Prague Property

This week’s entry for Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats

Europe.view

Tsar struck

Man of the year, or scandal of the decade?

Get article background

CHOOSING a “Man of the Year” is a risky business and writing about him even more so. Take this sentence: “His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning.” It is a fair bet that by 1941, the editors of Time magazine regretted this description of Adolf Hitler, used in “Hymn of Hate”, a (largely negative) cover story that celebrated his crowning as 1938’s “Man of the Year”.

Now Vladimir Putin is Time’s “Person of the Year” for 2007: not an honour, the magazine insists, but just a recognition of “bold, earth-changing leadership”. Even so, that is hardly future-proof. Russia’s still-shaky economy and disastrous demographics mean that rather than being the harbinger of Russia’s stability-based revival, as Time predicts in a cooing article it cheekily titled “A Tsar is born”, Mr Putin may be seen as the mortuary assistant who presided over the greatest missed opportunity in its history.

Reuters

He didn’t even finish dinner

Even without endorsing Mr Putin’s rule outright, Time largely swallows the Kremlin’s version of Russia’s past and present. Yet as Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss point out in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, it is far from obvious that autocracy has been good for Russia, either in economics or in the growth of modern, efficient and accountable state institutions.

Russia’s economy is certainly doing better now than in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, but any comparison based on that must also include the wildly different starting conditions and external environments. “Even in good economic times, autocracy has done no better than democracy at promoting public safety, health, or a secure legal and property-owning environment,” they note.

Russia’s economic history lends itself to sharply different interpretations. An excellent recent book by Anders Aslund, “Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed”, gives Mr Putin and his team high marks for their economic policy in the early years of his rule, particularly the unglamorous but vital fiscal reforms of 1999-2001, which ended an era of chaos in Russian public finances.

But Russia’s recent political history tends to attract criticism from all corners. The audible but mostly invisible feuds inside the Kremlin, and the total secrecy about political decision-making, make even the stability so praised by Time look precarious. Even Mr Putin’s biggest fans would find it hard to argue that he enjoys a robust debate with critics, or promotes a fastidious separation of business and political interests.

He has also a troubling habit of dissembling when faced with awkward facts—claiming, for example, that the state had nothing to do with the onslaught on Yukos, the energy company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an anti-Kremlin tycoon. Mr Aslund says of this episode that Mr Putin, Soviet-style, “re-established the public lie” as an official standard.

The Time journalists avoided calling Mr Putin a liar, though they clearly struggled to like the man they interviewed for more than three hours. They politely bemoan his humourlessness, rudeness, and “vein-popping” short temper, and note that he left abruptly and without explanation, with his dinner just half-eaten. They signally failed to confront his absurd equation of America’s deplorable electoral hiccoughs with the Kremlin’s crushing of its political opponents, or Mr Putin’s slanderous attacks on the opposition leader, Garry Kasparov, or his brazen evasion of allegations about corruption in his inner circle. And how come Mr Putin demands strict non-intervention from other countries when it comes to Russia, but shows no such restraint when the Kremlin is dealing with its troublesome neighbours?

No doubt Time will have plenty of opportunity to deal with these questions in the months and years to come. So will everyone eView Bloglse.

With all the hubbub in Russia’s online community regarding LiveJournal and increased internet watchdogs, another frightening development has been added to the mix, this time involving Russia’s campaign to establish a new Cyrillic internet. According to a report in the Guardian, the government is lobbying hard to change the DNS from “.ru” to “.rf”, which could possibly involve a new root server based in Russia, requiring all people to register. Needless to say, this raises some concerns that the Kremlin may be seeking a greater level of control over internet content. Guillaume Lovet of Fortinet says “Russia has a very strong academic tradition of technical universities, which form very sharp and competent computer scientists. At the same time, the average income per head is extremely low. This combination creates an explosive cocktail. Any attempt to confine Russian hackers inside some kind of Russian cyberspace is bound to fail.“

Gotta love their ability to deliver clever headlines, no? From the Economist: The audible but mostly invisible feuds inside the Kremlin, and the total secrecy about political decision-making, make even the stability so praised by Time look precarious. Even Mr Putin’s biggest fans would find it hard to argue that he enjoys a robust debate with critics, or promotes a fastidious separation of business and political interests.

He has also a troubling habit of dissembling when faced with awkward facts—claiming, for example, that the state had nothing to do with the onslaught on Yukos, the energy company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an anti-Kremlin tycoon. Mr Aslund says of this episode that Mr Putin, Soviet-style, “re-established the public lie” as an official standard.

