Love Thy Neighbor

There's been some interesting news out of Russia over the past few days. First, in a typically surreal political agenda, Russian legislators are considering banning Halloween and all things emo in an effort to save its youth. This, as anyone who is familiar with Russia's youth knows, is insane in a culture where the government holds neo-fascist Pro-Putin Youth Camps. Somehow the Russians never got the memo about how criminalizing already self-righteous and rebellious adolescent behavior is not the greatest deterrent.

Addressing more pressing issues facing his country, Dmitry Medvedev gave an interview to the Times in which he said lots of nice, wonderful things about building political competition (he used the modifier, "correctly" as opposed to incorrectly building political competition and god knows what that means), and continues his assertion that he will do everything he can to eliminate corruption. It all sounds really terrific, but we heard it all before in Putin's first term. He will hopefully need more than rhetoric to bring Russia into cooperation with the EU.

About the only unqualified positive thing I can say about Medvedev is that he's not in the security services. You may remember these guys: descendants of the KGB and NKVD, people who've allegedly poisoned two dissidents, one, a legislator and journalist who was exposed to a chemical that ran him a deadly fever and made his skin peel off in layers, the other exposed to polonium-20, a highly radioactive substance, which killed him slowly and made his hair fall out.

And speaking of Litvinenko, Medvedev states that he's ready to work with Britain regarding the former security officials death. Depending on what he wants from Gordon Brown, this could be a good thing.

The current relationship between Russia and The West, historically a tumultuous one to say the least, is now yet agin on the brink of disaster. But there are nuances today that weren't there yesterday and they're especially worrisome. For instance, Russia is content to alienate the West because they believe that they can negotiate instead with Hamas, with Tehran and with Beijing. They believe that America is on the decline and thus Europe will soon follow. They're hedging their bets. But they're ignoring the fact that they have a terrible relationship with their expanding Muslim population in the Caucuses, a population which has some pretty serious issues with Moscow. What do they even think is going happen? Do they think that radical fundamentalists are going to forget Chechnya? Chechnya makes Iraq look like a Donald O'Connor song and dance number.

Then there's China. The Kremlin has this ridiculous fantasy of an equal partnership between Russia and China. However, China's economy is much more stable, much less dependent on energy resources and while Russia imports a vast number of Chinese goods, the reverse can't be said. When I was in Moscow, I saw kiosks selling Chinese food on practically every metro station, in the huge markets there were entire tables selling chinese tea sets, home decor and other goods. I can hardly imagine there being more than a handful of token novelty stores selling matryoshka dolls in China. If Russia enters into a dependent relationship with China, then, as Andrei Piontkovsky points out, Putin's legacy could see China in control of Russia's mineral rich Far East region. Then what would happen? Russia would be transported back to their pre-Imperial history, nestling in Kiev Rus and utterly dependent on countries who've they've worked so hard to piss off.

[--Edit: Ok. So I've fixed the roughly 6,000 typos and errors in this post. Sorry about that.]