most of Putin’s decrees went unfulfilled is enough evidence in and of itself.

With Putin looking more like Tsar Nicholas II, the smell of February 1917 is clearly in the air. It is the smell of a confused, wounded and weakened leader and a bureaucratic class standing dazed before the public eye. It is the smell of blood in the water.

It is not an especially pleasant odor because as experience has shown in impoverished countries led by corrupt and incompetent rulers, this kind of February 1917 can easily bring about another October 1917.

Last month, dozens of photographs of what has become known as “Putin’s Black Sea Palace” were dumped onto Ruleaks, the Russian analog of Wikileaks. The pictures gave new life to allegations that Russian taxpayers have been unknowingly funding a grandiose vacation home for their prime minister’s “personal use.” Presidential Affairs chief Vladimir Kozhin denied the administration had any involvement in the project, which whistleblowing businessman Sergei Kolesnikov claims has eaten up $1 billion in construction costs so far.

The photographs piqued the curiosity of environmental activists at the Environment Watch North Caucasus group, who say the sprawling complex is being built illegally on protected land. Despite being briefly arrested, the activists were able to release their own pictures of the palace, which is apparently crawling with federal guards. Then, last week, Novaya Gazeta published documents that, as they put it, “not only confirm the Office of Presidential Affairs was involved in the construction of the facility in Gelendzhika, but also point directly to Vladimir Kozhin as the civil servant who approved the project.”

In a column written for the Moscow Times, business magazine editor Alexei Pankin explains what all of this talk about luxury dachas could mean for Russia’s current political situation.

The Great Dacha Wars
By Alexei Pankin
Feberuary 22, 2011
The Moscow Times

Russia is headed for some major shocks. I came to that conclusion after reading a news release with the heading: “Yabloko Party Activists Detained at Putin’s Black Sea Dacha.” The key word here is “dacha.”

Late last year, businessman Sergei Kolesnikov wrote an open letter informing President Dmitry Medvedev that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was having a $1 billion palatial residence built for himself on the Black Sea shore, and the money to finance the project was obtained by extorting money from businesses. Kommersant, Dengi, Vedomosti and Novaya Gazeta newspapers and Radio Svoboda all ran stories on the subject, and Sobesednik newspaper reporter Rimma Akhmirova was recently arrested at the construction site. Investigations by journalists have generally corroborated Kolesnikov’s claims.

Instead of being elated by the triumph of the free media over corruption, I am deeply concerned. The problem is that every time there is a public fight against “dacha corruption,” it ends with a new round of hardships for ordinary citizens.

For example, in 1990-91, rather modest dachas owned by nine ministries from the Soviet Union’s powerful military industrial complex were bought out by top officials from those ministries. Then, in summer 1991, democrats from the Supreme Soviet attacked this blatant attempt at nomenklatura privatization. A coup d’etat was all but unavoidable. The captains of military industry had no qualms about shedding their Communist ideology; it was their dachas they were prepared to defend tooth and nail. A nomenklatura putsch was staged in August 1991, and that soon led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lost power when he was at his dacha in Foros, Crimea, the construction of which had met with significant opposition even during the perestroika years. He was first kept in isolation there by the people who had staged the putsch and later brought to Moscow by the victorious democrats to be subjected to public humiliation.

In 1992-93, the ideological struggle between the “democratic” President Boris Yeltsin and the “red-brown” Supreme Soviet boiled down to the media outlets controlled by both forces reporting on how the other side was building luxurious suburban dachas for themselves while the people were going hungry. The end result was the order for tanks to fire on the White House and the passage of the authoritarian 1993 Constitution.

The next round of the dacha wars was fought in the international arena. During the 1999 State Duma election campaign, reporters from the pro-Luzhkov NTV showed aerial shots of an enormous castle in southern France that they claimed belonged to the Yeltsin family. The pro-Yeltsin ORT television station aired live reports from a collection of luxurious cottages in Spain and claimed that they belonged to the owners, senior managers and leading journalists of NTV. Since then, there hasn’t been any free, balanced coverage of elections.

The next dacha war was initiated in the fall. Reports on Luzhkov’s opulent dachas outside Moscow and in Austria was a key weapon used by state-controlled media to discredit the capital city’s mayor, who had fallen out of favor with the president.

