Is one happening in DC today? I can’t find an address or time…

One correction: the Defense Minister is Anatoly Serdyukov, not Aleksandr Serdyukov.

Thanks for the PDF link. I will read with great interest. Thanks also for the correction regarding my Kashin citation. I must have pulled the article from Kashin’s LJ and not bothered to check the byline, which Kommersant annoyingly hides at the bottom of their articles.

So who makes the top ten of your friendlenta? Let’s have it.

It’s a fair point. Do you think it would be more effective or truer-to-life to conduct more of a Kremlinology-type approach, looking for figures in the administration and in United Russia, unpacking their personalities, and so on?

I’m curious to know what you think could be an improvement, as I’ve been thinking about this myself.

Glossy, thanks very much for that. I’d say you’ve certainly raised some doubts about the study. Thanks for your take on the matter.

I appreciate the sentiment that T.I.’s results don’t jive with popular notions or stereotypes, but I’ve still yet to hear much in the way of specifics about why this report’s methodology is really flawed. I get it that you don’t like the fact that comparisons are even being made, but let’s focus on the idea that a monitoring group analyzed Russian transparency and gave it a low grade. In a vacuum, what are your issues with how they did this?

I’m not asking you guys to go master quantum physics here. That PDF laying out their methodology (see link above) is literally just a collection of questions with quantifiable answers, put to businesspeople and professional experts/scholars.

I think this discussion would benefit immensely from one of you discontents actually reading the thing.

Wow. Very cool!

Back in February this year, Ron Asmus, a Clinton administration State Department official, published “The Little War That Shook the World.” a book based on interviews with Bush administration people stating that “President George W. Bush and his senior aides considered — and rejected — a military response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32487.html#ixzz0v8I7tmCO

Anatoly, thanks for setting me straight on my claim about Russia’s ranking drop. I had not realized that the pool of countries doubled. This was sheer laziness on my part. Apologies all around.

I wonder if you could be a little more specific about why you distrust the CPI’s methodology. I understand that you think the results are far-fetched, but presumably it’s how Transparency International arrived at its conclusions that we should scrutinize — not its unappealing or hard-to-believe results. A detailed overview of their process is available here:
http://www.transparency.org/content/download/47733/762810/CPI_2009_methodology_long_en.pdf

If you can turn up something concretely “ludicrous,” I would be interested to hear it. Honestly. (I don’t mean that as some impossible challenge — I’m just curious.) My impression at least is that these guys know what they’re doing.

I understand that people are offended by the idea that Russia is crippled by un-European-like levels of corruption. Perhaps I should have avoided making a comparison to Africa. This sort of language, after all, is meant only to be sort of ‘shocking,’ and I’ll admit that it’s a tad cheap. But my point is simply that Russia faces a very serious corruption problem that undermines its efforts to further develop and thrive. Medvedev has signed no less than seventeen presidential orders laying out anti-corruption measures (http://kremlin.ru/search?query=%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BF%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F&section=2&order=&since=1.1.2008&till=1.8.2010&data_type=&rview=full&limit=20). And then there’s the fact that the man himself came out and told the country that “significant successes in the battle against corruption have yet to come” (http://kremlin.ru/news/8341).

I’m all for calling out Western observers for double-standards, but when I talk about the threat corruption poses to Russia, I’m not saying a word about illegitimate governance in the U.S. or in Sweden or in Africa, or anywhere but Russia. Let’s be real here and realize that it’s not Russophobic to discuss the Russian federal government’s policy hurdles. If you walked into a meeting with Medvedev and the Legislators Council (where he made that aforementioned admission of failure) and you told everyone in the room that the world unfairly accuses the Motherland of suffering from endemic corruption, you’d be told to shut up and asked to start thinking up solutions instead of excuses. This is a paramount domestic policy challenge for Russia. There’s no need to go into spasms of denial and start ranting about how America sucks too. So what if it sucks. We’re not talking about America! (For once.)

LOL.

Transparency International makes no secret of their methodology. They amalgamate 13 different sources to produce a quantified score, which they then rank. Here are their sources: the Country Performance Assessment Ratings by the Asian Development Bank, the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment by the African Development Bank, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Country Risk Service and Country Forecast by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Nations in Transit by Freedom House, Global Risk Service by IHS Global Insight, the World Competitiveness Report by the Institute for Management Development, Asian Intelligence by Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment by the World Bank, and the Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum.

The scores for both Russia and the U.S. were pulled from eight of these sources (though not the same eight sources). If you have issues with the research of any of these reports, I’m happy to hear your objections, but it seems to me that you’d prefer to get red in the face about how America is corrupt, too.

Yeah, no shit. The USA is rated 19th, by the way — hardly a gold medal for ‘the exceptional nation.’

Thanks for the kind words, Sean. I chose Slezkine’s piece because I think he addresses the most important issue that shaped the USSR (nationality) in a way that best illuminates the Russian Federation’s starting-point. It’s really hard for me to imagine trying to get a handle on contemporary Russian politics without appreciating the dynamics of the Soviet collapse. And for that, Yuri’s article is wonderful.

Also, his metaphor (the communal apartment) is just good literature. It’s fun as shit to read. For others who haven’t seen it yet, or for those who might not remember it completely, have a look at his concluding paragraph, where he really brings the literary tropes home:

This points to another great tension in Soviet nationality policy: the coexistence of republican statehood and passport nationality. The former assumed that territorial states made nations, the latter suggested that primordial nations might be entitled to their own states. The former presupposed that all residents of Belorussia would (and should) someday become Belorussian, the latter provided the non-Belorussian residents with arguments against it. The Soviet government endorsed both definitions without ever attempting to construct an ethnically meaningful Soviet nation or turn the USSR into a Russian nation state, so that when the non-national Soviet state had lost its Soviet meaning, the national non-states were the only possible heirs. Except for the Russian Republic, that is. Its borders were blurred, its identity was not clearly ethnic and its “titular” residents had trouble distinguishing between the RSFSR and the USSR. Seventy years after the X Party Congress the policy of indigenization reached its logical conclusion: the tenants of various rooms barricaded their doors and started using the windows, while the befuddled residents of the enormous hall and kitchen stood in the center scratching the backs of their heads. Should they try to recover their belongings? Should they knock down the walls? Should they cut off the gas? Should they convert their “living area” into a proper apartment?

Glad you’re feeling better, poemless! I eagerly await your reaction to Surkov’s visit to Селигер-2010! If you’re not preparing anything already, I hope you’ll take it up and share your thoughts.

Peter, I see your point, and I agree that it gets tiresome to discuss the headline-news figures over and over, but this was a fairly general discussion, so I’m not sure it would have been germane to have explored lesser known individuals here.

The Russified transliterations of Ukrainian words and names is pretty common. Seeing as how far more outsiders are reading Russian language sources when it comes to Ukrainian news, I think we can all understand why it’s Kiev instead of Kyiv for most people. (Try googling “Kyiv” and the first hit is for “Kiev.”)

Otherwise, you sound like you’re generally well entertained. Glad to hear it.

Thanks for the shout-out, Anatoly. I’m happy to be included among such talented company. Sean and Mark are definitely leading the pack these days, with Sean being a veteran of the field and Mark writing nearly every day. In terms of unexpectedness, you and Poemless always manage to surprise me the most with the topics of your posts. It all makes for a great mix of smart buzz-commentary and original insights.

LR’s list also includes Julia Ioffe, incidentally. I guess that makes her the winner of the Internets?

Wow, I don’t know where you find the time to put together such frequent, well-researched pieces on events so recent. Very nice work.