Medvedev Promises Police Reform, But Proposals Are Off the Mark

BROOKLYN, New York -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is talking tough about police reform.

On Thursday, Medvedev dismissed two high-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry, as well as 16 regional ministry officers, 15 of whom are generals. According to the Russian daily Kommersant, half of these dismissals were tied high-profile incidents of police criminality and corruption, while the rest were the result of scheduled position rotations within the ministry.

The changes were announced in a speech before senior officials of the Interior Ministry, in which Medvedev said the country needed to "cleanse this evil from the state and municipal structures."

(Agence France-Press translated that phrase as "cleanse the state structures of evil," which could be interpreted to mean that Russia's security agencies are "state structures of evil." The original Russian phrase was, "очистить государственные и муниципальные структуры от этого зла." Either way, I think the misinterpreted phrase is closer to the truth.)

Among other reforms announced by the president was a plan to cut the Interior Ministry's bloated general staff in Moscow by half from its current size of 20,000. He also called on Prime Minister Vladmir Putin to draft a sweeping reform proposal for the country's law enforcement agencies, which is to be submitted to parliament by December 1. Medvedev stated that he would maintain personal control over the reform project, but giving Prime Minister Putin a central role is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

While the housecleaning and tough talk about corruption are somewhat heartening, I remain skeptical (an opinion I've expressed before here and here). In the past several months, the country has been rocked by shocking criminal acts by police officers, including well-publicized beatings, mysterious deaths, and a not-so-mysterious video-taped mass killing. Some commanding officers have lost their posts as a result of these incidents (though not their jobs or their pensions), but almost none of the guilty officers have seen the inside of a courtroom, and jail time seems like a remote possibility.

One thing that Medvedev said betrays a fundamental misunderstanding (or, more likely, an intentional misinterpretation) of how democratic policing works and how the country's law enforcement structures should be reformed. While his principal target of reform should be dismantling the police's culture of corruption and bringing dirty cops to justice, he has taken elsewhere: clearance rates.

"Only one in every two crimes is cleared annually. There are over 1.3 million unsolved crimes in Russia each year, and a quarter of these are serious or very serious crimes," he said Thursday.

The clearance rate is the proportion of reported crimes that lead to an arrest –they are "cleared" when the case is turned over to the courts for prosecution. The political reasoning behind Medvedev's statement is clear – people want the police to solve more crimes, because they think it will put more criminals in jail and will make them safer. It is true that solving more crimes is a good thing, but setting your sights on clearance rates is highly problematic.

Clearance rates are easily manipulated. Especially within an embedded culture of corruption, there is a powerful temptation to doctor figures. This can be done in two basic ways – by not filing reported crimes, thus reducing the overall crime figures, or by making knowingly erroneous arrests, which moves the case off the police department's ledger and into the hands of prosecutors. Medvedev said about these supposedly paltry numbers, "Most importantly, behind [these figures] lie the fate of real people – of victims, their loved ones, their family members." He should remember that there are also countless victims of bad police work and police corruption who get caught up in this chase for ratings.

Law enforcement agencies in the Soviet Union were obsessed with clearance rates, and every department was mandated to keep theirs at 95% or above until that target was scrapped in the 1980's. This is an impossible figure, but like so many other statistics in the USSR, it was doctored and fudged, often by ignoring crime reports, planting evidence, throwing innocent people in jail, and coercing confessions through torture. None of these things are acceptable from police in a democratic society, yet they were and remain commonplace in Russia.

No up-to-date statistics are available on Russia's clearance rate nationwide (if you can find them, please let me know), but the regional figures fluctuate wildly and are highly unreliable. For certain crimes, like murder, many jurisdictions report preposterous rates of 90 to 100%. Regardless, Medvedev's ballpark figure of 50% is absurdly high – if he believes that it is too low, then it suggests that he is not aiming for accurate, accountable figures, but the phantom rates of the Soviet days that will dupe citizens into thinking that the police keep them safe.

By comparison, in the United States, 45.1% of violent crimes were cleared in 2008, and 17.1% of property crimes (theft, burglary, etc.), according to the FBI. America's law enforcement system is by no means perfect, nor is it fundamentally broken like Russia's – so why are the figures so low? Because the clearance rate only tells a small part of the story. It does not tell you how officers go about solving crimes, and whether they do it legally.

