Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand

WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.10
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
By Nicholas Thompson 09.21.09
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand.

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

The system that Yarynich helped build came online in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the '70s, the USSR had steadily narrowed the long US lead in nuclear firepower. At the same time, post-Vietnam, recession-era America seemed weak and confused. Then in strode Ronald Reagan, promising that the days of retreat were over. It was morning in America, he said, and twilight in the Soviet Union.

Part of the new president's hard-line approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was unafraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers had long advocated modeling and actively planning for nuclear combat. These were the progeny of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and an expressed readiness to use it would gain leverage during every crisis.

The new administration began expanding the US nuclear arsenal and priming the silos. And it backed up the bombs with bluster. In his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings, Eugene Rostow, incoming head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, signaled that the US just might be crazy enough to use its weapons, declaring that Japan "not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack" of 1945. Speaking of a possible US-Soviet exchange, he said, "Some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population."

Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department. US troops swooped into tiny Grenada to defeat communism in Operation Urgent Fury. US naval exercises pushed ever closer to Soviet waters.

The strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. "The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination," Soviet marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a gathering of the Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff in September 1982. "In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming," Ogarkov said, referring to the German invasion of his country. "Thus, the situation is not only very serious but also very dangerous."

A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative moves of the Cold War. He announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as "Star Wars."

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan's shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that's exactly what you'd expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you're dead.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it's no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The US did build versions of these technologies, deploying command missiles in what was called the Emergency Rocket Communications System. It also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor for nuclear tests or explosions the world over. But the US never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.

Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War. Their mission was similar to Perimeter's, but the system relied more on people and less on machines.

And in keeping with the principles of Cold War game theory, the US told the Soviets all about it.

The first mention of a doomsday machine, according to P. D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, was on an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical system of hydrogen bombs that could cover the world in radioactive dust and end all human life. "Who would want to kill everybody on earth?" he asked rhetorically. Someone who wanted to deter an attacker. If Moscow were on the brink of military defeat, for example, it could halt an invasion by declaring, "We will detonate our H-bombs."

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly "cobalt-thorium-G."

"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" cries Dr. Strangelove. "Why didn't you tell the world?" After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, "It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday."

In real life, however, many Mondays and many party congresses passed after Perimeter was created. So why didn't the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? No evidence exists that top Reagan administration officials knew anything about a Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, secretary of state for most of Reagan's presidency, told me that he had never heard of it.

In fact, the Soviet military didn't even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. "I was never told about Perimeter," says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won't talk about it today. In addition to Yarynich, a few other people confirmed the existence of the system to me—notably former Soviet space official Alexander Zheleznyakov and defense adviser Vitali Tsygichko—but most questions about it are still met with scowls and sharp nyets. At an interview in Moscow this February with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former official in the Strategic Rocket Forces, I was ushered out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military's extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn't fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was "to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished."

And Perimeter bought the Soviets time. After the US installed deadly accurate Pershing II missiles on German bases in December 1983, Kremlin military planners assumed they would have only 10 to 15 minutes from the moment radar picked up an attack until impact. Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe. Indeed, all these events actually occurred at some point. If they had happened at the same time, Armageddon might have ensued.

Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. "That is why we have the system," Yarynich says. "To avoid a tragic mistake. "

The mistake that both Yarynich and his counterpart in the United States, Bruce Blair, want to avoid now is silence. It's long past time for the world to come to grips with Perimeter, they argue. The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now "just another cog in the machine"—but Dead Hand is still armed.

To Blair, who today runs a think tank in Washington called the World Security Institute, such dismissals are unacceptable. Though neither he nor anyone in the US has up-to-the-minute information on Perimeter, he sees the Russians' refusal to retire it as yet another example of the insufficient reduction of forces on both sides. There is no reason, he says, to have thousands of armed missiles on something close to hair-trigger alert. Despite how far the world has come, there's still plenty of opportunity for colossal mistakes. When I talked to him recently, he spoke both in sorrow and in anger: "The Cold War is over. But we act the same way that we used to."

Yarynich, likewise, is committed to the principle that knowledge about nuclear command and control means safety. But he also believes that Perimeter can still serve a useful purpose. Yes, it was designed as a self-deterrent, and it filled that role well during the hottest days of the Cold War. But, he wonders, couldn't it now also play the traditional role of a doomsday device? Couldn't it deter future enemies if publicized?

The waters of international conflict never stay calm for long. A recent case in point was the heated exchange between the Bush administration and Russian president Vladimir Putin over Georgia. "It's nonsense not to talk about Perimeter," Yarynich says. If the existence of the device isn't made public, he adds, "we have more risk in future crises. And crisis is inevitable."

As Yarynich describes Perimeter with pride, I challenge him with the classic critique of such systems: What if they fail? What if something goes wrong? What if a computer virus, earthquake, reactor meltdown, and power outage conspire to convince the system that war has begun?

Yarynich sips his beer and dismisses my concerns. Even given an unthinkable series of accidents, he reminds me, there would still be at least one human hand to prevent Perimeter from ending the world. Prior to 1985, he says, the Soviets designed several automatic systems that could launch counterattacks without any human involvement whatsoever. But all these devices were rejected by the high command. Perimeter, he points out, was never a truly autonomous doomsday device. "If there are explosions and all communications are broken," he says, "then the people in this facility can—I would like to underline can—launch."

Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There's a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.

Wouldn't any officer just launch? I ask Yarynich what he would do if he were alone in the bunker. He shakes his head. "I cannot say if I would push the button."

It might not actually be a button, he then explains. It could now be some kind of a key or other secure form of switch. He's not absolutely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded.

Great Moments in Nuclear Game Theory

Permissive Action Links
When: 1960s
What: Midway through the Cold War, American leaders began to worry that a rogue US officer might launch a small, unauthorized strike, prompting massive retaliation. So in 1962, Robert McNamara ordered every nuclear weapon locked with numerical codes.
Effect: None. Irritated by the restriction, Strategic Air Command set all the codes to strings of zeros. The Defense Department didn't learn of the subterfuge until 1977.

US-Soviet Hotline
When: 1963
What: The USSR and US set up a direct line, reserved for emergencies. The goal was to prevent miscommunication about nuclear launches.
Effect: Unclear. To many it was a safeguard. But one Defense official in the 1970s hypothesized that the Soviet leader could authorize a small strike and then call to blame the launch on a renegade, saying, "But if you promise not to respond, I will order an absolute lockdown immediately."

Missile Defense
When: 1983
What: President Reagan proposed a system of nuclear weapons and lasers in space to shoot down enemy missiles. He considered it a tool for peace and promised to share the technology.
Effect: Destabilizing. The Soviets believed the true purpose of the "Star Wars" system was to back up a US first strike. The technology couldn't stop a massive Soviet launch, they figured, but it might thwart a weakened Soviet response.

Airborne Command Post
When: 1961-1990
What: For three decades, the US kept aircraft in the sky 24/7 that could communicate with missile silos and give the launch order if ground-based command centers were ever destroyed.
Effect: Stabilizing. Known as Looking Glass, it was the American equivalent of Perimeter, guaranteeing that the US could launch a counterattack. And the US told the Soviets all about it, ensuring that it served as a deterrent.

