Postmodern Conservative.

Former Soviet Union: Vanguard of the West's Future

Off to the north, he showed me, was the tentlike roof of Circus Circus, the first of the family-themed hotel-casinos, where he sometimes went as a kid; in the near distance were the Mirage and Treasure Island, home of the warring pirate ships (in dry dock, sadly, over the Christmas holiday); and behind us were the Luxor, Excalibur and the Mandalay Bay. The Strip is swelling outward to the south, toward the airport, he explained, with the resorts growing ever bigger and more gimmicky. “They’re all variations on a theme,” he said, “and I wonder what’s next. I keep waiting for the Fatherland.” -- NYT

An adventure park offers a journey back to the Soviet Union with KGB interrogation methods and "beatings" with a leather belt. The 1984 Soviet Union theme park is located outside the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in an old bunker which served as a secret TV station in case of a nuclear attack. Visitors to the park pay to be "beaten, interrogated and shouted at" by tour leaders dressed as agents of the Russian secret police, the KGB. -- Daily Telegraph [Thru K-Lo]

Vlad the Improver

I trust the man as much as I trust Amy Winehouse. But Andrew is right about Putin and the GOPers spluttering about Petraeus and so on are not.

UPDATE: Julie Ponzi defends the righteous indigation; Mitt's specifically. Beyond question Petraeus has done good work. Without him we'd probably be up to our necks in mess. But Putin's significance has been far, far greater, and that's what Human of the Year is all about. Petraeus will come and go, as most do who do their duty, do it well, and, thus satisfying it, stop. Putin will not go anytime soon, and what he has saved his country from ranks him among the towering figures of Russian history -- with a historical minimum of casualties, one might add. But, yes, I'd much rather have Petraeus watch my kids. (Don't trivialize that, either.)

Russia In The Pink

Pink police state, that is. 'Rubles are a girl's best friend.' NYT's extraordinary coverage continues.

Russia: The Wild West

John Gray was right several years ago when he called Russia the cutting edge of 'westernization.' The latest dispatch from the NYT, in their extraordinary series -- especially this page -- should convince any laggards.

Russia: the Cutting Edge of Politics

What I find surprising is the level to which the government feels it needs to engage in electoral hanky-panky: all signs suggest that Edinaya Rossiya would receive a comfortable majority, even without the blatant manipulation of the system. Kommersant reports that a recent poll shows that it is very likely that no party besides Edinaya Rossiya will clear the 7% threshold for Duma representation--in that case, a "loyal opposition" may actually need to be manufactured to preserve the pretense of a multiparty system. Is this a dictator's fear that his popularity is merely illusory? Or is it based in a belief that greater legitimacy is derived from a manipulated landslide than a clean victory? It's hard to tell from the outside. -- Maia Gemmill, the Duck of Minerva

Here's a guess. The Russian population needs to be conditioned to understand that the State, not the citizens, has full responsibility even for big incumbent victories, and that the State, not the citizens, can guarantee the fair and balanced presence of opposition parties. If 'hanky panky' is an open secret, manipulation itself gains the legitimacy of unopposed practice. Of course, it's always illegitimate, if the word 'legitimate' has any real meaning, so the State will have to pay off and churn a steadily expanding elite class of people with no political liberty and lots and lots of economic and social liberty. (Welcome to the pink police state.)

Kasparov knows. He tells GOOD Magazine that

The West should not be panicking when Putin talks about targeting Western cities with Russian missiles. ... If the West is getting serious about halting Putin, you should stop talking about petty issues and look at the big one, which is the investments of the Russian ruling elite in the free world.

Russia: the Cutting Edge of Hip

What's kitscher than kitsch? Move over, childhood nostalgia of the emotionally stunted American hipster. If 1UP mushrooms and Clash T-shirts, why not this?

young and trendy Muscovites are in the throes of nostalgia for the staples of Soviet childhoods, relics of a time when the U.S.S.R. was at the height of superpower status. That may explain why one of the most popular fashion designers this fall is Denis Simachev, who is selling overcoats fastened with hammer-and-sickle buttons, gold jewelry minted to look like Soviet kopecks and shirts festooned with the Soviet coat of arms, complete with embroidered ears of wheat. “People in their 30s see these kinds of symbols as reminders of happy memories, like going to pioneer camp where they lived together, ate breakfast together and played sports,” said Mr. Simachev, 33, who wears his hair in a Samurai-style ponytail. He insists he is no Communist — for one thing, his overcoats sell for about $2,100 and his T-shirts for about $600. His boutique is sandwiched between Hermès and Burberry stores on a pedestrian lane, Stoleshnikov, that is one of the capital’s most expensive shopping streets.

Ah the irony, when history repeats itself as farce and capitalism's to blame.

UPDATE: Julian about nails it with the Hang the Capitalists Playset analogy: a fake gulag, though tacky, is always to be preferred to the real thing.

Problem is of course that in Russia's case today the gilded hammer and sickle is merely one shiny facet of the Putinocratic diadem. Kind of takes the shine off freedom of contract when it applies only to the entertainment sector. But that's what I keep nattering on about with this 'pink police state' stuff.

Getting Frisky

How much is this just an election-season gambit? Notice it's happening even though our new missile defense policy is far more cautious than ever before.