Boosting clearance rates can be part of a successful crime control strategy, but only part, and not when corruption is so widespread. Cities like New York used clearance rate targets to reduce crime, but the NYPD also meticulously maintains its databases and they are subject to regular audits. Even then, the system is prone to manipulation, and many have criticized the department for being too focused on clearance and crime rate numbers. Statistics are only worthwhile if they are accurate and reliable, and even then, they are only part of the answer.

Medvedev's focus on police reform is admirable, and it is certainly more genuine than the promises of his predecessor, who remains irretrievably entrenched in the rottenness of the Soviet security apparatus. But this endeavor looks doomed to repeat the mistakes of past reform efforts by focusing on top-down, statistically-driven initiatives that pay no attention to the institutional problems of Russian law enforcement.

UPDATE: For more on the topic of policing statistics and fudging the numbers, check out this post from Peter Moskos on his blog, Cop in the Hood - "Juking the Stats."

The Sergei Magnitsky Murder: Siloviki Circle the Wagons

BROOKLYN, New York -- It has been more than two months since the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in police custody after being refused medical attention. Magnitsky represented British investor Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, in a case involving a huge tax fraud allegedly perpetrated by Russian police officials and uncovered by Mr. Magnitsky. He had spent nearly a year in pre-trial detention, imprisoned without charge by the very people he accused of perpetrating the fraud against his clients and the Russian government.

Were it not for his British citizenship, Mr. Browder himself could have wound up in similar circumstances. He has been refused entry to Russia since 2005, despite the fact that he runs one of the largest investment firms in the country and has been a tireless booster of investing in Russia. He is not a political activist or human rights campaigner; instead, he champions investors' rights, which are also severely trampled in Russia. He refused to play by the crooked rules of the coterie of Kremlin insiders and current and former members of the security services, the so-called siloviki, who control business in Russia. Magnitsky was a tireless advocate of his client's interests, and he was murdered because he refused to flee the country or commit perjury by implicating himself or his client for the crimes of his captors.

Since this case became an international sensation (though only after Magnitsky's captors had succeeded in killing him), President Dmitry Medvedev has done some house cleaning, firing top prison officials who oversaw Magnitsky's detention and non-existent medical treatment (he died of untreated pancreatitis and gall stones, not a heart attack and toxic shock as the government claims). As for the men who orchestrated the fraud and arrest, Viktor Markelov, a sawmill foreman and likely a bit player in the $230 million tax fraud, was convicted in April 2009 of stealing government funds (his conviction was in fact based on the investigative work of Magnitsky himself). The two police officers who orchestrated the whole affair, Lt. Col. Atryom Kuznetsov and Maj. Pavel Karpov, have been reassigned to desk jobs at the Interior Ministry, and no charges are pending against either one. Not a penny of the $230 million has been recovered.

This is how things usually work in Russia when a scandal like this breaks. The government offers up a few sacrificial lambs – this time in the form of Moscow prison director Vladimir Davydov and 19 other prison officials and the fall guy Markelov – but it always protects its own in the police.

For more details on the Magnitsky case, read Bill Browder's letter published in Foreign Policy in December. You can also listen to an interview with Browder from The Economist, which I highly recommend.



Hermitage has set up a website, Law and Order in Russia, which chronicles this entire ordeal and contains a wealth of documents related to the tax case and Mr. Magnitsky's detention, all of which have been translated into English.

Whistleblowers in Russian Police Turn to Youtube, But Real Reform Still Unlikely

BROOKLYN, New York -- Several days ago, Alexei Dymovsky, a police major in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, released a series of Youtube videos that have caused a stir across the country. In the three videos, Dymovsky launches an assault on the country's law enforcement agencies, accusing them of corruption, incompetence, and abuse of junior officers. Throughout his monologue, he appeals to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to tackle these problems.