Senior editor Nicholas Thompson (nicholas_thompson@wired.com) is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

Putin hints that he could return to lead Russia

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6831459.ece

September 12, 2009
Vladimir Putin hints that he could return to lead Russia until 2024
Richard Beeston in Moscow

Vladimir Putin has given his strongest hint yet that he is considering a return to the Kremlin, a move that could allow the combative Russian leader to stay in power until 2024.

Speaking at the Novo-Ogaryovo official residence outside Moscow, Mr Putin insisted that swapping places with Dimitri Medvedev, the President, was no more sinister than the Labour leadership agreement in which Gordon Brown took Tony Blair’s job.

Mr Putin, who turns 57 next month, expounded on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues that left few in doubt that he remains Russia’s paramount leader, even though he officially occupies the number two position as Prime Minister.

Asked whether he would run again for the presidency, Mr Putin said that he would come to an accommodation with Mr Medvedev, just as the two men had done when Mr Putin stepped down in 2008.

“We will come to an agreement because we are people of the same blood and of the same political views,” he told foreign journalists and academics at the annual Valdai Discussion Club.

“According to the reality of the moment, we will make an analysis and take a decision. Did we compete in 2008? No. So we will not compete in 2012,” Mr Putin said.

This is the strongest hint he has given so far that he is considering returning to the Kremlin. Mr Putin stepped down after serving a maximum two terms as President and allowed Mr Medvedev to run largely unopposed in presidential elections last year.

His term ends in 2012 when new constitutional provisions will allow the next president to serve two six-year terms.

If the men complete this revolving-door manoeuvre Mr Putin could, in theory, be in power until 2024, when he would be 72. Although that is a decade older than most Russian men live, Mr Putin looked fit, alert and certainly confirmed what everyone in the country already knew — that he remains the real power in the land.

When asked who was in charge in Russia, Mr Putin insisted that Mr Medvedev was in control.

“We have nothing to prove to anyone,” he said. “If someone lives in a dream he needs to wake up, take a shower and look at reality. If you want to co-operate with Russia you need to know that it is the President who heads Russia.”

Anatol Lieven, a Russian expert at King’s College London, said that it did not matter whether Mr Putin or Mr Medvedev were president or prime minister. “What he is saying is that the political establishment will remain united and in power,” he said.

The prospect of Mr Putin dominating politics for another decade and a half will shock the liberal minority in the country where, under his rule, human rights and freedom of speech have been curtailed.

It would cause concern across Russia’s borders, where the Kremlin is in open dispute with Ukraine and Georgia, which is still suffering the effects of its war with Russian forces last year.

Many Russians, however, would be delighted with the prospect of having the most popular post-communist politician leading the country. Mr Putin is credited with restoring self-respect, rehabilitating the economy and restoring order after the chaos of the 1990s.

Relations between Russia and the US remain pivotal. Mr Putin said that a visit to Moscow in July by President Obama had improved the atmosphere.

He provided a long list of complaints about outstanding disputes with the Bush Administration regarding Russia’s failed attempt to join the World Trade Organisation and high-handed treatment by Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State.

Although Russia should be pleased that the Obama Administration is planning to shelve a plan by the former President Bush to base a missile defence system in Eastern Europe, there is still no sign that the two sides will complete a strategic nuclear weapons treaty by the end of the year, when the existing agreement expires.

Relations between Washington and Moscow could come under strain this month over Russia’s relationship with Iran. Russia is helping Iran to build a civilian nuclear reactor and has agreed to sell Tehran sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles.

The US, Britain and France fear that Iran is building a nuclear bomb secretly and are pressing for sanctions at the United Nations. Israel has warned that it may attack the nuclear facilities before Iran builds a nuclear weapon.

Mr Putin deflected questions about whether he had met Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, on a secret visit to Moscow on Monday.

He warned that any attacks against Iran would be counter-productive. “This would be very dangerous, unacceptable, this would lead to an explosion of terrorism, increase the influence of extremists,” he said, adding that he doubted airstrikes would achieve their objective.

Mr Putin added, however: “The Iranians should show restraint in their nuclear programme. We have told Iran that it has the right to a civilian nuclear programme but that it should understand what region of the world it is in.

“This is a dangerous region and Iran should show responsibility, especially by taking into account Israel’s concerns, all the more so after the absolutely unacceptable statements [by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President] about the destruction of the state of Israel.”

Judo and spying

— Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin Born October 7, 1952, in Leningrad

— Putin did well at school despite an impoverished upbringing. He became interested in judo and spy stories

— He applied to the KGB at the age of 17 but was told that he could not be considered until he had a degree. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a law degree in 1975

— He was a KGB agent in East Germany between 1985 and 1990

— He became Prime Minister in August 1999 and President in March 2000, standing down to become Prime Minister again in 2008

Sources: Times database, Reuters

Moscow reacts to US buildup in Afghanistan

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4330.shtml

Moscow reacts to US buildup in Afghanistan
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 6, 2009

Moscow has correctly assessed that the announced Obama troop buildup in Afghanistan has no relevance to the stated aim of combatting the ‘Taliban,’ but rather with a new attempt by the Pentagon strategists to encircle both Russia and China in Eurasia in order to retain US global military dominance. It is not waiting for a new policy from Washington. Rather Russia is acting to secure its perimeter in Central Asia through a series of calculated geopolitical moves reminiscent of the famous Great Game of more than a Century ago. The stakes in this geopolitical power game could not be higher -- the issue of world war or peace in the coming decade.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are asking Obama to double US troop presence in Afghanistan. Both Gates and Mullen said that while they’re thinking about the war in Afghanistan in terms of a three- to five-year time frame, their immediate goals are ‘unclear.’ That’s highly revealing. It is clear from the deliberate pattern over months, despite vehement protest from Pakistan’s government, of US bombing attacks on villages inside Pakistan, allegedly to hit Taliban targets, that the US intends to widen the conflict to Pakistan as well. What could be the possible aim?

Militarily, adding 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan could never secure peace in that war-torn tribal region. It has been documented that many of the groups whom the US command labels ‘Taliban’ are in fact armed bands controlled by local warlords, and not ideologically close-knit Taliban cadre in any sense. By labelling them Taliban, Washington hopes to convince its NATO allies such as Germany to send their troops to fight in an unwinnable war. Afghanistan presently has an estimated 40 percent unemployment and some five million living below the poverty line. It has been ravaged by more than four decades of continuous war.

Adding a mere 30,000 more for a total of 60,000 US troops in Afghanistan where the current killing rate for US soldiers is running 15 times above that in Iraq, is ludicrous. According to the official US Marine Corps counterinsurgency guidelines, to run a countrywide counterinsurgency strategy with the absolute minimum force levels required by US Army and Marine Corps doctrine, the US would need almost 655,000 troops, or an escalation roughly 600,000 troops higher than the force levels in the proposed Gates strategy. In fact the US strategy as it now appears seems to be a replay of the gradual escalation strategy the US pursued in Vietnam in the early 1960s.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy guidance, as that of her husband, is virtually indistinguishable from the Bush faction’s, has just convened a dinner discussion of leading policy experts on Afghanistan and South Asia. It included Defense Secretary Gates, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, and National Security advisor Gen. James L. Jones. It follows the appointment of former Ambassador, and hawk, Richard Holbrooke as the State Department’s Special South Asia Envoy.

