Dispatches

dispatches

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dispatches _ on russia

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publisher / simba gill editors / mort rosenblum / gary knight art direction / gary knight operations manager / amber maitland art direction / de.MO / giorgio baravalle design / de.MO / megan hall contributors / jeff danziger mark franchetti andrew meier seamus murphy ilana ozernoy fotodepartament mort rosenblum louise shelley alison smale martin cruz smith andrei soldatov editorial / editors@rethink-dispatches.com art dept / art@rethink-dispatches.com advertising / advertising@rethink-dispatches.com subscriptions / subscriptions@rethink-dispatches.com endowments / endowments@rethink-dispatches.org dispatches is published four times a year by dispatches corporation. dispatches / format: print / ISSN 1945-3329 printed and bound by grafiche milani printed on biberist furioso and fedrigoni arcorpint klavika / process type foundry arnhem / ourtype type foundry

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On Russia is dispatches’ third issue, after In America and Beyond Iraq. We focus each quarter on a critical subject of our time, with writers and photographers who have lived what they report. Our aim goes beyond what and who to the more crucial why and what can be done.

Support has been enthusiastic. One old pro dubbed us, “merchants of depth.” On our Web site, www.rethink-dispatches.com, we explain that dispatches falls somewhere between Gutenberg and Google. Though committed to the heft of words and images on paper, to an objet d’art journal meant to last, we are also in tune with an electronic age.

You can find a mission statement on our site, but its substance can be simply said. “Objectivity,” a tricky word, is essentially a moving target. Facts alone can distort, and they seldom add up to “truth.” But the bedrock tenets of journalism are immutable: integrity, credibility, responsibility, and accountability.

We realize, as one colleague observed, we are heading into heavy seas in a little boat. Small craft tend to do well in rough water; so far, so good. In the end, dispatches is meant for you. Please let us have your thoughts and ideas.

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table of contents

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appendix contributor biographies page 298 some additonal reading page 302 //

a new russia : less evil, more empire / 016 mort rosenblum putin, power, and a new kind of russia / 030 mark franchetti putin’s dream : an energy superpower / 070 andrew meier photo essay : 1860 – 2008 / 080 chart : world oil production / 130 nashi : »ours« as in »not yours« / 134 ilana ozernoy animal farm 2 / 170 jeff danziger fsb : kgb with a vengeance / 176 andrei soldatov crime and non-punishment / 194 louise shelley the seventh continent / 208 alison smale east of the sun : a journey in russia's far east / 224 seamus murphy martin cruz smith : from gorky park to gold lamé / 290 the editors

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from the editors

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a new russia less evil, more empire

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Symbols get no starker than those dueling flags, back in the 1960s, atop embassies on opposite banks of the Congo River. In Brazzaville, a hammer and sickle on the blood-colored Soviet banner rose above walls bristling with barbed wire, topped with guard posts, as forbidding as the Iron Curtain up north. In Kinshasa, even limp in the muggy air, the red, white, and blue of Old Glory marked a higher road to a Free World.

Things were simpler then, provided you didn’t look too closely. A First World (the United States and its democratic allies) vied with a Second World (the Soviet Union and its satellites) for influence within a Third. This last was a catchall of former colonies and assorted states in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. A few had something important to sell. And each had a United Nations vote.

Because Washington and Moscow both had the capacity to blow the other off the map many times over, statesmen did not worry much about nuclear holocaust. Instead, they fought with carrots and sticks; they simply rented friends who could not otherwise be swayed by argument or arm-twisting.

The good guys had their dark side. U.S. colors flew over Kinshasa, for instance, because Washington arranged the murder of Patrice Lumumba, a popular left-leaning leader, and installed in his place a greedy despot named Mobutu who America backed for nearly 40 years.

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When Russia seized the opportunity to establish Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow to win over Africans, most students were appalled at a racist, xenophobic, and corrupt state, a parody of its lofty goals. A few went home to overthrow fragile governments that colonizers had left behind, installing totalitarian regimes with Kremlin help.

As an American news agency reporter in Africa back then, my Soviet contacts were mainly TASS correspondents who presumed I was a spy like them. They were generous with caviar but stingy with useful information. The East-West interplay grew more sophisticated during the 1970s. In 1982, I got a visa to poke around in the belly of the beast.

I had counted on a roots tour. My grandmother, at 12, had made matches until her fingers bled in a Belarus factory. She was an eager firebrand in the 1917 Revolution against the tsars. Then, disillusioned, she spent four years getting the family to America. I was refused permission to visit her old town of Borisov so I took a train that passed through it. But when I stepped onto the platform, a buxom conductor clamped a meaty paw on my shoulder, and she yanked me back aboard. The Soviet Union was that kind of place.

A decade later, back in Moscow, I danced on Red Square the night Communism died. Boris Yeltsin made his fabled leap onto a tank and tipped over the last tottering domino of Soviet power.

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Euphoria was beyond description. In ageless Mother Russia, the slate was suddenly wiped clean. Anything was possible.

America took credit for defeating a system that had, in fact, crumbled from within. President George H.W. Bush made an effort at magnanimity, trying to assuage wounded Russian dignity. Western leaders did not want freelance nuclear scientists on the job market. They feared that lethal flotsam and jetsam of the imploded Evil Empire would end up in dangerous hands. But no one wanted to squander massive aid on an old foe.

The Clinton Administration and its NATO partners worried little about the toothless bear, taking it for granted as they focused on other priorities. Russia would fall in line when needed if it knew what was good for it. By 1994, Foreign Minster Andrei Kozyrev put aside his willingness to accommodate the West.

“It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not,” he told U.S. Ambassador Strobe Talbott. “Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interest to obey your orders.”

Russian hopes evaporated fast. Yeltsin diminished from folk hero to bumbling, bullying drunk. Old Soviet apparatchiks, oligarchs, and mafia lords – overlapping at the most basic levels – seized the loose reins of power to amass private fortunes.

In 2000, West and East had an historic opportunity to chart a common course. George W. Bush and

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// russian hopes evaporated fast. yeltsin diminished from folk hero to bumbling, bullying drunk. old soviet apparatchiks, oligarchs, and mafia lords – overlapping at the most basic levels – seized the loose reins of power to amass private fortunes.

Vladimir Putin, each with fresh mandates, met to take each other’s measure. History is clear enough on how that worked out.

While America’s strength was drained away in Iraq, Putin committed $200 billion to overhaul a military that already had more tactical nuclear weapons than the United States. “The Russian army on the march is a terrifying sight – part Stalingrad, part Mad Max,” Owen Matthews wrote in Newsweek. The article’s headline said it all: “Russia’s military may be no match for NATO’s. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Plagued with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poor rural health care, male life expectancy in Russia is only 59 years. Chinese already outnumber Russians 10 to 1. The United States has twice the population and 10 times the gross domestic product.

Yet, with oil production to match Saudi Arabia’s and vast reserves of natural gas, the humbled nation is now a primordial world force. Russia outmaneuvered America and Europe in Central Asia. As Arctic ice receded, allowing access to petroleum reserves that could dwarf deposits under the Gulf, Russia planted a titanium flag on the sea floor to stake its claim. If less evil this time, the empire is back with a vengeance.

As the dust settled in Georgia, Germany and other European Union states edged closer to Russia. In Berlin, Dmitry Medvedev declared the American century was over. German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodded agreement. Foreign policy is pragmatic;

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noble sentiments aside, national interests usually come first.

Late in 2007, the Russian specialist Dimitri Simes warned in Foreign Affairs that something like the Georgia crisis was all but inevitable. “Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia has not acted like a client state, a reliable ally, or a true friend – nor has it behaved like an enemy, much less an enemy with global ambitions and a hostile and messianic ideology. Yet the risk that Russia may join the ranks of U.S. adversaries is very real today. To avoid such an outcome, Washington must understand where it has gone wrong – and take appropriate steps today to reverse the downward spirit.”

The message is clear enough: A humiliated Russia has had enough bear-baiting.

To fathom this new Russia, dispatches called on perceptive insiders and enlightened outsiders from across a wide gamut.

Mark Franchetti, London Sunday Times Moscow correspondent since 1997, is happy sipping tea in high places or manhandling a motorcycle across remote steppes. Eloquent in five languages, he gets close to his story. He won the 2003 British Press Award for twice entering the besieged Moscow theater to interview Chechen hostage-takers.

Russia has been Russia for a very long time, Franchetti notes, and its reaction to outside pressure

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has remained constant: Push too hard and you bring out the worst.

Andrew Meier, a seasoned Russia hand who left Time to write independently, builds on Franchetti’s theme in a dispatch from Omsk. Siberia is no longer shorthand for “fallen off the edge of the earth.” It booms, as do former Soviet Asian republics where Putin’s hard-nosed diplomacy thwarted an American offensive. Russia, he shows, is the world’s first energy superpower.

Ilana Ozernoy visits the summer camp of Nashi, Putin’s “anti-fascist” movement, which smacks of the Hitler Youth. Nashi means “ours” with a particular twist: “not yours.” Ozernoy is the daughter of an eminent astrophysicist and Jewish refusenik, an intimate of Andrei Sakharov, who took the family to America in 1988. She sees Russia with the clear eye of an inside outsider.

Andrei Soldatov, who keeps tabs on security issues for his investigative site, Agentura, explains how the KGB has morphed into the FSB, a hydra-headed monster with a Kremlin power base, ties to vast fortunes, foreign agents, and police powers that touch all aspects of Russian life.

Alison Smale, International Herald Tribune managing editor, offers poignant reflection from the dacha she visits often with her Russian composer husband.

She has been close to the heart of Russia since the 1980s. As an Associated Press correspondent, Smale frequently talked with Kremlin leaders and dis-

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sidents who later took charge. When the Berlin Wall opened, Smale and a young German woman she was interviewing were the first two people through Checkpoint Charlie.

Louise Shelley, who runs the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Virginia, shows how a parallel economy corrupts Russia. She has testified on Russian mafias in the U.S. Congress, at international tribunals, and in criminal courts. Shelley travels often to Russia, Georgia, and elsewhere in a region where her roots run deep.

Novelist Martin Cruz Smith, whose detective Arkady Renko led so many readers into a snowy, Soviet Gorky Park, has the final word. In an interview, he compares the Russia he first saw in 1973 to the place he visited at length in 2008.

Photographer Seamus Murphy was dispatched to Russia’s Far East, the new frontier of the energy boom that has propelled Soviet remnants back to world power status. Company officials in Moscow and London made promises they apparently never meant to keep. Authorities in Siberia made outright threats. Prevented from photographing oil and gas installations, Murphy set out on a road trip across the lyrical landscape of the remote, insular region from which Russia’s power flows.

What emerges from this mosaic is a Russia far

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different from what anyone imagined on that night we splashed vodka and hugged strangers near Lenin’s Tomb. Hopes and fears have mingled inextricably, and both exceed expectations.

Democracy is off the table, and exceeding limits exacts a price. Nearly 300 journalists have been murdered since 1990, some gunned down in plain sight, others dosed with polonium in the fashionably Russian manner. If state connections are seldom clear, few killers are caught.

But is this hardly the old evil empire. A glance at the new quarterly Russia! depicts one aspect of the new mood. On a recent cover, two male cosmonauts embrace in a soulful kiss among emblematic snowflecked Russian birches. A nightclub scene inside elevates half-clothed hedonism to inspired heights.

Plummeting oil prices hit Russia hard late in 2008. Oligarchs dropped in droves off the Forbes billionaires list, yet they still buy up the Riviera from Monaco to Montenegro as well as fancy urban enclaves in London and New York. Wealth trickles down as never before. Entrepreneurs with good ideas can flourish overnight. Yet a distressingly numerous underclass sees a bleak life that grows steadily worse.

In November 2008, presidents and prime ministers sent effusive congratulations to Barack Obama, but Medvedev was pointedly silent. In a speech, he said a new U.S. administration might devise a more sensible foreign policy. Russia, he added,

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would deploy more missiles to counter a Western threat in Europe.

Clearly, those old watchwords of Ronald Reagan’s are no longer enough. Trust but verify, sure. But then what?

Mort Rosenblum

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mark franchetti

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putin, power, and a new kind of russia

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I have watched the scene out the window of my flat in Moscow thousands of times in the last 11 years, and I still find it compelling. For me, there is no better way to sum up the nature of power in Russia.

Some 400,000 cars pass by every day on Kutuzovsky Prospect, one of the city’s main highways, at its widest a full 12 lanes. The flow is relentless, the noise deafening, even at night. But then it suddenly stops, and the air fills with an eerie silence.

In an operation of military precision, police clear the lanes and block all access routes. Within a few minutes the highway is emptied, down to the last car. It is deserted, frozen in time. Everyone waits.

Then, on the horizon, flashing blue lights and sirens fill the wide road. A motorcade appears.

At speeds of up to 100 miles an hour, an armored dark-blue limousine whizzes by. Traffic wardens stand to attention and salute. The vehicle is flanked by police cars and minivans crammed with men pointing machine guns out the windows.

Inside the limousine, seated comfortably behind drawn curtains as he is driven to work in the Kremlin or to his home in Moscow's leafy suburbs, is either Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strongman, or President Dmitry Medvedev, his handpicked successor.

A stretch of 30 miles is cleared in this fashion, but Russians have long become accustomed to the discomfort of their leaders’ travel arrangements.

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Massive traffic jams ensue but people wait patiently.

Publicly at least, nobody complains. Nor has a single lawmaker ever dared suggest curbing such privileges – or proposed that Kremlin leaders switch to helicopters.

The honor used to be reserved for Russia’s president. But now that Putin has moved from the Kremlin to head the government, it has been extended to the prime minister lest he feel a loss of status. As a result, the ritual can take place four times a day.

Few moments better capture the contempt of the Russian state for its people. Power here is bullying, not democratic. It is there to be flaunted, not questioned. Russia’s leaders may be elected but they are still treated like tsars, and they are really accountable only to themselves.

I first watched this display of power after I moved to Moscow in the spring of 1997 when it was Boris Yeltsin’s show. It has not changed much. By contrast, the wide road could hardly be more different.

It begins along the Roublevka, once a quiet country lane through thick woods of fir trees that led to the small hamlets of summer dachas used by the Soviet intelligentsia. Now transformed into Russia’s answer to Beverly Hills, the area is where most of the country’s billionaires and government ministers live in the ostentatious luxury of their gated compounds boxed in by 16-foot-high fences

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watched by closed-circuit cameras and patrolled day and night by private guards.

In once open countryside now shines Barvikha Luxury Village, an elite shopping complex just down the road from Putin's dacha. Lamborghini and Ferrari have showrooms. Pre-credit crunch, the Bentley dealership was said to sell a car almost every day. Gucci, Prada, and Armani are there too, as is Dolce & Gabbana, with its VIP fitting room decorated in mink.

As they reach Kutuzovsky, Putin and Medvedev speed past the building where Leonid Brezhnev lived. But instead of going by drab Soviet shop fronts, they pass more evidence of Moscow’s giddy transition from diehard communism to rampant capitalism.

There’s the Harley Davidson dealership, the 24hour luxury supermarket where four peaches will set you back $30, the local sushi bar, the fancy Italian restaurant, where thickset bodyguards pace up and the down while inside their patrons feast on lobster fettuccine. Not to mention the lavish beauty salons and designer fashion shops where the wives and mistresses of the well-heeled spend their afternoons – they, too, with their minders in tow, of course.

Towering above Kutuzovsky’s Stalinist buildings is the Moscow Siti – Russia’s new financial district which for years seemed pure fantasy but is now being built. Several glitzy glass skyscrapers already

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have been finished and will soon be joined by Europe’s tallest building, designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster.

The contrast with Soviet times is stunning. But there is no need to go back that far. Just wind the clock back to 1997 when I first moved to Kutuzovsky. Then, battered Volgas, Ladas, and Zhigulis drove by below the windows of my flat. Now every second car is of a foreign brand and every third an SUV, a Merc, or a BMW. Or take mobile phones.

Very few Muscovites had one then. Now even my local beggar Sergei, a 65-year-old former prison convict, who pretends to be blind as he plays the accordion in an underpass a few blocks from me, has his own cell phone.

Moscow is one of the world’s five most expensive cities and must surely be its capital of bling, brashness and ostentatious display of wealth. But, as the locals like to say, Moscow is not Russia.

Millions of Russians still struggle to survive. Travel only 100 miles from the capital, and you’ll find people who live on monthly salaries and pensions that in Moscow will barely buy a fancy dinner for two. The wealth, however, is beginning to trickle down to a rising middle class as well as to other Russian cities.

True, financial meltdown wiped out Russia’s stock market and hit hard most of the country’s

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billionaires, depleting their ranks. Until the summer, they were second only to America’s.

Repercussions will be felt for long and Russia’s economy – which has known only growth during the last nine years – is certain to stall.

At best the boom may be on hold, at worst it could be over, but one thing is for sure: Russia has taken to capitalism with a vengeance.

With the credo of communism long defunct, the brash and swift accumulation of wealth is now the new ideology, the new value system, the new religion. No other country has ever given birth to so much private wealth in so little time. Despised and denounced for 70 years as the root of all evil, capitalism has been embraced in Russia with the fervent passion of the neophyte.

On the surface at least, Russia looks increasingly like the West. And in the last century, the West and Russia have never had as much contact as during the last 15 years or so.

From Manhattan to Chelsea and Knightsbridge, from Sardinia to the Caribbean, Russians are buying up some of the world’s most expensive properties. Sending their children to private boarding school in England and university in America has long been a must.

Until the financial crisis hit, foreign investment increased every year, and Russians had started buying business in the West. Ordinary citizens

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from manhattan to chelsea and knightsbridge, from sardinia to the caribbean, russians are buying up some of the world’s most expensive properties. sending their children to private boarding school in england and university in america has long been a must. //

learn English in record numbers, and more and more travel abroad on holiday at least once a year.

New York and London have sizable Russian communities. Never has there been so much interaction, nor has Western culture ever been so accessible.

After the dramatic fallout between Russia and Britain over the death by polonium-210 in London of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, I had an off-the-record dinner with one of the most senior people in the FSB, as the KGB has been renamed.

The decorated general has spent more than 30 years in the Kantora – the organization – as insiders refer to Russia’s feared secret police. But when we discussed Litvinenko and the damaging diplomatic crisis, what upset him most was that he had to cancel his yearly tour of Britain’s best whiskey distilleries because he had been denied a visa – the Brits suspect the FSB played a hand in Litvinenko’s death. “That,” he said, “was over the top. A personal insult.”

Putin, a cold war veteran who spent 16 years in the KGB, speaks English and German. Medvedev, at 42 Russia’s youngest leader since Tsar Nicholas II, is a liberal-minded lawyer who has no links to Russia’s security services. He practices yoga and is a Deep Purple fan. By nature he is far more open-minded towards the West than any of his predecessors.

The irony, however, is that far from understanding each other more, the gulf between the West and

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Russia has never been so wide. After the war in Georgia, relations between Washington and Moscow are at the lowest since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Talk of a new cold war is exaggerated but for all the contact between us and them the mistrust has only deepened.

Most Russians were genuinely shocked at the ferocity of criticism the West vented during the Georgia crisis. Moscow, they say, did not start the war. It acted in self-defense only after the Georgian army attacked South Ossetia, killing Russian citizens. Nor did the Russians invade Georgia – their operation was a mere incursion to destroy military targets. America is to blame for meddling in Russia’s backyard and arming the Georgians. Finally, most Russians ask angrily, what moral right does the U.S. or Britain have to criticize the Russians for briefly entering Georgia when both have been in Iraq for more than five years?

In the West, the view could hardly be more different. Russia, an aggressive power with expansionist ambitions, provoked Georgia because its proAmerican government wants to join NATO. As in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Moscow aimed to quash a country seeking to escape the Kremlin’s nefarious influence.

Relations between Russia and the West have steadily worsened since the late 1990s. The crisis in Georgia only hardened differences. Nearly 20 years since

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talk of a new cold war is exaggerated but for all the contact between us and them the mistrust has only deepened. //

the end of the Cold War, the misunderstandings are many.

The West sees Putin, who stepped down as president but remains Russia’s most powerful man as prime minister, as an autocrat bent on turning back the clock. Most Russians, however, view him as a savior and wanted him to stay on as president. We think of Russia under Putin as a threat to its neighbors. Russians feel besieged and speak of dark Western plots to weaken Russia. We criticize the Kremlin for stifling democracy but in Russia itself, debating the state of democracy is not a priority. Last but not least, few realize that Russia’s list of grievances is long, starting with a widespread feeling that the West let them down after the collapse of communism.