These videos have become an Internet sensation, drawing more than one million hits and sparking some measure of debate about the state of law enforcement in Russia. In very uncharacteristic fashion, Russia's Interior Ministry, which controls the country's police forces, has launched an investigation into police corruption, though the Interior Minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, denied that it has any connection to Dymovsky's allegations. Nurgaliyev claimed that it was part of a normal review process, yet he ordered that Dymovsky be suspended until the review is completed. Nonetheless, the major's employers in Novorossiysk were less impressed; despite the order from the minister to merely suspend him, he has been fired from the police force for slander. The local police chief, Valery Medvedev, has also asked prosecutors to file criminal charges against him for libel. Following the release of the videos, Dymovsky traveled to Moscow to address the news media - he claims that law enforcement officials attempted to prevent him from leaving Novorossiysk, forcing him to make the journey by car.

Here is the first of the videos, with English subtitles (here are the second and third, without translations):

Dymovsky’s videos have caused other police officers to come forward with stories of corruption and misconduct. One such whistleblower is Mikhail Yevseyev, who worked for the police department in the northern city of Ukhta, where in 2005 a firebombing of a shopping center killed 25 people. Yevseyev claims that the case against the two young men who were convicted of the crime and sentenced to life in prison in 2008 was entirely fabricated, and following the verdict, he resigned from the department in protest. Soon after Yevseyev’s video was released, Grigory Chekalin, who formerly worked in the Ukhta procurator’s office, posted a video describing how his office fabricated the evidence in the bombing case. Dymovsky has spawned a whole new genre of Youtube videos in Russia, and even a Moscow traffic cop has gotten in on the action.

This story has been picked up by news outlets all over the world, but what does the case of Maj. Dymovsky really tell us about Russian law enforcement? Frankly, not very much that we did not know already.

The fact that the public has embraced Dymovsky simply underlines the high levels of distrust of the police and other public institutions in Russia. According to a survey conducted by the Levada Center in 2005, only 12% of Russians expressed trust the police. Sadly, this ranked higher than many democratic institutions - the federal legislative bodies, the State Duma and the Federation Council, garnered only 10% trust, while political parties managed only 5%. According to a 2007 poll, 65% of respondents believed that efforts of police are "mainly devoted to their own interests," while only 21% believed they were "devoted to the security of the population of the country." Researchers Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson concluded that policing in Russia was fundamentally “predatory”; that is, rather than serving a useful societal function, the police use their coercive power to extract wealth from the “prey” population.

For some, the quick reaction of Kremlin authorities was suspicious - one political analyst hypothesized that the entire affair was fabricated by the Interior Ministry, perhaps to draw attention away from other public scandals - principally, the murderous rampage of police officer Denis Yevsyukov, who killed three people in a Moscow supermarket in April. He, like many other officers guilty of heinous crimes, has somehow avoided prosecution. I think that this public relations conspiracy is unlikely, but what makes these whistleblowers somewhat convenient for the Kremlin is that they attack some degree of systemic corruption, but they do not challenge the foundation of Russia’s security apparatus. Dymovsky appeals directly to Vladimir Putin, as if he can sweep away his corrupt underlings with his purity and sobriety; what the major fails to understand is that this former KGB stooge is at the very center of the country’s systemic police corruption. He derives his power from the predatory state.

One of Dymovsky’s most important criticisms is of the quota system. This was one of the superficial policing reforms that Russia has undertaken in recent years. These quotas are so rigidly enforced that officers are in effect encouraged to make bogus arrests and fabricate cases to meet their absurd targets. Rather than improving professionalism and accountability, this system has had the perverse effect of retrenching the predatory policing model. Rather than tackle this substantive issue, it is more likely that the government will find scapegoats. This is a tried and true method of giving the appearance of making reforms while avoiding real change. During perestroika and the early years of the Yeltsin administration, some people were brought to justice for the excesses of Soviet oppression, but these were usually low-ranking officials. One would expect that the current investigation will result in some very public firings of regional officials but no concrete changes in policy or practice. Dymovsky actually gave the Kremlin the perfect scapegoats, blaming his superior officers in the local police force - the least-connected brass will make perfect sacrificial lambs.