In January 2008, more than a year ago, present National Security adviser to Obama, General James Jones headed a private Afghan Study Group which recommended drastic steps to ‘revitalize’ the war in Afghanistan. Revitalize a war whose goals have not even been clearly formulated? Not surprisingly, Moscow suspects another agenda is at work when Washington puts such heavy concentration strategically on the issue of the forgotten “war on terror” in Afghanistan, a region with no discernable direct national security implications for the United States or NATO member countries. No conceivable combination in Afghanistan, a failed state if there ever was one, could threaten a war of aggression abroad. The tribal warlords around President Karzai seem to be struggling just to maintain their heroin export flows at record levels.

Moscow’s response

Not surpisingly, the Kremlin has reacted to the US plans for Central Asia. The president of Kyrgyzstan just flew to Moscow where he received promises of debt relief and billions of dollars in aid. Kurmanbek Bakiyev was told he would get a write off of Kyrgyzstan’s $180 million debt to Russia, a $2 billion discounted loan and $150 million in financial aid from Russia. On the occasion, President Bakiyev announced plans to close a US air base crucial to the war in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan has been home to the only remaining US base in the strategically crucial region to Afghanistan’s north.

After the Bush administration declared its “war on terror” and announced plans to strike Afghanistan to root out the arch evil Osama bin Laden from the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, Washington secured air force basing rights in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

At about that same time, it covertly began preparing to unleash a series of US-financed ‘regime change’ Color Revolutions in Georgia (The Rose Revolution, in November 2003) and Ukraine (Orange Revolution in 2004). It tried and failed in Belarus as well as Uzbekistan. A glance at a map of Eurasia makes clear the pattern of those pro-NATO efforts was to militarily encircle the territory of Russia, especially as at the time Washington believed it had the government of Kazakhstan in its pocket with military training agreements and Chevron’s large oil investment in Tenghiz.

Once Washington announced in January 2007 that it would station strategic missiles and advanced radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to ‘defend against rogue missile attack from Iran,’ as I detail in my soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, then-President Putin told the Munich Wehrkunde conference in February 2007 that the true target of the US ‘missile defense’ strategy was not Iran but Russia.

Similarly, today the US insistence the Afghanistan military buildup is about the Taliban, rings equally hollow. That’s clearly why Moscow is acting to secure its borders from a US militarization of the entire Central Asian region. Oil and gas pipeline routes are a major consideration, including US wishes to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India that would deprive Russia’s Gazprom of a vital component of its current gas supply.

The prime objective of the Afghan escalation however, is to draw a new ‘iron curtain,’ this one between the two formidable Eurasian powers with the only capacity to challenge future US global dominance: Russia and China. Should the two former rivals firm up their cooperation not only in raw materials and industrial economic trade, but as well in the military cooperation sphere, as Obama campaign foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has stated, the combination would present a devastating threat to America’s global hegemony.

Now the decision, aided by the help of generous Russian financial concessions, to abruptly cancel US Air Force landing rights at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base deals a devastating blow to US Great Game’s grand strategy to encircle the key powers of Eurasia -- China and Russia.

When Washington tried to use its various NGOs to foment a Color Revolution in Uzbekistan in 2005, the country’s not-so-democratic president, Islam Karimov, demanded the US evacuate its air bases, repatriate US Peace Corps volunteers, and most NGOs were shut down and foreign media banned. Karimov moved to firm his frayed ties with Moscow at the time. Today Washington is reported to be feverishly trying to reestablish itself in Uzbekistan, but the sudden cancellation of base rights in Kyrgyzstan deals a new devastating blow to the entire Eurasian encirclement Great Game strategy.

With the major NATO supply routes to Afghanistan going through Pakistan from the Port of Karachi, and strikes on those supply lines increasing by the day, the Pentagon is eagerly searching to find alternative supply routes to the North. Militants just blew up a key bridge in Pakistan’s strategic Khyber Pass.

The securing of alternate Afghan supply routes is at least the official explanation. Unofficially, it would also provide the pretext to beef up US military presence in Central Asia. Now, with the loss of Manas Air Base, a gaping hole in the Washington Great Game ‘Mach IV’ has been left.

To further complicate Washington’s strategy, Moscow is moving to firm up defense cooperation ties across former Communist states in Central Asia.

A Central Asia answer to NATO?

The announcement by Kyrgzystan President Bakiyev that he was cancelling US basing rights came during his visit to Moscow February 4 for a summit meeting of the formerly moribund Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a security grouping comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They reportedly agreed to set up a collective rapid reaction force to ‘counter military aggression, international terrorism, extremism, crime, drug-trafficking and deal with emergency situations.’ Clearly the US plans for a major military build-up in Afghanistan were high on the agenda as well.

The CSTO was established in 1992 to serve as a basis for maintaining some dialogue between Moscow and her former Soviet republics after their declared independence, Russia’s so-called ‘near abroad.’

Today the level of talks is taking on a quite new seriousness as US encirclement operations clearly are seen as a threat to all the Central Asian republics. The CSTO lists its major security ‘threats’ as Pakistan and Afghanistan. The decision to create a truly collective force with a permanent location and a united command would propel the alliance to a new level.

Russian President Medvedev announced the decision to form the collective regional CSTO Rapid Reaction Force: ‘I would like to emphasise the importance of this decision to establish rapid reaction forces. It’s aimed at strengthening the military capacity of our organisation.’ He claimed the new response units would ‘not be less powerful than those of NATO,’ adding that ‘the reason behind the creation of the collective forces of operative functioning is a considerable conflict potential which is accumulating in the CSTO zone.’ Translated from the Russian, that means the US strategic build-up in and around Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At the same time as it hosted the CSTO summit, Russia hosted a meeting of the so-called Eurasian Economic Community in Moscow, EurAsEC. That group consists of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan as full members. EurAsEC, established in 2000, also involves Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine which hold observer status.

They discussed establishing a $10 billion joint assistance fund to deal with the effects of the global economic crisis, as well as establishing an international hi-tech technology exchange center and implementing various innovative projects in member countries.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev captured the vulnerability of Washington’s exposed hypocrisy in Afghanistan when he told the press after the Moscow summit, ‘We are ready for full-fledged and equal cooperation on security in Afghanistan, including with the United States.’ That of course is the last thing the Pentagon strategists wish to hear.

F. William Engdahl is author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” (Pluto Press) and “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” (www.globalresearch.ca ). His new book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order” (Third Millennium Press) is due for release in late Spring 2009. He may be reached via his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

DECEMBER 29, 2008
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.

Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.

The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.