Some simply shrug: Who cares and why bother?

Well, Russia may be a shadow of its former Soviet self but like it or not it is fast becoming an energy superpower. It holds the world’s largest natural resources and already supplies Europe with a quarter of its gas. Its stranglehold on energy pipelines that head West is all but complete and by its own admission it is becoming assertive again.

For better or worse, after years on its knees, Russia is coming back. Some argue the West should engage it, others warn it should be contained. Either way, one first needs to know where it’s coming from.

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So, what is the mood in Russia two decades after the collapse of communism? What is Putin’s Russia really like? And what is it that we in the West don’t really understand about today’s Russia?

I put the question to Sergei Ivanov, the Russian deputy prime minister and former defense minister who was long tipped as Putin’s successor. Ivanov, a veteran of 20 years in the KGB, is viewed in the West as a hawk. But he sees us, not them, as the true cold war warriors.

“In my view the problem is that the West does not believe that Russia is a European country, sharing European moral, historic, religious values, sharing market economy principles,” he said in fluent English. “And when Russia seeks to explain why we disagree on a particular issue the reaction in the West is always: ‘Oh, Russia is a special country, it is still not European, it is an Asian country, we should not trust it.’”

“Too much mistrust?” I asked him as we sat in the White House, the seat of the Russian government where Putin has his new office, and the same building Yeltsin shelled with tanks in 1993 when it housed a parliament that dared defy him.

“Yes, too much mistrust,” he answered. “The wall should go - as my favorite Pink Floyd song says. For many in the West it’s much more convenient not to understand and to give the impression that

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nothing changes. There are many cold war warriors.

Old habits and old perceptions die hard.”

Ivanov concluded: “Many Brits and Americans still think that there are bears on the streets here, that all Russians are drunk, that they are treacherous, and that we spend our time plotting how best to attack the West and seize its wealth. That’s part of old-style Cold War propaganda.”

I was here when in August 1999 a desperate and deeply unpopular Boris Yeltsin made Vladimir Putin prime minister and anointed him as his chosen successor. Most dismissed Putin. He was the fifth man to head the government in the space of only a few months and was practically unknown. That changed quickly. Nine years later, Putin is among the most influential leaders in Russia’s history. He is certainly its most popular.

During his time I have seen many ugly trends and reported on countless reprehensible acts. It is a myth that there was democracy and freedom under Yeltsin, as some in the West claim. But it is true that under Putin, Russia is an authoritarian place.

Putin has crushed all opposition and turned both houses of parliament into rubberstamping tools of the Kremlin. He has canceled regional elections and brought all national television under his strict control. True, under Yeltsin, channels had become political tools of powerful oligarchs, but at least

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there was more than one voice. Now, TV in Russia is a Kremlin propaganda tool so sycophantic in its reporting of Putin and Medvedev that it can be compared only to the evening news of Soviet times.

So efficient is the system that there is no need for censorship anymore. Self-censorship rules. Everyone knows what is not allowed. Critical voices have been banned from television for nearly nine years already. Independent journalists have been sacked or bullied into fleeing abroad. Nearly 20 have been killed – not by the state but the Kremlin’s indifference has created a culture of impunity. Such contract hits are never solved. True investigative reporters do not last long in today’s Russia.

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Putin and his coterie run Russia utterly unchallenged. No decision or legislation is questioned, no matter how important. At home Putin is never put on the spot. For the Kremlin, there is no accountability. No Western leader enjoys such power and means.

In his time, Putin has either jailed his critics or forced them into exile. He launched a brutal second Chechen war, which killed tens of thousands of civilians and handed power in the region to a young thug who has been accused of personally torturing his opponents with a blowtorch. (Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov rejects the claim.)

Shortly after Putin last year recorded a statement to the nation at Moscow’s television center, its management had the desk and chair at which he sat removed to put them on display in the building’s museum. Putin’s two daughters are in their 20s, but Russians do not have the faintest idea of what they look like because the only available photographs date to when they were little girls.

Already widespread under Yeltsin, corruption has become rampant during Putin’s time. To say that it is endemic is to downplay its extent. It permeates all levels of society, from the Kremlin down. This is so because state employees could not possibly survive on their official salary and because Russia’s bureaucracy is so complex and Byzantine that its people would find it hard to function without bribes.

When in early October 2008 the Russian stock market collapsed by 20 percent in a single day – its worst loss ever – Russian television did not report the news. Instead it led with an upbeat meeting on the state of the economy between one of Russia’s richest men and Medvedev. Many welcomed the news blackout. The crash was not reported to avoid creating panic, they argued. Imagine trying to pull off something of the kind anywhere in the West.

Millions of Russians either live off bribes, pay bribes, or both. Much of the state’s cumbersome machine functions as a result of people greasing each other’s palms.

The concept of an honest traffic policeman is so alien in Russia that the country’s equivalent of “Saturday Night Live” runs a weekly sketch in which a comedian plays the fictional part of the

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only policeman in a provincial Russian town who stubbornly refuses to extort bribes from drivers. At night he goes back to an empty home and a wife and son dressed in tattered potato sacks. Both are starving. For dinner his wife serves him a bowl of cold water. As millions of Russians do every autumn, when they store away homemade pickled vegetables for the winter months, the policeman’s wife too, carefully seals several big glass jars – but they are all empty.

For most things in Russia there is an official way – invariably tortuous and time-consuming – and an unofficial one – smooth and efficient but usually corrupt.

People pay backhanders to doctors to jump queues and get decent medical attention. Teachers accept bribes to admit students or, in cases, to raise grades.

Motorists pay bribes to traffic police to avoid fines or even buy their driving license. Businesses pay customs officers to get goods through smoothly. Journalists take cash to run positive or negative articles.

Legislators accept envelopes stuffed with cash to pass laws and lobby. A bribe can sway a judge’s verdict, a police report, or a security services investigation. And so on. Corruption is one of Russia’s vital organs. It keeps the system running.

Twice I have been the guest at the house of a very close acquaintance, a member of the Russian government. I knew he was well off but it was only when the gates to his estate on the outskirts of Moscow

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opened that I realized he is a multimillionaire. And over an exotic dinner, which included swan meat, I understood the source of his wealth.

He is not corrupt – of that I am sure. Instead he has multiple businesses on the side. In Russia there is nothing wrong with that. There is no conflict of interest and everyone knows who is making money, and how, by capitalizing on his position of power.

It is expected. Why else would a smart Russian want to work for the state in return for a miserable salary?

It grants influence, and in Russia, power is a lucrative money earner.

As a result, whenever a powerful figure is accused of corruption, stripped of his job and, as in some cases, jailed, corruption is only the pretext. The real reason is that he has fallen from grace and come into conflict with people who are more powerful.

Both Putin and Medvedev have described corruption as one of Russia’s greatest ills. Still, Putin has done all but nothing to tackle it. Medvedev has vowed to put an end to it but so far has had no success. Privately, both believe it to be so deeply rooted they doubt it can be really eradicated.

What cannot be taken care of with a bribe is usually dealt with through connections. Knowing people in the right place helps in most countries. In Russia, it is paramount. For those with the right connections here, almost everything is possible and often considerably easier than in the West – unless the conflict is with the Kremlin.

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But ordinary Russians with neither money nor influential acquaintances have no rights. Not even the most basic. And if God forbid they should end up in the sights of the country’s power structures, they are sucked into a terrifying Kafkaesque nightmare where they are impotent and at the mercy of their persecutors.

As most Russians like to complain, one irony of modern-day Russia is that the biggest mafia clan of all, the scariest banditi, are not members of organized crime groups but rather those men wearing epaulettes. Not all, of course. But the problem lies as much in the system as it does in the individuals.

Abuse of power and impunity are commonplace.

Add corruption and you have a dangerous mix: anyone with power far more influential than his counterpart in the West.

Recently, I had a private lunch with one of the most powerful figures in Russia, a man I like who has served the state for nearly four decades and is close to Putin. After a couple of glasses of Chacia, a powerful grappa from Georgia, I pointed out that I was driving. Without a pause, the man dialed a number on his mobile, reached the head of Russia’s traffic police and ordered a police escort to allow me to drive back home drunk, without fear of being pulled over.

This was a simple reminder that for a man of his influence in Russia, there is no limit to power, no person who will not bend rules to please. It would be unwise to appear disrespectful and foolish to

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pass on an opportunity to accommodate a man who one day could return the favor. In the West, such behavior would go down as a reprehensible display of power abuse. But here, it was simple courtesy.

Since connections are all, I nearly turned to the man for help when I recently experienced at first hand how Russian rule of law works. Following a minor traffic violation – briefly driving my motorbike down a pavement to skirt a traffic jam – I got into a trivial argument with a local Moscow prosecutor.

Instead of summoning a traffic cop to fine me, the man chose to show off his power. I was detained for six hours at an Interior Ministry police station, where, under the prosecutor’s instructions, a senior officer typed up a false report accusing me of pushing and insulting a policeman and attempting to flee the scene.

You would not surprise a Russian with the notion that police officers systematically fabricate evidence, use brute force, torture and blackmail to extort false confessions and persecute innocent people on trumped-up charges. But this was enlightening because for the first time I watched the process unfold before my eyes.

What struck me most was the nonchalance with which the police captain twisted a minor traffic violation into a case that could see me end up in court. It was no sudden moment of creative inspiration but rather a talent fine-tuned to the point of being second nature.

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And as I was to be reminded, in Russia members of the police, the judiciary, and the security services as well as anyone in a position of state authority are mostly above the law they are supposed to be enforcing. Many are diligent, committed officers.

Far more, however, are there not to protect fellow citizens and uphold the law. They are the law. They need not fear society and its ordinary citizens – only their boss.

Nine years after Putin came to power, Russia remains a brutal place. Those with money and the right connections have opportunities they could only dream of in other countries, but the ordinary man on the street has little or no rights. It is a place of endless possibilities on the one hand and terrible suffering and injustice on the other. Life is still cheap and the state has not lost its arrogant and contemptuous disdain for the rights of its citizens.

Given Russia’s immense problems, one could be forgiven for thinking that Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Instead, after the war in Georgia, a staggering 90 percent of Russians expressed approval.

As some of his critics rightly point out, that is hardly surprising in view of the Soviet-style propaganda Russians see every night on state television. There is even a pop song titled “I Want a Man Like Putin” which, of course, made the charts.

But Putin is genuinely popular. Most Russians wanted him to change the constitution so he

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given russia’s immense problems, one could be forgiven for thinking that vladimir putin is in trouble. instead, after the war in georgia, a staggering 90 percent of russians expressed approval. //

could stay on as president instead of becoming prime minister.

The main explanation is simple: things may still be difficult in Russia but nothing like they were before Putin came to power.

Liberalizing Russia’s economy after 70 years of communism was a traumatic business. Millions lost their savings and were plunged into dire poverty while a few insiders became fabulously rich oligarchs who flaunted their wealth. Crime became rampant. Russia, once the heart of an empire feared and respected around the world, was on its knees.

For scientists, engineers, and state workers who had given up a life of certainties to eke out a living as gypsy cab drivers, or for pensioners forced to survive by collecting empty bottles off the street for a few kopeks, a free press could hardly be much consolation.

That explains why Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin were feted in the West but despised by most in Russia as the two leaders who stopped the clock and engineered the end of the Soviet Union.

My cleaning lady, for instance, was an officer in Soviet military intelligence who served in Afghanistan and Hungary. Her official monthly pension now is $200 and her life has taken quite a turn for the worse. No wonder then that she sees Gorbachev and Yeltsin as criminals who sold away her country.

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“Putin is the product of a reaction to the national humiliation, collapse, and degradation that we saw here in the 1990s,” explained Mikhail Leontiev, one of Russia’s first independent journalists, “Putin was needed.”

Leontiev has transformed himself into a rabid antiAmerican commentator who has his own political show on Russian state television. During the war in Georgia, a quarter of Russia’s TV audience watched him. He sings to the Kremlin’s tune but reflects as much as he shapes the views of Russia’s man in the street.

“The country woke up again. It stopped washing its dirty linen in public, telling everyone how sick, drunk, and incapable of a normal existence we were. It stopped urging someone, anyone, to come and occupy us. It is out of this state of mind that the country emerged. Putin gave us the state back.

And he gave us back our sense of dignity.”

Western opinion may have been shocked when Putin described the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” but he was in tune with most of his people.

Russians who vilify Yeltsin for what he dismantled praise Putin for what he is seen to have rebuilt.

While we in the West are up in arms at his authoritarian style and the ruthlessness with which he has rolled back most of Yeltsin’s democratic reforms, Russians see in him someone who is gradually returning their self-esteem by improving standards

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of living and making Russia a player again on the world stage.

In 1998, a year after I moved to Russia, Yeltsin oversaw the country’s greatest financial crisis. The ruble lost a sixth of its value, Russia defaulted on billions of dollars of foreign debt, and millions lost their savings.

Greatly helped by record high oil prices, under Putin Russia experienced eight years of uninterrupted growth, repaid its foreign debts early and put aside a stabilization fund of more than $160 billion. Until the world financial crisis, Russia had been booming. Moscow, once a drab place many thought of as a third world city, became one of the most hedonistic places on earth.

Millions still struggle here and the world credit crunch has hit Russia hard. But walk into any of Moscow’s nightclubs on a good night and you’d be forgiven for thinking the crisis was not so bad after all. Take RAI Paradise, a club popular with Russia’s golden youth – its first generation since tsarist times born or raised rich.

Outside, chauffeur-driven black Hummers, BMWs with tinted windows, and at least one Lamborghini crawl along the canal past guards in dark suits and earpieces.

Inside, the scene is pure hedonism – Moscow style – brash, unabashed, gaudy, and ostentatious. Longlegged models covered in body paint pose topless

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next to a Formula One car on show for the night, a few steps from a dozen oversized Fabergé eggs on sale for $4,000 apiece. Perfectly sculpted dancing girls covered only in baby oil and tiny bikinis gyrate on the bar overlooking a packed dance floor.

Rising above are the club's private lodges.

The cheapest – a cramped cubicle for six – costs $2,500 for the night. The VIP, a kitschy affair with its own back room and shower, can be rented for $10,000, drinks included. On a night I visited, all lodges were taken – one by Andrei, the son of a wealthy businessman, who was celebrating his 17th birthday with friends while his driver and bodyguard killed time watching a DVD in a Mercedes outside.

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an attractive young blonde, sipping a cocktail, wore a white t-shirt with a warning emblazoned across her cleavage: "no yacht. no plane. no money. no chance." //

crowd went so wild that security had to remove two young girls. Later, by the bar, I found an even more poignant way to sum up the Moscow of the zolotoya molodezh (golden youth). An attractive young blonde, sipping a cocktail, wore a white T-shirt with a warning emblazoned across her cleavage: "No yacht.

No plane. No money. No chance."

To travel outside the capital is to go back decades.

In regional cities, life is slowly improving. Wealth is trickling down, and a small middle class is growing. Pick any village in Russia, however, and you’ll come face to face with a society blighted by alcoholism, poverty and hopelessness.

In a haze of smoke, bright laser beams and sparkler sticks, Andrei and his schoolmates were puffing on water pipes and knocking back vodka shots and mojitos. One of his girlfriends, who looked barely 18 in a see-through top, fishnet tights, and diamond earrings, drank Champagne and picked strawberries from a giant fruit platter.

Many still live along dirt tracks in wooden houses without proper sewage. They survive on what they grow and shop in small Soviet-era food stores where most products are Russian-made. Unemployment is high. Seeking work, young people head for nearby cities, leaving behind the sick and old, often in semi-deserted villages.

"Life is great," Andrei shouted over the loud music as a throng of very young women and older men danced below. "Look at this! It's RAI! What better place to be than in Moscow? We have it all. It's the best place in the world to party. If you have money, of course. But that's not a problem."

Life may have improved, but Russia remains a deeply tragic place. The average male life expectancy is just 59, well below that of Western Europe and many developing countries. For women, it is 70. Elderly ladies, mostly, populate the villages.

Alcoholism kills men early, especially in the countryside. Counterfeit vodka alone is responsible for 40,000 deaths a year. Bad health care, smoking, and depression among the jobless all take a toll.

As if on cue, a Russian pop song with the lyrics zhizni udalas (life's worked out well) came on. The

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Many of Russia’s 30 million pensioners live in poverty. They can be seen on the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg trying to scrape a living by selling gherkins, woolly socks, or the odd personal possession.

Hard times partly explain a new tide of hate. There are many unpleasant aspects to Putin‘s Russia.

One of its most despicable is the dramatic rise in racially motivated murders by Russia’s growing mob of neo-Nazis.

It is one of the contradictions of modern Russia: the country which 60 years ago did the most to defeat Nazism is now home to one of Europe’s most vicious neo-Nazi movements.

Some 300 immigrants have been killed and 2,000 injured in attacks over the last five years. The Kremlin strongly condemns the violence but is often accused of not doing enough to stop it. In some cases, police play down crimes, categorizing them as acts of hooliganism. The issue is sensitive, and politicians are reluctant to admit Russia has a racial problem.

As a result, except for a few well-publicized cases, those Russian skinheads and neo-Nazis who are prosecuted receive far lesser sentences. In a worrying sign of a growing social malaise in Russia, often those committing the murders are mere teenagers.

Any non-white might be a victim. The youngest to

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// many of russia’s 30 million pensioners live in poverty. they can be seen on the streets of moscow or st. petersburg trying to scrape a living by selling gherkins, woolly socks, or the odd personal possession.

date is Khursheda Sultanova, a 9-year-old Tajik girl who bled to death on the outskirts of St. Petersburg after being stabbed by skinheads chanting, "Russia is for Russians."

By far the most shocking brutality against darkskinned immigrants was posted on the Internet less than two years ago. A video showed two migrant workers tied up and gagged in a forest. Hooded and posing in front of a neo-Nazi flag, their captors beheaded one man with a hunting knife and shot the other in the head.

Police have yet to make a single arrest and, like most racially motivated killings, the double murder remains unsolved.

I once joined a group of 50 neo-Nazis at a secret boot camp in the woods two hours from Moscow where volunteers receive combat training and classes in extremist ideology. At night, around a bonfire flanked by torches, they exchanged Nazi salutes, chanted slogans celebrating Hitler, and made speeches about a "super-race" of ethnic Russians.

"We need to kill all dark-skinned immigrants," explained a young man renowned as one of Moscow's most radical skinheads. He calls himself Tesak, Russian slang for "hatchet.” Weighing 238 pounds, shaven-headed, and wearing a black bomber jacket, Tesak is a 23-year-old unemployed building engineer. Fellow neo-Nazis respect him for his brutal assaults on non-whites. "We shouldn't just kill adults,” he said. “We must also get rid of

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their children. When you squash cockroaches to death, you don't just kill the big ones. You go for the little ones, too.”

In a sign that the authorities are starting to clamp down, Tesak has since been arrested. More neoNazis are going on trial. The murders, however, are no less frequent.

If capitalism has not been good to millions of Russians, surprisingly few blame the government.

Mention Putin’s name, and even among the poor it is easy to find fans of Russia’s strongman. Take, for instance, Larissa Vralova. She earns $500 a month, and her elderly parents each collect a $180 pension. They don’t have much hope in the future, but they only have praise for Putin.

“Under Putin, of course things have become better,” Larissa said. “Under Yeltsin, we didn’t get our salary.

They would just give us a part of our salary and they didn’t pay us for months. They didn’t pay pensions.

We worked and worked, and they didn’t pay us. Then our factory went bankrupt and they shut it down."

“I wanted him to stay on as president,” her mother, Anna, added. “During his time we saw no suffering.

Now they pay our pensions and even raise them.”

It should then come as no surprise that while many in the West like to vilify Putin for his authoritarian streak and criticize his regime for rolling back

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democratic reforms, in Russia to be labeled a “democrat” is political suicide. Very few Russians worry about the sorry state of Russian democracy, and Putin’s KGB background was never an issue to the overwhelming majority of voters.

I recently asked Vladimir Pozner how Russia’s attitude towards democracy had changed since the collapse of communism. Once a Soviet propagandist, Pozner, 72, turned his back on communist ideology and lived several years in America where he worked as a broadcaster. Now back in Russia, where he hosts the only live political show left on television, he is one of the country’s sharpest commentators.

“There is a play on this word that you can’t really translate when Russians talk about der-mo-cratia – not de-mo-cratia,” Pozner said. “Dermo in Russian means crap – so initially what was called democracy became, excuse me, shitocracy. Because Russians saw some people getting filthy rich, and the majority of people losing everything, and that was supposed to be democracy, so naturally they said we don’t want this.

