This is worse than crime, this is an error

"This is worse than crime, this is an error", once said Prince De Talleyrand. Putin's decision to run for the next President of Russia goes into that category. For the time, I expected that the Tandem (Medvedev and Putin) will obfuscate the issue but closer to the election jointly support a third candidacy, for instance, the Minister for Regional Policies Kozak. Feelers from Moscow were also to a different tune. Newly elected Head of the Federation Council (the Senate), Mrs. Matvienko, suggested direct elections of the senators--currently they are elected by the provincial legislatures as in the US before 1912--the order, which replaced ex-officio appointments, which marred the Yeltsin years. Because the Kremlin was intimately involved in promotion of Matvienko, her "suggestion" must have been vented with Medvedev and Putin in a very deliberate manner. This decision is not so wrong in practice, as in its symbolism. Finally, Medvedev, though a good man did not cut a particularly convincing figure of a president, and Putin is genuinely popular.

But the idea that the leaders of the country are not chosen by the electorate but by a ruling Party Congress could not come in less opportune times. There are obvious signs, even among very loyal commentators, of tiredness and a feeling that a country is on the wrong track. While Russia comes out of the crisis relatively unscathed, the revival is anemic by the standards of emerging markets, and its political system, less than two decades old, is widely regarded as sclerotic. The Wiseacre-in-Chief, a late Prime Minister Chernomyrdin told that "No matter what we are making, the outcome is either the CPSU or a Kalashnikov rifle." United Russia Party, which is a dozen years old, acquires old habits particularly quickly despite the fact that majority of its leading members had their careers after the fall of the Soviet Union and many are (former) businessmen. Namely, they are a collection of provincial bosses who tightly control policies in their regions and represent the most corrupt part of business in cahoots with the state.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this arrangement: every viewer of "Boardwalk Empire" can see for herself/himself that the period of the fastest industrial expansion of the US was characterized by monstrous corruption and unholy union between politicians and businesses, frequently mediated by criminal classes. But for this one needs a significant openness of a political system to energetic (if not more honest) newcomers, the process, which United Russia was created to terminate. I nevertheless hope that the next four years will put forward a new group of leaders (mentioned above Kozak, Matvienko, Finance Minister Kudrin are the prime candidates), which can gently turn the country in a different direction without ruining the unquestionable achievements of the past decade.

M. MacMillan. Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Random House, 2002.

Margaret McMillan's book is a propaganda rag in support of neocon policies of redrawing the map of the world with the superior US air power. As is usual with neocons, who, not altogether without foundation, disdain the ability of recipients of their agitprop to think, the purpose of the book is revealed in the preface by late Richard Holbrooke, the preeminent and the most successful practitioner of neoconnery.

The book proffers a revisionist theory that the architects of Versaille system were not the wreckers of everything, which remained in the wake of the World War I ultimately responsible for the extremist direction of public policy in the defeated nations, but the benefactors of humanity. The arguments cannot be rendered here without diminishing reader's IQ by a significant bit. The book was published in 2002 when it seemed that US colonial wars would lead to the new millennium of American domination of the world. Then even such moderate as David Gergen proclaimed on CNN that we need to get into Iraq sooner rather then later to finish with it sooner, so that we can start war against Iran quicker. Now this (and the precepts of the Lady McMillan's books) look as madness but these were the times, "now very far away" when Anglo-American elite was totally under the spell of the magic thinking of the neocons.