Russian treason bill could hit Kremlin critics

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hQN0kCGsFmnjL25UfABb3Ou2KD-gD954H05O0

Russian treason bill could hit Kremlin critics
By DAVID NOWAK
12-17-8

MOSCOW (AP) — A new law drafted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's Cabinet would allow authorities to label any government critic a traitor — a move that leading rights activists condemned Wednesday as a chilling reminder of the times under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The draft extends the definition of treason from breaching Russia's external security to damaging the nation's constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That would essentially let authorities interpret any act against the interests of the state as treason — a crime prosecutable by up to 20 years in prison.

Prominent rights activists said passage of the bill would catapult Russia's justice system back to the times of Stalin's purges.

"It returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s," the activists said in a statement, urging lawmakers to oppose what they described as the "legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler."

The activists included the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and the head of Civic Assistance, Svetlana Gannushkina.

Despite the criticism, the draft is likely to receive a quick approval by parliament, which is dominated by Kremlin loyalists.

The government systematically rolled back Russia's post-Soviet political freedoms during Putin's eight-year presidential tenure — and shows no signs of stopping.

The current law defines state treason as actions harming external security by passing information to foreign parties.

But Putin's proposed bill broadens the term "treason" to include inaction as well as action, includes a breach to internal security and adds international organizations to foreign ones as those forbidden to receive state secrets.

Critics also warned the loose wording will give authorities ample leeway to prosecute those who cooperate with international rights groups.

Some Russian commentators said the government wants the new law in place quickly to curb possible protests resulting from the global financial crisis.

In a related move, the upper house of Russia's parliament passed a bill Wednesday that would end jury trials for those facing charges of terrorism and treason.

The Kremlin-controlled Federation Council approved the bill 147-0 with two abstentions. It must be signed by President Dmitry Medvedev to take effect.

The bill strips defendants charged with some crimes — involvement in illegal armed units, violent seizures of power, armed rebellion and mass riots — of the right to jury trials. Instead they would face judges.

The bill's authors say the change was necessary because they claim juries have acquitted many suspects despite strong incriminating evidence. Critics denounced the bill as another blow to democratic principles.

Ukraine and Georgia

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4124.shtml

Ukraine and Georgia: Entry into NATO put off indefinitely
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 12, 2008

NATO ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore US wishes and to delay the admission of Ukraine and of Georgia in effect indefinitely in what the Washington administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive ‘compromise.’

The decision, following EU member state alarm last August over the prospect of European states having to go to war at some point against Russia over an incalculable despot in the Caucasus or in Kiev who decided to provoke Moscow to react, was simply too much.

The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat such a prospect as lightly as Condi Rice or Washington seems willing to do. The decision deepens growing tectonic fault lines across the Atlantic, as the ‘Made in USA’ financial crisis deepens and the dollar looks more and more vulnerable once hedge fund repatriation effects by yearend wind down. The year 2009 will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in world geopolitics.

The Brussels decision is the more remarkable as an indication of the slipping power of Washington over European NATO members. The December 3 NATO Foreign Ministers Brussels meeting issued what to the naïve observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy. They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards NATO full membership. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies -- the Nato-Georgia Commission and the Nato-Ukraine Commission -- basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan. As well, NATO ministers agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia ‘in a conditional and graduated manner.’

Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact President-elect Obama retained Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who is strongly on record for bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.

The real reasons

The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia’s incalculable president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and not Moscow who initiated the adventure of sending Georgian troops to try to occupy the breakaway province of South Ossetia, that on evident encouragement of Washington.

On November 28 in Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony, on the background to the August events, which saw Russian troops march into parts of Georgia to repel the attack on Ossetians, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war.

According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia’s “intervention” in the region. “We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable,” Saakavili said.

The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: “The issue is not about why Georgia started military action -– we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory.”

Saakashvili’s surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia’s former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of Parliament.

A former confidant of President Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.

He refused to name the officials who he said had told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, saying that identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had ‘warned’ Mr. Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.

Kitsmarishvili’s testimony in front of the parliamentary commission, was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for “professional negligence.” Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili’s testimony, called the allegations “irresponsible and shameless fabrication,” and said they were “either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics.” Mr. Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.

Mr. Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor on December 2. “They don’t want to listen to the truth,” he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.

Full Spectrum Dominance

As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole Superpower Pax Americana.

Russia’s understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US Secretary of State James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any planned sole US superpower domination.

The Bush presidency was a raw attempt to remedy this by brute military force. The militarization of Iraq and the Middle East oilfields was but one step. The creation of a US ‘missile shield’ in Poland and the Czech Republic, was another, a major step.

The misnamed ‘missile defense shield’ would be in reality an offensive capability that, when installed by perhaps 2012, will put the world, especially Western Europe, on a hair-trigger to nuclear war, and combined with entry of Russian border states Georgia and Ukraine would simply present Moscow with de facto defeat. This is not about Russia returning to old Soviet-style rule under Putin or Medvedev. It’s about the ultimate survival of Russia as a nation, as Moscow rightly sees it, not about the fine points of democracy.

No one in either Berlin, Paris, London or Brussels, and certainly not in Washington, is ignorant of that reality. European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August’s swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe. Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August.

That, simply stated, is the real, unspoken reason that Washington on December 3 in Brussels was forced to accept a face-saving compromise. The NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine to all intent and purposes is dead. As one NATO military official stated, ‘Nato has lost the glue that once held it together.’

The statement of Rice following the NATO meeting was telling. She was forced to tell the press, ‘ . . . there is a long road ahead for both Georgia and Ukraine to reach those standards. The United States stands resolutely for those standards, meaning that there should be no shortcuts to membership of NATO.’

Polish motorcade shoot was ‘Georgia stunt’

Further adding to the atmosphere of an almost Laurel & Hardy comic farce around Georgia’s erratic president, who was filmed shortly after the Russian invasion in August by the BBC actually swallowing and chewing on his tie, it has now emerged that an alleged shooting incident a week before the Brussels NATO meeting, involving the motorcade of the Georgian and Polish presidents was a staged ‘stunt.’

Special services in Warsaw say the alleged attack near the South Ossetian border was a provocation staged by the Georgians. A report by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego -- ABW), published by the Dziennik newspaper, claims Georgia staged the incident for propaganda purposes.

The incident took place on Sunday evening when Georgian President Saakasvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the area near the border with South Ossetia. After the convoy stopped at a checkpoint, there was gunfire, which the Georgians claimed was an ‘attack by Russian troops.’

Lech Kaczynski’s personal security chief was dismissed. Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec was accused of failing to ensure proper security for the Polish president during his trip to Georgia. Olszowiec was dismissed despite objections from Kaczynski, according to the Polish media.

The trip to the border area with Russian-backed South Ossetia was the result of a last-minute invitation from Saakashvili, according to Polish Foreign Ministry spoke spokesman Piotr Paskowski.

Initially, Warsaw blamed Russia for the incident. But now Polish security forces say it was staged by Tbilisi. Russia strongly denied the allegations, saying Tbilisi was behind it. President Kaczynski confirmed that shooting had taken place but stopped short of blaming anyone. Russia’s position has now been supported by Poland’s ABW, who said “the shots fired near the cars of Georgian and Polish president were a Georgian provocation.” The Polish document points out that Saakashvili kept on smiling after the first shots and his bodyguards didn’t react. The report also highlights another suspicious fact, namely, that the bus carrying journalists was instructed to travel in front of the motorcade, while the car with Kaczynski’s own bodyguards was pushed back by Georgian soldiers. The result was that they were not in a position to witness the alleged shooting.

