Reuters have put together a nice little list of highlights, and the BBC are pretty much on the money with both their reporting and analysis. But to give you an idea of just what a tough job they had, these are the main points the media could pick out of a four-hour public phone-in with Forbes Magazine’s third most powerful man in the world:

• Putin “might” run for President again in 2012.
• He thinks terrorists are bad; and he doesn’t deny they exist; but he won’t call the situation in North Caucasus a “war.”
• America is blocking Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization; and linking trade with the emigration rights of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 1980s is just not fair.
• The worst of the financial crisis is over; but we’re not out of the woods yet, and in the meantime the government will continue its bailout of the maker of Lada cars; oh, and Russia should diversify its economy.

He produced his usual acid wit, graciousness, sympathy, frankly intimidating grasp of the economic situation, and, of course righteous anger at the right things (terrorism, corruption, America). Then there were the “spontaneous” phone calls from citizens asking for help with individual problems, such as the woman who wanted to know what would be done to help an elderly pensioner who had given all her blankets to help victims of last Friday’s train bombing. “I was just talking with the head of Russian Railways about that lady the other day,” said Vladimir Vladimirovich, “and we’ve agreed to double her pension at the rail monopoly’s expense. And we’ll see what can be done about helping her move in with her relatives. They live nearby, and it’s difficult for her alone.”

Three cheers for the prime minister, however improbable that is. But none of this excuses the fact that he said shamelessly little of substance, and what he did say was merely repetition of the same lines he’s been parroting for the past decade.

If you don’t believe me, you can have a look yourself. There’s eight years of the stuff on archive in English and Russian on the Kremlin’s website, and another year or so, covering the period since he became prime minister, on the White House site. If its not too much a stretch to say so, it makes fascinatingly repetitive reading.

After a bit, you learn to predict Putin’s favorite tropes, of which diversification of the economy is far and away his favorite. His proposed remedies change from time to time - at one point he was big on nano-technology, but that seems to have fallen out of favor - but for ten years the subject has allowed him to spew out truisms about helping small and medium sized businesses and provided a nice hook on which to hang patriotic words about the importance of education and Russia’s proud tradition of technological achievement. Terrorism, America, and the financial crisis get similar treatment.

Of course, that’s not to say Putin never says anything newsworthy - he can, and he does, when he wants to and when the times demand it. But all the Russian public got yesterday was the same politician’s patter he’s been serving them for a decade. I suspect a new generation of Russia correspondents will inherit the task of hammering it into news long before he’s finished.

What makes it more sickening is that it was not the first such attack. In August 2007 a near-identical bombing succeeded in derailing the Nevsky, but failed to kill anyone. The terrorists apparently had a good think about what went wrong, and came back with a refined plan.

This time they buried 7 kilograms of TNT-equivalent under the tracks, five kilograms more than last time, and for good measure left behind a secondary charge to hit the investigators.

They killed at least twenty five people and hospitalized at least 90. Most of the casualties were in the rear two carriages, which cart-wheeled when they hit the break in the track caused by the explosion. If the other carriages had not by some fortuitous chance skipped the gap, the death toll would probably have been in the hundreds.

The second bomb didn’t hurt anyone, but in the bizarre way tragedy is sometimes accompanied by comedy, it apparently blew off the hat of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee when he arrived on the scene on Saturday afternoon.

The prime suspects for Friday’s attack are Russian nationalists and North Caucasian Islamists. Most experts have dismissed the nationalists as too amateurish to carry off an attack so sophisticated, but in 2005 a neo-nazi who had apparently picked up the requisite skills while fighting in the former Yugoslavia bombed and derailed a train traveling from the Chechen capital of Grozny to Moscow. In 2003, a suicide bomber killed 44 on commuter train near Grozny. Two men from Ingushetia, a North Caucasian republic neighboring Chechnya, are currently on trial for the 2007 attack.

It is likely that apologists for the terrorists will point out that the reason North Caucasians are immediately suspected is that this kind of thing happens in the North Caucasus all the time, but no one makes much of a fuss about it. That is fair:  bombings and assassinations are as ubiquitous to that part of the world as to Iraq or Afghanistan, and Russians are as inured to the violence there as Westerners are to the campaigns in the Middle East. But weariness at bad news from far away is no crime. And, as if it needs to be said, the passengers of the Nevsky Express were not responsible for the low-level war in the Caucasus.

