Year in pictures – July & August

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Moscow's painted ponies

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

ALEXEY SAZONOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Last week, Moscow’s traffic police announced they were going to paint horses and ponies to look like zebras. Why? To remind drivers to drive safely, of course. It’s a literal stunt: the city’s crosswalks are in a zebra style (like the one John, Paul, Ringo and George strode on for the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover). The faux zebras are part of a campaign to draw attention to children’s safety during the start of the new school year. They will be stationed at five of the city’s busiest crosswalks in central Moscow, and children can ride the animals and learn about traffic rules.

Traffic is a huge concern in Moscow. Last week, Mayor Yury Luzhkov asked the Kremlin for a $130-billion handout to fix the capital’s clogged roads. One survey of 20 world cities found that Moscow had the worst traffic delays of all. The average reported delay was 2.5 hours, and more than 40 per cent of respondents said they had been stuck for over three hours—three times other cities’ averages. At least with the imitation zebras, the kids will have some way to pass the time.

Under Attack

By Malcolm Gray - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Tatyana Makeyeva/ Reuters

They struck during Moscow’s morning rush hour. On Monday, two female suicide bombers—members of a team police say may have included as many as 30 people—ignited belts of explosives in two of the city’s subway stations, killing 39 and wounding at least 70 more. The double bombings amounted to the worst terrorist attack in the Russian capital in six years. And they raised fears that the blasts could be followed by similar attacks across the country by insurgents from Russia’s south.

Agents of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) had an uncomfortably close perspective; the first explosion, at 7:52 a.m., occurred at Lub­yanka station, underneath FSB headquarters. Another detonation, three stops further south along the same line, occurred 40 minutes later. Both underscored the intelligence failures of the bureau, the successor agency to the KGB. Earlier in March, the FSB did manage to find and kill Said Buryatsky, a Muslim convert who had rapidly become the chief ideologue of the persistent Islamic insurgency in Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus. But these bombings showed that the rebels could hit back, and that armed resistance to Moscow’s rule had now spread across five republics—Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as Chechnya.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who built his enduring popularity in part through a military win in Chechnya, had characteristically tough words following the attacks—he promised to destroy those responsible. President Dmitry Medvedev took just as hard a line. “We’ll find them and we’ll eliminate them all—to dust,” he said. Medvedev had wanted to bring economic modernization and a campaign against corruption to the impoverished region. But those goals are now threatened by Kremlin hard-liners favouring a military solution. Also holding such views is Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Chechen strongman who has imposed a repressive regime on his republic, and called it peace. Writing in Izvestia after the bombs went off, he said: “Terrorists must be hunted down and found in their lairs; they must be poisoned like rats, crushed and destroyed.”

Continue…

The dead spy and the oligarch

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Alastair Grant/ AP

More than four years after Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210, the drama surrounding his mysterious death in Britain continues. On March 10, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky won a libel suit in London against Russian state television, which claimed he masterminded the killing.

Berezovsky lives in Britain after being granted political asylum in 2003. He is wanted on a variety of charges by Moscow, which Kremlin opponents see as attempts to discredit and ultimately silence an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The current court case was launched after a 2007 story aired by Russia’s state TV claimed Litvinenko was murdered on orders from the billionaire because he had witnessed a drugged man make a false statement that bolstered Berezovsky’s claim for asylum.

The billionaire vehemently denied the charges, stating that, in fact, Litvinenko, a former spy turned Putin critic, had saved his life on more than one occasion. “He had helped me and I him,” Berezovsky testified. “Fundamentally, we shared the same enemy.” Litvinenko’s widow, Maria, backed Berezovsky in court: “I knew that the accusation against Boris was propaganda.” While Russian TV refused to defend itself in the libel case, several state prosecutors helped the defence of the media firm’s co-accused, Vladimir Terluk, who had claimed Berezovsky drugged him.

In the end, Justice David Eady ruled definitively for Berezovsky and awarded him $230,000. “I can say unequivocally that there is no evidence before me that Mr. Berezovsky had any part in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko,” Eady stated. “Nor, for that matter, do I see any basis for reasonable grounds to suspect him of it.”

British investigators have long since come to the same conclusion. In 2007, they requested the Kremlin extradite former Russian spy Andrei Lugovoi, a Putin ally, to stand trial for Litvinenko’s murder. Moscow refused.

Moscow gays find a new way to party

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Russian gay rights activists are planning to bring some extra drama to a popular European pop music competition. Moscow Pride organizers have scheduled a pride parade to coincide with the live TV finale of the 54th Eurovision Song Contest on May 16. Thousands of fans are expected for the show—most famous for launching ABBA’s career in 1974—and activists see Moscow’s hosting of the contest as an opportunity to build support for gays in Russia.