All in all it might be that Saakashvili’s tenure as president faces major internal challenges for his bent to undertake such reckless stunts.

The Obama White House will inherit a plateful of geopolitical problems in Europe next January 20.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). This essay is adapted from a book he has just completed, titled Full Spectrum Dominance: The Geopolitical Agenda Behind Washington’s Global Military Buildup (release date estimated Autumn 2008). He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

The top 5 murder capitals of the world

http://www.gadling.com/2008/10/01/the-top-5-murder-capitals-of-the-world/?icid=200100397x1210914139x1200653032

The top 5 murder capitals of the world
by Aaron Hotfelder
Oct 1st 2008

Congratulations to the remaining residents of Caracas, Venezuela! Foreign Policy has just honored your fair city as the murder capital of the world, with around 130 murders per 100,000 people.

Not only that, the actual murder rate may be much higher, because the numbers "omit prison-related murders as well as deaths that the state never gets around to properly 'categorizing.' The numbers also don't count those who died while 'resisting arrest,' suggesting that Caracas's cops-already known for their brutality against student protesters-might be cooking the books."

Also showing up on the list are Cape Town, New Orleans, Moscow, and, surprisingly, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, which was recently named "Worst City" in an Economist Intelligence Unit survey.

Although Cape Town is rapidly emerging as one of Africa's most appealing cities, the city's homicide rate is still off the charts, at 62 per 100,000 people. But here's something to comfort you before your next visit: "The city's homicides usually take place in suburban townships rather than in the more upscale urban areas where tourists visit."

The article adds: "According to the South African Police Service, most of the Cape Town area's violent crimes happen between people who know one another, including a horrific case last year in which four males doused a female friend in gasoline and lit her on fire."

Sweet dreams!

Moscow: new world capital for billionaires

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080306001953.xvguehx7

Moscow: new world capital for billionaires
Mar 5, 2008

Moscow has overtaken New York City as home to the most billionaires, according to Forbes magazine, with 74 of the super-rich elite now counting the Russian capital as their home.

By contrast, 71 billionaires live in New York, according to the magazine's annual list, which placed London in third place with 36.

"Russia is again the dominant story in (Europe) this year. Its billionaires are just fast and fearsome. What's fascinating is that every single one of them is self made," said Forbes senior editor Luisa Kroll.

"We're not going to get into exactly how they got it but none of them inherited it and their average age is 46," she added.

Russia now counts a total of 87 billionaires, ousting Germany in second place but still trailing the first-placed United States, which has 469.

Russian oligarchs have made seen their fortunes rise in recent years thanks to booming commodity prices.

Among the top-placed Russian figures were aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, valued at 28 billion dollars and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, said to be worth 23.5 billion dollars.

A Tsar Is Born

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1690766,00.html

Tuesday, Dec. 04, 2007
A Tsar Is Born
By Adi Ignatius

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.

This may explain why there is so little visible security at Putin's dacha, Novo-Ogarevo, the grand Russian presidential retreat set inside a birch- and fir-forested compound west of Moscow. To get there from the capital requires a 25-minute drive through the soul of modern Russia, past decrepit Soviet-era apartment blocks, the mashed-up French Tudor-villa McMansions of the new oligarchs and a shopping mall that boasts not just the routine spoils of affluence like Prada and Gucci but Lamborghinis and Ferraris too.

When you arrive at the dacha's faux-neoclassical gate, you have to leave your car and hop into one of the Kremlin's vehicles that slowly wind their way through a silent forest of snow-tipped firs. Aides warn you not to stray, lest you tempt the snipers positioned in the shadows around the compound. This is where Putin, 55, works. (He lives with his wife and two twentysomething daughters in another mansion deeper in the woods.) The rooms feel vast, newly redone and mostly empty. As we prepare to enter his spacious but spartan office, out walk some of Russia's most powerful men: Putin's chief of staff, his ideologist, the speaker of parliament—all of them wearing expensive bespoke suits and carrying sleek black briefcases. Putin, who rarely meets with the foreign press, then gives us 3 1/2 hours of his time, first in a formal interview in his office and then upstairs over an elaborate dinner of lobster-and-shiitake-mushroom salad, "crab fingers with hot sauce" and impressive vintages of Puligny-Montrachet and a Chilean Cabernet.

Vladimir Putin gives a first impression of contained power: he is compact and moves stiffly but efficiently. He is fit, thanks to years spent honing his black-belt judo skills and, these days, early-morning swims of an hour or more. And while he is diminutive—5 ft. 6 in. (about 1.7 m) seems a reasonable guess—he projects steely confidence and strength. Putin is unmistakably Russian, with chiseled facial features and those penetrating eyes. Charm is not part of his presentation of self—he makes no effort to be ingratiating. One senses that he pays constant obeisance to a determined inner discipline. The successor to the boozy and ultimately tragic Boris Yeltsin, Putin is temperate, sipping his wine only when the protocol of toasts and greetings requires it; mostly he just twirls the Montrachet in his glass. He eats little, though he twitchily picks the crusts off the bread rolls on his plate.

Putin grudgingly reveals a few personal details between intermittent bites of food: He relaxes, he says, by listening to classical composers like Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. His favorite Beatles song is Yesterday. He has never sent an e-mail in his life. And while he grew up in an officially atheist country, he is a believer and often reads from a Bible that he keeps on his state plane. He is impatient to the point of rudeness with small talk, and he is in complete control of his own message.

He is clear about Russia's role in the world. He is passionate in his belief that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, particularly since overnight it stranded 25 million ethnic Russians in "foreign" lands. But he says he has no intention of trying to rebuild the U.S.S.R. or re-establish military or political blocs. And he praises his predecessors Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev for destroying a system that had lost the people's support. "I'm not sure I could have had the guts to do that myself," he tells us. Putin is, above all, a pragmatist, and has cobbled together a system—not unlike China's—that embraces the free market (albeit with a heavy dose of corruption) but relies on a strong state hand to keep order.

Like President George W. Bush, he sees terrorism as one of the most profound threats of the new century, but he is wary of labeling it Islamic. "Radicals," he says, "can be found in any environment." Putin reveals that Russian intelligence recently uncovered a "specific" terrorist threat against both Russia and the U.S. and that he spoke by phone with Bush about it.

What gets Putin agitated—and he was frequently agitated during our talk—is his perception that Americans are out to interfere in Russia's affairs. He says he wants Russia and America to be partners but feels the U.S. treats Russia like the uninvited guest at a party. "We want to be a friend of America," he says. "Sometimes we get the impression that America does not need friends" but only "auxiliary subjects to command." Asked if he'd like to correct any American misconceptions about Russia, Putin leans forward and says, "I don't believe these are misconceptions. I think this is a purposeful attempt by some to create an image of Russia based on which one could influence our internal and foreign policies. This is the reason why everybody is made to believe...[Russians] are a little bit savage still or they just climbed down from the trees, you know, and probably need to have...the dirt washed out of their beards and hair." The veins on his forehead seem ready to pop.