Someone clever once wrote that Russian literature is wreathed in steam, or that a locomotive runs through every page of it. That was apt, if not original. And while the 19th Century preoccupations of the likes of Lev Tolstoy may have been overtaken by history and better writers, the importance of the railway to Russia has not.

Russia’s roads are awful, and internal air travel, though expanding all the time, remains ill-developed, costly, and unreasonably dangerous. For a lot of people, the trains are what hold the country together. Whether you are traveling in the barrack-room like hard class coaches, or the petit-bourgeois four-berth compartments, or one of the first-class carriages with flat-screen televisions, the train is a familiar most people’s first choice of transport from city to city.

I leave it to lovers of Tolstoy and hawkers of travel guides to decide what this says about the Russian character.  The pertinent point is simply that Russians are very dependent on their railways, and Friday’s attack was a frightening reminder of how vulnerable railways are to those inclined to sabotage and murder. The horrible truth is, as one official at Russian Railways put it in a recent radio interview, it is physically impossible to defend 86,000 kilometers of track.

This is a follow-up to an October 4 article about the controversy over historical memory in Russia.

Russia’s latest row about historical memory has mutated into a three-way free-for-all about the proper limits of free speech and when legitimate protest becomes criminal harassment. What began as a fight over the name of a kebab house has exploded into a debate about the limits of free expression in today’s Russia, and the controversy has moved from the streets and the media to the court room.

The Faster Times thought the controversy around the re-naming of the Anti-Soviet Kebab House and Alexander Podrabinek’s explosive letter to Soviet veterans had exhausted its not-inconsiderable newsworthiness. But this week it returned to the headlines with the news that Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth group that led the charge against Podrabinek, had decided to sue several media organizations – including four European newspapers – over coverage of the affair.

The Anti Soviet Kebab House (so named because it stood across the street from the Sovietskaya Hotel) was forced to change its name after a veteran’s group complained that the title was offensive to those who had served in the Red Army. Former Soviet dissident Alexander Podrabinek, responded with an article accusing the veterans of complicity in Stalin’s crimes. That attack on the honor of Soviet war veterans provoked outrage in the Russian media that resulted in Nashi picketing his house. Podrabinek went into hiding.

This particularly spectacular round in Russia’s ongoing internal debate about how to deal with its Soviet past made good newspaper copy. Almost too good. Nashi are now riled because of what they say are slanderous misrepresentations of the group and its tactics. In particular, they complain that several media have unfairly characterized their actions as criminal. Novaya Gazeta, one of the Russian organizations being sued, apparently said certain members of the group had “established themselves beyond the criminal line” - though your correspondent failed to dig up that exact quote in a search of the paper’s online archive. Others, including REN-TV and the Echo of Moscow Radio Station, were less explicit, but described Podrabinek as “persecuted,” which could also suggest a crime. The Independent, the only English-language newspaper Nashi is suing, is facing accusations that neither its legal team nor its Moscow correspondent would talk about on the record. But you can read the offending article here, and try to work out what the offending sentence is.

Nashi says that its tactics are entirely legitimate, and attempts by the press to represent them as criminals are not only slanderous, but an attempt to limit their own right to public protest and free speech. As Nashi tell it, they are playing by the rules: “No one disputes the right of any person to their own opinion or any legitimate form of expression of their position, but no one will ever be able to challenge the same right of people who have a different view and are ready to defend it,” they said in a statement published on October 22.

Not everyone agrees, however. On October 5, not long after the controversy began, the Kremlin’s own Human Rights Council issued a statement condemning Nashi’s campaign against Podrabinek as “illegal and immoral,” “beyond the scope of existing legislation,” and bearing “obvious signs of extremism.” It went on to list four articles of the Russian constitution that it believed Nashi had violated, and followed up with a letter – also published on the Council’s website – to Chief Prosecutor Yuri Chaika asking him to investigate.