Corruption has always been a popular target of reform because it is an issue that impacts many ordinary citizens’ daily lives, but focusing on the corruption and misconduct of individual officers distracts attention from the philosophical foundations of the Russian police state. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, reforms to the Russian security services have been superficial and ineffective. The Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB - formerly the KGB) remain largely unchanged in structure and function from the Soviet period. “Law enforcement” is a misnomer in Russia - you must have the rule of law in order for it to be enforced, which Russia lacks. The police forces (called the militsia in Russian, sometimes referred to as “militia” in English) may resemble those you would encounter in a Western democracy, but they differ in fundamental ways. Louise Shelley, an expert on policing in Russia and the Soviet Union, described the difference like this in her book Policing Soviet Society:

A superficial glance at the militia’s patrols, safe houses and covert techniques might suggest that the Soviet militia differed little from the police of western societies. Such superficial similarities, however, masked fundamental differences. Without procedural guarantees of the rights of citizens, the law remained on the side of the Soviet militia, which readily imposed its will on both criminals and law-abiding citizens.

This fact remains largely unchanged in Russia today. In the US and other democracies, most people (I will grant that there are those who disagree, and most justifiably) believe the job of the police is to protect the public against crime and disorder. In Russia, their job is protect the state from the public. As long as that fact remains true, and believers in this philosophy continue to hold power, not amount of Youtube videos will change the practice of policing there.

Special Commentary: Don't Be Stubborn, Scrap the Interceptors

Today at the Walter Duranty Report, we are publishing a special commentary from our friend Mac Broderick on the Obama administration's decision to cancel the ballistic missile interceptor program in Eastern Europe. We encourage our friends and readers to contribute any articles or commentary they find interesting or relevant to the wide range of topics we discuss here on our site, and as always, feel free to add your comments about anything you read here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When analyzing the Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, one characterization seems to have trumped all others: “It is a system that doesn’t work, designed to counter a threat that doesn’t exist, designed for a people that don’t want it.” Analysts and politicians should keep this variation on former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s original description of the proposed system in mind while debating the merits of the system.

First and foremost, the system did not work, nor did it show the promise of working anytime soon. Second, neither the Western Europeans the system was designed to protect, nor the Eastern Europeans who would be hosting it, seemed particularly enthused about it. Third, Iranian missiles do not currently have the ability to reach Western Europe, and probably will not until 2018, according to most estimates. These circumstances gave the Obama administration more than enough reason to cancel the Czech and Polish interceptor stations.

So why was the decision so contentious? The reactions provide a microcosm of the political attitudes towards Russia. Those opposing the administration's decision, the “Russia hawks”, cite two arguments: 1) Demonstrating our commitment to our Eastern European allies, and 2) The notion that we need to “get tough on Russia.” The first point is a valid one. Examples abound of Russia’s belligerence towards its neighbors. At best, it can be described as an irritable neighbor with a tendency to overreact to the most petty slights. In an area where concrete actions carry more currency than diplomatic gestures, NATO would be wise to reaffirm its commitment to the defense of Poland and its neighbors in some manner other than speeches. The deployment of the Patriot missile battery originally planned to defend the missile installations would be a good start. Moreover, several politicians in the region, especially on the Polish side, have staked considerable political capital on supporting the system, and should not be punished for their decision to do so. The Obama administration’s communication of the decision did not show any sensitivity to the situations of Poles and Czechs; hopefully its further actions will demonstrate otherwise. However, this commitment to our allies does not require the US to spend irrationally on projects with little ability to confront temporal problems; rather, a pragmatic approach to the security, integrity, and stability of Eastern Europe will serve not only our allies, but ourselves well in the long term.

As for the idea of getting tough on Russia, this has become the national security equivalent of being tough on crime: it’s the low hanging fruit for establishing your national security bona fides. There is no lobby to contend with, you appear to bask in some sort of Reagan-esque glow, and you may convince a few people that you have some grasp of international politics. Unfortunately, Russia bashing is too often the result of knee-jerk politics, as opposed to a carefully thought-out decision on how to deal with this country.

This does not mean to minimize the Putin administration’s lack of respect for democracy or the sovereignty of its neighbors. However, Putin and Medvedev’s actions do not mean that opposing Russia for the sake of opposition should be the US’ default position. This is especially true when the leaders in question have a tendency to foment nationalist sentiment for domestic benefit. Careful engagement, complemented by constructive reinforcement of our allies and the clear delineation of how we expect Russia to act if it would like to be treated as a valuable member of the international community, should bear more fruit. Let’s leave stubborn petulance to the Russians.