Gay rights marches in Moscow have been repeatedly banned by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The city’s first ever, held in 2006 despite being banned, led to violent clashes between activists and anti-gay demonstrators. At a Eurovision press conference in December, Luzhkov advised gay visitors to the city: “Entertain yourself, no problem, but not on the streets, squares, marches and demonstrations. We do not allow gay parades.” Homosexuality has only been legal in Russia since 1993, and the influential Russian Orthodox Church still strongly disapproves.

Continue…

A silver lining for Russia

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 8 Comments

Amid the global financial bloodbath, few have been as hard hit as some of Russia’s oligarchs: the Kremlin-friendly super-rich. Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man, has lost $16 billion in a month. Rumours suggest Deripaska—also embroiled in a political scandal in London—has sacked his servants, replacing them with cheap help from the provincial town of Tula. Russian No. 2, Roman Abramovich, who owns Britain’s famed Chelsea Football Club, has lost half his fortune. The word is he’s postponed his wedding to 26-year-old ex-model Daria Zhukova. Since the market peaked in May, Russia’s 25 richest men have lost a combined $230 billion, 62 per cent of their total worth; when the dust eventually settles, some will have been made “formergarchs,” forfeiting their metals, mining and telecommunication empires.

But it’s not just the oligarchs who are suffering. At a time when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Moscow has been flexing its global muscle, the economic crisis could substantially weaken Russia and help curb its aspirations. At first glance, the country appears to be in deep trouble. Its two key stock indexes have lost over two-thirds of their value, wiping out nearly $1 trillion in wealth. Capital flight is running at over $12 billion a week. And the price of oil, crucially important to the Russian economy—and Russian power—has tumbled more than 50 per cent from a record high of $146 per barrel just three months ago. This week, it hit $64 a barrel, its lowest level in over a year.

In fact, the Kremlin has been forced to adopt a $200-billion rescue plan to shore up its troubled banks and companies. It’s unclear, however, whether the average Russian knows about these elite-level discussions, or, indeed, about the financial crisis itself (less than three per cent of Russians have mortgages or invest in the market). According to the English-language newspaper Moscow Times, Russia’s three main channels—Channel One, Rossia and NTV—have either played down or completely ignored the collapse of the main stock market, the RTS, which halted trading for the fourth time last week, after stocks took another plunge. Ekho Moskvy, Moscow’s independent radio station, says the Kremlin has banned state media from using the words “financial crisis” and “collapse.” (Russians do know, however, that Putin—whose personal popularity, one month into the crisis, has risen to 83 per cent—received a tiger cub for his 56th birthday this month, and that the prime minister, a marshal arts enthusiast, has released a judo DVD.)

Rather than financial ruin, however, some experts are predicting that Russia could emerge strengthened from the global meltdown—and in a position to exert even more pressure on its neighbours and others. The country is cash-rich, thanks to $1.3 trillion in oil and gas revenues over the past eight years, and the Kremlin is sitting on a $500-billion cash reserve: the world’s third-highest hard currency reserves. As well, Russia is largely debt-free (at 8.5 per cent of its GDP). The price of oil, meanwhile, is still double what was considered high just a few years ago. “Here in Russia, officials and experts see the crisis as much as an opportunity as a danger,” says Harvard University Russia expert Henry Hale, reached in Moscow. “They see opportunities to play a stabilizing role in the world economy, and to expand Russian influence.”

Indeed, while state media have downplayed Russia’s financial crisis, they have covered the West’s economic problems; ordinary Russians know that when Iceland was tottering on the brink of financial ruin, it turned to Moscow—not the International Monetary Fund, Washington, London or, indeed, any Western capital—a telling indication of Russian might. (At press time, Reykjavik, which last week agreed to a $2.1-billion loan from the IMF, was continuing discussions with Moscow for a loan worth as much as $5 billion.) And Russia has since announced a $2-billion loan to Belarus, a part of the former Soviet Union still within its sphere of influence. In return, Minsk has pledged to resume common currency negotiations with Moscow, edging it one step closer to all-out union with Russia.

But across the former Soviet sphere, where Russia has stoked separatist fires in recent months—handing out Russian passports in the Ukrainian republic of Crimea, and invading Georgia over the issue of breakaway South Ossetia—banking systems are teetering on the brink of collapse, making those countries more susceptible to the influence of their cash-rich neighbour. So far, they have gone elsewhere for aid. This week, Ukraine, whose stock market has fallen nearly 80 per cent this year, and which recently saw a panic run on deposits, received a $16.5-billion, two-year loan from the IMF; Hungary, its neighbour to the immediate southwest, whose currency and stock market are in free fall, will also receive a “substantial financing package,” from the institution.