Elected Emperor

Putin has said that next spring, at the end of his second term as President, he will assume the nominally lesser role of Prime Minister. In fact, having nominated his loyal former chief of staff (and current Deputy Prime Minister) Dmitri Medvedev to succeed him as President, Putin will surely remain the supreme leader, master of Russia's destiny, which will allow him to complete the job he started. In his eight years as President, he has guided his nation through a remarkable transformation. He has restored stability and a sense of pride among citizens who, after years of Soviet stagnation, rode the heartbreaking roller coaster of raised and dashed expectations when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin were in charge. A basket case in the 1990s, Russia's economy has grown an average of 7% a year for the past five years. The country has paid off a foreign debt that once neared $200 billion. Russia's rich have gotten richer, often obscenely so. But the poor are doing better too: workers' salaries have more than doubled since 2003. True, this is partly a result of oil at $90 a barrel, and oil is a commodity Russia has in large supply. But Putin has deftly managed the windfall and spread the wealth enough so that people feel hopeful.

Russia's revival is changing the course of the modern world. After decades of slumbering underachievement, the Bear is back. Its billionaires now play on the global stage, buying up property, sports franchises, places at élite schools. Moscow exerts international influence not just with arms but also with a new arsenal of weapons: oil, gas, timber. On global issues, it offers alternatives to America's waning influence, helping broker deals in North Korea, the Middle East, Iran. Russia just made its first shipment of nuclear fuel to Iran—a sign that Russia is taking the lead on that vexsome issue, particularly after the latest U.S. intelligence report suggested that the Bush Administration has been wrong about Iran's nuclear-weapons development. And Putin is far from done. The premiership is a perch that will allow him to become the longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene.

But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin's hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain—of freedom for security—appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes' promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin's popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. "He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.

Putin's global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia's former Soviet neighbors. What he's given up is Yeltsin's calculation that Russia's future requires broad acceptance on the West's terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, "sometimes Russia will be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler."

Up from the Ruins

How do Russians see Putin? For generations they have defined their leaders through political jokes. It's partly a coping mechanism, partly a glimpse into the Russian soul. In the oft told anecdotes, Leonid Brezhnev was always the dolt, Gorbachev the bumbling reformer, Yeltsin the drunk. Putin, in current punch lines, is the despot. Here's an example: Stalin's ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for him help running the country. Stalin says, "Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue." "Why blue?" Putin asks. "Ha!" says Stalin. "I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part."

Putin himself is sardonic but humorless. In our hours together, he didn't attempt a joke, and he misread several of our attempts at playfulness. As Henry Kissinger, who has met and interacted with Russian leaders since Brezhnev, puts it, "He does not rely on personal charm. It is a combination of aloofness, considerable intelligence, strategic grasp and Russian nationalism."

To fully understand Putin's accomplishments and his appeal, one has to step back into the tumult of the 1990s. At the end of 1991, just a few months after Yeltsin dramatically stood on a tank outside the parliament in Moscow to denounce—and deflate—a coup attempt by hard-liners, the Soviet Union simply ceased to exist. Yeltsin took the reins in Russia and, amid great hope and pledges of help from around the world, promised to launch an era of democracy and economic freedom. I arrived in Moscow a week later, beginning a three-year stint as a Russia correspondent.

I retain three indelible images from that time. The first: the legions of Ivy League—and other Western-educated "experts" who roamed the halls of the Kremlin and the government, offering advice, all ultimately ineffective, on everything from conducting free elections to using "shock therapy" to juice the economy to privatizing state-owned assets. The second: the long lines of impoverished old women standing in the Moscow cold, selling whatever they could scrounge from their homes—a silver candleholder, perhaps, or just a pair of socks. The third, more familiar image: a discouraged and embattled Yeltsin in 1993 calling in Russian-army tanks to shell his own parliament to break a deadlock with the defiant legislature when everything he was trying to do was going wrong.

Yeltsin bombed his way out of the threat of civil war and managed to hang on to power, but Russia was left hobbled. Virtually every significant asset—oil, banks, the media—ended up in the hands of a few "oligarchs" close to the President. Corruption and crime were rampant; the cities became violent. Paychecks weren't issued; pensions were ignored. Russia in 1998 defaulted on its foreign debt. The ruble and the financial markets collapsed, and Yeltsin was a spent force. "The '90s sucked," says Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University professor who was the State Department's special adviser for the new Independent States of the former Soviet Union under President Bill Clinton. "Putin managed to play on the resentment that Russians everywere were feeling." Indeed, by the time Putin took over in late 1999, there was nowhere to fall but up.

Path to Power

That Russia needed fixing was acknowledged by all. But how was it that Putin got the call? What was it that lifted him to power, and to the dacha in Novo-Ogarevo?

Putin's rise continues to perplex even devoted Kremlin observers. He was born into humble circumstances in St. Petersburg in 1952. His father had fought in World War II and later labored in a train-car factory. Putin's mother, a devout Orthodox Christian, had little education and took on a series of menial jobs. The family lived in a drab fifth-floor walk-up in St. Petersburg; Putin had to step over swarms of rats occupying the entranceway on his way to school. Putin's only ancestor of note was his paternal grandfather, who had served as a cook for both Lenin and Stalin, though there's no sign that this gave his family any special status or connections.

Putin describes his younger self as a poor student and a "hooligan." Small for his age, he got roughed by his contemporaries. So he took up sambo—a Soviet-era blend of judo and wrestling—and later just judo. From all accounts, he devoted himself to the martial art, attracted by both its physical demands and its contemplative philosophical core. "It's respect for your elders and opponents," he says in First Person, his question-and-answer memoir published in 2000. "It's not for weaklings."

It was the KGB that rescued Putin from obscurity—and turned the child into the man. Putin had begun to apply himself to schoolwork, and in 1975, during his senior year at Leningrad State University, he was approached by an impressive stranger who said, "I need to talk to you about your career assignment. I wouldn't like to specify exactly what it is yet." Putin, who had dreamed of becoming a spy, was intrigued. Within months he was being trained in counterintelligence. By the mid-1980s he was assigned to East Germany, where he worked undercover, pursuing intelligence on nato and German politicians. He was in Dresden, not Berlin where the action was, and probably would have been only a bit player in the Le Carré version of the cold war. But when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so did Putin's KGB career. As angry crowds moved on the local KGB headquarters, Putin and his colleagues feverishly burned files that detailed agents' names and networks—so much paper, he recalls in the memoir, that "the furnace burst." Then he slipped into the crowd and watched as the newly liberated mobs sacked the detested building. Within two years, he left the KGB altogether.

Putin's big break was a friend's introduction to Anatoli Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, who was happy to bring in an intelligent, no-nonsense outsider to help push his reformist agenda. Putin ran the office that registered businesses and promoted foreign investment. He was responsible for ensuring that President Clinton's visit to the city in 1996 went smoothly—it was the first time American officials saw Putin in action. But later that year, Sobchak, damaged by a perception of ineffectiveness and rumors of corruption, lost his re-election bid. As Putin tells us at the dacha, as a member of the losing team, he was suddenly untouchable. "Nobody would hire me there," he says.