The Council’s move provoked a furious response from Nashi and its allies. Ella Pamfilova, the chair of the Council, was herself accused of extremism (a nebulously defined crime under Russian law) for taking Podrabinek’s side, and United Russia and Liberal Democrat deputies in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, called on President Dmitry Medvedev to sack her. But other than reiterate her disapproval of what Podrabinek had written, Pamfilova refused to back down. Last Thursday October 29, the Council published a legal opinion by an independent expert, exonerating itself of the charge of extremism, and upholding the call for an investigation of Nashi’s activities.

Whether or not the Human Rights Council’s activities will have any effect on Nashi’s lawsuits against the Independent and others is anyone’s guess. But Medvedev’s refusal to fire Pamfilova does make one wonder whether the powers that be are inclined to let Nashi fight this little scrap on their own, even though the group is nominally supported by the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, Medvedev has added his own voice to the endless historical debate that all this comes from. In a video blog entry on October 30, Russia’s official day of remembrance for victims of political repression under the Soviet Union, he put the memory of the repressions on the same footing as the 1945 victory. He directly criticized the tendency to brush over Stalin’s crimes. And he suggested that the focus on combating revisionist interpretations of the Second World War had overshadowed an equally dangerous trend – the rehabilitation of Stalin.

That doesn’t tell Russia how to make sense of its 20^th century history, and it certainly doesn’t amount to an endorsement of either side in the row between Nashi and its critics, which has moved so far beyond the historical. But it was a refreshingly honest appraisal of the conundrum Russia faces.

The owner’s intention was certainly not malicious. The restaurant stands opposite the Soviet Hotel on Leningradsky Prospect in Northern Moscow, making the “Anti” epithet a nice play on words. But when the owners put up their sign after renovations this summer, Dolgikh complained that the pun was “inappropriate.” The offending banner was duly dismantled on September 18.

Even in a different country that might have seemed like political correctness gone mad. But for some in Russia the removal of the sign signified something far more sinister.

Podrabinek has his reasons to despise nostalgia for the Soviet Union. He did two stints in Siberian labor camps, first in the 1970s for “slandering the Soviet system” after he publicized research on the use of psychiatry against dissidents, and again in the early 1980s for publishing articles in the foreign press and distributing samizdat literature. In short, he is one of those “veterans of the struggle against the Soviet regime” who are particularly dismayed by what they see as the creeping rehabilitation of Soviet history.

So for him the renaming of the kebab house was not a trivial matter. It smacked of censorship and a  spineless willingness on the part of the authorities to cave into nostalgia for a criminal regime. Worst of all, it demonstrated the use of the Second World War to silence criticism of the Soviet Union.

He set out these thoughts in the online magazine Yezhednevny Zhurnal (you can read a decent English translation here) on September 21. The Soviet Union, he reminds the veterans, was not simply a land of political commissars and triumph, but also of “peasant revolts, victims of collectivization and the Great Famine, hundreds of thousands of innocent people shot in secret police cellars, and millions of people who suffered in labor camps to the tune of the hideous Soviet national anthem.”

Now, despite the recent trend for venerating all-things Soviet, and notwithstanding Mitvol’s bizarre concession to Dolgikh’s complaint, recognizing and condemning the faults of that regime is not (yet) taboo in Russia. If he’d left it there, Podrabinek would not have attracted half the opprobrium that he did. Attacking Second World War veterans, on the other hand, is unforgivable. And that is exactly what he did

The particular cause of Podrabinek’s anger seems to have been Dolgikh himself, a war-time political commissar who later rose to become a member of the Politburo. For Podrabinkek that makes him “a member of the group of Communist criminals who tried to ruin our country and who then happily escaped justice.” But he did not confine his assault to Dolgikh. In attacking the flawed memory of the Soviet Union, Podrabinek explicitly attacked the veterans themselves.

“You merely think that you have privatized patriotism, love for Russia and care for its future. It only seems to you that your rest is well-deserved and honorable.  It merely appears to you that you are respected by everyone. You were made to think so a long time ago, but your time has run out. Your motherland is not Russia. Your motherland is the Soviet Union. You are Soviet veterans, and, thank God, your country disappeared 18 years ago,” he told the veterans. “You are so concerned about the ‘Anti Soviet’ name, because you were probably the wardens in those labor camps and prisons, the commissars in those anti-retreat units, the butchers on those execution fields.”

