Fledgling Democracies

In news related to an earlier post, the lawyer for the NGO head who won a constitutional court showdown this week was attacked late Thursday, RIA Novosti reports. Skinheads allegedly beat the attorney on the head repeatedly with wooden sticks, and one attacker said he had “a mission to kill the lawyer.”

The “smuggling” case against Aslamazyan had press freedom significance - the NGO she ran trained broadcast journalists and more than 2,000 Russian journalists had directed a letter protesting her arrest to former president Putin her arrest prompted more than 2,000 Russian journalists to send an open letter of protest to former-president Vladimir Putin.

So a Russian by the name of Dima Bilan won the recent Eurovision song contest, a sort of multinational version of American Idol. On the news that votes from the Baltic states helped Bilan claim the title, a young pro-Kremlin assemblage gathered outside the Latvian and Estonian embassies in Moscow to express their gratitude.

They even released a statement which read, in part: “It’s very pleasant to hear that Russia was supported in this contest by our nearest neighbours, including the Baltic states, with whom our bilateral relations aren’t very good.”

Just so you’re clear on how big this show is: Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev made a telephone call while on his first official foreign trip (to China) to congratulate Bilan, who’s win guarantees next year’s contest will be hosted by Russia. The former President/current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin referred to the win as “yet another triumph for all of Russia.” If ever anyone was all about triumph…

Take that, Western Europe.

A case highlighting the crackdown by Russian authorities on NGOs with Western ties was decided today in favor of Manana Aslamaziyan, former head of an organization that helped train journalists and which was funded largely by U.S. sources.

Aslamaziyan had been charged with smuggling after failing to declare cash worth about $12,400 as she passed through Sheremetyevo airport in January of 2007. In the months following her arrest, her NGO was raided by police, its bank accounts were frozen and a new charge of tax evasion was brought against Aslamaziyan, who fled to Paris.

But today’s decision found the smuggling charge to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that the government’s definition of “large sums of money” was simply too vague. Reason to be cautiously optimistic? Aslamaziyan’s lawyer thinks so. Viktor Parshutkin, Aslamazyan’s lawyer, called Tuesday’s decision a “good omen” for the Russian legal system. He’s quoted in The Moscow Times story:

“This decision has made me very happy,” he said by telephone from St. Petersburg. “[The Constitutional Court] has demonstrated its independence from the political machinations of the authorities.”

In a speech at the University of Denver today, John McCain spoke of his willingness to work with Russia towards crafting legally binding limits on nuclear weapons. Such an accord would replace START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which expires in 2009.

The New York Times called the speech a sign of McCain’s efforts to distance his own policies from those of President Bush, who has been unwilling to enter into such agreements. But the same story also mentioned McCain’s proposed expulsion of Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries* (other members: Great Britain, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy), and questioned the subsequent likelihood of Moscow’s interest in bargaining with a President McCain.

*See why Nina Hachigian, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, thinks McCain’s proposal is a terrible one.

Ever wish your job involved traveling to new places, learning as much as you can about the people there and conveying the message of the United States while you’re at it? A career as a foreign service officer might be right up your alley.

So say Russian nationalists, who are doing what they can to reverse the 1954 transfer of ownership of the Crimean Peninsula from the USSR to, well the other USSR (Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic).

With Ukraine aching for NATO membership, and Russia doing their best to thwart it, this dust-up centers around a naval base in the Ukrainian coastal town of Sevastopol. Vladimir Putin has nightmares of the strategic base falling under NATO command should Ukraine succeed in joining.

The (Scottish) Sunday Herald has all the he said, he said here.

Also see this post on the same topic, from a blog called Windows to Russia.

Georgia held parliamentary elections on Wednesday, and though the ruling party won the day, it was not without some serious drama which has, of course, led to much finger-pointing, speculating and insinuating on all sides.

An opposition leader was shot on the way to a polling station, buses bringing ethnic Georgians from across the Abkhazia border to vote exploded, and opposition supporters threatened to ambush the Central Elections Commission…but any hope of storming of the CEC evaporated when a night time rally turned out to be sparsely attended.

Why the poor showing? A soccer match, according to opposition organizers, who say President Saakashvili scheduled elections to coincide with the League of Champions final match broadcast, banking on the liklihood that the event would take priority over politics in the minds of Georgian men that evening.

Kommersant (”Russia’s daily online”) has the full story here and here.

The new Russian president is in China, where talks are expected to center around trade. His predecessor is credited with strengthening ties with China, though plenty of tensions still exist. According to Bloomberg, Medvedev hopes to persuade China to buy more than just energy from his country.

Medvedev also touched down in Kazakhstan en route; on the agenda there was a request that the country continue exporting its oil via pipelines through Russia.

All in all, the trip underscores the new global strategy game major players are part of: the struggle for control of energy supplies and growing resistance against Western dominance.

Medvedev’s first Western trip is set for early June when he’ll meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany.

The Snow Leopard, in this case, signifies South Ossetia, about which Joshua Kucera writes in Slate’s feature called Dispatches: Notes From Different Corners of the World. So far, Kucera has posted four installments in a series on the former Soviet Union, and they prove a really fascinating glimpse into the world of shoddy spies, propaganda and other facets of life in South Ossetia, Azerbaijan and beyond.

Global Voices Online reports that bloggers in Uzbekistan have spent the last couple weeks questioning the logic of its leaders, whose over-the-top zeal for change is seen by some as cause for alarm.

The new government in the former Soviet republic has renamed streets and squares, dismantled monuments, changed the alphabet and even adjusted the calendar to cleanse it if of celebrations linked to Soviet times.

One blogger on neweurasia.net sees it this way:

I look at the calendar and I’m really surprised to see the governments trying to change the history and eradicate the memory of the past… The Labor Day, May 1, that used to be widely celebrated [in Soviet times], is totally forgotten in the country. However, those citizens, who lived during the Soviet time, still remember this day…

It’s an interesting quandary: at what point does well-intentioned change start to resemble unhealthy denial of a country’s difficult history?