Russia

“The economic crisis ended in people’s minds a month ago”, told me a high-ranking Russian official.

Those words puzzled me rather than made me happy. The other day the press wrote about Vladimir Putin’s triumph as an anti-crisis manager who could resume the hot water supply to the town of Pikalevo, and who had made the owners of the Pikalevo enterprises pay wages to the workers.

It had to happen sooner or later. The first bill on nationalization has been submitted to the State Duma. That such a bill would appear in Russia only after similar legislation was introduced in Britain and the United States might seem paradoxical, at least at first glance. After all, Moscow officials would rather die than be accused of an attempt to revive communism. This is especially true of senior government officials in the "economic bloc" whose job is to please investors.

Russian officials have become optimistic again. Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev criticizes his Minister of Finances Alexey Kudrin in public because he said that Russia’s favorable economic trends had become a thing of the past, and the Central Bank representatives joyfully speak about the growth of gold and currency reserves.

The diarchy in the Russian politics is a permanent problem for analysts, propagandists and moralists. Who is the head of state? The President or the Prime Minister? And what kind of our system is? The superpresidential republic or the moderate constitutional monarchy? In fact, these questions are not the most unpleasant.

The commentators’ main difficulty and temptation is their natural desire to find in the diarchy an intrigue concealing the confrontation of the political tendencies, for example, to imagine Vladimir Putin as a “bad cop” and Dmitry Medvedev – as a “good one”.

It seems that in this spring not only weather but also the political climate in Russia is getting warm. Although those symptoms are unconvincing, they continue to multiply turning particular cases into a tendency. The crime committed by police major Denis Evsukov, who has shot down innocent people in a Moscow supermarket, led to a dismissal of Vladimir Pronin, head of the Moscow police – there is no precedent for this event in Russia where top officials are not accustomed to being responsible not only for the actions of their subordinates but also for those of their own.

When looking round the Russian city of Izhevsk a participant in the last week Ural Social Forum said: “Now I came to realize why the Kalashnikov assault rifle had been invented here”.

In Izhevsk it was too cold for the middle of April, but also there were many policemen, members of riot squad, who were ready for action, and numerous military equipment including a new police armored car resembling those in a Hollywood film about the war in Iraq. Suddenly the Izhevsk hotels refused to accommodate the forum organizers, although the money had been transferred to those hotels.

While economists debate whether the economic crisis has bottomed out yet and celebrities throw gaudy evening bashes and ordinary citizens count their shrinking incomes, there is a quiet but grim war taking place on the streets. Bands of fascists and anti-fascists are pitched in a brutal struggle that is rarely mentioned in public or in the mass media.

For some months now, fascist gangs have been attacking foreigners, minorities and immigrant workers, killing several people every month. Even members of anti-fascist organizations are counted among the murder victims.

The main decision, which the Russian government made last week, concerned protection of seals. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin decided to ban the hunting of the Greenlandic seal cubs which are mercilessly killed for their fur when they are one year old. Not only does the Russian Prime Minister sympathize with young seals – the West European environmental organizations have come out against the hunting of baby seals for a long time.

The Russian government has developed a new anti-crisis plan. Although nobody has seen it yet, we can be 100 percent certain that it is a good one and that it will enable Russia to fulfill its strategy for development through 2020, offer solutions to new problems and provide for overall stability.