Provocative is not the word. To understand how scandalous that is, consider that even observing that victims of the Soviet regime and veterans of the struggle against it are practically ignored, while veterans of the struggle against Nazism are lionized, is to tread on thin ice. It is absolutely true, as Podrabinek writes, that “no squares or streets have been named in [dissidents'] honor,” and that, unlike war veterans,  survivors of Soviet repression receive little or no support from the state. But to suggest there is something unjust in this - that, perhaps, dissidents are equally deserving of the country’s respect - could be taken to imply that there is some kind of equality between the evils they fought. And a formidable part of Russian public opinion - backed up time and again by none other than Vladimir Putin - is extremely sensitive to even the slightest  hint of an equation of Communism and Nazism.

Attacking the very institution of respect for veterans, and by extension Russia’s victory in the Second World War, and accusing them of nothing less than murder, is is not just insulting to the old men. It is nothing less than an attack on how Russia sees itself. It is, in the view of many, practically treason.

Hence the vilification in the press, threats of legal and action and even worse that followed. The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi have decided to picket Podrabinek’s house until he apologizes or leaves the country. One representative of the youth group told the Interfax news agency that if he doesn’t doesn’t apologize to the veterans, “it will be more comfortable for him somewhere in Estonia, where the policy of the state coincides with his beloved pro-Nazi views.”

Podrabinek himself has gone into hiding, not because of Nashi, whose campaign he dismissed as   “propaganda stunt,” but because of “serious people with serious intentions.” In his last blog entry, posted on September 28, he wrote that “a decision has been taken at a sufficiently high level to settle with me in any way…the campaign of ‘popular anger,’ so heavily inflated in the last week, should serve as a cover for the planned reprisals.” Nothing has been heard from him since.

You don’t have to like Russia’s current government, or be nostalgic for the Soviet Union, to be proud of its record in the Second World War. And the venom of Podrabinek’s article alienated even critics of the what he calls “our criminal government.” But whatever you feel about his tone, one has to admit that he is contributing - however offensively - to a serious debate: how to reconcile pride in Soviet achievements, and above all the victory over Nazi Germany, with condemnation of the horror of the regime that presided over it. That bit of mental gymnastics is further complicated by patriotic touchiness about criticism from other countries - especially the Baltic States - about Russia’s role in the war.

The debate permeates Russian society. At the highest level it informs foreign and domestic policy decisions and can even fuel diplomatic crises. Elsewhere it turns into rows about kebab shops. And no matter how much effort Nashi and others might put into forcing an apology from the truculent dissident, it is not going to make the problem go away.

And at the fringes – in the ‘liberal’ media – commentators recalled the intelligence failings that led to the attack, the survivors’ anger that no official has been held to account for incompetence, and the still unanswered questions and suspicious holes in the official account of events. Novaya Gazeta, a  particularly bold liberal paper, devoted two pages to a troubling story about the role a Russian double agent may have played in the Beslan tragedy.

The anniversary of the 1999 bombings might have gained even less attention if it were not for a furor over the censorship of a similar article outlining the darker side of that story. But the publication concerned was not bastion of Russian opposition media like Novaya Gazeta or the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station, but the American edition of GQ magazine. And the censoring body was not the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that the article implicates, but the Conde Nast publishing house.

How not to bury a story

The article, by the American war reporter Scott Anderson, carries a title and expounds a theory that is not designed to endear its author to the Russian authorities. Briefly, “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” details how the Russian special services may have organized the 1999 attacks to install one of their own – then and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – as president. The article centers around a series of interviews with the former KGB and FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, who has carried out independent investigations of the bombings and continues to question the official account.

The idea is not new, even in Russia. But it is not the kind of story (or the kind of title) that a prudent investor would publish in Russia without thinking about it very carefully first. Conde Nast’s decision that the story “should not be distributed in Russia” was, in Anderson’s own words, “not surprising.” It was the effort to to make sure that it was not read by anyone outside the United States, let alone in Russia, that Anderson – and the world - found bizarre.

According to an NPR report last Friday, the publishing house went as far as to forbid the article’s publication or promotion in any Conde Nast magazines in other countries or online. Copies of the U.S. edition were not to be taken to Russia, shown to Russian officials or journalists or advertisers.