Wednesday Links: Screw you, GPS

BOULDER, Colorado -- This week we offer you new rights for Gurkha soldiers, stomach-turning photos of children dressed like adults, and Russia's war on GPS.

Urban Oyster: Brewed in Brooklyn. After twelve months of researching, interviewing, and exploring the streets of Brooklyn, Urban Oyster, which offers unique, hands-on experiences in some of New York City’s most fascinating neighborhoods, is ready to launch. In two weeks their new tour on the history of brewing in Brooklyn will start, and they will be offering their bus tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. If you're in New York, this is definitely the way to see some of the city's out of the way places.

Gurkha Justice Campaign: Jai Mahakali, Ayo Gorkhali! Nepalese Gurkhas have long served in the British army and are renowned for their courage and tenacity. Despite this, they have been denied the right to become British citizens or even reside in the UK. The campaign to win them this right won a huge victory today when the British Home Secretary announced that Gurkhas who have served four years in the armed services would be allowed to settle with their families in Britain.

Financial Times: Why interview anyone else? The rivalry that may play out between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over who will stand in the 2012 elections is interesting, by the FT's reporter may want to ask someone other than a longtime Kremlin stooge with close ties to the intelligence apparatus.

Baseball Analysts: The new Yankee Stadium is three times better than any other ballpark. And its premium seats are six times better, which is why they cost $1,250 (down from $2,500 on opening day) as compared to a league average of $203 for front-row seats.

Youtube: Get a three-course meal for a dollar. Take a gleeful romp through the bodega economy of the Bronx, which has rendered it, and much of inner-city America, a food desert. Why eat fresh produce when you can get two honey buns and a forty for $2.50?




Jezebel: Which one is the tireless human rights campaigner? In case you are confused, here is a rundown to help you distinguish between anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean and beauty pageant loser Carrie Prejean.

Anna Skladmann Photography: Russia has pageants, too. These aren't beauty pageant photos, but they possess the same creepy aesthetic of children's pageants in which these young Russian girls and boys are made to ape the poses, mannerisms and dress of Las Vegas strippers. The results are terrifying (as pictured above).

Zagolovki: GLONASS will dominate the heavens. GLONASS, the Russian government's answer to America's GPS satellite navigation system, is having trouble catching on. Perhaps that is because it is unreliable, and they have yet to develop any sort of workable, hand-held consumer electronics that can interact with the system. But now the government is going to make people use it, by banning any foreign navigation devices that do not use the GLONASS frequency.

New York Times: One man's freedom fighter. This article needs no introduction. I will just say that writing an imperialist travelogue of Israel does not help convince people that the New York Times is not part of a vast liberal Jewish media conspiracy.

Russia, Bowed But Not Oranged by the "Krizis"

NEW YORK, New York -- Conventional wisdom may hold that Russia will be hit hard by the global economic shitstorm. After all, the place is generally a mess, and it's a mess dependent on oil and gas prices.

I don't argue with the gist of that conclusion. But while some observers are convinced that Russia's geopolitical heft and domestic stability will be circumcised by the economic problems it's facing and has yet to face, it appears every cloud has a polonium lining.

Yulka and "Da Boyz": Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko and the Kremlin Tandem ("The Kremdem")

Bloomberg reports today on just what that lining is, and it's almost embarrassing nobody else had figured this one out yet: Russia's neighbors are even (way) more screwed than it is! And since 90% of what Russia cares about is just having the right to screw with its neighbors in the most arbitrary and medieval ways, it may likely be as pleased as the Kremlin ever is with its geopolitical position for a while yet (for perspective, here's what some motards were saying back in '01).

Privatizations, Nationalizations and Mortalizations, Oh My!

NEW YORK, New York -- The New York Times' Economix blog reports today that the renowned British medical journal The Lancet has published a study that concludes that the privatization of businesses in post-communist states caused a spike in mortality rates.

In other words, after the Soviet Union and the socialist regimes in its satellite states collapsed in 1990-1992, selling factories and other formerly state-owned enterprises into private ownership caused people to die, in essence. The study alleges that privatizations increased the death rate in former communist states by 12.8%.


Would keeping you in the government's hands have saved lives?

To my mind, the report's conclusions sound suspicious. Here's a preliminary rebuttal, based on a quick perusal of the report and a few dashed-off thoughts.