So Putin headed to Moscow. What transpired next seemed to Kremlin watchers as unlikely as Chauncey Gardiner's unwitting rise to power in the Jerzy Kosinski novel Being There. Although Putin often says that he had no connections when he arrived in the capital in mid-1996, he had several powerful allies who landed him work in the Kremlin. He became deputy to the head of Yeltsin's general-affairs department. Within two years he was asked to head the FSB, the spy-agency successor to the disbanded KGB. Putin, in his memoir, says he received a call out of the blue asking him to head to the airport to meet Russia's Prime Minister, Sergei Kirienko. Kirienko offered congratulations. When Putin asked why, he replied, "The decree is signed. You have been appointed director of the FSB." Then, in August 1999, Putin was named Prime Minister. It's a grand title, but it doesn't come with much security: Putin was Yeltsin's fifth Prime Minister in 17 months. But Putin did far better than survive; within four months a declining Yeltsin asked Putin to take over as acting President. Putin tells us he initially declined but that Yeltsin raised it again, saying, "Don't say no." By the last day of 1999 Putin was running the country.

We ask if it had ever occurred to Putin that history would place him in such a role. "It never occurred to me," he says. "It still surprises me."

Experts generally believe that Putin won Yeltsin's endorsement because he was competent, because he wasn't part of any of the major Moscow factions competing for power and because his KGB past gave him a source of authority. But they also widely assume that he made a deal with Yeltsin and his family: in return for Yeltsin's endorsement, Putin would not pursue corruption charges against the outgoing President and his relatives, despite the rumors that surrounded the family's dealings. It's impossible to verify, but neither Yeltsin, who died this year, nor his well-connected daughter Tatyana Dyachenko was ever a subject of public investigation (though Putin quickly fired her from her position as a Kremlin image consultant). Indeed, Putin's first decree guaranteed Yeltsin and his family immunity from such probes. Putin explains things to us this way: "Mr. Yeltsin realized that I would be totally sincere and would spare no effort to fulfill my duties and would be honest and see that the interest of the country could be secured." Eight years on, one can't help seeing a parallel with the latest maneuverings in the Kremlin: just as Yeltsin rewarded Putin for his loyalty, now Putin is doing the same for his anointed successor, Medvedev. There is already a new Putin joke: Putin goes to a restaurant with Medvedev and orders a steak. The waiter asks, "And what about the vegetable?" Putin answers, "The vegetable will have steak too."

Taking Control

Putin is no vegetable. In 1999, when he assumed the role of acting President, he was a relative unknown. It was his response to a Chechen rebel incursion in the Russian republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus that quickly set him on a path toward national glory. Alexei Gromov, who has served with Putin as press secretary since he came to power, remembers being in the room when Putin told his wife Lyudmila that he was preparing to go on a New Year's Eve trip to the war zone to meet with the troops. She was worried about his safety and went along with him. In the end, the trip may have been no more than a calculated, if risky, photo op, but it was effective. Russians met their new leader and admired his courage and energy.

The following year Putin stepped up Russia's invasion of the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Rambo-style, he promised a quick and decisive victory, reiterating his earlier pledge to defeat enemy fighters "even in the toilet." Grozny, Chechnya's capital, was all but obliterated; Russia reassumed power and installed a puppet leader. Despite heartbreaking subsequent Chechen terrorist attacks—including a 2004 assault on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, where 339 civilians, most of them children, were killed—Russians by and large admire Putin for drawing the line in the south. Having watched Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics slip from Moscow's grip, Russians were happy to keep Chechnya—even a bombed-out Chechnya—in the fold.

To the West, meanwhile, Putin was a mystery. Russia watchers debated endlessly: Was he a pro-Western reformer? (He had worked for Sobchak.) Or a hard-liner? (He was a career KGB man.) Yet just as 9/11 helped define President Bush, so did external challenges allow Putin to grow into a leader. His first steps on the world stage were tentative. His global coming-out had occurred in Auckland at a 1999 meeting of heads of apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) nations. Sestanovich, who was traveling with President Clinton, remembers meeting Putin at Clinton's hotel suite. "He seemed rodentlike," says Sestanovich, "like an overgrown summer intern." But Clinton was willing to work with him. Putin tells us how, at an apec dinner at which he was feeling somewhat lost, Clinton crossed the room past other world leaders and leaned down to talk to him. "Volodya," Clinton said, using the familiar form of the name Vladimir, "I suggest we walk out together from this room." Putin rose to his feet, and the two men strolled out together. "Everyone applauded," Putin recalls. "I will remember that forever." It was Putin's only sign of softness during the 3 1/2 hours we spoke.

Clinton was not the only American who found something to like about Putin. Two years later, in a line that has haunted him ever since, President Bush declared that he had looked inside Putin's soul. It was their first meeting, at a summit in Slovenia, and Bush said, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy...I was able to get a sense of his soul." We ask Putin to return the favor, to describe what he has sensed of the U.S. President's soul. He declines to get personal. "I have a very good personal relationship with Mr. Bush," he says. "He is a very reliable partner, a man of honor."

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 provided Putin with another defining moment. He was one of the first world leaders to offer condolences and help to President Bush. That probably led the U.S. to back off from stridently criticizing the Chechnya adventure. But the initial shared objectives between Putin and the Bush Administration did not last. Putin strongly opposed America's invasion of Iraq and established Russia as a steady voice of opposition to Bush's adventure, demanding that decisions on Iraq be made at the U.N. (where Russia, of course, has Security Council veto power). America's occupation of Iraq has affirmed Putin's sense that he was right. "If one looks at the map of the world, it's difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country," Putin tell us. "But this undertaking is enormous. Iraq is a small but very proud nation." The debacle in Iraq plays into what is perhaps Putin's most cherished foreign-policy dictum: that nations shouldn't interfere in one another's affairs. And what that really means, of course, is that no one should interfere in Russia's affairs.

Another Putin joke: Putin and Bush are fishing on the Volga River. After half an hour Bush complains, "Vladimir, I'm getting bitten like crazy by mosquitoes, but I haven't seen a single one bothering you." Putin: "They know better than that."

A Ruthless Streak

Now that Putin has solidified his grip on power, he no longer seems overly concerned with courting Western approval. Despite a chorus of disapproving clucks from the West, Putin has shackled the press, muted the opposition, jailed tycoons who don't pledge fealty. In Russia this has been a terrible time to be a democrat, a journalist, an independent businessman. Just ask Garry Kasparov. The chess grandmaster—the highest-rated player of all time—is a far cry from stereotypically dysfunctional champions like Bobby Fischer. Kasparov has a keen political mind and a lively sense of humor. For years he has fought an increasingly lonely struggle as a democratic activist facing an uncompromising state. On Nov. 24, while holding a political rally in Moscow, he was arrested on a technicality and spent five days at Moscow's Petrovka 38 jail.