The move could not have gone more wrong. The same day NPR revealed the self-censorship, Gawker posted a scanned copy of the print edition. Over the weekend it was translated into Russian by volunteers, and by Monday it was available in translation all over the Russian internet. By Tuesday both Western and Russian media had picked up the story, and Conde Nast was steadfastly refusing to comment.

Who benefits?

It is a characteristically Russian approach to crime detection to ask “who benefits?”, and in the case of the 1999 apartment bombings, the obvious beneficiary was Putin. At the time he was a near-unknown plucked from obscurity to serve as prime minister in the last days of an increasingly shaky Yeltsin administration, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one (he was Yeltsin’s fifth prime minister in 18 months). But the bombs provided the demand for a “strongman” leader and a casus belli for the second Chechen War. Most analysts put Putin’s overwhelming victory at the presidential elections the following year to the successful prosecution of that war. Without the bombs, the reasoning goes, Putin would never have become president.

But who benefits is a matter of perspective. The authorities’ standard response to accusations of this kind is that that any crime that implicates the Russian government could only be of benefit to the regime’s critics, and therefore must have been planned by Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and  Kremlin critic now exiled in London. That implication has been used to suggest that he killed  anyone from Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya to former FSB man Alexander Litvinenko, one of his close associates, just because it would embarrass the Kremlin. The same reasoning, incidentally, suggests that Conde Nast’s apparently bungled attempt at censorship was actually a cunning publicity stunt.

Cowardice or editorial integrity?

Nikolai Uskov is an interesting, if not downright mercurial character. A former history lecturer, he turned in his academic career for a life in glossy magazines back in the late 1990s, and rose to become the chief editor of Russian GQ in 2003. He is an eloquent defender of the concept of glamor and the elitism it implies, but he is also a regular guest on Echo of Moscow, a radio station with a reputation for serious debate. And under under his editorship GQ has not completely shied away from sensitive topics – this month’s edition features an interview with Mikhail Khordokovsky, the disgraced former oligarch and Putin nemesis, on life in prison. Not in the same league as accusing Putin of mass murder, perhaps, but not the behavior of a regime sycophant either.

Uskov is also the only Conde Nast employee to comment on the furor around Anderson’s article. In an interview with Echo on September 6 – Sunday, two days after the NPR article appeared – he denied that he had that he had been forced into censorship from the American office. “I haven’t received any orders from my superiors forbidding the publication of Scott Anderson’s article,” he said. “I can still publish it if I want to. But this article contains nothing that the Russian mass media has not already been writing about for several years in a row.”

When the Faster Times called Russian GQ the next day a spokeswoman said that Conde Nast had issued an order against commenting on the topic, but Uskov had already repeated his comments on Echo to the Kommersant business daily: the American office has no control over his editorial policy, and the article didn’t say anything new anyway. Why, GQ even published an interview with Litvinenko in 2005, in which “he said the same thing.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” said Anderson when I put it to him that most of the information was already on the public domain, “but this seems to be the party line that is being adopted by those defending the Russia government or who would like to dismiss the article as ‘nothing new.’” From Anderson’s point of view, at least one thing is very new indeed - a major international news magazine has taken an in-depth look at one of the most controversial topics in recent Russian history.

From one conspiracy to another

Juxtaposing the 1999 apartment bombings with the September 11 attacks may seem a little too neat, but it is illuminating. Faced with why one is willing to believe that Putin or his henchmen may have been behind the Russian apartment bombings, when the suggestion that the Bush administration organized 9/11 is so repellent, one could point to any number of things. One might argue that Putin and the FSB are clearly more mendacious than Bush; one might argue that the evidence in the one case is much stronger than in the other. But the real comparison is between the level of public debate that has occurred around either crime.

“There has been a vast array of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as entire books, that have examined the 9/11 bombing from every possible angle, including the notion that the Bush Administration may have known of it beforehand and/or actually carried it out,” said Anderson. “Most people who have seriously examined the topic have dismissed these accusations as absurd, but the larger point to our discussion is where is the corresponding body of investigative articles and books looking at the ‘99 bombings in Russia?  It doesn’t exist.”