Charles Taylor's Superstate

Would have to shift scale even higher than neutrality among faiths to neutrality among belief, semibelief, nonbelief, and, presumably, antibelief. How ephemeral a cloud is that? The state will get tired flapping its stubby wings so furiously to hover so close to the ground yet so pointedly above it.

Another problem: he thinks Turkey is not in Europe because it isn't Christian, then says in the same breath things are far more complicated. There are lots of Christian countries not in Europe. Imagine if Turkey was as ethnically white of a country as Russia. Think about why people insist Georgia is European: yes, there are four big red crosses (five actually) on the rejiggered Georgian flag, but we flatter ourselves if we think it's that simple. And not just ethnicity but the properties and singularities of geography that we still can't transcend (you can't make Turkey not adjacent to Iraq, Syria, and Iran) profoundly impact the shape of the Western world, too.

That Old Sweet Song...of World War

Yes, in a strict sense, we do need others’ cooperation; unfortunately, we’re not getting it. The last few years show that Russia, China, and their friends do not want to become “responsible stakeholders”—if I may use the State Department’s optimistic term—in the world as it is.

Call it what you wish—World War III, World War IV, or the Long War—but the existing international system is disintegrating. We have to confront the reality that we are already involved in destabilizing competition with other great powers. Not supporting Georgia and other democracies under attack will only hand victory to the aggressors. -- Gordon Chang, Contentions

Make up your mind, Mr. Chang: is the world 'as it is,' or is it 'disintegrating'? If we are 'already involved in destabilizing competition with other great powers,' what part of the world that we live in are those other powers refusing to recognize? Is Georgia under attack, or under phony attack? Why not equally phony support from the US? What other sort of support did you have in mind? Dropping dud missiles in Russia? But that's destabilizing! Oh, yes, but you already admitted this is already so. So when we destabilize the world, the world's being as it is, but when Russia destabilizes...um, Georgia, the whole world is plunged into destabilizing competition?

The more we care about what happens next door to Russia, the greater a power Russia becomes. Nothing in that realization means selling Georgia down the river, or standing by smugly while a now-sovereign state is subverted or overthrown or whatever by the Kremlin. If you can think of a constructive and proportionate way to 'support' Georgia in its time of crisis, I'm open to suggestions. Only, we're already 'supporting' Georgia as much as we can without planting a NATO flag there (aha...), and the 'Georgia' we're supporting is in fact a Saakashvili regime more interested in American protection than the rule of law. I understand Chang's gist that letting Russia do as it pleases with a nervous smile and nary a peep is bad policy. That's what I take that last, dissatisfyingly vague sentence above to be saying. But I am tempted to wonder whether a first draft of his post read like the following:

Yes, in a strict sense, we can't 'force' people to appreciate freedom; unfortunately, we have to. The last few hundred years show that Russia, China, and other countries that aren't US allies do not want to become “responsible stakeholders”—if I may use the State Department’s optimistic euphemism for US allies—in the world as it could be if tyranny was ended in it.

Call it what you wish—World War III, World War IV, the Eternal War, Better Living through War, the War on Words Beginning With 'Terr' or 'Tyrr', Permanent Revolution—but the international system we never actually succeeded in establishing after World War II and World War III is in catastrophic danger of not ever being established. We have to confront the reality that we might need one last big war in order to get it right this time. Not declaring Georgia and other democracies to be under attack will only prove there isn't another total war going on, and without total war, what's victory?

Did Litvinenko Deserve It? Did Britain?

While I hesitate to do so, I must take issue with the take of James Poulos on the Litvinenko affair. [...] Someone must speak the Derbyshirean hard truth here, which is that someone who makes a name for himself as a defector and associate of a man loathed and wanted on criminal charges in Russia, and as a tacit apologist for the Chechen cause, just is liable to get whacked on someone's orders - or even by freelancers or rogues. Contrary to the idea that the Russian policy, whoever applied it in this case, was unduly concerned with one man, that policy was very much concerned with an entire nation: the pet causes of the West have no purchase in any corridors of power, because they are bad for Russia. -- John Martin (Maximos), WWWtW

I did make the assumption that "the Russians" ordered Litvinenko's death, and I insinuated (but only insinuated) that 'the' Russians who did so were carrying out an element of Russian foreign policy. I agree with JM(M) that much in Russia that would seem 'official' under Western circumstances actually is not, and vice versa.

But I'm not sure this at all dilutes my main point -- namely, that Litvinenko was indeed "whacked on someone's orders," that only an idiot could believe those somebodies were not powerful Russians, and that Britain erred not in the slightest by reminding the Kremlin that, regardless of how they do things at home or in the rest of the world, transnational hit jobs involving anti-Putin Russians are not to be conducted on British soil and will be treated as the responsibility of the Russian government to prevent. The idea that Chechnya is still a sore spot is compelling, but the notion that the British should have shown some restraint because of it is not.

In the end the question is whether the onus is on a country -- Britain, which had just unwillingly hosted a high-profile, exceedingly clumsy, and distressingly inventive assassination -- to figure out precisely how 'official' of a killing it was, or whether, in fact, the onus is on the country -- Russia, from which both perpetrators and victim had come -- to deal with the fallout when the host country rebukes them for an all too useful lack of oversight.