Before Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson was the singer in Samson. a well regarded but not hugely successful NWOBHM band (well not in comparison to Iron Maiden anyway) . I wonder if he ever looks back at these early videos and wonders what they were thinking of. Then again, not many videos stand the test of time.

It’s good to see cold cases solved but some notorious crimes are bound to remain unsolved for good – The identity of Jack the Ripper will almost certainly remain a mystery. The FBI seems determined to ensure that one 36 year old crime that does not fall into that category. It has just reopened the D B Cooper case, the world’s only unsolved hijacking

In November 1971, DB (or Dan) Cooper, not his real name, stepped off the back stairway of a Northwest Orient Boeing 727. Equipped with two parachutes and a bag of $200,000 in ransom money, he jumped into the rugged terrain of Washington State. No one was hurt and it became an act that entered modern American folklore. The FBI has reassembled the few fragments of evidence that it has and made a fresh appeal to the public for help. “Would we still like to get our man?” the FBI said in a release out of its Pacific Northwest office in Seattle this week. “Absolutely. And we have reignited the case.”

The public is being invited to visit the FBI website where, for the first time, it has displayed sketches of Cooper together with photographs both of a cheap clip-on tie he left behind on the plane before making his mid-air exit and of ragged remains of a few $20 bills found in the vicinity on the ground by a boy in 1980. By making this of information available to the public, the FBI is hoping they will jog someone’s mind somewhere and they will come forward with the key to unlock the mystery.

Dan Cooper is the name the hijacker gave when he showed up at the Northwest Orient desk at the airport in Portland, Oregon, on 24 November 1971, and bought a ticket to Seattle. He settled quietly in a seat towards the rear of the plane and paid $2 for a bourbon and soda shortly after take-off. Then he handed one of the flight attendants a note. “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit beside me.” Cooper showed the attendant tangled wires and what looked like red sticks of dynamite. He then gave her his instructions. “I want $200,000 by 5pm. In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” Flight 305 landed and the money and parachutes were handed over as requested. Cooper allowed all 36 passengers off the plane leaving only the crew on board. He then ordered the pilot to take off again, and head for Mexico City. A few minutes after leaving Seattle that Cooper performed his disappearing act.

Over the years, multiple people have come forward claiming to know the real identity of Cooper. Many pointed to a Vietnam War veteran named Richard McCoy who staged a similar hijacking over Utah, leaping out and wafting to the ground below under a parachute with $500,000 in ransom money. He was captured, imprisoned and subsequently shot in 1974 by prison officers during a botched break-out. Minnesota man, Lyle Christiansen, believed his deceased brother, Kenneth was the culprit while Duane Weber, claimed on his deathbed that he himself was Cooper. All of these have been discounted by the FBI.

The agency with nothing beyond the vague hope that the pictures on the web page launched this week will mean something to someone. On it, the agency admits that over the years it has pursued “thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios” but to no avail. “And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved. Please look it all over carefully to see if it triggers a memory or if you can provide any useful information.”

The UK’s Daily Telegraph is running a story today on a new twist to the Yukos case. The article says that investors who lost money in the company when it was taken over by the Russian government are now accusing the Russian Federation of unlawfully expropriating their investments. Up to $100 billion could be claimed.

The article reads: “Later this year, three arbitrators will begin to consider the largest compensation claim ever launched outside the normal court process. At face value, it is worth £16 billion. According to the claimants, though, not even that eye-watering sum would be enough to cover their losses. The figure they may eventually be seeking could be as much as £50 billion, or more than $100,000,000,000.

At the heart of this fascinating tale is Russia’s attempt to open its oil industry to western investment in the 1990s, followed a decade later by President Putin’s decision to bring his country’s energy resources back under state control.“

The dispute over the British Council’s activities in Russia continues, with a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry saying that the Council’s continued presence in the country constitutes “unlawful activity”. Amid protests that native Russian workers are being outnumbered by foreigners, the Russian government say it intends to cut the number of foreign migrant workers the in the country by two thirds in 2008. Last year saw an influx of roughly six million workers without visas. Russia has admitted that customs officials thwarted more than 120 attempts to smuggle “highly radioactive” material out of the country last year, “fuel[ing] concern about how many illegal exports were not halted”.

Azerbaijan’s state oil company is set to auction off 605,000 barrels of Russian oil that will be delivered to Russia’s Novorossiysk port.

World Energy

The Indian government “must allow prices to be market driven” says oil retailer Indian Oil Corp after it emerged that the company is losing $43.1 million a day from selling cheap fuels.

The US is sending a chief negotiator to North Korea, after admitting that it is “skeptical” about the region disclosing its nuclear programs.