This is tremendous longform journalism on Russia. For better and worse, this is the future of e-journalism. It is also very informative about Russia

Boris A. Berezovsky, once the richest and most powerful of the so-called oligarchs who dominated post-Soviet Russia, and a close ally of Boris N. Yeltsin who helped install Vladimir V. Putin as president but later exiled himself to London after a bitter falling out with the Kremlin, died Saturday.

Mr. Berezovsky was a Soviet mathematician who after the fall of Communism went into business and figured out how to skim profits off what was then Russian’s largest state-owned carmaker. Along with spectacular wealth, he accumulated enormous political influence, becoming a close ally of Mr. Yeltsin’s.

With Mr. Yeltsin’s political career fading, Mr. Berezovsky helped engineer the rise of Mr. Putin, an obscure former K.G.B. agent and onetime aide to the mayor of St. Petersburg who became president of Russia in 2000 and last May returned to the presidency for a third term.

After his election, Mr. Putin began a campaign of tax claims against a group of rich and powerful Russians, including Mr. Berezovsky and Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon, who remains jailed in Russia.

Mr. Berezovsky fled to London, where he eventually won political asylum and at one point raised tensions by calling for a coup against Mr. Putin.

Here is is NY Times Obit

Police in Russia have confiscated a painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in women’s underwear from an art gallery in the city of St Petersburg.

The artwork depicts President Putin combing the hair of the prime minister.

The gallery owner said he had been given no formal warrant or explanation for the removal of the paintings.

Who is the real Vladimir Putin? This question has never been fully answered. Putin has dominated Russian politics for more than 12 years, but in that time almost no new information has surfaced about his background beyond the material in a few early biographies. Even in the biographies, very little information about the Russian president is definitive, confirmable, or reliable. As a result, some observers have said that Putin has no face, no substance, no soul. He is a man from nowhere, who can appear to be anything to anybody.

But Putin is a product of his environment — a man whose past experiences have clearly informed his present outlook. Indeed, Putin is best understood as a composite of multiple identities that stem from those experiences.

This briefing paper, “Local Government in Russian Federation: Developing New Rules in an Old Environment” is really interesting. Though 100 pages (half of which is text, half is data tables) this is worth perusing. Gives insight into how Moscow can/should balance powers with local governments.

How Putin rose to power is spelled out by Russian journalist Masha Gessen. She says Putin, a KGB operative with little government experience before he was first elected in 1999, was specifically selected by the elite cohort that surrounded former President Boris Yeltsin.

“One of the very few requirements that Yeltsin’s inner circle presented to people was that they had to be personally loyal to Yeltsin, who very much feared he would be prosecuted once he left office,” Gessen tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “And one thing about Putin that seems to have been consistent throughout his career is that he does have a great sense of personal loyalty. I think Yeltsin’s inner circle sensed this. And this is why Yeltsin picked Putin.”

Assessments of Russia’s civil society development have been almost universally negative, yet the assessments are usually based on very limited and unsystematic evidence. Missing from the discussion are new developments such as institutions and competitive funding for NGOs and other civic groups that suggest there is a foundation in Russia to support citizen participation in governance.

In this article we present current assumptions about Russian civil society, that public space between the home and government where citizens act collectively. We then report some unexplored developments in Russian civil society, including pockets of public activism, NGO activity, and newly institutionalized frameworks for citizen participation in governance. We submit that these developments merit attention in assessments of contemporary Russian politics.

Four part (1 hour each) pro-Western documentary on Putin

Summary of the 4 December 2011 State Duma election results

Parties and alliances	Seat composition			Popular vote	%	± pp swing
	Seats	±	%
United Russia	238	77	52.88%	32,379,135	49.32%	14.98%
Communist Party	92	35	20.46%	12,599,507	19.19%	7.62%
A Just Russia	64	26	14.21%	8,695,522	13.24%	5.50%
Liberal Democratic Party	56	16	12.45%	7,664,570	11.67%	3.53%
Yabloko	0	0	0%	2,252,403	3.43%	1.84%
Patriots of Russia	0	0	0%	639,119	0.97%	0.08%
Right Cause	0	0	0%	392,806	0.60%	new party
Total	450	0	100%	64,623,062	100%
Valid ballot papers				64,623,062	98.43%
Invalid ballot papers				1,033,464	1.57%
Eligible voters				109,237,780	Turnout: 60.10%
Source: Summary table of election results – Central Election Commission

Summary of the 4 March 2012 Russian presidential election results

Candidates	Nominating parties	Votes	%
Vladimir Putin	United Russia	45,513,001	63.64
Gennady Zyuganov	Communist Party	12,288,624	17.18
Mikhail Prokhorov	Independent	5,680,558	7.94
Vladimir Zhirinovsky	Liberal Democratic Party	4,448,959	6.22
Sergey Mironov	A Just Russia	2,755,642	3.85
Valid votes		70,686,784	98.84
Invalid votes		833,191	1.16
Total votes		71,519,975	100.00
Registered voters/turnout		109,610,812	65.25
Source: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation

1. Medvedev Responds with Proposals for Systemic Change (NYT Dec 22)
2. How far can the resistance to Vladimir Putin go? (New Yorker Dec 12)
3. Is this a Russian Spring? (BBC Dec 7)

Your assignment–Write, and post a 750-1000 word essay which:
1. Cites all three of the above articles (other resources are available below)
2. Synthesizes the given articles with previous lectures, readings, and discussions
3. Is thesis-driven and evidence-based
4. Attempts to pose an original argument
5. Answers these questions:

• Summarize the 2011 Duma election results. What do these results suggest?
• What are the causes of post-election political discontent in Russia? To what extent are these grievances valid?
• According to Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker, how is the suppression of civil society at the heart of the problem in Russia? Do you tend to agree with his assertions? (If you want more scholarly info on civil society in Russia, see the pieces posted below.)
• Specifically how have Putin, Medvedev, and United Russia responded?
• Conclude by hazarding a response to these questions: Is this the end of an era in Russia? The beginning of the end? Neither?