Well, according to some people it does. “I think after ten years, when so many journalists and writers and political technologists have looked at this, we have to admit there is no proof the FSB was involved in this crime,” said Andrey Soldatov, an independent security analyst.

Soldatov is not the kind of character you would describe as a defender of the government. He used to work for Novaya Gazeta, and was at one point himself “a captive” of the idea that the FSB was behind the bombings. But for all the suspicious activity around the bombings, there is simply too much evidence pointing the other way. Berezovsky’s involvement in pushing the theory – he backed both Litvinenko, who co-authored a book about it, and Trepashkin’s efforts – is one good reason to take it with a pinch of salt. The oligarch has a very personal vendetta against Putin, and is even credited with masterminding the transition of power from Yeltsin to Putin. That suggests he would have been involved in the bombings if they were part of that plan. And there were other pretexts for the invasion of Chechnya – in August Chechen militants had invaded neighboring Dagestan. So who’s to say Putin benefited?

Soldatov subscribes to the official explanation – that the bombings were organized by a hitherto virtually unknown Islamist terrorist group from the Caucasus republic of Karachay Cherkessia. But he does not dismiss the idea of FSB involvement as absurd. “We know the guys who carried out the operation, we know the guy in Cherkessia who was behind it, but we don’t know the next step,” he said. “And that is the point where the official investigation failed; we cannot understand who, in the end, was behind this operation. Were they acting alone, did [Chechen rebel leader Shamil] Basayev ask them to do it, or were they organized by somebody else – even the Kremlin? I cannot exclude this version.”

That is why the conspiracy theories around the 1999 bombings attract skepticism rather than derision. There has been some kind of independent investigation, but it has been so completely stymied by official evasions and suppression, that it is impossible to be able to rule out one theory or the other. Does that evasiveness signal guilt, as Trepashkin suggests? Or were the FSB just “so incompetent they couldn’t even present the real facts,” as Soldatov argues? It is impossible to tell, and the result is that if most people who have seriously examined the topic of 9/11 have dismissed the “inside job” theory as absurd, those who have examined the 1999 apartment bombings have given up in frustration.  Except for Trepashkin, which depending on your point of view either makes him heroic, or deluded.

An opinion poll conducted over the same weekend that Russian bloggers were busily translating Gawker’s copy of Anderson’s article showed that some 22 percent of Russians think the special services were either certainly or possibly involved in the attacks. But that level of suspicions comes with a heavy dose of resignation.

“Do I care? Of course I care,” reflected one Muscovite. “But we’re never going to know. We didn’t have a public dialogue about Beslan, or Dubrovka, or the accident at the Sayano Sushenskaya hydro-electric plant the other week. So why expect to have one about this?”

The resulting war of words ranged from the defensive - Stalin was buying time; Britain and France had rejected his offers of a mutual-security pact - to attacks on one another’s own record. Hadn’t Poland concluded its own non-aggression treaty with Germany in 1934? Hadn’t it taken part in the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938? And besides, Stalin only took back the land that Poland had seized during the 1920s.

This is no place to rehearse the interminable squabbles that follow from these premises. Suffice to say the arguments on both sides are well practiced, and none of last week’s spat was spontaneous: tensions had been ratcheted up to the point where an explosion was inevitable.

In July the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) caused outrage in Russia by adopting a resolution that condemned Nazism and Stalinism in pretty much equal terms (the Duma in response passed a motion condemning the resolution). In August Medvedev sent a menacing letter to his Ukrainian counterpart Victor Yushchenko, in which he complained (amongst other things) about historical revisionism. And on August 30, two days before the ceremony in Gdansk, Medvedev called such an equation of Nazi and Stalinist crimes “a cynical lie.” Then, while European leaders were gathered in Gdansk, the Russian foreign intelligence service released files “proving” that Poland had brought about its own downfall by flirting with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

The history war has been going on in one form or another almost since the Berlin wall came down. It is fought on several fronts, but by far the most crucial is the Second World War. Poland, for example, feels that Russia has not properly apologized for the Molotov Ribbentrop pact (though the Russian Parliament has condemned it), the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers (though Russia recognizes it as a Soviet crime), or the 45 years of communist dictatorship that followed “victory.” The Baltic states, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, view the entire post-war period as an occupation. Estonian attempts to relocate a memorial to Red Army soldiers in 2007 led to a diplomatic crisis and a cyberwar. Ukraine, meanwhile, has taken to lionizing nationalist partisans who the Russians consider Nazi collaborators.