I think controlling for privatizations is a difficult, problematic thing to do, first of all. The report's authors say they used a multivariable longitudinal regression analysis. And to effect of privatization, they controlled for "price and trade liberalization, income change, initial country conditions, structural predispositions to higher mortality, and other potential confounders." But they acknowledge that "one mediating factor could be male unemployment rates, which were increased substantially by mass privatization."

Well, not really. They draw a line between Russia and non-Soviet Eastern Bloc states, arguing that Russia saw more mass privatizations than the East European states (Croatia, Poland & co. -- Dickbag Cheney's "New Europe," in short). Now, although the authors acknowledge that they don't control for unemployment and that that could be a problem, they subsequently say it's not a problem because privatizations in Russia saw three times as much unemployment as in the East European states. This, to them, means that unemployment is linked to mass privatizations and that they can't be separated, or, equally, there's no use in separating them.

But that's not necessarily the case. It may be the case, but we don't know it must be. For what exactly tells us unemployment in Russia was higher because there were more mass privatizations there? Other factors could are just as likely to have come into play -- for instance, that Russia's economy was more tightly controlled by the communist state. (The Eastern Bloc states were as close as Soviets could get to a magical bohemia, where there was limited private industry, high-quality goods from the West, and less political oppression.) With the collapse of the centrally planned economy, Russia was, simply put, worse off than the others. Therefore it fell harder, and unemployment was higher. That's a structural problem of Soviet communism as practiced in Russia, not privatization.

Moreover, how do we determine that privatization, and not attempted coups (as in 1993 in Russia) and general political/mortal uncertainty, caused either unemployment or, ultimately, the deaths attributed to it? And then there's the Trump Card of Russia: You mix in the accessibility of alcohol, which was very limited under Gorbachev but repealed under Yeltsin, and you have a complicated picture. Study after study have shown that the status of alcohol sales and production has a huge impact on Russian life expectancy.

I don't doubt that being jobless contributed to people's misery, stress, and willingness to consume alcohol (though any person who has lived in Russia knows that employment/unemployment was hardly the biggest factor in alcohol consumption by Soviet workers). Nor do I want to argue that "shock therapy" was perfect. But the study's conclusions sound very dubious.

Take into account as well that what we got in Russia wasn't just privatization but crooked, swindled, corrupt privatization. Did the authors control for that? They don't mention it.

So there are methodology and controlling issues that may be at work. But there's also this, which the Times picks up on: “Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatization workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis."

I get the feeling this report has almost westernized the situation in early post-Soviet Russia. All Russians have healthcare. It's not very good, but everyone has it, regardless of whether you work. There of course was no American-style system of private, employer-based health care in the Soviet Union, and there isn't today. This summary makes it sound as though losing one's job meant losing access to healthcare. And unless you live in a one-factory town where the closure of a factory meant the general abandonment of the town and closure of the local polyclinic, it is a stretch to imply that losing one's job meant losing one's access to healthcare.

Why do I care? Well, the report is quite political in its own way. (Living in Russia, you realize anything can take on political overtones if seized upon by the right people, i.e., Russian propagandists -- which the Lancet obviously is not, but someone reading their report may be.) Throughout, we encounter statements like this:

There were two approaches to capitalism. Radical
free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition
needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed
policy was called shock therapy, with three major ele-
ments: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets
to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to
suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned
enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When
implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause
an irreversible shift to a market-based economy. By
contrast, gradualist economists, also known as insti-
tutionalists, called for a slow transition, recommending
that countries gradually phase in markets and private
property while allowing time to develop institutions that
are needed to make markets work well.

Meanwhile, we are told that "the main policy advisers at the EBRD, who backed the shock therapists, were also responsible for scoring progress in privatisation" and that their indices were "biased and subjective."

This paper sounds more like revisionist history than a medical study. Particularly, it sounds very much like the Great Oz Vladimir Putin's revisionist history. The Putin regime's founding myth, put forth incessantly in today's Russia, is about the evils of the "chaotic 90s" and the unscrupulous (and Jewish) oligarchs who cheated the people out of their assets. While the privatizations were quite corrupt, for Putin it becomes a question of Russia being sullied by the West -- the shock therapists and the likes of the EBRD. Putin and Lancet seem to converge, then. But Putin's intentions are darker than the journal's: For him, as for the discontented elements in Weimar Germany, the perceived indignities heaped upon his country by the West are a primary motivator. And they boil down to privatization. Today there is talk of re-nationalization in Russia. It's the culmination of years of visceral hatred of the privatizations.