“And even today if you ask people how they feel about democracy, your average Russian will respond negatively because they don’t know what it is. They have heard things about it but it’s become a very compromised concept.”

Instead of cringing at the sight of a drunken and sick Yeltsin, most Russians now rub their hands

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with glee at Putin’s swipes at America. Most Russians like strong leaders, men who in the tradition of the tsars are seen to rule with an iron hand. The more Russia flexes its muscles and forcefully pursues its interests beyond its borders, the greater the impression that it is regaining some of the influence it lost with the collapse of communism.

“I’m no big fan of Putin’s or of his methods, but the reason he is popular is because he managed to bring back the country together,” Pozner went on. “For the first time in many years Russians are living better, there’s stability and people believe in their future.

“And he is popular because Russia is becoming assertive again. For the average Russian who is a very proud person, with a sense of history and a belief that his is a great country, Putin has given him back his sense of pride. Now, people say, the West will have to take us into consideration. You cannot ignore us anymore they way you did when Yeltsin was in power and Russia on its knees.”

I put the question to Ivanov, Putin’s deputy. Is Russia becoming more assertive and why? What has changed?

“Yes!” he shot back. “We are becoming more assertive. Because our economy is stronger, and we are simply richer. As a result we are more free to defend our national interests. No country in the world, however strong or rich, can dictate its rules to us and to the rest of the world. That’s our point.”

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So, the Russian bear is on its hind legs again. And Putin is popular in part because he is seen as defending his country’s interests. Surely, there is nothing wrong with that. What few in the West realize, however, is that this comeback is fueled by a sense of revanchism towards the West – America in particular – and by a siege mentality.

Most Russians, including Putin and those around him, are convinced the West wants Russia to be weak. Far from seeing themselves as aggressive, they feel America and its allies want to encircle them. To make matters worst, many feel betrayed

by Western nations that let them down when they needed help. True or false, the perception is widespread. Twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this is hardly a healthy state of affairs.

“When the Soviet Union collapsed, most people, including myself, were thrilled with all things from the West. Now that attitude has changed,” said the man at the center of the worst Anglo-Russian diplomatic crisis since the end of the Cold War. Andrei Lugovoi is the Russian wanted by Scotland Yard on suspicion of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent who was killed in London in 2006.

He vehemently denies the allegation but has consistently refused to stand trial in Britain. To Downing Street’s fury, Russia has refused to extradite him, citing its constitution, which bars the extradition of Russian citizens.

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“When we first saw Western goods – Marlboro, jeans, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, porn, all these things which were unimaginable in the Soviet Union, we thought it was our salvation,” Lugovoi said. “Then as we became used to such things and began to realize how many negative things the West also brought us, the infatuation was over. And now we see that in fact the West wants Russia to be weak. Why? Because it’s eyeing our massive natural resources.”

Last year I spent much time with Lugovoi to report on the Litvinenko story. He granted me unprecedented access, allowing me to follow him for more than a month. I went with him on a hunting trip, watched him socialize during a day at the Moscow horse races, and spent dozens of hours interviewing him.

I also attended his private birthday party when one of the guests presented him with a World War II heavy machine gun mounted on wheels and another gave him a walking stick encrusted with precious stones and gold which concealed a sharp dagger in its handle.

He has since become a member of parliament as No. 2 in a hard-line nationalist party. Innocent or guilty, how does one explain to a Western audience that the man accused of the only murder known to have involved a radioactive substance has a political future in Russia? Why do people stop him for his autograph? And what does that say about the mood here?

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The answer is simple: a mounting anti-Western sentiment among ordinary Russians. Those who think Lugovoi did commit murder in London think of him as a hero because Litvinenko, who fled to Britain and revealed all he knew about his former KGB employers, was viewed as a traitor. Those who think Lugovoi is innocent also consider him a hero because they believe he was set up in a complex conspiracy to smear Russia.

And those who would not vote for his nationalist party would not do so whatever they think of Lugovoi. Murderer or not, Lugovoi is in a winwin situation.

“There was a lot of euphoria in Russia,” Ivanov said.

“A lot of Russians thought that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the West is on our side, they will help us and there will be eternal peace and prosperity. That was very, very naïve, but it happened.

Now I think that the bulk of the Russian population is much less naïve. The temperature now, the antiAmerican feeling among the public in Russia is growing. That’s unfortunate.”

In contrast to Soviet times when anti-Americanism was virulent in the Kremlin but weak at the grassroots, now at the top it is tepid but strong among ordinary people, especially among young people who are becoming increasingly patriotic.

“When communism collapsed, most expected the West to embrace them,” Pozner recalled. “To say yes, now we are together. Most people thought

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that especially the U.S. would help. But then they began to see that it was either not helping or helping very little. And to make matters worse the U.S. did not want Russia to come back again.

“There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. Quite the opposite, in fact. You know, keep them down and what’s more you lost the Cold War, well now you are going to pay for it – the whole attitude towards the U.S. and towards Americans began to change.

And now there’s a feeling that they betrayed us.”

Pozner is right. The mistrust runs deep. Putin has gone so far as to claim that American intelligence officers were on the ground fighting the Russians in Georgia. Even the war in Chechnya, some Russians never tire of telling me, was somehow the result of a dark Western conspiracy.

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probe much, and they reveal little. We genuinely like each other, and once I was given what is clearly considered a special treat inside the Kantora: a private audience in the building’s archives with Hitler’s teeth, which except for a piece of his skull, are the Fuhrer’s only remains left.

But, inevitably, I always feel they think I am an undercover intelligence officer. From where they look at the world, an Italian working for a British paper in Moscow can only be a spy. There is not much point in trying to prove the contrary, so when they ask how I am I joke: “Not well. They still haven’t promoted me to major.” They laugh, but never without a nod and a wink.

The official in charge of the British press at the Russian foreign ministry once asked me who prepared my questions whenever I traveled to the war-torn region to interview Islamic rebels fighting the Russians.

It is hardly surprising that even reasonable and affable FSB officers should be suspicious of a foreigner. But they share the same background as Putin and many of his closest aides. Old habits die hard. They, too, see the West through a prism of con-spiracy and distrust – not unlike many politicians in the West who were brought up during the Cold War and are still wary of Russia.

It is a deep-seated suspicion I am always confronted with whenever I visit the Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters in Moscow, whose cloakand-dagger residents jokingly describe as the country’s tallest building – “because from here we can see as far as Siberia.”

Disillusionment with the West has led to patriotism in most spheres – even in Russian culture. People are still open to the West but now that the euphoria has long gone, homegrown culture is back. When I first moved here, the highest grossing films were all Hollywood blockbusters. Now they are all Russian.

I have known a couple of people there for years.

We chat periodically over cups of strong tea. I

Actor-director Nikita Mikhailkov, the most powerful man in Russia’s film industry and a personal

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friend of Putin’s, is now shooting a patriotic epic set in World War II. At $60 million it promises to be Russia’s most expensive film to date. According to him, love for the Motherland is growing because Russians now have a choice.

“Before you had to love the USSR. Now the state does not force you to love Russia so when you do it’s because you have made a conscious decision that this is where you want to be,” he said on his film set.

Mikhailkov has worked abroad, regularly travels to the West, and counts stars like Jack Nicholson among his friends. He too, however, shares the Kremlin’s fortress mentality.

“Unlike others, I was never naïve about the West embracing us when communism collapsed,” he said. “The West has never liked Russia. In fact, Russia has always been a thorn in the West’s side.

It’s always looked to us with envy because of our massive natural resources and rubbed its hands with glee when it saw everything collapse.

“And now America and its allies must understand that we have a right to our voice again and that we must be respected, but not as a little old lady you can just flick away. Russia must be respected because it’s strong and can answer back. It can say no, you want to talk let’s talk. You want to fight, let’s fight. But then don’t complain.”

Not only do many Russians think the West let them down. They also feel besieged – most of all, by NATO’s

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expansion eastward. Seen from our vantage, the issue is straightforward. After communism collapsed, several former East bloc countries joined the military alliance. It was their free choice and no threat to Russia. The same is true of Georgia – where most want to join – and Ukraine – where most do not.

The Russians, however, see things very differently.

Why, they ask, is an alliance founded to contain the Soviet threat advancing right up to its borders?

To add insult to injury, the Kremlin is adamant that NATO promised it would not expand eastwards if Moscow accepted German reunification.

A further complication is America’s plans for missile-defense components to be stationed in Poland and the Czech Republic. This infuriates the Russians, but Washington insists the shield is to protect it from Iran and North Korea.

“We can’t buy that explanation,” Ivanov said. “Iran and North Korea don’t have missiles which theoretically might reach Western Europe. At the same time, we know perfectly well that the new radar and anti-ballistic missiles might reach Russian territories in seconds, not minutes. Russia will definitely react, because we cannot just sit back when there’s a new military threat only 300 kilometers from our borders.”

Leontiev, the political TV show host, whose radical views are aired into the homes of tens of millions of Russians, echoed the thought. “Ideally America would like Russia not to exist,” he fumed. “And

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NATO too – it’s an organization in the first instance directed against Russia.

“We are to blame because for years we gave the impression – especially to America – of a country which was falling to pieces. And that is the basis on which they have formulated their policy towards us. So now that we are a player again, they have a problem. Either they have to change their entire policy or try to push us back down.”

This may sound a bit paranoid, but take my word: millions of Russians, including many in the Kremlin, would agree.

So, what is the mood in Putin’s Russia, nearly two decades after the collapse of communism?

Pro-western liberalism is out while nationalism, fierce patriotism and self-assertion are back with a vengeance. And since Russia is a former superpower emerging from very traumatic times of transition, its bullish stance is fueled by two conflicting emotions: a sense of superiority over what it once was and one of inferiority over that which it lost.

Is it a threat? Well, I have seen many things I don’t like in my time here, but, no, I don’t think so. Far more dangerous is a widening gulf in understanding between us and them. Far more worrying is growing mistrust.

Forget the talk of a new cold war. But there is no doubt, like it or not, that Russia is back. And given

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far more dangerous is a widening gulf in understanding between us and them. far more worrying is growing mistrust.

//

its sense of inferiority, most of all it craves respect.

And least of all, given its sense of superiority, does it want lecturing.

Pozner summed it up like this: “Yes, Russia is in many ways its own worst enemy.

But there are far too many things the West does not get about Russia. Most of all, the West does not want to understand that if a country has never had democracy in its entire history – no freedom of the press, religion or elections – nothing, then you cannot expect it in the space of 15 or 20 years to say, ‘Bingo, we’re now democratic.’ It’s going to take generations. This country is still run by people who grew up in Soviet times.

“Give this country a break. Hold off a little. You’re not asking the Chinese for some reason to be democratic; you don’t seem to care. Let the Russians evolve and don’t put that much pressure on them because if you do you’ll bring out the worst. You’ll bring out the super-patriots who will say: ‘You see, we told you you can’t trust the West.’”

andrew meier

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putin’s dream an energy superpower

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Out here in Omsk, on the southwestern edge of Siberia, Russia’s petroleum trickledown lights up the dark autumnal nights. Omsk, a black-collar city of 1.3 million, nearly the size of Dallas with all the luster of Albany, is a boomtown. Welders’ sparks illuminate the condo towers rising fast.

And out at the refinery – the largest in Russia – oil flares that burn all night at the edge of civilization mark the promise of the future.

For those who imagine that Russia’s revival has not yet to reach Siberia, Omsk offers a vantage point on how far Russia has evolved under Vladimir Putin.

Not only do Jaguars and Range Rovers now crowd out the tired Ladas and Zhigulis along Lenin Prospekt, but Euro-style cafes and boutiques brighten the avenues still struggling to arise from the Soviet hangover. The emergent generation, as dynamic and entrepreneurial as any west of the Urals, is in no hurry to head for the exits. And Omsk offers a glimpse beyond the Age of Putin, with its rebirth of the centralized state apparat, distaste for Jeffersonian democracy, and constriction of civil liberties, toward something new, the world’s first energy superpower.

“After Georgia.” The phrase now resounds from Houston to London, marking the end of the postSoviet era in U.S.-Russian relations. Following the Kremlin’s five-day war in the Caucasus, Western politicians and oil executives sit and fret. Russia is back. But Putin’s ambition is neither to reignite the Cold War, nor to rebuild the Soviet empire.

He is winning back Russia’s place in the world

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// omsk offers a glimpse beyond the age of putin, with its rebirth of the centralized state apparat, distaste for jeffersonian democracy, and constriction of civil liberties, toward something new, the world’s first energy superpower.

not with tanks but banks, not on battlefields but in boardrooms.

In Omsk, once the nest egg of Putin’s favorite oligarch, Roman Abramovich, and now the preserve of Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant, the battle lines are clear.

“It’s no longer just about oil but economic growth and independence,” a former director of the Omsk refinery told me. If during Putin’s first years the goal was to keep fields pumping, the new challenge lies downstream, the energy consumer markets of the West and East.

“It’s a war for control of the spigot,” added Andrei Illarionov, once Putin’s chief economic advisor, now in self-exile in Washington.

Russian resentment has fed the greatest economic and political resurgence of the new century.

The West, meantime, has squandered a historic chance at a slice of Russia’s oil and gas fields.

American diplomats and executives have been outmaneuvered from Siberia, across Central Asia, to the Caucasus.

As the United States headed into its worst financial crash since Herbert Hoover, Russia waged a victorious little war in Georgia, showing Mikheil Saakashvili to be a feckless upstart and NATO as an outdated alliance. Now, amid talk of a new cold war, Russia is reclaiming its sphere of influence across old Soviet lands and beyond.

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Aggressive Russian statecraft exploits not only a sea of oil and gas wealth – the largest reserves outside OPEC – but also myopia in the West.

Consider the case of Iceland, a NATO member, with the world’s fourth highest per capita GDP, the first country to sink in Wall Street’s back-wash. President Dmitry Medvedev, the former Gazprom chairman, rushed to offer Iceland 4 billion euros.

Or Venezuela. On his trip to the Caucasus in 2008, Dick Cheney pledged the defeated Georgians $1 billion in “humanitarian aid.” Three weeks later, Putin made his own billion-dollar gesture – to Hugo Chavez, Washington’s nemesis, who has supplanted Fidel Castro as Moscow’s favorite Latin American leader. Venezuela, of course, is the fourth largest supplier of gas to the United States.

For good measure, Moscow also dispatched a fleet to Venezuela from the Arctic, including Russia’s biggest warship, the nuclear-powered Peter the Great, for joint maneuvers. If unnoticed by Western policymakers awash in a financial tidal wave, Russians saw this slap in America’s face as a step toward Putin’s energy dream.

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// aggressive russian statecraft exploits not only a sea of oil and gas wealth — the largest reserves outside opec — but also myopia in the west.

officials believed in the promise of Western oilmen.

Eager for a hedge against their northern neighbors, they signed PSAs (production sharing agreements) with foreign oil giants. Americans filled the new Hyatt in Baku, raised drilling platforms along the Caspian shore, and adorned their Chevy Suburbans with bumper stickers proclaiming, “Happiness is multiple pipelines."

In the early 1990s, the Azerbaijanis backed a U.S.led plan for a $4 billion, 1,000-mile-long oil pipeline to channel 1 million barrels a day from Baku, through Tbilisi to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Today, the BTC is the only pipeline from ex-Soviet territory not under Kremlin control.

The Azerbaijanis had backed another line, with the operatic name Nabucco, that would bypass Russia to bring Central Asian gas to Turkey. Azerbaijani officials once spoke brazenly of a new pipeline order. But Georgia changed all that.

Mostly, after Georgia, Kremlin energy planners focused on the Caucasus and Central Asia. Results have been dramatic in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich land of nearly 8 million Muslims on the Caspian Sea.

Cheney saw this sea change firsthand on his swing through the Caucasus after the war. In early September, he flew to Baku to press Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliev to endorse the Nabucco line. Aliev refused. Moreover, he reported on the Cheney têteà-tête to the Kremlin, which immediately leaked the story. As the evening news echoed Aliev’s about-face across Russia, Cheney fumed, skipped a state reception, and left Baku empty-handed.

After the Soviet collapse, when a nearly bankrupt Russia languished, insulted and injured, Azerbaijani

In the “stans,” as Washington calls the five former Soviet Central Asian states, America faces even

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tougher odds. After 9/11, largely to help dislodge the Taliban, Putin tolerated the U.S. push into Central Asia. Tajikistan was home to a strange duality: Russia’s 201st Division guarded the Afghan border, while elsewhere along the frontier U.S. Marines trained Tajik border guards and Special Operations units.

The Americans are now likely to go home. And the Russians hold sway again over much of the region by promising to pay above the market for natural gas. “It is a natural course of development,” Alexander Medvedev, head of Gazprom Export, told me.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in turn, have pledged to build a new gas pipeline north to Russia.

Turkmenistan, too, has felt Russia’s embrace. Since 2006, when death ended Saparmyrat Niyazov’s term as president for life, it looked as if his successor, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, might pull off the tough balancing act between East and West.

U.S. energy executives rejoiced when the new leader installed a young Turkmen, fluent in English and Western finance, to negotiate with companies eager to tap into Turkmenistan’s vast reserves of natural gas. But after the events in Georgia, he vanished.

In his place appeared a former Soviet apparatchik loyal to the old ways.

In September came another dark turn, a bloody shootout in Ashgabat. The government was unsure if it was fighting opium dealers or Islamic militants, but there was no doubt who restored order. Russia's

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// the americans are now likely to go home. and the russians hold sway again over much of the region by promising to pay above the market for natural gas.

top anti-terror unit, Alpha, flew in from Moscow on the Turkmen presidential plane. The message, intentional or not, was clear in Washington. In Ashgabat, once again, Moscow rules.

Still, Putin’s ultimate goal remains a mystery.

A status of energy superpower is one thing, but Russia also seeks large-scale customers – and a place at the table in matters beyond petroleum.

In recent years, Gazprom has made unsubtle moves to off-load small deliveries of liquefied natural gas at U.S. ports. “The United States is, of course, the largest market in the world,” Medvedev, the Gazprom Export chief, said. But, he added, “It’s too early to speak about which way our cooperation will go in the U.S.” Out here in Omsk, one thing is clear: the petroleum future of the former Soviet lands, once dominated by the West's Caspian dreams, is now Russia's to lose.

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Curated by Olga Korsunova Nadya Sheremetova Yuri Kozyrev 083

Soon after photography was invented, in 1840, masters of the new daguerrotype technique emerged in St. Petersburg and Moscow – even though Khudozhestvennaya Gazetra (The Paper of Arts) dismissed the process as “useless.”

As photography evolved in Western Europe, the middle classes embraced it as a new means of self-representation, very different from painted portraits that had been reserved for nobles. But photography was delayed in Russia, where slavery and class structure still thrived. Only the aristocracy and foreigners commissioned portraits in Imperial Russia.

Complexity and cost prevented amateurs from taking pictures. Until the 1880s, photography was the realm of professionals who worked in studios. Up to 95 percent of their work was portraiture, and natural light was critical.

The heart of any studio was a glassed pavilion with accessories to cater for subjects’ tastes. Furniture, painted backgrounds, columns, and curtains created a sort of a theater scene on which simple plays were staged to help capture the self-image each client wanted to save for posterity.

In the last decades of the century, this changed drastically. With political and social reforms, new consumers wanted portraits. Standardized techniques made the product cheaper. This created a boom. Before the 1880s, photographers owned small studios. By 1900, enterprising businessmen invested in larger shops. Fashion changed significantly, and earlier constraints dropped away.

Portraits were full height, to the knee, half-height, to the hip, or to the waist.

Dramatic events brought an upheaval in photography: World War I, the October revolution that led to civil war. New governments requisitioned businesses, including photo studios.

A 1928 exhibition called “Ten Years of Soviet Photography” inspired reflection among ideologues. Despite earth-shaking upheaval, Russian photography was still influenced by pre-revolutionary culture. For all their efforts to crush the old ways, a surviving report says, what dominated was “the flattering portrait, full of parlor romanticism, and the beauty of nobilities’ estates.”

Discussion on the future of photography shifted from the aesthetic to the ideological. Citizens’ private lives would be overridden entirely by the new state.

But it proved impossible to wipe out people’s desire for “remembrance pictures.”

Throughout the Soviet era, professionals in government service made ritual photos for family albums. However, clients were no longer the bourgeoisie but rather unpretentious workers. Depersonalized and without competition, the photographer’s art was stripped of originality. This led to decay. By the mid-1970s, the century-long tradition of visiting a photographic studio had ceased to exist.