BRING A PRINT COPY TO CLASS IN ADDITION TO POSTING AS A COMMENT

EXTRA CREDIT: Up to 7 points for offering a substantial (200+ word) and evidence-based refutation of a classmates’ essay. (this is probably the only extra credit for the semester)

“A Balanced Assessment of Russian Civil Society” from Colombia University. More optimisitc than Remnick

Russian Democracy in the Absence of Civil Society. Not so optimistic.

Photo Essay: The Anti-Putin Brigade (Foreign Policy)

Thousands Call on Putin to Go (BBC Dec 25)

Day By Day Summary (Slate Dec 4-12)

2 Minute BBC video

Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Politial Information think tank, agreed that Putin is increasingly the target but stressed that the opposition continues to lack a comparable leader figure. “Russia without Putin” is the strongest slogan, but it is at the same time the weakest one,“ Mukhin said in an interview. “Because the answer is: ok, Putin, leaves, and then what? Nothing is being offered instead. There is no strong figure that would be able to compete with Putin. It is the weak point, where the pro-government forces are going to strike.”

How does the Kremlin see all this? Check out the state-owned RIA Novosti covers the 2011 protests. Want a hint? December 29th headline: “Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has blamed the United States for being behind the recent wave of protests in Russia against the outcome of the December 4 parliamentary elections”

Below: Discussion with Anastasia Mirzoyants, the Eurasia Project Manager at Intermedia & ; Jeffrey Mankoff, Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

30 minute video: The Stream speaks to Anastasia Mirzoyants, the Eurasia Project Manager at Intermedia, a leading consulting firm; Jeffrey Mankoff, Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, Anatoly Karlin, student at UC Berkeley, gives some context to the numbers in this op-ed for Al Jazeera. Karlin also runs the blog Supreme Oblivion

It is now clear that instead of restoring public confidence in the political system, the announcement that Mr. Putin and President Dmitri A. Medvedev would switch jobs annoyed many Russians. Mr. Putin’s approval rating briefly dipped to 61 percent this month, high by international standards but lower than at any point in a decade.

Meanwhile, the governing party, United Russia, has had to scale back its expectations for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, when it is likely to lose the two-thirds majority it has held since 2007.

The announcement, in other words, seems to have had an unintended negative effect, a jarring outcome for a government that has proved itself adept at measuring and manipulating public opinion.

Though United Russia, which now has a commanding majority in Parliament, faces no powerful competitors in the election, opinion polls suggest that it will lose 50 to 60 seats, reflecting growing weariness with leadership that has not changed in a decade. State officials at all levels have been told to guard against significant losses.

With parliamentary elections only days away that are expected to reflect dwindling public support for Vladimir V. Putin’s party, Russian prosecutors have opened a case against the country’s only independent election monitoring organization.

The organization, Golos, has already posted reports of more than 4,500 violations of election law in the prelude to the voting on Sunday. Golos receives financing from Western governments, including the United States, and some Russian officials have suggested that the organization’s real aim is to incite an Arab Spring-type revolution in Russia.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says Russia’s parliamentary elections scheduled for December won’t be fair, and he blasted “authoritarian” rule in Russia in a Wall Street Journal interview.

Mr. Gorbachev said Tuesday that he believed an authoritarian government was necessary to pull Russia together in 2000 when Vladimir Putin first came to power. At the time, he brushed off concerns from a French colleague that Mr. Putin would “make a habit” of such tactics.

Now, however, the Kremlin’s “habit” of authoritarianism is undeniable and “a very dangerous thing,” he said.

Now “we in Russia are forced to seriously struggle to strengthen democracy, ensure honest elections, the independence of the judiciary and many other things,” Mr. Gorbachev said.

The Kremlin denies charges that it rigs elections, and Mr. Putin rejects accusations of authoritarian methods, saying he is committed to democracy in Russia.

Mr. Putin’s United Russia party is virtually certain to win parliamentary elections in December, and Mr. Putin plans to return to the presidency in 2012 elections.

“The elections will not be fair,” Mr. Gorbachev says.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, told a congress of the ruling United Russia party that Vladimir Putin would return to the Kremlin after a presidential election in March 2012, and Mr Putin informed them that Mr Medvedev would stay on as prime minister and leader of United Russia. The applause from bureaucrats whose only concern is to stay close to the rent-distributing centre grew louder when Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev told them that they had agreed this arrangement several years ago.

In a country of 140m people with huge demographic, economic and regional problems, and a simmering war in the north Caucasus, elections ought to be a serious affair. But in place of proper debates about the country’s future is a political marsh bubbling with imitators, clowns, nationalists, provocateurs and other imps.