For this reason, I think one must be very careful before drawing such stark conclusions about Russia's privatization. For they can be used to real consequence.

Russia Celebrates Constitution Day with Arrests, Dead Sheep

BOULDER, Colorado -- Friday marked the 15th anniversary of the ratification of Russia's constitution, and the celebrations varied from the depressing to the bizarre to the macabre.

The most notable incident took place inside the Kremlin, when President Dmitry Medvedev delivered a speech to 5,000 invited guests outlining proposed amendments to the constitution. During his speech, an opposition activist and journalist named Roman Dobrokhotov stood up and began shouting at the president.

"Shame on these amendments!" he shouted. The president continued speaking, but was again interrupted. "Why are you listening to him? He has violated all the rights and freedoms of the people and citizens. The constitution has been violated, there are no elections, and he goes on about the constitution."

Dobrokhotov was immediately removed from the hall by agents of the Federal Guard Service (ФСО) and was briefly detained. He will be charged with an administrative, not criminal, violation, which usually carries a fine. Here is a video of the incident from Russia's Channel 5:



Dobrokhotov is reporter for the newspaper Private Correspondent (Частный корреспондент) and a member of the liberal opposition youth group We (Мы). After the incident he claimed that he attended the speech in his role as a political activist, not as a journalist.

He also hosts a weekly radio show on a local Moscow station. After his return from the Kremlin, he was immediately informed that he had been fired, though the station manager claimed that all non-staff presenters were being fired (technically, Dobrokhotov has been hosting his show every week for the past two years as an "invited guest host"), and his termination had nothing to do with his outburst at the Kremlin.

Among the proposed changes to the constitution are extensions of terms for the president and members of parliament to six and five years, respectively, from the current four. The amendments, which will be the first ever made to the Russian constitution, have already been approved by both houses of parliament and now require the approval of two-thirds of the regional legislatures to be ratified.

To illustrate just how much the constitution really matters in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, since 2006 Constitution Day has not been a national holiday. Instead, it has been superseded by such nationalist flag-waving days as Peoples Solidarity Day, which celebrates how much Poland sucks for joining NATO (or it has something to do with driving the Poles out of Russia in 1612. I can never remember.)

Just next door to the Kremlin on Vasilievsky Spusk, pro-Kremlin activists were celebrating with a Miss Constitution pageant. The event, organized by the nationalist youth group Nashi, had young women traipsing around an outdoor stage in skimpy dresses and swimsuits in the middle of a Russian winter while they answered inane questions about how awesome the government is. The Los Angeles Times has a story on this absurdity (the photo is from that story).

Finally, in the nearby city of Khimki, opposition activists gathered for a conference to form a new political coalition they are calling "Solidarity." When conference delegates arrived at the site on Friday, however, they were met by a bus filled with sheep wearing hats adorned with the Solidarity logo. The sheep had been mutilated, and many of them were already dead. The animals stumbled out of the bus in a bloody heap.

Police arrived at the scene and detained the driver of the bus, who claimed he didn't know why he was asked to transport these animals or who was responsible for the stunt. Police also briefly detained some 150 delegates, ostensibly to check their documents. The delegates were subjected to a number of other dirty tricks, including anonymous phone calls giving them incorrect directions to the conference, and they had their cell phones jammed.

The conference finally got underway Saturday, and organizers Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov announced the formation the group, which was approved unanimously by the delegates. Outside the meeting, a number of members of Nashi protested the event. They showed their disdain by dressing as monkeys and hurling flaming bananas at the building, a maneuver they usually reserve for commtting racially-motivated hate crimes or for soccer games to mock black players.

Patriarch Aleksii II Dies, Russia Loses Prominent Nationalist Voice

BOULDER, Colorado -- The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Aleksii II passed away in Moscow Friday at the age of 79. Aleksii had been in the post since 1990 and oversaw a resurgence in the church's popularity and political influence.