And now we have the latest dacha scandal, and this time it involves Putin. For the time being, all talk about Putin’s palace has been confined to the print media, but when we start seeing aerial shots of the castle on our television screens, you can be sure that another wave of political upheavals will soon follow.

So it was no surprise when the prime minister announced today that Russia’s leading political party, of which he is the head and which controls the vast majority of positions in Russia’s federal, regional, and local government bodies, actually operates in a “competitive political environment.” Just weeks earlier, Medvedev was seen on his video blog discussing the stagnation in Russian politics that has resulted from a lack of political competition.

As the Moscow Times reports:

United Russia has to deal with tough political competition in the country, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Monday, contradicting President Medvedev’s recent criticism that the ruling party risks becoming an appendix of the executive branch because of a lack of competition.

But Putin’s remarks, made at a United Russia conference in Khabarovsk, failed to impress opposition politicians or analysts, who said the ruling tandem was actually acting in accord as it prepares the ground for State Duma elections next year and the presidential vote in 2012.

“We operate in a competitive political environment and, of course, face criticism from our opponents,” Putin told the conference focused on the development of the Far East in Khabarovsk.

Putin, who heads United Russia without being a card-carrying member, said “well-grounded criticism” was useful and “helps avoid many mistakes,” but did not elaborate.

He also called on United Russia to “think about people” and establish a broader dialogue with voters, working for their welfare and “not for elections.”

“To win in a competitive environment, we need to prove with real actions … our ability to solve real problems of the citizens,” Putin said, according to a transcript of his speech published on his web site.

He said achieving this was within the party’s power.

His remarks about political competition were out of tune with a speech that Medvedev gave last month on his video blog, where he said United Russia was close to becoming part of the executive branch and the country faces stagnation because of a lack of political competition. “If the ruling party has no chances to lose anywhere at anytime, it becomes ‘bronzed’ and ultimately degrades, too,” Medvedev said, winning immediate praise from senior United Russia officials for his remarks.

But the two cogs of the tandem simply speak to different audiences, with Medvedev promising to Western observers to step up democratization and Putin assuring ruling classes inside the country that the current system will undergo no drastic changes in the elections, said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Medvedev makes more abstract statements aimed at the West, while Putin directly addresses the elites inside the country,” he said by telephone.

Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the Yabloko liberal party, which failed to win seats in the State Duma in the 2007 elections, dismissed Putin’s remarks, saying, “United Russia has always enjoyed favored conditions.”

United Russia’s critics have linked the party’s success to electioneering and support from executive branch for years, but to little avail. The Central Elections Commission and courts routinely reject complaints.

After October 2009 regional elections that were widely criticized as the dirtiest in years, United Russia decided to stage four regional development conferences, including the one in Khabarovsk, this year in what analysts called an effort to negate the effect from a public growing dissatisfied with its performance and lack of political alternatives. The conference resemble to be part of a campaign for the 2011 Duma elections, Mitrokhin and Petrov said.

“United Russia never quits campaigning,” Mitrokhin said.

Meanwhile, Medvedev kept speculation alive about whether he will run for re-election in 2012, saying in interview with the Polish media released by the Kremlin on Monday that “doesn’t exclude such a possibility.”

Putin, who was last asked about his 2012 plans on CNN’s “Larry King Live” last week, dodged the question.

While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

Western Russia has been suffering from unrelentingly scorching temperatures since mid-June, with no apparent end in sight. The heat has been so intense that spontaneous wildfires have been springing up over the past month both in large cities and more rural areas.

Aside from the resulting toxic air quality, the fires are responsible for the deaths of at least 48 people and the destruction of about 3,000 homes. The Emergency Situations Ministry has admitted that some of them are “out of control,” and a state of emergency has been declared in seven different regions. Critics blame the ministry and the Russian government overall for failing to properly fund and manage the country’s firefighting forces.

Writing for the Moscow Times, award-winning journalist Yulia Latynina discusses what the Russian government’s handling of the fire crisis says about its current state of development – and why it is totally unacceptable by contemporary standards.

Putin Sang Songs While Russia Burned
By Yulia Latynina
August 4, 2010
The Moscow Times

Since the first wildfires started a month ago, 125,000 hectares of Russia’s forest have been destroyed in 17 regions, and 40 people have died.