In the late 20th century, with social liberalization and simplified photography, swarms of amateurs appeared. Freed from professional and ideological constraint, they have created a striking iconography. With this open, fresh approach, there is mutual trust between photographer and subject. Although technical errors are frequent, amateur photography shows us the faces and private lives of modern Russia.

Alexander Kitayev October 2008 / St. Petersburg

this page above / High society ladies, 1864.

Unknown photographer. Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk. below / Portrait of M.F. Birileva, daughter of poet F.I. Tyutchev, 1860s. G. Denyer, St. Petersburg.

Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk. previous page top left / Cossack Saveliy Tirin.

Ekaterinodar, 1890s. Beletskiy.

Collection of S.P. Hlebyankin, Krasnodar. top right / 1890s. Unidentified girls.

Photographer S.Golydenberg, Ekaterinodar, Collection of B.Ustinova, Krasnodarbottom left / Cossack Y.I. Laktionov of the Kuban Cossack Army, Ekaterinodar, 1910s. Archive of V.A. Solovyev, Krasnodar. bottom right / 1910s Girl with tennis racket. Photographer Beletskiy, Ekaterinodar, Collection of Znamerovskiy, Krasnodar

above / Soldier, Egersky Life Guards Regiment, 1900s. V.Y. Yankovsky, Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk right / Family portrait, Bobruysk, 1912. Sh.A. Bogatina, Collection of Azamat E. Cheslav, St. Petersburg.

I.D. card of Leonid Chudnovsky, 1917.

Studio “Ideal”, Petrograd, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

this page above / G. Lurikh, champion of the first male beauty contest in Russia, St. Petersburg, 1912.

Karl Bulla, Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk. below / Unknown location.

1LT Sokolov, Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk. previous page top left / Sailors during the Revolution, Petrograd, 1918.

Bitovik, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg.

Private album.

Unknown photographer, Collection of Azamat E. Cheslav, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Pioneers, Moscow region, 1920s. Unknown photographer, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg. below / Two friends, 1922.

Unknown photographer, Collection of Azamat E. Cheslav, St. Petersburg. opposite page above / G.M. Turmasov, Red Army soldier, 1924. I. Yakovlev, Kronstadt, Collection of M.I. Golosovsky, Krasnogorsk. below / Third-year pupils at School No. 51, Petrogradskaya Side, Leningrad, 1946. Unknown photographer, family archive of Ziryanov, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Kitaev family, Poltava, Ukrainian SSR, 1935. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg. below / Ketochka Petrova and Veronika Yegorova, Leningrad, 1935. Aleksey Petrov, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg. previous page Commissar, 1930. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

Portrait against a painted backdrop, 1930s.

Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

Inscribed on the back, “To Sasha and Masha Krivalevi … from Tafi”, Kronshtadt, 1938.

Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

this page Rural family, 1940. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg. opposite page top / Third-year pupils at School No. 51, Petrogradskaya Side, Leningrad, 1948. Unknown photographer, Ziryanov family archive, St. Petersburg. bottom left / Boy with rooster, Ukrainian SSR, 1940s.

Bronislav Yasinsky, Leningrad.

Collection of G.Golovin, St.Petersburg. bottom right / Girl with hen, Town of Nevel, 1945.

Bronislav Yasinsky, Leningrad.

Collection of G.Golovin, St.Petersburg.

this page Soldiers, 1945. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

Central State Archive kinofotofonodokumentov St. Petersburg previous page above / Kazakhs Shayki Kumizbaev and Tazhibek Akhmetov of an anti-tank division on the Leningrad Front, 30th November, 1942. S. Nordshtein. below / Inscribed on the back “To Borechka, darling and beloved, from Vera”, Astrakhan, 1944.

Unknown photographer, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Brothers and soldiers, Leningrad region, 1945. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg. below / Soldiers of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Svaliav, Carpatho-Ukraine region, 1960s.

Unknown photographer, Ziryanov family archive, St. Petersburg. previous page Nina Makarova with cavalier, Luga, 1946. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Yalta, 1948. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg. below / Egoryevsk, Moscow region, 1948. Unknown photographer, Strelnikov family archive, Moscow. opposite page top left / Tania and Leva Petrovi at the zoo, Leningrad, 1940.

Unknown photographer, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg. top right + bottom / Law students at the weekend, Siverskaya, Leningrad region, 1948. Unknown photographer, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Friends, Leningrad region, 1950s. Bronislav Yasinsky.

Collection of G.Golovin, St-Petersburg. below / Leningrad region, 1950s.

Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg. opposite page V.N. Hristianova, musical comedy theater actress, Leningrad, 1940s.

Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Family portrait, 1951.

Unknown photographer, Voronkov family archive, St. Petersburg. below / Galia Guseva and Zhorzh Buzin, Moscow, 1954. Strelnikov family archive, Moscow. opposite page A.A. Kitaev with his son, Sasha, Leningrad region, 1956. Unknown photographer, Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

Crew of the mine sweeper 437 of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet, Baltiysk, 1960.

Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg.

above / Crimea, 1961. Bitovik, Olga Korsunova’s family archive, St. Petersburg. below / Father and older sons of the Dervishly-Guseynov family, Markosovka, Gazahsky region, Azerbaijan, 1958. Unknown photographer, Gueynov family archive.

Leningrad, 1966.

Unknown photographer, Voronkov family archive, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, 1970s. Unknown photographer, Collection of Azamat E. Cheslav, St. Petersburg. below / Graduates of a dress-making course, Club “Luch” of House Bureau No. 2 of Moscovsky District, 1968.

Unknown photographer, Karnachkov family archive. previous page above / Souvenir photo. Leningrad, 1967. Studio and photographer unknown. Voronkov’ family archive.

St-Petersburg. below / Captain of the Strategic Rocket Forces Yuri Soloviev and his wife, Tamara, Korosten, Ukraine, 1982. Soloviev family archive, St. Petersburg.

above / Rural women, Kalinin (Tver), 1975. Photographer Petr Filippov. Karnachkov family archive. below / The Voronkov family, Leningrad, 1973. Studio No. 1 (the former studio of Karl Bulla), Voronkov family archive, St. Petersburg.

Dmitry Popov, Kantemirovskaya 4th Guard Armoured Division of the Soviet Army, Naro-Fominsk, 1975.

Unknown photographer, Popov family archive, St. Petersburg.

I.D. photographs for passes to the Admiralteysky shipbuilding facility, Leningrad, 1980s.

Collection of A.A. Kitaev, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Oleg in front of the Leonid Sabinov, Black Sea coast, 1981.

Bitovik, Pochenkov family archive, St. Petersburg. below / Sisters Katia and Rita Minasyan, Studio at No. 66 Lenin Street, Dushanbe, Tajik SSR, 1986.

Family archive of M. Minasyan, St. Petersburg. previous page Oleg and a stuffed brown bear, Black Sea Coast, 1980. Bitovik, Pochenkov family archive, St. Petersburg.

this page above / Kindergarten, St. Petersburg, 1996. Bitovik, Karnachkov family archive, St. Petersburg below / Olia Popova, studio in Sofia Petrovskaya Street, Leningrad, 1988.

Popov family archive, St. Petersburg. opposite page above + below / Passers-by at the cover of Malaya Sadovaya and Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg, 2008. Photographer Tatyana Rakitina.

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world oil production

A

3 US _ 7.4 A 4

4 IR _ AN 98

3.

1 RU _ S .0 SIA 8

5 CH _ 3. IN 73 A

10

L

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8 N _ 2. orw 56 ay

1 BR 0_ 2.1 AZ 4 I

7 CA _ N 32 AD A 3.

Production in millions barrels per day_

6 M _ 3.4 EXI 8 CO

EL

9 VE _ N 39 EZ U

2.

A

BI

RA

2 SA _ 8. UD 48 I A

SOURCE International Energy Agency 2007 World oil production. Oil Market Report.

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ilana ozernoy

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nashi »ours« as in »not yours«

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By Vladimir Putin’s second term, Russia was flush with oil money. Terrorists and liberals – “agents of the West” – had been crushed, the oligarchs brought to heel. Yet Russia’s leaders saw a remaining weak spot: the malleable youth. Enemies had to be stopped from exploiting them.

Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgystan, despite statecontrolled armies and strong intelligence systems, fell when “Orange” banners swept across their streets. These former Soviet-bloc states could not stop young revolutionaries backed by the West.

But Russia would.

In 2005, Putin created a countermovement called Nashi – literally “Ours,” and implicitly “Not Yours.”

Soon it was 120,000 strong, and growing. After the elections in December 2007, the Russian press fueled rumors of Nashi’s imminent demise. The Kremlin’s “hooligans” and “marionettes” were no longer needed now that Putin had consolidated his power. But young zealots continued to gather, march, recruit, fundraise, and strike out at enemies.

Much like the rest of the country, Nashi seemed determined to go on with its business until Putin said otherwise, and it struck a chord that resonated deeply among Russian youth. So I went to see what it was all about and help peel a few potatoes.

It is 8 a.m. and the Russian national anthem crackles over camp speakers: Russia – our sacred stronghold, Russia – our beloved country.

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// putin’s face is everywhere, a designer logo splashed across red jackets, red t-shirts, red hats, pins, stickers, flags, and posters.

A mighty will, a great glory – Your heritage for all time!

Some 5,000 youth activists are in various stages of awake: sleepy-eyed, climbing out of tents, standing in line at the porta-potty, forming columns, waving their flags in the main camp square in sway to the Soviet-era hymn. Putin’s face is everywhere, a designer logo splashed across red jackets, red T-shirts, red hats, pins, stickers, flags, and posters.

Be glorious, country! We take pride in you!

Nashi calls itself a “Democratic Antifascist Youth Movement.” It defines fascism as the threat of “Orange” democratic revolutions and liberal opposition figures. The Nashists – tagged thus by the “liberal media” because it rhymes with fascists and because it evokes the Hitlerjugend – are in their late teens and early 20s. For the fifth straight summer, they have traveled from the farthest reaches of Russia to Lake Seliger, a night’s drive northwest of Moscow, to run, swim, learn, march, and procreate in the name of restoring their country’s great glory.

You are the only one in the world! You are the only one of a kind!

The dozen press department tents are still. The department handles the movement’s internal and external information flow, and its encampment shelters the brightest of the bright, the ones

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everyone else wants to be, the kids at the top of the food chain. They have a proud precedent: the previous press chief, Robert Shlegel, now backs Putin as Russia’s youngest Duma deputy. One of them could be next.

Our devotion to our Motherland gives us strength.

So it was, so it is, and so it will always be!

The camp speakers crackle again, gears shift, and the solemn anthem is followed by happy, snappy music from Soviet cartoons. Still, the press officers will not wake up, which means there is no fire and no breakfast, just unboiled lake water, uncooked oats, unopened cans of condensed milk.

Commissar Natasha – stout, tight blond braid, late 20s – appears with a clipboard. She takes in the situation and starts shouting questions at no one in particular. Why isn’t anyone up? Who is in charge of the fire? Where’s breakfast? She shakes tents, rips open zippers.

Commissar Lyosha, the foreman, barks a muffled reply from inside his tent: “We’ll take care of it!”

“Why haven’t you already taken care of it? Rise! Get up! That’s it! I won’t warn you again! Let’s go!”

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and, with a few threatening words for good measure, she turns and leaves. A few middle fingers fly up in her wake. But breakfast is under way, and the group bonds in shared loathing of the enemy. They do not bother to go on the mandatory morning two-mile run.

“Hello Seliger!”

Nikita Borovikov, the movement’s new leader, is standing on a sound stage above a jacked-up crowd.

He wears a red polo shirt with a white crucifix across the back. The kids wave flags, whistle, cheer; a few are propped up on their friends’ shoulders. It is what I imagine a Christian youth group rally would feel like, were it sponsored by Republican National Committee hardliners and held at an drug-free Woodstock.

“Wooooooh! Yaaaaaaaay!” The sun is shining, and there is a steady supply of sugar.

Borovikov looks weary. He waits for the crowd to simmer down, nods, pauses, then says, “Russia’s best youth is here!”

The youth scream in unison: “Yeeeeaaaah!”

A few rumpled heads appear, more shouting ensues, and soon the firewood is chopped, plastic buckets of water materialize, dishes are washed.

Commissar Natasha, having fulfilled her function, stands awkwardly to the side. The clipboard drops

Borovikov is a 27-year-old from the provinces who fell into the movement four years ago when he was still a law student. He is reticent and thoughtful; often he is defensive. People

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say he is not charismatic like his predecessor, Vasily Yakemenko, Nashi’s founder, who recently moved on to chair the Kremlin’s State Youth Affairs Committee. The kids in the press service who are loyal to Yakemenko have taken to calling Borovikov Forrest Gump.

“Since the last Seliger, we have solved our main problems,” Borovikov says into the mike. “Russia is sovereign. There is no more Orangeism.” His face looms above his audience on a Jumbotron next to the sound stage, then the camera pans the red swarm below.

“Wooooooh!” The Nashists jump up and down.

“Now our projects will shape Russia’s future!” To drive home this point, Borovikov calls out names of elevated alumni: regional Duma deputies, federal ministers, Kremlin advisers. He saves the legendary Vasily Yakemenko – known by all simply as “Vassya” – for last.

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of us has to leave here with the answer to that question.”

“Yeeeaaaaah!”

He does not specify that which has to be done.

One of the veterans steps forward. The kids chant spasibo – thank you – in unison.

“Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo!”

“Dear friends,” the veteran begins. “You are here because you want to protect Russia from outside invaders! You are going to build a new Russia. Russia’s future depends on you. The veterans of the Great Patriotic War believe in you. We believe that in your hands Russia will be saved, will grow and prosper. Russia full speed ahead!”

Patriotic hip-hop booms through the forest.

The congregation erupts in applause. Then the young people dance.

The crowd responds with a drumbeat, “Vas-sya!

Vas-sya! Vas-sya!”

-

Yakemenko steps onstage like a middle-aged rock star-cum-preacher and asks for a minute of silence to honor the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, two of whom are standing behind him on stage, their suit jackets drooping with medals. When he looks up, his green eyes sparkle on the mega-screen, and his voice rumbles across the clearing. “Can we do that which hasn’t been done yet? Each one

The author of this patriotic hip-hop is a lanky, bespectacled 19-year-old named Mark Novikov.

I am told his tent is in the woods just left of the eternal flame and behind the Anna Shapovalova boutique, which sells ironic “designer” Nashi T-shirts for 50 bucks a pop. Sample slogans: “It is fun and good for you to procreate”; “I am the reason for the population explosion”; “Love

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Russian.” (The procreation takes place in the encampment across the way, which Nashi has designated for “young families.”)

One evening at dusk, I find Mark hanging out by an unlit campfire with his friend and sometimes producer, Ivan Polyaninov. They tell me a disco party is going on later, but they don’t much feel like going and nothing else is happening so we stay by the unlit fire. Ivan pulls an iPod from his jeans pocket. He sticks one headphone in my ear and the other in his own and plays a song from the “Motherland” CD which Nashi helped fund.

It is called “Children of the ‘90s.”

Mark’s music is about the sense of abandonment felt by Russia’s lost generation, those who came of age in the brief window between Soviet disintegration and Putin’s new order. “Rap in America came from the streets, so nothing reflects street trends like rap music,” he says. Ivan adds, “Our music is American form with Russian content.”

He tells me about growing up in a small provincial town built around a military factory. “It’s like another country compared to Moscow,” he says.

He remembers how his mother gave him poetry books, and he remembers how it felt when the Soviet Union crumbled.

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people were walking around in these cheap baseball hats made in China that said ‘USA.’” Ivan nods. “Yeah, I remember the macaroni, too,” he says. “It was all we ate. Every day. We didn’t even have margarine or butter for the noodles, we had this thing called ‘fat blend.’

If we put an egg in there, it was a holiday.” He shakes his head and flips through his iPod. He wants to play another song for me – this one called, “How Much Can We Take?” – but Mark cuts in.

“My girlfriend asked me today, ‘Why do you keep writing about the nineties? There’s so much other stuff to write about.’ I couldn’t answer. No matter what I sit down to write about, this is what I write.”

Ivan shoves the iPod back in his pocket; he’s getting fired up. “My parents were both engineers,” he says. “They had the highest education, and they were impoverished. Not just poor – impoverished.”

His eyes burn bright in the twilight. “There were so many people like that! Everything around us was falling apart as we were growing up, and we thought it was normal because it’s all we knew.

Only now we’ve started to understand that this was not normal.”

“It wasn’t normal,” Mark agrees.

“Our world was split in two,” Mark says. “A small number became really rich, and there was everyone else who became really poor. We had to eat macaroni every day and wear old clothes. And

“When I understood everything that happened, I joined Nashi,” Ivan says. “Because our generation was the generation nobody cared about.”

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I ask Mark if he thinks the Kremlin cares about his generation.

“Look,” he replies, “It’s like this: I work for this organization, and it works for me. Nashi gave me a lot. I got money to go to college. For a kid from the provinces to be able to go to university, and in Moscow no less, that’s, like, unheard of. I am grateful to this movement for that, and I will never forget it.”

I ask him how far his gratitude goes.

“I go to all the demonstrations,” he says.

I am older than Mark and Ivan, and I was able to escape the troubles they speak of because my family immigrated to the United States in 1986. But I wonder as I listen to them speak what might have happened if we hadn’t left. Would I have joined this movement? Half of me does not know the answer to that question.

Soviet children, we are all of us bruised, wounded in the war this nation waged against itself. And lately it seems that when I sit down to write, I, too, can write only about Russia.

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// these are mostly ordinary kids, who feel bored or lost or neglected. some see this kremlin-sponsored movement as a way into the system.

prodding represents America; the pig is Estonian President Toomas Ilves.

Ilves is an “external enemy” because in 2007 he relocated a Red Army memorial – the “Monument of the Soldier-Liberator” – from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery. The bronze, six-foot statue honors Soviet soldiers killed by Nazis in Estonia during The Great Patriotic War. Putin condemned Ilves for “desecrating monuments to war heroes” and severed diplomatic ties with Estonia to show that he was serious. Nashi reinforced his message with an “action.” Any time Nashists picket, harass, or dress piglets up as presidents, it is called an action.

Nashi is a loaded word. It was not invented by zealous nationalists; it defines a broader attitude.

People use it to mean Russian. (“Is he ours?” they say instead of, “is he Russian?”) People also use it to mean homegrown. I am a native Russian speaker, but I grew up in the States so most Russians see me in terms of Yours. They say, what’s it like over in Yours? Do You have it better? Commissar Lyosha asks me one afternoon, do Yours talk about Ours as much as we talk about Yours?

A young man walks a pig through the woods. He wears a stars and stripes top hat and a bodysuit covered in ersatz dollar bills. His pig is on a leash, and every few minutes he gives it a tap on the ass with a wooden stick. The young man pushing and

These are mostly ordinary kids, who feel bored or lost or neglected. Some see this Kremlin-sponsored movement as a way into the system.

“An overwhelming majority in Nashi are just kids who see an opportunity,” Alexander Tarasov, a

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scholar who studies youth movements at Moscow’s New Sociology and Practical Politics Center, writes me in an e-mail. “They are practically ignorant of politics, kids plucked from the provinces – where there’s nothing to do and no prospects – and who are happy just because someone has taken an interest in them, is doing something for them, teaching them something and paying for it. The Nashi commissars are subjected to intense ideological brainwashing and among them there probably really are some fanatics. But even then, their fanaticism is merely a sincere loyalty to the leadership and inability to understand how it is possible to argue with their leaders. The closest analogy is the loyalty of mafia lieutenants to their capo.”

Within Ours, there is a further classification: svoyi, which means our own. The word Ours is used when facing outwards and against external threat, as a demarcation drawn between Ours and Yours. Inside, Nashi is splintered by divisions, clans, tribes, and groups, which see themselves in terms of svoyi and stick to their own. In other words, those who join the movement to vent their rage don’t mingle with the kids who are there to further their careers; the Chechens don’t mingle with anyone at all; and so on.

These detached particles brush up against one another and this creates a kind of polarized energy but, much like Russian society at large, there is nothing shared by the factions within Nashi except an allegiance to the leadership and the contempt and fear of outsiders.

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After two days of sunshine, a storm sweeps over Lake Seliger. Shoes are soaked through, a press tent is swept away. Tanya Vihrova, a 20-year-old press officer from Nizhny Novgorod, is on lunch duty. But it is already 3:30. For the past hour, she has been trying to build a fire to boil a cauldron of lake water for soup. It is raining and the wind is blowing, and the kindling is wet and smoking.