A week or so after Kasparov's release, we are sitting in Moscow's Cosmos Hotel, where he is taking part in a human-rights meeting. Assembled is a ragtag group of Russian activists, and here Kasparov is a star. (Even here his two bodyguards sandwich him whenever he walks about.) Unlike many of Putin's other critics, who seem fearful of chastising their leader openly, Kasparov isn't cowed. "Putin wants to rule like Stalin but live like Abramovich," he says, referring to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire Russian oil trader who owns London's Chelsea soccer team. "Putin's system is more like Mafia than democracy."

Putin's administration has blocked democrats like Kasparov from participating effectively in politics by making it all but impossible for them to meet the entry requirements. The President, in our discussion, routinely suggests that Kasparov is a stooge of the West because he spoke to the foreign press in English after his arrest. "If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God's sake," he says. Kasparov recently gave up his long-shot race for President.

Dmitri Muratov also knows the difficulties of life in the Putin era. A softspoken, heavyset man whose neatly trimmed beard is turning gray, Muratov is the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, published twice a week, with a reputation for pursuing tough investigative pieces. In the past seven years, three of his journalists have been murdered; all were looking into corruption and wrongdoing. After the third murder, Muratov decided to close the 14-year-old paper to avoid putting any other journalist at risk. But his staff talked him out of it. The paper is perpetually harassed by officials around the country, but, Muratov notes with a weary smile, "we're still alive."

The last of Muratov's journalists to die, Anna Politkovskaya, was shot in the elevator of her apartment building last year on Oct. 7. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned government critic living in London, accused Putin of sanctioning the killing. Within weeks, Litvinenko himself was dead too, killed by radiation poisoning from a mysterious dose of polonium 210. (Britain wants to charge a former KGB officer, Andre Lugovoy, who has just been elected to Russia's parliament, with the killing. He denies it, and Russian law prevents the extradition of Russian citizens.)

Muratov, for his part, doesn't know who ordered his journalists' killings. He says only that he blames "corruption," which has flourished during Putin's eight years.

Although few Russians seem to think Putin himself is corrupt, it is commonly believed that he is surrounded by business and political heavies who are amassing millions in payoffs. Indeed, if anything can bring him down, it may well be graft. As long as living standards rise, people are more likely to forgive the perception that officials are getting obscenely rich by demanding illicit payoffs. But if the economy stops growing—if the price of oil falls back to earth—Putin will face a challenge, whether from the masses in the streets or from military and civilian challengers.

One insider, who asked that his identity be protected, spelled out for us just one example of how the game is played, detailing the payments a prospective regional governor has to make to political bagmen in Moscow in order to get the Kremlin's nod for the post. For wealthier regions, such an endorsement can cost as much as $20 million, money that the politicians raise quietly from corporate "sponsors" that expect special treatment in return. The amount of money flowing to kingmakers in the Kremlin, in other words, is staggering.

When we ask about the view that he is surrounded by corrupt officials, Putin turns testy: "If you are so confident, then I presume you know the names and the systems and the tools...Write to us." As for Politkovskaya, who had been investigating policy failures and human-rights abuses in Chechnya when she was killed—and who authored the 2004 book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy—Putin says he believes she was murdered by a provocateur to cast suspicion on his administration.

For all the attention the outside world pays to such cases, formal polls make it clear that within Russia, Putin's critics are in the minority. For every journalist distressed at the rollback of freedoms, there are scores of Russians who quietly applaud Putin's efforts to reassert stability. Once a year, when Putin takes phone calls from citizens around the country, tens of thousands of people try to get through. Listening to the calls, however screened and rehearsed they may be, one is struck by the ardor of the appeals to the President to get things done and by the broad range of information at Putin's fingertips. (A woman who lives on an island off Vladivostok complained about the local ferry service. Putin told her a bridge will soon be built to link the island to the mainland.)

Certainly life in Russia today is better than it has been for years. The stores are stocked with goods. The once worthless ruble is a genuine currency, strengthening against the dollar these days. Crime persists, but the cities are not as rough as in previous years.

And then there are the President's loudest and most visible defenders: members of Nashi (Ours, in Russian), the cultish pro-Putin youth movement. In mid-December, about 20,000 of the Nashi faithful from all over Russia gathered for a rally by the Kremlin walls to celebrate the recent victory of Putin's United Russia Party in elections to the parliament. From the stage, speakers, rock singers and rappers declared their patriotism and love for the President. A banner read, into the future with putin! Someone introduced Dasha, a 10-year-old member of Mishki (Bear Cubs), the new children's division of Nashi. "I love Russia," said Dasha. "I love teddy bears. I love Putin. Together we will win!"

I went to Nashi's Moscow headquarters a few days later and met with Lyubov Serikova, a pretty 22-year-old redhead from Russia's Chuvash Republic who is a rising star in the organization. She was thrilled with the recent election and credited Nashi with helping thwart an unnamed enemy's attempt to launch an "orange revolution" in Russia. Her world seemed conspiratorial, and she echoed Putin's own statements: those who run against the President were trying to bring the country down. Putin, she said, "has made Russia a leading country in just a few years."

When we finish talking, I take a look at an official Nashi poster hanging outside her office, which excoriates U.S. policies. It's reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda with its non sequitur acceleration of hysteria: "Tomorrow there will be war in Iran. The day after tomorrow Russia will be governed externally!" But this is no fringe group. Putin frequently visits Nashi's training camps and meets with its leaders. And from there he sometimes launches anti-Western tirades, including a recent blast at London authorities who are demanding the extradition of the suspected killer of Litvinenko.

Putin's mission is not to win over the West. It is to restore to Russians a sense of their nation's greatness, something they have not known for years. This is not idle dreaming. When historians talk about Putin's place in Russian history, they draw parallels with Stalin or the Tsars. Putin, one can't stress enough, is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it. "Putin has returned to the mechanism of one-man rule," says Talbott of the Brookings Institution. "Yet it's a new kind of state, with elements that are contemporary and elements from the past."

And there's plenty that could go wrong. The depth of corruption, the pockets of militant unrest, the ever present vulnerability of the economy to swings in commodity prices—all this threatens to unravel the gains that have been made. But Putin has played his own hand well. As Prime Minister, he is set to see out the rest of the drama of Russia's re-emergence. And almost no one in Russia is in a position to stop him. If he succeeds, Russia will become a political competitor to the U.S. and to rising nations like China and India. It will be one of the great powers of the new world.

Back at the dacha, with snow falling lightly outside, our dinner and discussion continue. Putin has been irritable throughout, a grudging host. Suddenly, at 10 o'clock, he stands and abruptly ends the evening. "We've finished eating, there's nothing more on the table, so let's call it a day," he declares. Actually, the main course (choice of sturgeon or veal) and dessert ("bird's milk" cake)—lovingly printed in gold ink on the prepared menu cards—haven't yet been served. The Russian President's brusqueness is jarring. Have our questions angered him? Bored him? Does he have another appointment? It's not clear. "Bye bye," says Putin—in English—as he walks briskly out of the room. The work of rebuilding Russia, apparently, is never done.

—with reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich and Dario Thuburn/Moscow