Since the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000, the patriarch was a reliable ally of the Kremlin, especially on issues related to foreign policy. Nationalism and religion have always been closely paired in Russia, as Orthodoxy is seen as part of the bedrock of Russian national identity. Despite the current regime's communist pedigree, Putin and his cronies have always voiced strong support for the church, and the church has returned the favor.

Despite this newfound prominence for the church, Russia remains a largely secular country. More and more people claim to be believers in the Orthodox church - estimates range from a third to a half of the population - but regular church attendance hovers around eight percent.

Under Aleksii, the church espoused a rather narrow political agenda, preferring to perform a more social function, at least officially, and efforts to introduce church doctrine into state policies, such as in schools, remain hotly contested. Abroad, however, the church has actively promoted Kremlin policy. Here is a quote from a speech the patriarch made in 2005 echoing Russia's staunch opposition to an independent Kosovo and its affinity with Serbia. He drew direct parallels between Serbia’s foundational myth – the Battle of Kosovo, fought against the Turks in 1389 – and Russia’s, the Battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380 against the Golden Horde:

Many peoples hold sacred memories of their great battles and of events that led to the formation of their states, nations, and cultures. We recall how in Serbia they revere the Battle of Kosovo, which, regardless of the difficulties they faced in that period, became the spiritual foundation of the unification of the Serbian people.

Just as Russia would never surrender Kulikovo, the Serbs should never be asked to leave the land on which their nation was supposedly formed. Thus, Kosovar separatism threatens all of Orthodoxy because it threatens the foundational myth of Serbian nationalism. If the bond between church, nation and state is broken there, it can be broken elsewhere.

The Moscow Patriarch was in many ways actively engaged in contemporary political discussions, while at the same time found his position overwhelmed by other voices both within his church and in the wider arena of Russian politics. The relationship between the church and the state has been characterized by cooperation, confrontation, and co-option, stripping the patriarch of his ability to become of voice for political change and leaving him with a largely symbolic role.

Clearly the church leadership is willing to live with this compromise. Not only does the Russian Orthodox Church lend its image and symbols to the state – Orthodox religious ceremonies have become an important component of civic political events, like presidential inaugurations – but in exchange it receives a host of benefits, such as a privileged and protected status as the recognized official church of Russia, often to the detriment of other religious groups.

It remains unclear who will succeed him as patriarch, but the Kremlin will likely have a hand in the decision. This is not without precedence - Aleksii II was supposedly elected without the interference of Soviet authorities as the first patriarch since the Bolshevik Revolution, but he never fully answered accusations that he had colluded with the KGB throughout his career. The likely leading candidates are Metropolitan Kirill Gundiaev of Smolensk, who is known for his support of a strong church authority and anti-ecumenical views, and the more centrist Metropolitan Kliment Kapalin of Kaluga and Borovsk.

Vladimir Putin Hates the Boardgame "Clue"

BOULDER, Colorado -- Only in Russia could a stupid magic show be turned into a preposterous piece of political theater.



Okay, for those of you that don't speak Russian, here's what happened.

The magician is doing a trick in which he locks in a safe a piece of paper with a description of a crime written on it. He then asks different members of the audience to guess the instrument used, the city in which the crime took place, and the name of the guilty party; the first two people offer suggestions of a knife and the city of Munich.

The trouble starts with the third audience member, who struggles to come up with a name, and finally blurts out "Putin." After the volunteer from the audience writes these three things on the board, the show's host - who looks and speaks like a total skinhead thug - intervenes.

"We have to change that name. They're telling me you have to change that. Try again. That simply isn't right," he says.

They even begin arguing about whether they can leave the name of the prime minister up on the board and just write the compromise suggestion - "Vladimir" - below it, or whether they need to get a new piece of paper entirely.

Apparently, the name "Putin" is like "Jehovah," not to pass the lips of man. This is a truly terrifying piece of self-censorship, but is commonplace in Russia. The cult of personality of now-Prime Minister Putin is well-established and nearly unassailable. That is, until the country's economy goes in the tank completely, and people start figuring out that he has unabashedly raided the treasury more than any of the oligarchs. Putin will go down as the worst kleptocrat the world has ever know, putting Suharto and Mobutu to shame.

Thanks to Itchy for this video.