Tanya’s fire flares then dies.

Just adjacent is camp security. “Internal Control,” a young guard corrects me. He turns so I can see the back of his black T-shirt – their uniform – which shows Putin’s face with the words, “We see you are not working.” The guards are brawny military types, country boys adept at wilderness survival.

They are hired hands – not Nashists – but they share a cooking area with the press service, and the separate campfires sit only one yard apart.

Internal Control’s fire is ablaze: yellow flames lick a boiling cauldron atop snapping red-hot coals.

Two guards sit warming themselves. They watch Tanya struggling to light her pile of wet wood, and they say nothing.

Every few minutes, Tanya’s walkie-talkie crackles with one press officer or another demanding to know if lunch is ready. Kids come and go. They sit down to await the delayed meal, eat soggy cookies and probe cans of condensed milk with sticky spoons. After a while, they get up and go. Nobody

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offers to help Tanya. She fans the weak flame with cardboard. She blows on the wood. She burns her hand. “I need a man to help me,” she says. “I can’t get this damn fire to light!” No reaction.

She finds paper scraps in a pile of garbage left by the trash bag and stuffs them under the kindling.

When that doesn’t work, she pulls big logs from the fire and rearranges them in a teepee. Flames catch for brief seconds before a gust of wind blows them out. “Damn it!” she says. Two boys from the press office stand behind her and watch passively.

She does not look at them. “This is not a woman’s job,” she mutters. They walk away.

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looks down to find there is nothing left for her.

“There’s none left,” she says flatly. The others pretend not to hear; they are busy emptying their own bowls as if someone might swipe their lunch, too.

Tanya picks up a can of condensed milk and stale bread. Her friend Julia sits next to her. Julia looks blankly at Tanya’s empty bowl, then says, “Some asshole used my spoon to stuff himself and didn’t frickin’ wash it.”

-

Tanya did not really know Soviet life, but her parents did. They knew what it meant to fear thy neighbor: you don’t stick your neck out unless you want to lose it. The previous generation learned to be wary of strangers, especially those who ask too many questions, and this is what they teach their children. They could not teach their children, these Nashists, the concept of a greater good because they did not know it. Now the young activists with their grand hopes of raising Russia from the ashes are pathologically unable to work together, even in their own interest.

The Nashi movement is an outgrowth of an earlier organization Yakemenko founded called “Walking Together.” He mobilized 10,000 kids in Red Square to celebrate the first anniversary of Putin’s inauguration in 2001, but the movement lacked a cogent ideology. Soon Yakimenko dropped the project to join Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Putin administration, in developing Nashi. His new movement’s activists, Yakemenko told the daily Izvestia, would have a “thorough understanding of whom they should fight and how.” Meanwhile, some members of the abandoned movement, who did not have this understanding, fell under the influence of the “fascists” and formed a countermovement called “Walking Without Putin.”

“We won’t be eating lunch any time soon,” Tanya tells me. She can’t bring herself to ask anyone for help. When an hour later the potatoes finally boil, she announces over the radio that lunch is ready.

Twenty kids descend with their aluminum bowls and spoons. After Tanya doles out the soup, she

The Nashists would not let this happen to them.

In the months after the December parliamentary elections that solidified Putin’s power, Nashi responded to threats (both real and imagined) of disbandment by regrouping into a sort of al Qaedalike structure. The top echelon formed an umbrella

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of commissars to oversee Nashi’s myriad projects.

Each project became an autonomous cell responsible for its own recruitment and funding. One project promoted the Orthodox faith, another tourism, and yet another encouraged young professionals to get involved in construction.

There was even a business school. This allowed Nashi to expand by recruiting kids from outside the narrow spectrum of political activism.

Nashi projects appeal to the “normal kids” who just want to get involved in their community, help build stuff, cure drug addicts. Once inside, kids can be gently but systematically indoctrinated and, finally, mobilized into action under Nashi’s brand. Such a cellular framework cannot be demobilized or disbanded.

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// the goals of the organization remain deliberately undefined; the kids sustain what they do not understand. they regurgitate the meaningless words they are given, and this engenders order and unity and strength unencumbered by free thought or ideology.

of government. We turn into the forest, which is littered with posters (“Tomorrow, there will be thousands of us and no one will be able to tell us what to do” and “Participate in the modernization of our country” and “Be better!”).

“Have you talked to Vassya?” Ivan asks me about Vasily Yakemenko.

“He’s Nashi’s ideological papa,” Mark says.

“I haven’t been able to track him down,” I say.

“You have to talk to Vassya,” Ivan says.

“Yeah,” Mark agrees. “You can’t write about Nashi without talking to Vassya.”

The goals of the organization remain deliberately undefined; the kids sustain what they do not understand. They regurgitate the meaningless words they are given, and this engenders order and unity and strength unencumbered by free thought or ideology. In this way, as in many ways, Nashi is like the country that made them. It is how Putin wields the post-Soviet landscape: by manipulating vague, aimless nationalism to buttress his empire.

“He’s an amazing orator,” Ivan says. “When I heard him speak, I knew I wanted to join the movement.

He’s just so . . .” He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know, what’s the word?” he asks Mark.

-

Ivan tells me about the first time Nashi convened at Seliger. Kids brought alcohol, and a lot of people got drunk. “I mean, wasted-drunk. It was crazy!”

Ivan says. “Then Vassya gathers everyone in the main square and he comes on stage and he’s just got this energy – it’s amazing – and he says, ‘Those

I am walking along Lake Seliger with Mark and Ivan. We pass a makeshift gym on the beach where boys lift weights in the sun. On the dock behind them stands a replica White House, Russia’s seat

“Charismatic,” Mark says.

“Yes, charismatic,” Ivan says. “He’s just got so much charisma.”

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who’ve been drinking, you know who you are and I know who you are and I am going to find you.’ And it was like he was talking to you directly, you know?”

“Crazy,” Mark says.

“Yeah,” Ivan says. “It really made an impression on people. One of my friends went right back to his tent and dug a hole in the ground and hid his bottle of vodka in there. He was so afraid Vassya would find him, he actually dug a hole in the ground!” Ivan shakes his head. “He didn’t dig it up until the night before he left.”

“He still dug it up, though,” Mark says.

I am told Vassya lives “on the mountain” at the edge of camp beyond the VIP section. I go there one afternoon but Vassya is not there. Instead, I run into Nikita Borovikov.

The new Nashi leader is unshaven and in rubber sandals, gym shorts, and a T-shirt that does not hide his paunch. He answers my questions with questions. When I ask him about Nashi’s vilification of the opposition, he fires back, “Is your government 100 percent democratic?” When I ask what happens when Putin does something Nashi doesn’t agree with, he answers, “Does your government do everything you want it to with your tax money?” When he does answer my questions, he speaks mostly in parables and metaphors.

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We are walking along a country road. A half dozen kids dive off a jury-rigged dock. In the distance, three canoes drift by on placid, coffee-colored waters. I ask about the campaign against Anthony Brenton, Britain’s ambassador in Moscow, who attended what Nashi termed “a fascist meeting” of the opposition. Brenton complained of “psychological harassment bordering on violence.”

Borovikov nods like he’s been waiting for this one.

“Let’s pretend I come and visit you in your home in the U.S.,” Borovikov says. He looks up to make sure I’m following. I nod. “And imagine that in your home you have a problem with cockroaches.

No matter what you do, you can’t get rid of them.

And there are so many that they are aesthetically getting on your nerves. And on top of that you’re the mother of a young child, and these cockroaches spread disease.”

He pauses for reaction. “Okay,” I say. He nods.

“So you invite me into your home for tea and right there in front of you I am feeding the very cockroaches you are trying to get rid of. As soon as you turn your back to feed the baby, I start feeding those cockroaches. What would you do?

Would you tell me to leave?”

Borovikov looks me in the eyes, and waits for me to say something. When I don’t, he repeats: “Would you tell me to leave?” Another pause. “You’d tell me to leave, wouldn’t you?” Okay, I say, in this hypothetical instance, yes.

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“Okay, so we agree!” he says, triumphant. “You would tell me to leave, and you might use rude words to do it. Because the most important thing for you is to protect your child from disease, right?”

Sure, I say.

“Good. Then tell me what’s worse, the person who might have used bad words or the person who is spreading disease? Who is more immoral? Because on the one hand, all we are talking about are some impolite words. And on the other hand, a crime.” I assume the crime he means is Brenton’s presence at a conference organized by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and Putin opponent. The “impolite words,” then, must be the six months Nashi spent picketing the British embassy, tailing Brenton with a banner demanding his apology, disrupting his public speeches, and posting his whereabouts on the Internet.

“The point,” Borovikov concludes, “is that we don’t want people from other governments to come into our house and feed the cockroaches we’re trying to fight when we turn our back. And if they do, of course, we’re going to act like a hurt mother. Because that is who we are: a hurt mother.”

In the absence of real information, rumors are as good as truth in the local mindset. And rumor has it that the Kremlin (or certain factions within the Kremlin, or certain people, like Putin) dramatically

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cut Nashi’s funding this year, signifying that the group is no longer needed.

In January, after elections, the daily Kommersant suggested in an article the Kremlin wanted to distance itself from the movement’s antics. The Russian press picked up on it, and soon it was widely accepted truth that the movement’s days are numbered.

Nashi responded with an action to reassert its doggedness. It printed Kommersant’s logo on thousands of toilet paper rolls with the phone number of the article’s author. Nashists handed them out on Moscow streets, and a few rolls found their way into the toilets of the State Duma. Meanwhile, Nashi hackers shut down the Kommersant Web site for five hours and bombarded the editor with spam. The action reportedly cost the newspaper $155,000. It also reminded the Kremlin how quickly these youths can mobilize against an enemy.

The Voluntary Youth Militia, known as DMD, is Nashi’s vigilante group. DMD polices small-town streets to “keep order,” and it protects Nashi actions. One camp rumor has it that truckloads of trees for firewood caused a major gridlock until DMD swept in and unloaded the trucks within the hour. Another rumor – this one printed in the press – says the DMD is where Nashi funnels its “socially maladjusted” members.

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At the DMD tents, I am told a kid named Artyom Kazlov is the best person to explain what DMD does. “Our job is to return patriotism to young people,” he says,” “to introduce them to new – oy, not new – I mean old, centuries-old ideology with the goal of increasing the population.”

Artyom is angry because he believes “fascism” is resurging. “After we beat it 60 years ago,” he says, incredulous. He is also upset that his country has become less Russian – less Ours. “People copy Western culture, listen to foreign music, and a lot of people want to go to America,” he tells me. I hear this a lot; two decades after the Cold War, the nation still suffers from an inferiority complex.

Artyom says he joined Nashi to help change things.

“I want to belong to something big and powerful,” he says. “I want to realize myself, and I want to be able to say we’re good, and they’re bad.” He picks at his tattooed arm and adds as an afterthought: “You know, I was once a skinhead.”

At midday the camp is quiet. Under threat of expulsion, the Nashists are at lectures: “Human Capital and Social Capital,” “United Russia’s Party Projects,” “Sovereignty of the Soul and Russia’s Spiritual Leadership in the World.”

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artyom says he joined nashi to help change things. “i want to belong to something big and powerful,” he says. “i want to realize myself, and i want to be able to say we’re good, and they’re bad.” //

icially, he is a Kremlin puppet. His anti-establishment tirades in the Duma are so outrageous, so incendiary, as to invalidate themselves, but his presence helps maintain a veneer of plurality. He is, to date, the longest surviving post-Communist politician.

“People tell you you’ll be governors and presidents,” Zhirinovsky says to the sea of red T-shirts before him. The tent is hot and stuffy, and he is sweating profusely. “Well, you won’t be.” He fishes for a hanky and rubs a corpulent hand over his face. Some kids photograph him with their cell phones. “The elite is full, and the elite doesn’t take strangers,” he says.

“I am telling you the truth. Better to have the truth than a sweet lie.”

A young girl in a red Nashi T-shirt, with a bandana tied around her neck, stands up and takes the mike. “What would you do to change the situation?”she asks.

“You can’t do anything to change the situation,” Zhirinovsky fires back. “In Iran, young people just like you are relaxing and having fun right now and

by December they’ll be in their graves. You think you can change this? History is dirty and bloody and full of violence. Nothing has changed and nothing will change.”

The crowd boos; the kids put away their cell phones.

The questions peter out. A few leave the tent early.

-

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is speaking in the central tent.

Officially, he leads the LDRP opposition party; unof-

Tanya is telling me about last year’s Seliger. A record

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10,000 activists showed up, twice as many as the year before and four times as many as the first summer in 2005. Nashi’s sister organization, Young Russia, was also invited last year, and one night the group staged an action. They marched on the main square, shouting and pushing people. DMD rushed in to establish order, and the con-frontation got violent. “It was total chaos,” says Tanya, recalling how the Jumbotron got smashed. “Then Yakemenko comes on stage and says, ‘if you think this was bad, wait until you see what happens in December!’”

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the forest, nodding occasionally at people he passes. He is giving me another parable. “We all have to go to a store when we need to buy something,” he says. “It would really nice to go to dictate the price to the shopkeeper, wouldn’t it?”

I say I guess so.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to buy things at the price you want?”

“Okay, yes,” I say.

I ask if Yakemenko staged the Young Russia demonstration. “Yeah,” she says, shrugging like it’s no big deal. “He wanted us to be prepared for the elections.” I ask her about the violence. “Whatever,” she says. “I don’t care about it one way or the other.

And, anyway, when you join a movement you have to adjust yourself to that movement. So, you learn to close your eyes at the things you don’t like.”

She busies herself cleaning the table. She wipes it down, moving around torn bags of sugar and cans of boiled meat. She stops to think over what she just said. She shrugs again. “If there was another movement to choose from then maybe I’d think about it,” she says and goes back to cleaning. “But for now, this one suits me just fine.” This is something I often hear people say about Putin.

“Well, we sell gas to Europe. And frankly I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I am being told by the customer what the price is,” he says. “We’re not accustomed to being manipulated.”

I ask him who he thinks is manipulating him. “Our country and your country are fighting for the sphere of influence in geopolitics,” he says. “Nobody wants to be led.”

At the Armenian encampment, the leader sits at a log table surrounded by several boys in track pants.

He wants to start a similar movement in Armenia and needs advice.

-

“Which of our projects are you interested in?”

Borovikov asks after pleasantries. “Child development? Builders? Technology?”

Nikita Borovikov has an appointment with the Armenian delegation. He walks briskly through

The Armenian looks a little confused. “We want to be able to do what Young Russia does,” he says.

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“Okay,” Borovikov says. He leans in and clasps his hands. “Young Russia is offense. They have methods for staging actions. There is also defense. That’s what DMD does. DMD has developed special techniques for breaking up other people’s actions and protecting our own from aggressors.”

“Great,” the Armenian says.

“Okay,” Borovikov says. He stands up and shakes the Armenian’s hand. “We’ll get you set up.”

In 2007, Putin visited the Nashists at Seliger, but this year he sends his first deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov. If that is a slight, the movement overlooks it. (“He already came. What would coming again accomplish?” Borovikov says defensively).

But the Russian press sees a sign that Putin no longer cares about Nashi.

I ask Alexander Tarasov about the rumors. “It is simply dangerous to abandon this many kids after yanking them out of the wilderness and into political activism,” he tells me. “I’ll repeat once more: I don’t believe they will be abandoned. The regime is flush with oil dollars, it doesn’t cost that much to maintain Nashi, so why would they do such a stupid thing? The Walking Together experience showed that disillusionment with Kremlin politics leads to youth movements like Walking Without Putin. The administration is not full of idiots.”

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Shuvalov visits on the day that foreign reporters are also invited, but only a hundred or so handpicked guests can attend the “press conference.” The press is not invited. The VIP visit is not announced in camp, and most people don’t learn about it until it is over.

The tent is half-empty and airless. Shuvalov arrives three hours late. He cracks a few jokes but says not much of anything. This goes on for nearly an hour, and I find it difficult to concentrate. Then, instead of answering the last question, Shuvalov drops a warning: “We are developing quickly, so of course people are scared of us – we must be prepared for that. We have to show ourselves as a strong, equal partner, and we cannot have people thinking that we are bears who lash out any time the mood strikes us. It is our responsibility to project a better image.”

On the way back to the press office, I see a man in khaki pants on a Segway scooter in the middle of the woods. He is talking to two young women, heads upturned, eyes entranced. Vasily Yakemenko? I ask. The girls thank him and run off.

“That’s not me,” the man says. His ID badge is turned inward, and I don’t know if he is telling the truth.

You’re not Vasily Yakemenko? I ask again.

“And who are you?” he says. I tell him.

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“You speak Russian very well,” he says. “Are you a spy?” He laughs like he’s joking, but his eyes are not sparkling now; they are dead and cold. I explain that I was born in Russia but grew up in America.

“What do you need from me?” he says. I say that I’d like to talk to him when he has some time.

“What do you want to talk about?” I say I want to ask him about Nashi.

“I don’t have any connection to Nashi,” he says.

“But you’re on stage here everyday.”

“There are many youth movements in Russia,” he says. “If I am quoted commenting on one, the others will get upset.” His lips curl upwards into a crooked smile, as if to say he knows he’s bullshitting me, and he knows that I know he’s bullshitting me.

I ask him if we can talk about youth movements in general.

“I tell you what,” he says. “You submit a list of questions to me and if I think they are appropriate, I’ll answer them.” Then he wheels off. I never get around to submitting a list of questions, and he never answers them.

Valeria, a pretty young woman who works for Internal Control and wears a gold cross and

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sparkly blue eye shadow, finds me at dinner and asks me to follow her. I wonder if I am about to be kicked out. She says nothing and leads me through a maze of tents to Nikita Borovikov’s base camp. Two Internal Control guards sit on plastic lawn chairs around a plastic table with a kid who says his name is Jefferson. They need help translating.

Jefferson says he is a “Kenyan from Delaware.” He came here to take part in a cultural exchange. He is very upset. He tells me he was talking to a girl on the beach when two muscular young women came up and asked if he had anything in his pocket. “I told them, no, and then they started pushing me in the river,” he says.

Jefferson picks up a pink cell phone from the table and shows me that it won’t turn on. “They were big girls, really fat girls. They just threw me in the water.

And now my phone is dead.”

Valeria examines the phone and says to a guard, “This looks old. It was probably dead before they threw him in the water.” The guard asks me to tell Jefferson that Internal Control will find out who was responsible. “Make sure to tell him he’ll be compensated for the phone,” he says.

“I don’t care about the phone,” Jefferson says. “I want a written statement that they are sorry. If not, someone will pay for this. One day, I will find some Russian somewhere, and I will throw him in the ocean.” He shakes his head.

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It has been raining for days, but this evening the sun is out and though the grass is wet everyone is happy to crawl out of the tents and gather for the evening rally.

I am with Karina, a 19-year-old who recently joined the movement. She considers herself lucky because she got a job in the press center writing and editing for the Nashi Web site, which means that she is “in the headquarters and not a soldier.” Karina tells me – with a little disgust and a little fear – that if it had not been for Nashi, she would be at a department store promoting perfume. “It would have just been a job,” she says. “This is a career.”

A video is blasting across the Jumbotron, a montage of scenes that flash back to hard metallic rock music. The footage shows an action at the Estonian embassy. A protest sign reads, “Hands off our grandfathers.” In other actions, demonstrators beat drums, picketers fire tear gas canisters. Finally, a large human dummy is set on fire, and the body burns and smokes and the youths shout with rage.

Karina is crying. I ask if she is upset by the sight of the burning effigy. She covers her mouth with a hand and nods. She is still a child, all baby fat and wet eyes. “But we had truth on our side,” she says, trying to convince herself. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “You have to draw attention to yourself

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somehow.” After a moment, she takes a breath and collects herself. Then she says, “The Estonian president called our grandfathers drunkards and grave robbers.” This time, she sounds angry.

After the video, I spot Jefferson in the main square with some other Kenyans. He tells me Internal Control bought him a new phone, but he is seething. The prank hit a nerve, or maybe it just confirmed to Jefferson what he had already assumed.

“If Russians are not ready to receive visitors, they should not have asked me to come here,” he says.

I ask him if he is still planning on throwing a Russian into the ocean. “I don’t know,” he says.

“It’s inhuman to attack someone and throw them in the water. It was not a true welcome, it’s just a mask. Their gates are open, but their hearts are not open. When I saw those girls later, they were talking as if nothing had happened. It’s just a small thing for them. They don’t care if another nigger dies.