Russia’s statistics on casualties from fires have always differed drastically from those in the West. For example, four firefighters died during wildfires in Washington state in 2001. Nine firefighters died in Colorado in 2002. Eleven firefighters died during Spain’s fires of 2005. Only one firefighter has died during this summer’s fires in Russia.

In developed countries, citizens don’t perish in fires. Firefighters perish. In Russia, it is directly the opposite, and there is a very good reason for this. In so many cases, there are no firefighters to put out the fires. Take, for example, the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where all of its 341 houses burned to the ground and seven people died. There was no fire station in the village, and the two firefighting vehicles on watch drove the other way when they were called to duty.

People don’t die this way in Europe or the United States. This is how people die in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Verkhnyaya Vereya. While wearing a neatly pressed button-down shirt, he promised to severely punish bureaucrats who did not properly fight the fires. In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself. After all, it was Putin who signed the Forest Code in 2007. The code placed the responsibility for defending forestlands on those who had the rights to use them. What an ingenious idea. This means that the Forest Code allows the Khimki forest to be “protected” by those who are now cutting it down.

There were two main groups who lobbied Putin to pass the Forest Code: paper mill owners — one of the biggest being Oleg Deripaska — and real estate developers.

Independent analysts and environmentalists heavily criticized the Forest Code. They predicted several years ago that the code would inevitably result in an increase in wildfires. Even the most loyal United Russia members from heavily forested regions opposed the code, but it was shoved through the State Duma under strong pressure from Putin’s presidential administration.

Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers.

In the modern world, there are no natural disasters but only social ones. For example, the number of victims in an earthquake depends less on its magnitude than on how effectively the state responds to the disaster. The Haiti earthquake is a case in point. And what is true for an earthquake is doubly true for forest fires.

In 2008, there were 200,386 fires in which 15,165 people died in Russia. In the United States for the same time period, there were 1,451,000 fires in which 3,320 people died. Here are the conclusions that can be drawn from these statistics: First, 99 percent of all fires in Russia are not registered. Second, the number of deaths from fires per 1,000 people is 10 times higher in Russia than in the United States.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged what she calls a global crackdown on human rights during a trip through former Soviet republics over the weekend, lamenting a “steel vise” squeezing the life out of social activism.

Clinton arrived in Azerbaijan on Sunday after declaring in Poland that intolerant governments, including Russia’s, are undercutting rights groups whose work is vital to the development of democracy. She said the trend is apparent and growing worse, even in countries that call themselves democracies.

At the palatial residence of President Ilham Aliyev, overlooking the vast, glimmering Caspian Sea, Aliyev and Clinton spoke briefly before reporters and television cameras.

Aliyev stressed the urgency of his country’s territorial dispute with neighboring Armenia. The two nations are in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan that has been under control of Armenian troops and ethnic Armenian forces since a 1994 cease-fire.

“This is the major problem for us and the major threat to regional security,” he said.

At an airport news conference later with her Azeri counterpart, Elmar Mammadyarov, Clinton said they had discussed at length the territorial dispute.

“The final steps toward peace are often the most difficult, but we believe peace is possible,” Clinton told reporters.

“This is a high priority for the United States,” she added. She said the 1994 cease-fire agreement “must be enforced.”

Following her meeting with Aliyev, Clinton gathered with about a dozen Azeri youth activists, including bloggers, to encourage them to speak out in favor of social change.

She said she raised the issue of freedom of expression in her talks with Aliyev.

On Saturday, addressing an international conference in Poland on democracy and human rights, Clinton recalled Winston Churchill’s warning 60 years ago that an iron curtain was descending across Europe. She noted that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that curtain no longer remains.

“But we must be wary of the steel vise in which governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit,” she said.

Among the offenders she cited: Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Belarus, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.

Clinton said her current trip, which began in Ukraine on Thursday and was to include stops in Armenia and Georgia, is intended to demonstrate the Obama administration’s commitment to democracy and human rights.

In Ukraine, Clinton praised the new Moscow-friendly leadership for its pursuit of democracy, skimming over concerns about a rollback of liberties.

At a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Clinton said the Obama administration supports efforts by Ukraine to deepen its relationship with Russia, so long as it also remains open to closer ties to the United States and Europe.

Yanukovych said he views the United States as a reliable strategic partner and is prepared to take new steps to build a stronger partnership.

Clinton also met privately at her Kiev hotel with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost the February presidential election to Yanukovych and remains his political enemy.