It’s like they pushed a dog in the water.”

Two boys in military fatigues from Nashi’s army project and two girls come up to Jefferson. The girls giggle softly and ask if they can take a picture with him. They are wearing pink lipstick and sunglasses that are too big for their faces and they pose like sexy pinups, their knees bent, their chests pushed forward. Jefferson stands in the middle of them and looks annoyed. “You see what I mean?” he says.

The boys offer him a handshake and walk away.

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It is dusk and a kid in aviator glasses and stovepipe jeans is playing the guitar and Mark is free styling and Ivan is taking pictures. Mark’s lyrics are heavy on God and patriotism and when he’s done, I ask him if he’s a believer. He says, yes, but he looks uncomfortable. I ask him what it is he believes in.

He pulls me off to the side and whispers, “I haven’t told this to anyone, but I’m a Jew.” He looks to make sure no one heard him. I ask him why he hasn’t told anyone. “It’s an uncomfortable situation,” he says.

I ask him if Ivan knows he’s Jewish. “Yeah, he knows,” Mark says, “But he’s cool. He doesn’t give me a hard time about it.”

“But what about your lyrics?” I say. “They’re all about faith and God.” “Yes, but did you notice I didn’t say which god?” he says proudly. “My lyrics are about God in general, not specific. And they’re about Babylon.” Just then, a large, stubbly kid called Makar interrupts us. He is a friend of the kid with the guitar. He knows Mark, too, and by way of greeting, he says, “Hey! Where’s the faith?”

“Faith in Orthodoxy!” Mark shoots back with a slightly raised fist. Then they hug.

The lyrics to another Nashi rap song: Our road is taking us out of the darkness and into the light.

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// the last victory they know is the victory of their grandfathers. now they want a victory of their own.

The plan is clear and we don’t need any more advice.

You can’t buy what we have with money – It’s Our world, Our way, Our time, Our hour!

Out of the camp gates, the pitted road to Moscow passes military memorials and the gilded cupolas of Orthodox churches. An incandescent mist floats above the rolling green on summer mornings, and the road twists through golden wheat fields, and fields of red and white wildflowers, and forests of birch trees, which stand in crooked rows like rawboned soldiers.

This tranquil land, these sunken farms and crumbling houses of worship, once terrorized, once starved, now hide secrets this nation cannot confront. The children strap on their boots and take to this road because they, too, cannot look back.

The last victory they know is the victory of their grandfathers. Now they want a victory of their own.

They are ready to be led – it doesn’t much matter by whom – and they will fight.

Because they are tired of insecurity. They don’t want to hear that elsewhere is better. They believe that their world, their way, and their hour has come.

And they will not be told otherwise.

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jeff danziger

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andrei soldatov

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fsb the kgb with a vengeance

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From the start, President Vladimir Putin spared no resource to strengthen Russia’s intelligence agencies. He inflated security budgets with cash from soaring oil prices, and he used state-owned media to make spying look good again. A belief spread that the KGB ogre had re-emerged as the FSB, the Federal Security Service. This was a convenient myth not only for human rights activists and journalists but also for FSB officials. Evoking a bygone era, they persuaded the Kremlin that their traditions and methods were crucial.

Like all myths, the truth here is much more complex, and it is deeply disturbing as a new Russia takes shape.

By the late 1980s, just before the Soviet collapse, the Committee for State Security – the KGB – was different from other intelligence services in the world. Mukhabarat intelligence services in the Middle East also combined secret police, spying, and counterintelligence under one roof. But their scope was confined largely to domestic matters.

The KGB consolidated its intelligence functions as the main Soviet weapon against political enemies at home and abroad. Only the Communist Party kept this powerful body in check; each division, department, and office had a party cell, a peephole by which the state could monitor agents.

After the Communists lost their power, nothing supplanted party supervision. Boris Yeltsin’s first challenge was to place the KGB behemoth under

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his thumb. His liberals decided to weaken its superstructure by splitting it into smaller independent agencies, American-style.

A separate Foreign Intelligence Service stripped the new FSB of the KGB’s external spy network. Ground forces were reassigned to border control. The intelligence agency no longer protected leaders; an independent force similar to the U.S. Secret Service did that.

A Federal Agency of Government Communication and Information (FAGCI), analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency, handled electronic surveillance. The FSB was even deprived of its secret bunkers, which went under the president’s direct authority. The neutered agency kept only a nominal presence in the army. All told, the FSB was pruned to resemble something similar to Britain’s MI5.

Yeltsin liked checks and balances, and he retained control by instigating intrigues within the splintered intelligence community. For instance, he played FAGCI and the FSB against each other, making both responsible for monitoring political developments and then using one agency’s reports as leverage against the other.

This volatile, imperfect system hobbled along until 1998 when the first directors of the FSB, FAGCI, and Foreign Intelligence Service were retired. Putin, with deep KGB roots, was named to head the FSB. Elected president two years later, he set about remaking the crippled agency.

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The Kremlin reinstated the FSB as warden of army morale to watch for potential mutiny. It gave back the foreign intelligence capacity that Yeltsin took away. Rumors circulated that Putin would put splintered KGB cells back into a single superstructure. He did not, but he restored much of the old framework.

In 2003, Putin eliminated the FAGCI and border patrol agencies, transferring most of their functions back to the FSB. Then he made a move that, in hindsight, underscores the craftiness that defined his presidency: he assigned FSB generals to head almost every remaining independent agency. Gen. Rashid Nurgaliev, a career FSB officer, was made minister of the interior.

The FSB began to help shape the president’s opinions, a departure from the past. The KGB had no separate analytical apparatus and never gave the Kremlin anything even remotely resembling the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates.

Instead, it funneled data to “consultants” in the party, a filter between intelligence officers and Soviet leadership. This ensured that the state could not be controlled by the security services.

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the fsb now influences policy and has rid itself of controls . . . no agency even comes close to competing. this is not simply a kgb revival. instead, the fsb has amassed powers to mutate into something russia has never seen. //

Duma’s State Security Committee, confirmed in May 2008 that the agency had no parliamentary oversight. No agency even comes close to competing. This is not simply a KGB revival. Instead, the FSB has amassed powers to mutate into something Russia has never seen.

In its new role, the FSB did the logical thing: it maximized opportunity while avoiding potential liability. During the second Chechnya incursion in 2001, it took charge of the region as part of Russia’s “war on terror.” But in 2003, when entrenched resistance lingered on, it passed command to the Ministry of Interior Affairs.

The FSB planted officials in every state-run structure, from government institutes to television stations to the Bolshoi Theatre’s ballet school (an FSB colonel was appointed director). Often, officers were dispatched openly, not undercover in the guise of crime prevention. This was explicit intent of control.

Putin rewrote the rules. He created an FSB analytical section, which reported directly to him.

This department became so important that its first director, Sergei Ivanov, was made minister of defense. Now he is deputy prime minister.

FSB generals insinuated themselves deep into Russia’s governing bodies. Exploiting the myth that the KGB was the only uncorrupted Soviet structure, Putin’s inner circle persuaded him that he could only find trustworthy managers (and allies) among the former Chekists. And so these siloviki amassed more and more power.

The FSB now influences policy and has rid itself of controls. Vladimir Vasiliev, the chairman of the

No one was untouchable. Masked FSB agents arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. As head

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of the Yukos oil giant, he amassed Russia’s greatest fortune and wielded heavy political clout. After Khodorkovsky, the war against the liberals metastasized into a struggle between two distinct clans of siloviki: those generals who lobbied for Gazprom, and those who stood up for Rosneft. Gazprom claimed a significant, if temporary, victory when Putin picked Dmitry Medvedev as his successor.

Meanwhile, the FSB expanded its role as defender of the regime. Back in 1998, it set up a Directorate for the Protection of the Constitution as heir to the notorious KGB Fifth Department, which thwarted dissidence. Its first chief, Gennady Zotov, declared that internal sedition was far more dangerous than a threat of outside attack. FSB officers tracked the opposition, such as Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, which might foment revolution as youth movements did in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia.

Russian law ostensibly forbade agents from infiltrating political parties. But in January 2008, the public learned that ban was no longer in force when Alexander Novikov sought political asylum in Denmark. He told journalists the FSB employed him to infiltrate the United Civil Front (UCF), the opposition party headed by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov’s group is one of the few opposition forces not controlled by the FSB. When I investigated Novikov’s story, he told me the FSB recruited him in 2006, paying about $300 a month for inside information on the UCF. It was not so astonishing, then, when intelligence chief

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// fsb officials regard themselves not only as heirs to the kgb but also the secret police that tsars deployed to battle political terrorism. they see no contradiction between these seemingly disparate missions. their main objective is to protect power.

Nikolai Patrushev declared the FSB to be Russia’s “new nobility,” defenders of the regime and saviors of the Motherland. There was even talk of setting up a “Teutonic Order,” harking back to medieval crusaders.

In 2006, the intelligence officials’ special status was made clear when Putin changed their uniform color from drab khaki to the black that evoked the FSB’s Imperial legacy. During the Russian civil war, an all-officers regiment in the White Guard called itself a “brotherhood of monastic knights who sacrificed their liberty, their blood, and their lives for Russia.” They wore black tunics as a symbol of their scorn for earthly goods.

The FSB has also strengthened its ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2002, the Cathedral of St. Sophia of God’s Wisdom was restored and reopened just off Lubyanka Square, a block from FSB headquarters. Patriarch Aleksei II of Moscow and All Russia himself blessed the opening in a ceremony attended by Nikolai Patrushev, then FSB chief.

Russia’s brand of Orthodoxy is based on a belief in Russian uniqueness. It is well suited for fanning patriotism and a concept that Moscow is “the Third Rome” after Ancient Rome and Constantinople.

Being “unique,” Russia sees itself surrounded by numerous envious enemies the FSB must combat.

FSB officials regard themselves not only as heirs to the KGB but also the secret police that tsars deployed to battle political terrorism. They see no

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contradiction between these seemingly disparate missions. Their main objective is to protect power.

In the same way, Orthodoxy and atheism serve a single purpose: a convenient guise to obfuscate the true psychology of the Chekists.

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“That’s not important,” he says. “We only found grounds for arrest after our experts examined the contents of the book, and that was only just published.”

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It was Kafka logic. Logic that makes you want to beat your head against the wall. Logic that the FSB inherited from its predecessors.

Moscow, July 2008. I am escorted into an office with a table, two chairs, and a barred window through which I can see the concrete outlines of Lefortovo, the KGB’s notorious torture prison. Across from me is a thin young man in his mid-20s. His name is Pavel Plotnikov, and he is an FSB investigator. I have been called in for interrogation because I interviewed a famous double agent named Sergei Tretyakov. He was a colonel in the foreign intelli-gence service, based at the U.N., before he deserted the agency in 2000. His story is told in Comrade J, a book by journalist Pete Earley.

My interrogator Pavel has a brother named Yuri. A few years ago, Yuri worked in the same “spy department” where his younger brother now serves, and where he investigated the case of scientist Igor Sutyagin. Sutyagin got 15 years of hard labor in 2004 for analyzing openource information for a British consulting firm.

Pavel’s and Yuri’s father is Oleg Plotnikov, the public prosecutor who charged Sutyagin. He also prosecuted Edmond Pope, an American convicted of espionage in 2000; he spent 253 days in Lefortovo before Putin pardoned him from 20 years of hard labor.

Officer Plotnikov demands to know how I tracked down Tretyakov. He tells me this is a very important matter: the FSB discovered secret information in Earley’s book and has charged Tretyakov in absentia.

Four hours of interrogation later, Plotnikov lets me go. He is escorting me out when he suddenly says, “While you’re out there making money, we are in here defending the Motherland.”

-

“When did you bring criminal charges against Tretyakov?” I ask. “In 2000, when he ran, or in 2008, when the book was published?”

“In 2008,” says my interrogator. “After all, that’s when we found evidence that Treyakov gave up state secrets.”

“Yes, but he deserted in 2000,” I counter. “He even left a note that he is going over to the other side!”

One generation of agents replaces another, the country changes, grows, and still the FSB retains its xenophobia and patriotism, the adherence to a caste system and an envy of outsiders. A nearly identical officer named Gorchakov interrogated me in 2002 after I reported on the Moscow theater hostage crisis. He also mentioned my salary and

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at our parting told me that he is ready to die for the Motherland. This sounded disingenuous given that 130 innocent hostages had just died in the center of Moscow while the war in the Caucasus continued.

In fact, FSB officers now make a good living, their perks dwarf those of the KGB, and even the headquarters parking lot overflows with new BMWs and Chevrolet SUVs. Still, they envy people outside the system.

Soviet leaders rewarded KGB service well; the rank and file received bonuses and free apartments with no waiting lists. The generals’ devotion was secured with chauffeured black Volgas and dachas in Rublyovka, the sanctuary of the Soviet elites. Still, it was understood that these privileges were linked to position, and positions were temporary. The dachas and cars belonged to the KGB.

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// in fact, fsb officers now make a good living, their perks dwarf those of the kgb, and even the headquarters parking lot overflows with new bmws and chevrolet suvs. still, they envy people outside the system.

Alksnis was outraged. He sent documents to me at Novaya Gazeta, and he raised the issue in the Duma. Not surprisingly, he lost his seat in the 2007 parliamentary elections. The FSB does not like meddling outsiders.

The public never knows when an FSB officer commits a crime. In 2006, a new law classified as a state secret any criminal activity by intelligence agents. And the FSB prevents any investigation of one of its own unless it also participates. The agency’s ferocious defense of its ranks enables many to evade criminal charges and encourages widespread bribery.

Today, FSB generals are not satisfied with state property on loan. They may not be attracted to all the West has to offer, but private property suits them well.

In lieu of external controls, the FSB created the Internal Security Directorate as a security check against corruption. The agency reasons that it can prevent misconduct with careful background checks of potential recruits. The question of dirty higher-ups goes unanswered, which is likely why every recent corruption scandal implicates Internal Security’s leadership.

Duma deputy Viktor Alksnis determined that in 2003 and 2004, the state gave about 40 hectares (100 acres) of Rublyovka land to private citizens.

This is Russia’s Golden Mile, where 100 square meters is valued at around $200,000. Much of this land went to FSB generals and their children.

These intelligence officers had become Russia’s landed nobility.

Vladimir Anisimov, chief of the Internal Security Directorate before his promotion to FSB deputy director, was finally fired in 2006 after media reports of corruption. Sergei Shishin replaced him as head of Internal Security but was soon booted out under a cloud. His successor, Alexander Kupryazhkin, was also nearly sacked when every state-run media outlet reported on corruption charges and announced

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his impending resignation. Somehow, he weathered the storm and kept his job.

Shishin and Kupryazhkin were linked to the biggest scandal of recent years. It involved control of contraband from Russia’s biggest trade partner, China, with an annual rake-off in the tens of millions.

An investigation was launched in 2004 but so far remains inconclusive.

When individual crimes go unpunished, institutions are not accountable for failure. On Oct. 23, 2002, 40 to 50 Chechen terrorists seized a theater in the Dubrovka district of Moscow during a musical performance. They took 850 hostages and after three days of deadlock, troops stormed the theater.

“Everybody feared that the terrorists would let us into the theater and then someone on the outside would blow the place up with a remote,” Col. Sergei Shavrin told me on an unusually cold evening in October 2004. He had led a Special Forces unit into the theater. “That would have been the end.

We were waiting for it. We even said goodbye to one another. But it turned out differently.”

Special forces released a chemical gas into the theater, which they assumed would lull the terrorists to sleep. The gas malfunctioned, and the terrorists stayed awake. When troops burst in, they responded with withering gunfire. Meanwhile, the gas killed 130 hostages.

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The Kremlin declared a victory against terrorism, and the generals who planned the operation were rewarded. The country’s highest honor – Hero of the Russian Federation – was given to FSB director Patrushev; his deputy, Vladimir Pronichev, who commanded the operation; and Aleksandr Tikhonov, head of Russia’s equivalent of Delta Force.

The Kremlin did not name an independent commission to investigate the circumstances. Leaders justified this decision by saying security services were so weakened during the 1990s that they needed support, not criticism. This was repeated after the 2004 Beslan attack when 335 people were killed, including 186 children.

Still, several FSB officials were forced to resign after the theater assault. Shavrin was one of them. He was a decorated officer, deputy commander of the FSB’s elite Vympel unit. He fought in both Chechen wars and was awarded the Hero medal in 1995 after he led his troops safely out of a siege during the invasion of Grozny. But he criticized the leadership’s handling of the theater siege and was cashiered.

The importance the FSB places on loyalty over skill, and its indulgence of mistakes, has led to increased risk-taking both at home and abroad.

“They weren’t prepared for what happened,” Shavrin told me. Reserved and soft-spoken, he was no typical Lubyanka man. I asked if anything changed. He shook his head and took a drag of his cigarette. “Everything is the same as it always was,” he said.

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Wahhabist, was shot dead on the stoop of a mosque from a car with Russian plates.

The Cold War is long since over, but the FSB still does not believe in cooperating with Western intelligence agencies. Internal failures are typically explained by “foreign meddling.” Just as Americans believe Iranian intelligence supports the Iraqi insurgency, Russia blames Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and the United States for fanning flames in Chechnya. According to the FSB, first foreign countries sent emissaries to the Caucusus and built safe havens for Chechens in the Middle East and Europe.

Then there was the very public poisoning of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London. Although the scandal hurt Russia’s image, it benefited the FSB. In the absence of external controls, the Kremlin had no way to verify the facts and was forced to believe whatever testimony the generals provided. Meanwhile, the outcry in Britain was just one more confirmation for suspicious leaders that they should not cooperate with Western intelligence.

It simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

But Israeli agents impressed the Russians with their ability to target terrorists worldwide, so much that the FSB decided to try its hand. In 2004, a bomb in Doha, Qatar, killed Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. Qatari authorities arrested two Russians in the Doha embassy and held a closed trial. The assassins were released only after Putin interceded. They came home to a hero’s welcome.

Today, Russian intelligence has a stature far beyond that of the Soviet KGB. Without scrutiny, its brutal maverick operations are widespread and unchecked.

It manipulates the Kremlin, protecting itself from threats it fabricates. It feeds inherent xenophobia to poison relations with the West. That, in turn, encourages Russia to turn inward. Thus, the FSB operates at will without meddling from inside or from beyond Russian borders.

In the summer of 2006, after four Russian diplomats were kidnapped in Iraq and another executed by insurgents, the Duma sanctioned foreign assassinations by intelligence agencies. About that time, Chechens in Azerbaijan started disappearing.

One local human rights organization had a list of 12 names, including 31-year-old Ruslan Eliev, who vanished in Baku in November 2006. His body was later found in a forest in Chechnya. In August 2007, Khamzat Gibza, a prominent local

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crime and nonpunishment

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Russia’s oil wealth is no shield from global economic turmoil, but its subsurface parallel economy thrives with undeclared trade in people, arms, drugs, counterfeit goods, and even nuclear materials. Cyber crime ranges from child pornography and identity theft to attacks on the Web infrastructures of such troublesome neighbors as Estonia and Georgia. The line between criminal and official is often blurred. Young hackers operate on their own and freelance for the state.

Essentially, the whole system is corrupt. Oligarchs who run legitimate businesses are often linked closely with organized crime, particularly in the vital energy and raw materials sectors. Comparisons often drawn between these oligarchs and American robber barons fall short. U.S. industrialists used violence and corruption to eliminate competition or coerce workers. Russians use violence and corruption to take over companies. Then they get rid of competitors.

Much of this illicit economy is hard to track. Computer hackers hide behind rapidly changing Internet addresses. But it is hard to miss the “Natashas,” Russian prostitutes who are everywhere from the Roppongi district of Tokyo to Istanbul brothels and London’s West End. In between, organized crime plays a large role in real estate, transport, oil and gas, and aluminum.

Honest people learn not to ask questions. I was an expert witness in a court case brought by the family of a young musician who signed onto a

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// essentially, the whole system is corrupt. oligarchs who run legitimate businesses are often linked closely with organized crime, particularly in the vital energy and raw materials sectors.

trawler to earn extra money. When its mobster owners realized he had seen too much, he was killed and thrown in the hold.

Previously murky relations between crime and business are increasingly clear as partners fight in Western courts rather than shoot it out on the streets. Lawyers must explain why Russian judges are too compromised to assure a fair trial. To win their cases, they reveal secrets about the criminal origins of disputed fortunes.

Mikhail Cherney, a billionaire tracked by lawmen across the world, recently sued Oleg Derispaska, one of Russia’s richest men, for a share of the aluminum industry. A London judge declared himself dumbfounded at the amount involved: $4 billion.

Russia’s legal and illicit economies heavily exploit depleting natural resources. This is no surprise since one mirrors the other, and both share the same cultural underpinnings. Russia was never a society of traders. Before the revolution, Armenians, Greeks, Germans, and others dominated trade from their distinct districts in Moscow. Russians sold off furs, timber, and the mineral wealth of their vast empire. With the return of capitalism in the 1990s, old patterns quickly re-emerged.

Regard for human life is often no stronger. With its killer instincts, organized crime went for the jewels of Soviet industry. Thousands died in the battle for control of aluminum and smelting plants, for instance, as well as banks that could ship stolen

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assets abroad. Mobsters command a bizarre hero status. In Ekaterinburg, a center of heavy industry, a proud citizen took me to a cemetery with larger than life sculptures of deceased killers. Christian and Muslim graves are separate, but the gangsters are divided only in death. Ethnic hostility is rare in the criminal world.

Quick gains push aside long-term planning. Crude oil and gas sales now represent a third of the economy, with little thought to diversification as reserves are steadily depleted. Trafficking of women operates on this natural resource model. Criminals sell women at the least profitable stage, as a raw commodity that will bring large returns to “retail” crime groups in destination countries.

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the global crash also took its toll on russian organized crime, but the system protected itself. //

often in cahoots with criminals, have plenty to hide.

Some acquire a stake in the economy via corporate raiding. In the 1990s, Russians coined the pun, prikhvatizatiysa, which combines privatization with property seizure. That was pure thuggery. Now this can be subtler, if no less dangerous. The stakes can be key companies in the petroleum and energy fields. At least 70,000 cases of corporate raiding have been reported in recent years.

A Russian colleague told me of a case in Khabarovsk, a pleasant city in the Far East. Raiders tried everything to dislodge a family from their home on a valuable piece of land. They set fire to the house 15 times before, in a grand finale, they burned the place down and killed everyone inside.

Russia is so vulnerable to sharp drops in oil prices that the state-controlled media avoids the subject.

But bankers and industrialists approached panic late in 2008. The stock market was closed for several days after dropping 70 percent, triggering monster margin calls for several billionaires. Russia’s major investors, out for fast profit, had bet heavily on the riskiest of American hedge funds.

Leaders show little will to protect citizens or stop corruption. Despite occasional arrests of such figures as Semyon Mogilevich, a leader of the important Solntsevo crime group and the mayor of crime-ridden Vladivostok, along with many smaller fish, there has been no coordinated attack on the thousands of known members of known organized crime groups.

The global crash also took its toll on Russian organized crime, but the system protected itself.

Late in 2008, the government abolished the special police branch dedicated to fighting organized crime.

As usual, no explanation was given. The unit had hardly been a significant deterrent. Specialists agree it was among the most corrupt of Russia’s police agencies.

In the midst of market free fall, President Dmitry Medvedev announced a new anti-corruption program to almost universal cynicism. Bureaucrats must declare their assets, but the proposed legislation is laced with loopholes. Government officials,

Violence is endemic. Russia’s homicide rate is 20

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times the European Union’s and four times the United States’. The police and courts are so corrupt and politicized that they cannot begin to enforce the laws.

Russian organized crime burgeoned with the Soviet demise in a scramble to acquire assets of the crumbling state. From the beginning, Russian mafias were different from others in the world because they focused on the legitimate economy. Elsewhere, crime groups made their money by extortion, drugs, gambling operations, and prostitution.

The Italian mafia only began to exploit government construction contracts a century after it was first identified. The Yakuza did not enter into banks and real estate until Japan’s economic rise after World War II. In Russia, it was the reverse.

Over time, Russian mobs turned to classic illicit activity, at first drawn by a drug demand in a country with one of the world’s fastest growing addiction rates.

In the mid-to late 1990s, Russian businessmen had to pay for “security” from violent thugs. Many who refused to hire protection found their businesses destroyed or their families tortured. Some ended up dead. Today, extortion is much less visible, but organized crime still extracts a share of profits at all levels. Criminals sit on the boards of major companies and demand a cut. This is not only a business cost but also a main reason why Moscow prices are among the world’s highest.

Organized crime and corrupt officials extract a

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// violence is endemic. russia’s homicide rate is 20 times the european union’s and four times the united states’. the police and courts are so corrupt and politicized that they cannot begin to enforce the laws.

sizable share of every new business, every meal consumed, and every item bought in the main markets and stores.

Human trafficking is growing on a large scale.

Russian women are exported for sex work abroad.

Despite Russia’s growing economy and expanding middle class, criminals find plenty of poor and vulnerable adolescents. Official estimates say as many as one million youngsters are now homeless. Some fled violent or drunken parents; others were abandoned. Even teenagers from good homes end up as victims.

Occasionally, light shines on this shadowy trade. In 2007, authorities found a deep pit near Nizhyni Tagil in the Urals where a group of men lured girls with meals and ice cream, then forced them into prostitution. Many who refused were murdered. The bodies of 40 girls who had been reported missing were found frozen in the pit.

Though tragic, the case was a tiny part of the bigger problem.

Increasing affluence, manpower shortages, and a male population unwilling to do hard physical labor has drawn migrants into Russia at a rapid pace. In a country of 140 million, an estimated 5 million to 10 million illegal migrants join several million legal migrants. A new law allows citizens of former Soviet republics work permits for up to three months. Still, 80 percent of migrants work in the parallel economy for a fraction of the wages paid to Russians.

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In a recent survey, one-quarter of Russians queried said they knew migrants who had been enslaved by having passports taken away or by actual confinement. These exploited laborers are now estimated to outnumber sex-traffic victims. Aiding victims of this massive exploitation is not a priority for the state or its citizens.

Russian history has no tradition of individual rights, and recent research makes clear this has not changed. Sixty percent of the population is not ready to help improve migrants’ lives. Only 13 percent believe a prostitute should receive assistance or protection, and a majority does not believe prostitutes, alcoholics, or drug addicts have human rights.

And organized crime exploits this lack of concern for others.

In the absence of official action, nongovernmental organizations throughout Russia are trying to help stem the tide. But little is done about drug addiction. More than 5 million Russians use heroin or other hard drugs, and the number soars as mafias increase large-scale smuggling.

Over the past decade, the northern heroin route from Afghanistan through Central Asia to Russia and Europe has overshadowed the traditional southern routes. No longer simply a transshipment country, Russia is a major consumer. Many of its addicts are military personnel who served along the borders in Central Asia and in Chechnya.

Drug traders include military and police officers,

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// the most alarming link between crime and terrorism is the smuggling of nuclear materials.

ethnically based mafias, illegal Asian immigrants, and ordinary Russian crooks. Protected by local and regional authorities, they operate in Moscow and throughout Russia. Smugglers from other countries are also active, including Eastern Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, South – and possibly North – Koreans, Vietnamese, Nigerians, and South Americans.

Russia now resembles Colombia in that drugs are used to finance separatist and terrorist movements.

Organized crime profits have helped prolong war in Chechnya, providing funds and motivation to both sides of the conflict. Money from the Russian drug trade is believed to be supporting the terrorist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and earnings fund crime-terrorist networks that operate from Afghanistan.

The most alarming link between crime and terrorism is the smuggling of nuclear materials.

In 2006, Georgian authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle weapons grade uranium that was similar to a case several years earlier. Both times, the material came from Russia through Abkhazia and Ossetia, then remote separatist regions of little international interest that were havens for organized crime.

In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov smuggled 100 grams of highly enriched uranium from South Ossetia with help from gangster relations. Late in 2008, a Georgian investigator disclosed that Khinsagov’s associates included a “thief-in-law” (a top-level

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mob member) and two second-tier avtoriteti of the Russian-speaking underworld. This confirmed a crime-terror connection, with professional criminals using their logistic capacity to move nuclear materials. Khinsagov’s years of residence in the Middle East, likely working for the Soviet KGB, suggest that the materials were destined for Iran.

Russia’s eagerness to annex these lawless regions does not augur well for international security. But one Russian specialist made the point to me in Moscow: “They are no different from the rest of the Caucasus that is all highly criminalized. So why wouldn’t we want them in our country?”

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the seventh continent

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In the somewhat unlikely setting of the Theatre de Champs Elysees in Paris recently, I caught a piece of Russia. It was in the hands, I saw, as the Russianborn French pianist Mikhail Rudy played Liszt’s “Sonata in B Minor,” part of a dazzling recital. In so many passages, watching his hands was like watching those of my husband, Sergei Dreznin, also a pianist (and a composer), when he plays the same piece. Pianists never produce identical sounds or interpretations. But here, in many, many instances, their hands moved in identical ways in certain passages to produce a velvety, singing tone and shape a phrase with the rounded eloquence of great oratory.

And I knew: this is the Russian school, the one that these men inherited straight from pre-revolutionary times.

Mikhail’s professor Yakov Flier and Sergei’s beloved teacher Boris Berlin both studied under the legendary Russian pianist Konstantin Igumnov. Flier and Berlin went different ways in their careers in Moscow, as Mikhail and Sergei have in theirs. But the inflection, the touch, is something that was preserved, preciously, and passed on – both despite and because of the generally brutal Communist system that dictated the course of Russia’s turbulent 20th century.

The night before we attended the concert, Sergei and I sat up late in our kitchen – very Russian, this – and read large excerpts from Mikhail’s memoirs, just published in French. Raised in the Ukrainian

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city of Donetsk, he had risen to be a star student of the Moscow Conservatory, and later – despite harassment from the KGB, and political difficulty – gained the rare privilege of participating in international competition, winning the prestigious Marguerite Long in Paris in 1975 and then defecting in France during a victory concert tour in 1976.

The very system that gave him the best possible musical education for free had also done everything to deprive him of the fruits of that self-same education. In France, thanks to his talent and hard work, but also to initial support from such luminaries as the then-exiled Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Mikhail embarked on what continues to be a rich and rewarding career.

That was not, however, what most caught our attention. Rather it was the descriptions of growing up in the Soviet Union. Born in 1953, Mikhail – we got to know him in the past few months – is just two years older than Sergei. Both played piano from an early age, both draw on Jewish cultural roots and both are imbued with that deep knowledge of music imparted by the very exacting Soviet training, and enhanced – bizarrely, perhaps – by the very isolation of that system. Both Mikhail and Sergei were rebels, in their way; Misha had a rock group in 1960s Donetsk; Sergei played Beatles and jazz whenever he could, uniting Young Pioneers at his summer camp in renderings of “Back in the USSR.” Like thousands of others in the Soviet bloc, they went to enormous lengths to get bootleg recordings, often made on X-ray film for primitive turntables, of all

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the forbidden musical fruit: Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, or the beloved Beatles.

And they studied classical music – very, very hard.

As Mikhail notes in his book, he lived a virtually monastic life in his late teens and very early 20s in Moscow, immersing himself in the study of music, in operas, concerts, books – anything that would both slake an unquenchable thirst to know and experience more and perhaps also further his developing desire to leave the country. Sergei, who never planned a future outside his country but never felt totally happy within it, was consumed with a similar hunger for knowledge, for a different experience.

The stagnation of the Brezhnev years drove both their imaginations and their activity into overdrive; the rigid Communist system – capable both of the highest achievements in culture and science, and some of the most brutal inhumanity in world history – put such a premium on education, and on achievements touted as proof of the rightness of Soviet ideology, that it nurtured their talents more completely than a Western musical education would have. Although it purported to overturn czarism, this system preserved – indeed, froze in time – tenets such as the pianism of Igumnov. And so, in Paris, a century later, I could feel this breath of an otherwise vanished world.

It is said of Russia that it is cultured, but not civilized. Certainly, the legions of its musicians, artists, dancers, actors, playwrights and novelists attest to

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it is said of russia that it is cultured, but not civilized. certainly, the legions of its musicians, artists, dancers, actors, playwrights and novelists attest to a great depth of culture, one that reaches its finest expression when tunes, images or words deeply rooted in russia combine with western influence. //

a great depth of culture, one that reaches its finest expression when tunes, images or words deeply rooted in Russia combine with Western influence.

Stravinsky or Shostakovich; the Bolshoi or Mariinsky ballets; Malevich or Kandinsky; Chekhov, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky – no one inside or outside Russia has any trouble acknowledging that they are special.

What, then, of the flip side – of the “uncivilized” Russia? Of that “bear,” most recently heard roaring (at least by startled Westerners) when Russian tanks rolled into Georgia this summer? Can we not view that, too, as something special, a product of a culture and a vast land that are, yes, different from ours, while adhering to common creeds – Christianity, Judaism, Islam – and thus aspiring to similar, even the same, spiritual quests? When this understanding informs observation of Russian behavior, Kremlin conduct loses some of the menace often ascribed by those who either simply fear or know little of it.

Yes, one should be wary of a great power suspended between superiority and inferiority complexes, as Russians so often are. But is this power – so needy at the same time that it is combative – always acting out of some incomprehensibly bad intent?

In the summer of 2008, as in most years, we went to our beloved dacha, just outside the ancient town of Tarusa, some 100 kilometers as the crow flies from Moscow. Often, our time there is not merely a splendid holiday, deep in the forests by the river Oka, languishing over books and simple meals of

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berries and tvorog (farmer cheese), cold cuts, fish, and vodka; it is a fine way to take the temperature of Russia.

It was, at the time. obvious that the Russians – at least the moneyed, and a slice of what passes for middle class – were on a real tear. Rolling in revenue from high oil and gas prices, an ever-growing number were in eager pursuit of consumer plenty.

Land, homes, furniture, holidays, cars, food, fashion, sports – anything held to signify success and choice were avidly devoured.

On a summer Saturday night, out in the once-dozy village that houses our dacha, or in the more elaborate brick mansions and wooden homes sprouting in Tarusa, fireworks soared skyward, bonfires were lit, music played, and alcohol and food (preferably barbecued meat) were consumed in quantity. Not for these Russians the credit crunch that was already hurting Americans and Europeans – indeed, not even the later financial turbulence that September seemed to make much impression on many Russians, the wild swings of their stock market and the worries of their more business-minded leaders notwithstanding.

It was, perhaps, this light-headed sense of being on a roll that infused the Russian actions toward and in Georgia. Certainly, it helped Vladimir Putin, his protégé Dmitry Medvedev, and their allies in the political and military elite clinch their argument that once Georgia had moved against the enclave of South Ossetia – which, in the ever volatile Caucasus,

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had been trying for years to break with Georgia and unite with North Ossetia, already a part of Russia proper – there was nothing for it but to send in the army. Most Russians seem proud to have acted decisively, and in the name, as their government avowed, of protecting civilians who were at the mercy of Georgian weapons.

The truth of exactly what happened on the night of Aug. 7-8, 2008, to spark off a five-day war may never be known. Russia’s toughness and subsequent recognition of the independence of South Ossetia, and another enclave, Abkhazia – a move that squelched the principle of the inviolability of state borders and thus scared every country grappling with such problems – are another matter.

These very definite actions have frightened, puzzled or enraged outsiders. But, despite the stern talk from Putin, Medvedev, Russian generals, and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, was this really the reawakening of the Evil Empire of the Cold War? There was a definite arc, that summer, to Russian events. In early June, the proud leadership invited flocks of foreigners, mostly business types, but also government ministers, to St. Petersburg, hometown of Putin, Medvedev, and Gazprom chief Alexei Miller. They touted the beautiful creation of Peter the Great, slowly reviving from its Communist dreariness. More significantly, a slice of the Russian elite in attendance touted a belief in the rule of law – albeit more to secure property rights and thus commerce than freedom of expression. Anatoly Chubais, one of the wiliest survivors from the days

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of Boris Yeltsin, a man hated by many poorer Russians for his wild privatization of national assets in the 1990s, even proclaimed from the podium: “Long live Russian liberalism.”

By late July, as we idled at the dacha, the tone had changed. Putin befuddled Russia’s business class by berating a Russian coal company, Mechel, for allegedly supplying domestic firms at a higher price than foreign clients. His mocking sarcasm – offering to send doctors to “cure” Mechel’s boss, who skipped a meeting with Putin due to reported illness – wiped at least $6 billion off Mechel’s value. Coming, as it did, in tandem with the flight to an unknown destination of the foreign head of TNK-BP, the once lauded Russian-British oil venture, this seemed to provoke the first real doubts among foreign investors about the wisdom of placing faith, and funds, in Putin’s Russia.

Foreign journalists and human rights activists have long assailed the decline of democracy under Putin, while business folk focused on the growth, opportunity and seeming stability of his Russia. In July, Putin sowed the first doubts as to the strength of his belief in, or even understanding of, the market mechanisms that have so enriched his country.

Medvedev and his people, most particularly his economics aide Arkady Dvorkovich, stressed the need for caution when judging public companies.

They raised the volume on such concerns even more in September, as their business markets went south in the general financial turmoil, and the world had many more questions following the war in Georgia.

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// medvedev still professes a concern to fight corruption and poverty. for all that russian leaders often seem so absolute in their control, they must heed the narod, the people, or face trouble.

Medvedev still professes a concern to fight corruption and poverty. For all that Russian leaders often seem so absolute in their control, they must heed the narod, the people, or face trouble. Medvedev and the liberals who dominated those podiums in St. Petersburg in June seemed mindful that their control, and their wealth, will endure only if secured for future generations. They were anything but complacent, recognizing the dangers of de-population (Russians are fast shrinking in number), and the urgent need for better infrastructure or for facing home truths (even about that hallowed education system, now seen by these reformers as quite unsuited to the 21st century). Tacitly, at least, they acknowledged that the current plenty has not lifted all, or even most, Russians. Statistics that purport to show average income at a few hundred dollars a month belie the gulf between the high earners in cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, or Yekaterinburg and the pensioners and marooned residents of countless impoverished small towns and villages.

Undoubtedly, today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union.

A new book has just appeared about our cherished Tarusa, to whose luminous landscapes and homespun hospitality we drank so many toasts with our friends that summer. Called The 101st Kilometer, a reference to Tarusa’s distance from Moscow, the book chronicles just how many intellectuals, first and foremost the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, experienced Communist repression in that bucolic place.

The under-35s who dominate city streets and many

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spheres of public life have little or no memory of all that. The eyes of our 24-year-old nephew, Kolya, and his architect friend Nadia rolled in bored disbelief one night on the dacha terrace as we recalled scrambling to buy scarce canned peas in Moscow in 1984. We recounted how I did not even come to Tarusa and the dacha until 1993, when limits on foreigners’ movements more than 40 kilometers beyond Moscow had finally relaxed. (Nadia, who had known nothing of such a restriction, had to doublecheck this truth with me the next day).

Today, there is no such iron ideology; besides the enthusiasm for consuming, there is the thriving and powerful Russian Orthodox Church. There is also a Slav nationalism that can veer into murderous nastiness, and which has perhaps gained ground since the incursion into Georgia and the West’s hostile reaction. Mostly, however, the rediscovery of Slavic and Orthodox traditions feeds and expresses a newfound pride. Much of this is harmless: the choice name for newborns a few days after Russia’s unexpected and skillful triumph over the Nether-lands in the European soccer championship was reportedly the distinctly un-Slav Guus, after the Dutch trainer of Russia’s squad, Guus Hiddink.

Back in the early 1980s, when I first tried to decipher this vast and endlessly enigmatic country, it often seemed that the task might be easier if Russia were its own continent, if we could just say “Russian” the way we easily brand some behavior “European,” “Asian,” or “African.”

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Today, of course, that thought is a brand – the successful supermarket chain “Sedmoi Kontinent,” or Seventh Continent.

Foreigners, particularly first-time visitors, often note that, in Russia, everything is exaggerated. To Russians, unsurprisingly, this is life. They live daily with the absurdities thrown up by a country capable of simultaneous bragging and humility, of pursuing petty quarrels and soaring goals, in short, of being both normal and abnormal at once. Another way to capture this, when I lived in Moscow in the 1980s, was expressed in one of my Russian nicknames: Alisa v strane chudes – Alice in the Land of Wonders.

I was reflecting on all this on our last day in Moscow, in late July. Like many other people in that teeming, hyperactive city, I had availed myself of the terrific normal/abnormal custom there of hailing a passing car to negotiate an impromptu cab ride. My driver was a retired sports team doctor who, it turned out, had once lived in orderly Austria for a year, and had visited several other parts of Western Europe. “It was so boring out there,” he said. “Russia is the only place I can live.”

In The 101st Kilometer, one of the Tarusa intellectuals who was arrested in Stalin’s terror in 1937 and sent to the gulag is quoted as writing from Paris to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (then also in exile) about her longing for the homeland. “Here I have complete freedom (and who can value it better than I?)” wrote Natalya Stolyarova. “But a wound is bleeding in my heart, a nod made of love and hate to the

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great, awesome, stomped upon, immortal, desired and long awaited land. Yes, for me, it is better to live there,” she wrote, even if she was “scared of the night footsteps on the staircase.”

As he ferried me a short distance, the doctor launched into a fond description of the most recent barbecue at his dacha. Upon parting, I wished him well, and stared after his car up the street. I was about to depart the Seventh Continent, and I wanted to linger in it as I left – not knowing when I might capture its spirit next.

That, it turned out, I felt next in the swoop into Georgia, and then … in the pianist’s hands.

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seamus murphy

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east of the sun a journey in russia's far east

Nogliki. Sakhalin Island. Corridor in Hotel Nogliki.

Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. Sakhalin Island. Apartment building in the center of town.

Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. Sakhalin Island. Migrant workers in the fields.

Heihe, China. On the Blagoveschensk border . above Heihe, China. Women struggle to the ferry with shopping bags, heading home to Russia with cheap Chinese goods . below Ulan Ude . opposite

Sikachi-Alyan. Fishermen heading out to Amur River.

Vladivostok. Woman working at a kiosk near the waterfront . above Khabarovsk. Woman working at a bus station ticket booth . below

above . Tambouka. In the kitchens of a state-run social club. below . Blagoveschensk. Woman at work in Druzhba Hotel.

Ulan Ude. Early morning bus.

Blagoveschensk. Wall mural . above Vladivostok. Exhibit and guard at Arsenev Regional Museum . below

above . Khabarovsk. Regional History Museum. below . Khabarovsk. Orthodox Baptism at the Church of the Transfiguration.

Vladivostok. Shooting gallery.

Blagoveschensk. Samples of wildlife in the Amur Regional Museum.

Blagoveschensk. Advertising chainsaws.

Blagoveschensk. Casino . above Train between Khabarovsk and Birobizhan . below

above . Irkutsk. Along the Angara River. below . Heihe, China. Inside the main shopping complex in the city center.

Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. Sakhalin Island. An American oil worker at Shashtia Nightclub where foreigners happily spend their earnings.

Vladivostok. Woman refilling her mobile phone at a booth.

Irkutsk. The main train station serving the Trans-Siberian.

above . Katangli. Sakhalin Island. Rossneft onshore oil production facilities. below . Aniva Bay. The LNG (liquefied natural gas) plant on the south side of Sakhalin Island. opposite . Katangli. Sakhalin Island. Rossneft onshore oil production facilities.

Irkutsk. Passengers on the Trans-Siberian . above Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. Sakhalin Island. Hotel lobby . below Blagoveschensk. Hotel cleaning . opposite

Irkutsk. The area south of the main city market.

Irkutsk. "Heating Station No.10" in the early morning in the Pervomaysky District.

Irkutsk. A heroin user.

Blagoveschensk. Driver with some history.

Tambouka. Sergei Ignatiev, a member of the Blagoveschensk Aero Club, prepares to board the plane for a parachute jump.

above . Tambouka. Marina Bondarienko undergoes the customary initiation ritual after her first parachute jump with the Blagoveschensk Aero Club. below . Birobizhan. Scene from a backyard. opposite . Listvyanka. A trader selling smoked omul fish from nearby Lake Baikal.

Khabarovsk. In the reception area of Banja (Bathhouse) Number 5.

Sikachi-Alyan. Drunken road accident in the village that is home to the Nanai people, one of the ethnic groups native to the Russian Far East, in the Amur River valley northeast of Khabarovsk.

Blagoveschensk. Problems in the car park . above Heihe, China. A shop owner prepares for the day’s trading . below

above . Blagoveschensk. Worker in the teachers’ college canteen kitchen. below . Blagoveschensk. Problems with a Volga.

Birobizhan. Old photographs of housing programs in the corridors of an office building . above Khabarovsk. Apartment building bedroom window . below Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. Sakhalin Island. Imprint of a removed Lenin plaque on the gate of an administrative building . opposite

Irkutsk. Playing football in fading evening light in the Pervomaysky District on the outskirts of the city.

Nevo. Sakhalin Island. A Nivkhi fisherman's home. The Nivkhi, an indigenous ethnic group, inhabit the northern half of Sakhalin Island and part of the Amur estuary and are believed to derive from Neolithic people who migrated from the Transbaikal region . above Ogliki. Sakhalin Island. Apartment building in town . below

above . Ulan Ude. The biggest Lenin head in the world. below . Leso Zavod. Sakhalin Island. Overgrown buildings, once a timber mill with labor by prisoners in Stalin’s gulags.

On a flight from Sakhalin to Vladivostok.

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a talk with martin cruz smith

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from gorky park to gold lamĂŠ

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The Russia that Martin Cruz Smith saw on his first visit in 1973, colorless and cold, he remembers as “the biggest cemetery in the world.” It was the bleak backdrop for Gorky Park and the Arkady Renko books that followed.

In a conversation with dispatches, Smith said: “The crust on people was inches deep, and it was hard to make contact. Once you made contact, people were extraordinarily human. But first you had to get through that crust. There was this wariness. That included Russians who had come over to the United States, as well. A friend of mine, who was a nuclear scientist and a defector, used to write home to his mother. Eventually, he got an answer that said: ‘I can tell you’ve become an American because in the photograph you sent me I can see your eyes.’

“What struck me even then were the consequences of friendship. Somebody was always informing on you, probably one of your best friends. You didn’t even have to say anything about overthrowing the government, just if you were critical. Everyone was complicit.”

These days, Renko would find it decidedly different.

Smith just came back from reporting on Moscow nights for National Geographic. “Now the whole place has gone to hell,” he said. “There are no rules anymore. When things got really bad, they used to say, well, it’s not Chicago. Now it’s Chicago. There

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// the brashness is kind of appealing. it’s like watching an adolescent who has just gotten $5,000 from his grandmother. there is no bar for behavior.

is a different kind of trajectory. I try not to compare it to the United States; there’s not enough in common. Obviously Putin rules the roost, but not completely. The ‘strong men’ have taken over the state, and within them are contending forces. Unseen gangs are vying for power in the Kremlin. We don’t see a lot of this contention. It is like Chicago in the the '30s with a lot more violence.”

But, he added, “The brashness is kind of appealing.

It’s like watching an adolescent who has just gotten $5,000 from his grandmother. There is no bar for behavior. For woman, their first idols are fashion models. It’s like you took an American man and pumped him up with 50 grams of testosterone, and had a woman watch ‘Sex and the City’ for a year. You get some wild animals out there. To be rich is glorious. This characterizes the whole place: money and then the looseness. Everyone is sick with money.”

Smith chuckled at how Russians were surprised when a global crash impacted on their economic miracle. “They didn’t anticipate they were going to be hit. Russians, too? Gee whiz. I’m astonished that even at the highest schools of economists they didn’t figure that out.”

In the 1970s when he began to research Renko’s world, Smith managed to get rare access to Moscow and Russia. “I never understood why I was let in,” he said. After Gorky Park appeared in 1982, the door slammed shut. “It took glasnost for me to get back.

Then generals welcomed me with big bear hugs.

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It was embarrassing, sort of like getting hugged by Fulgencio Batista.

Like so many people, he had high expectations when the Iron Curtain collapsed. “Now the pendulum has swung back. There was a big hope that democracy was a cure-all. But whatever they hoped it was curing, it isn’t there.”

Smith sees aspects of timeless Russia as impervious to change. A tinge of despair over Russia’s fate runs through history, such as worry about losing ground to China. Fear of the Outsider is perhaps the strongest.

In Gorky Park, Renko picks up a pamphlet his wife is reading. It is eerily reminiscent of today: “Russians procreate! Fertilize a glorious roe of young Greater Russians lest all the inferior nationalities, the swarthy Turks and Armenians, sly Georgians and Jews, traitorous Estonians and Latvians, swarming hordes of ignorant yellow Kazaks, Tatars and Mongols, backward and ungrateful Uzbeks, Ossetians, Circassians, Kalmuks, Chukchis tip with their upraised organs the recommended population ratio between white educated Russians and dark . . .”

Another passage reads, “Girls were afraid that after fornicating once with a black man, years hence they might give birth to a monkey.”

Today, Smith said, “I always feel nervous when I see a black in Moscow. Racism is so deep. I felt a

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brush of it myself. I don’t look Russian; I’m more Italian. Once I saw a lot of people pointing at me, and I asked a friend what they were saying. It was, ‘Who is this swarthy man?’ You see videos that thugs take of themselves on the subway beating people up.”

He recalled a classic Italian painting of foreigners visiting a snowy village. The shock on villagers’ faces suggests men had dropped down from Mars.

“It is the anxiety of visitors to anything strange. In a Marcello Mastroianni scene, a man visits the house of a woman in Moscow. As he goes away in a carriage, a servant runs out with a broom and sweeps away any trace of the visit. If you go below the surface, you’ll find it. People who are not Russian are dangerous; they bring a potential for danger.”

If Russia is still authoritarian, Smith says, its society is now too diffuse to control. Getting a Russian visa, he adds, is still easier than it is for many foreigners who face what he calls a humiliating process to visit America.

“They’re finding their way,” he concluded. “A lot of forces were let out of the lamp, and they’re not all bad. And we (in the West) need a counterweight.

Putin was like a deer in the headlights when Yeltsin picked him out, but he has matured into Andropov.

He is the ghost that’s running the place, not Stalin.”

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biographies

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Mark Franchetti / Mark Franchetti, Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, eloquent in five languages, has covered the former Soviet Union since 1997, with time out for wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In 2003, he won the British Press Award for his coverage of the Moscow theatre siege; he twice entered the building to interview Chechen terrorists holding hostages. In 2004, he won a Foreign Press Association Award for his reportage on the killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines. On the war’s third day, Iraqis ambushed the Marines he accompanied. Eighteen Americans died in a fierce battle, and survivors went on a rampage. Franchetti gained access to Andrei Lugovoi, the suspect in the Alexander Litvinenko murder, for a British TV documentary. After upheaval in Georgia, he depicted the new Russia in a primetime BBC Panorama series.

Andrew Meier / Andrew Meier worked as a stringer in Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union and then joined Time magazine as a staff correspondent. He wrote two books: Black Earth, on Russia’s first post-Soviet decade and The Lost Spy, a biography of a 1920s American Communist who spied for the Soviet Union. Meier returns frequently to Russia and Central Asia. He writes regularly for Harper’s, National Geographic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Orion, Outside, The Washington Post, and Wired.

Seamus Murphy / Seamus Murphy began photographing Afghanistan in 1994, and his book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, is a classic on the rise of the Taliban and the impact of U.S. invasion. More recently, he traveled across America during what he calls “a nervous and auspicious time.” Over two decades, he has worked extensively in Ireland, Peru, Sierra Leone, Lebanon; his accolades include six World Press Photo Awards. Murphy blends humor and irony with deep insight. “Photography,” he says, “is part history, part magic.”

Ilana Ozernoy / Ilana Ozernoy took up reporting in 2001 when Russian police arrested her at a demonstration. She had returned to Moscow 15

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years after her family fled to America as political refugees. As an eager freelancer, she went to Afghanistan after 9/11 and wrote for the Boston Globe. She covered the fall of Kabul for U.S. News & World Report. In 2004, U.S. News sent her to Baghdad, and she stayed two years. After a stint in Washington with The Atlantic Monthly, she discovered she preferred being close to the story.

Ozernoy returned to Russia to work on a book for Henry Holt and Company to be published in 2010.

Louise Shelley / Louise Shelley, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia, is founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC). After studying at Moscow State University in the 1970s, she was expelled for her reports on crime. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, she saw organized crime expanding fast. She followed it from Russia and Georgia into Europe, Israel, and the United States. Since the early 1990s, she has run research programs with Russian colleagues. Shelley is completing a book on human trafficking for the Cambridge University Press.

Alison Smale / Alison Smale began covering Germany and the Soviet Union for the Associated Press in the 1980s. As AP bureau chief in Moscow and then Vienna, she directed coverage of the Iron Curtain collapse, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the Balkan wars that followed.

Fluent in Russian, German, French, and Serbo-Croatian, Smale built a network of sources among dissidents who later rose to power in Russia and Eastern Europe. She joined the New York Times as assistant foreign editor before moving to Paris as managing editor of the International Herald Tribune.

Andrei Soldatov / Andrei Soldatov sheds lights on opaque Russian secret services the investigative site Agentura.ru that he started with a colleague in 2000. He has reported for Moscow dailies, including Novaya Gazeta. In a feature about his monopoly on a difficult beat, the Moscow Times called him “a security expert whose insights and opinion are in high demand from the media and Western think

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tanks.” Despite repeated questioning, he interviews active and retired officers. “Roughly speaking,” Soldatov says, “these people think and act as if they are members of a medieval monastic order.”

FotoDepartament / Olga Korsunova and Nadya Sheremetova of FotoDepartament in St. Petersburg worked with dispatches contributor Yuri Kozyrev to assemble “1860/2008,” 150 years of Russian portraiture previously unpublished in the West. Korsunova and Sheremetova traveled around Russian to collect photos from a wide range of sources.

Alexander Kitaev is an acclaimed photographer, artist and author.

Both commercial and non-profit, FotoDepartament is a gallery, educational institution, and photography information center. www.fotodepartament.ru

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some additional reading

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Books / Getting Russia Right, Dmitri V. Trenin A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, Anna Politkovskaya A Russian Diary, Anna Politkovskaya Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, Andrew Meier The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service, Andrew Meier Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival, Owen Matthews The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West, Edward Lucas Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia, Steve Levine The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea, Steve Levine First Person, Vladimir Putin Against the Grain: An Autobiography, Boris Yeltsin Resurrection, David Remnick Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remnick The Russians, Hedrick Smith Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, Sebastian Smith The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, Asne Seierstad Russia - Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies, Lilia Shevtsova Putin’s Russia, Lilia Shevtsova Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality, Lilia Shevtsova Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia, Marshall I. Goldman The Oligarchs: Wealth & Power in the New Russia, David Hoffman One Soldier’s War, Arkady Babchenko Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People, Jonathan Dimbleby In Siberia, Colin Thubron Among the Russians, Colin Thubron

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Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinski Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov Human Trafficking and Human Society, edited by Anna Jonsson The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies, Rasma Karkins The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy, Federico Varese Violent Entrepreneurs: the Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, Vadim Volkov Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, Janine Wedel Russia’s Battle With Crime, Corruption and Terrorism, edited

by Robert Orttung and Anthony Latta Organized Crime and Corruption in Georgia, edited by Louise Shelley, Erik Scott and Anthony Latta A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa Dances in Deep Shadows: The Clandestine War in Russia 1917–20, Michael Occleshaw Investigating The Russian Mafia, Joseph D. Serio The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians, W. Bruce Lincoln The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, Oleg Khlevniuk Literary St. Petersburg: A Guide to the City and its Writers, Elaine Blair Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, Lesley Chamberlain Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, Lesley Chamberlain Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Geoffrey Roberts The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements, Lynne Viola Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism, Paul Klebnikov Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition, Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

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Russia: Experiment with a People, Robert Service Siberian Dreams, Andy Home Reeling in Russia: An American Angler in Russia, Fen Montaigne Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland, Mark Kramer Pushkin’s Children: Writing on Russia and Russians, Tatyana Tolstaya How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices that Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business, Alena V. Ledeneva Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity, Andrei P. Tsygankov Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror, Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin Russia and the Russians: A History, Geoffrey Hosking Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal Through Siberia by Accident: A Small Slice of Auobiography, Dervla Murphy Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals, Dervla Murphy Chechnya: Tombstone of Russia Power, Anatol Lieven Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, Dominic Lieven Beyond Siberia: Two Years in a Forgotten Place, Sharon Dirlam My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back, Mary M. Leder Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, Thomas Goltz Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya, Thomas Goltz Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, James Billington A History of Russia, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace, Masha Gesson Russia’s Battle with Crime, Corruption and Terrorism, Robert Orttung and Anthony Latta The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism, Isaiah Berlin Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a MassCirculation Press, Louise McReynolds

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A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Andrzej Walicki Portable Twentieth Century Russian Reader, Clarence Brown Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, Andrei Siniavskii About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, Ivan Bunin Putin: The Results: An Independent Expert Report, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Mirov.

Photography & Art / Wonderland, Jason Eskenazy Winterreise, Luc Delahaye Motherland, Simon Roberts Open Wound, Stanley Greene Beyond the Fall, Anthony Suau Moscow Nights, Antonin Kratochvil Portraits, Ingar Krauss Soviets: Pictures from the End of the U.S.S.R, Shepard Sherbell Carl De Keyzer: Zona, Carl De Keyzer Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei, Alexander and Alice Nakhimovsky Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union, Jonas Bendiksen Afghanistan: A Darkness Visible, Seamus Murphy Yesterday’s Sandwich, Boris Mikhailov The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, David King Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection Rostropovich: The Musical Life of the Great Cellist, Teacher, and Legend, Elizabeth Wilson Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Volume III, Sergei Vasiliev, Alexander Sidorov Phiscultura, Valery Katsuba, K. Bulla, and Yulia Yakovleva RUS, Gert Jochems Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, Adam Bartos Aleksandr Rodchenko: The New Moscow, Margarita Tupitsyn Aleksandr Rodchenko Painting, Drawing, Collage, Design, Photography, Alexandr Lavren’ev, Magdalena Dabrowski, Peter Galassi, Glenn Lowry, Alexander Rodchenko The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934, Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900–1920: Art, Life, & Culture of the Russian Silver Age, John E. Bowlt

DISPATCHES

Russian Journal, Inge Morath Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, Robert Polidori Photography & Art / Russian Titles Biryukov and C-Photo: Biography in Photographs, E.M. Biryukov The Art of Photoportrait, L.F. Volkov-Lanit Vizhy Mayokovskogo (I see Mayakovskiy), L.F. Volkov-Lanit Portrait Photography, M. Kleygorn St. Petersburg Portrait Photographer K. Bergamasko: Zabitie imena I pamyatniki kyltyri (Forgotten Names and Cultural Artifacts), G. A. Mirolyubova Creative Photography, S. A. Morozov Nizhny Novgorod Photography: The City, People, and Events, 1843–1917, Decom The Stories about Photographers and Photographs, V. Nikitin St. Petersburg Album: Photographs from the Collection of the Hermitage, G. A. Mirolyubova and T. A. Petrova Russian Photography: from the mid-19th Century to the beginning of the 20th Century, N. N. Rahmanov The Portrait in Russian Photography: Selected Words, 1850–1990, T. G. Sabyrova Photographers and Photography of St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres (Zpiski Sankt Peterbyrgskoi Gosydarstvennoi Teatralnoi Biblioteki, Vipysk 4/5 / St. Petersburg State Theatrical Library, Issue 4/5), T. A. Sinelnikova Photographs for Memories: Nevsky Prospect Photographers, 1950–1950, Slaviya (2003) Photographers of Harkovskaya Guberniya, 1951–1917 (Kharkiv Guberniya Photographers, 1815–1917), Kharkiv Masterpieces of Photography from Private Collections: Russian Photography 1849–1918, Pynktym Moscow Photographers: From Memory for the Future to Remember, 1839–1930, T. N. Shipova Web Sites / David Johnson’s Russia List : www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/default.cfm Kommersant : www.kommersant.com The Moscow Times : www.themoscowtimes.com Novaya Gazeta : http://en.novayagazeta.ru/ The Russia Journal : www.therussiajournal.com Agentura : www.agentura.ru Council on Foreign Relations : www.cfr.org, www.eurasianet.org/

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Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty : www.rferl.org/ Eurasia Daily Monitor : www.jamestown.org/edm/ Russia! : www.readrussia.com/ EastWest Insitute : www.iews.org Belfer Center, Harvard : http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/ project/3/managing_the_atom.html Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) : http://policy-traccc.gmu.edu/

DISPATCHES

dispatches outreach / dispatches aims to reach a solid base of young people who must reshape a world they will inherit. Virtually every major crisis they face requires a long-term approach, with nuanced action rooted in an understanding of larger issues and of societies different from their own. Our goal is not only to help inform this fresh generation on vital world affairs but also to train students and young professionals who want to pursue careers in international journalism. dispatches outreach, a 501(3)C under U.S. tax law, welcomes support from foundations, corporations, and individuals who share our view.

For further details please visit www.rethink-dispatches.com or contact outreach@rethink-dispatches.org -

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