The Russian government has become so agitated by these reassessments of Soviet history that has introduced a law, modeled on German holocaust-denial legislation, making it illegal to deny the Soviet victory (shorthand for saying the liberating troops began a new occupation). And in May this year Russian President Dmitry Medvedev founded a commission to “defend against the revision of history to Russia’s disadvantage.”

A lot of this is populism. Russians are not only proud, but touchy about their record in the Second World War. No one who has lived here will have been surprised by a recent opinion poll that found some 63 percent of Russians believe the Soviet Union could have won the war without the help of the allies (if anything, one might be surprised that the figure has fallen in recent years, from 71 percent in 2001). Trying to salvage the Western allies’ honor with the war in the Pacific evokes pitiful smiles: it was not the atomic bombs, but the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 that forced the Japanese surrender.

So to suggest that the Red Army was anything other than heroic touches a genuine raw nerve. Changing the history of the Second World War is the abode of Russophobes and Nazi sympathizers, and is one of the safest possible targets for politicians looking for something to denounce.

That’s the Russian position. But the history war is not just about the Second World War. One of the sorest points between Russia and Ukraine, for example, is the Holodomor (literally “death by hunger”), an artificial famine that devastated Ukraine in 1932-33. The Ukrainians say it was genocide; Yushchenko even sent a draft bill to the Ukrainian parliament in December 2008 outlawing Holodomor denial. The Russians say it was a USSR-wide tragedy.

And that is what the real argument is about: how we remember the Soviet Union. Russia is the legal successor of that state - inheriting both its nuclear arsenal and its debts - and as a result there is a school of thought that says admitting responsibility for Soviet crimes would open the way for compensation claims from the victims and their families. But more importantly, Russia is also the emotional successor to the Soviet Union. And as the Duma’s reaction to the OSCE resolution showed, for many in power any attack on Soviet history is an attack on Russia itself.

The countries Russia quarrels with about history are countries it quarrels with about almost everything else. Poland’s support for the 2004 Orange revolution in Ukraine, its opposition to the Nordstream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, and offers to host an American anti-missile shield have had many Russian political analysts describing it frankly as “an enemy.” The letter Medvedev sent to Yushchenko last month (his second in less than a year), bundled up historical grievances with support for Georgia during the August War last year, plans to join NATO, the “ousting of the Russian language from public life,” and jeopardizing energy security. In light of which, Medvedev wrote, he would not be sending a new Russian ambassador to Ukraine.

So if you’ve been wondering why history has not been left to historians, the answer is simple; in this part of the world, it is not yet history.

Photo by Lord Jim

The story around the Arctic Sea is nothing but half-truth, inference and wild, wild speculation. And that’s how the Russian press like it.

The basic details will by now be familiar all over the world. The Finnish owned, Maltese-flagged ship left Finland on July 21, bound for Algeria with $1.8 million worth of sawn timber. On July 24 men posing as Swedish police officers boarded the ship from a speed boat, tied up the crew and searched the vessel. Originally it was reported that the “policemen” had left after a 12 hour search of boat, which had continued on its regular run to the Mediterranean. As we now know, that didn’t happen. But that doesn’t mean we know what did.

According to the story told at the time, the last that was heard of the ship was a routine radio contact with British coast guards as it sailed through the Straits of Dover on July 28. Its signal was then picked up west of Brest on July 29, before it disappeared. The next thing we knew was that after the vessel failed to arrive in Algeria on August 4, the Russian navy was suddenly searching the Atlantic Ocean for a modern day Flying Dutchman. On August 17, a Russian patrol vessel found and boarded the missing ship. A ransom demand for $1.5 million was received by the ship’s insurers, but no one could tell if it was genuine.

And that’s about it. Both the crew and the “hijackers” have been flown to Moscow, where the former are “helping police with their enquiries” and the latter have been arrested for kidnapping and piracy. But neither the crew nor their captors have told their story in public, and the investigating authorities have been extremely cautious in their statements. The families of the crew, who have not been allowed to leave Moscow, have complained that they are being treated as suspects rather than victims. Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee, denied that in an interview with the state-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta daily on Wednesday, but did describe the crew as “victims in need of urgent questioning,” given the mystery surrounding the affair.

Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the Russian General Staff told journalists on Tuesday that “the motivation for the capture is not very clear.” But in the Russian press, at least, the motivation is clear as day: the Arctic Sea was obviously carrying something other than timber; something valuable enough for the small team of desperate men to risk a hijack in some of the world’s busiest and best-policed waters; something the Russian government would deploy the might of its navy to recover. Something like S300 anti-aircraft missiles.

It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a “stolen nuclear weapons” theory, so the liberal weekly Novaya Gazeta at least deserves some recognition for coming up with this (half) credible back story. The S300 is, indeed, one of the few Russian weapons systems that Western militaries genuinely fear, and the Israelis and Americans have lobbied hard to prevent Russia from supplying the rockets to Iran. Last year even senior Israeli military officials were publicly worrying about it. So far, the Russians have complied - at least overtly. If Novaya Gazeta is to be believed, someone decided the deal should go ahead covertly. The Arctic Sea was loaded with S300s destined for the Islamic Republic via Algeria. Unfortunately for the smugglers, Mossad got wind of the plan and organized the hijacking in the Baltic. And, naturally, both Russian and Israeli officials have denied it.

Meanwhile the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, which has provided some of the most entertaining coverage of the affair, agreed that the Arctic Sea was carrying contraband weapons to an unknown destination, but claimed that the pirates were working for “the special services of a European Union country.” Even so, the motive remained obscure. “It is not a fact that the intercepted shipment was to be used to blackmail Russia in the international arena,” the tabloid noted sagely. “The contracting country may just have been in it for profit - knowing that the owners of the stolen goods would be unlikely to make much noise about it.”

Bastrykin has said that he does “not rule out” the secret cargo theory, but has not suggested that European intelligence agencies are in the habit of lining their own pockets with stolen contraband.

The truth, if it emerges at all, will now emerge from a Moscow court room. The legal process is already underway, and five of the eight suspects -two Latvians, two Estonians and two Russians - have already appealed their arrest for kidnapping and piracy. But there are already questions about the court’s jurisdiction over foreign nationals. And to further muddy the waters, Moskovsky Komsomolets, which claims to have tracked down the pirates’ relatives in Estonia, on Wednesday reported that at least four of the suspects are legally stateless. Expect wilder flights of the imagination as the case unfolds.

Photo by Tomás Fano

“Patriotic hacking,” the practice of taking on Russia’s enemies online, goes back at least as far as 2002, when a group of students from Tomsk attacked Kavkazcenter, a rather unpleasant website connected to the Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus.

Three years later, after the October 13, 2005 insurgent raid on the town of Nalchik, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino Balkaria, hackers again attacked the Islamist website. But this time they were more organized. A group calling itself the “Internet Underground Community vs. Terrorism” appeared, posting a recommended list of ways to attack the enemy, including distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the crude but effective method of crashing a site by bombarding it with requests for information.

The website  is now defunct, but it established a pattern for the cyber attacks that first hit Estonia in 2007 (one of the largest coordinated cyber-attacks ever) and later Georgia during last year’s war. “Internal” enemies have also been targeted, including the liberal radio stations Echo of Moscow and Radio Liberty and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Put briefly, a group of self-acknowledged hackers band together, apparently spontaneously, to put their skills to patriotic use. The IUCT described themselves as “members of the hacker community, with a wide range of specialties,” who had “long been on the wrong side of the law, but that doesn’t prevent us from being patriots, fighters for World Peace.” They use Web forums to recruit “foot soldiers” - less technically sophisticated, but eager volunteers - and issue them instructions. Because of the reliance on a non-professional volunteer army, the tactics used are generally unsophisticated, though effective. Hence the preponderance of DoS attacks.

This model allows the cyber warriors to quickly raise an army. If you want to join in the fight but don’t know how to hack or to launch a DoS attack, you can find directions posted on any number of sites. During the Russia-Georgia August war, instructions were posted on the forums Xakep and StopGeorgia, helpfully listing target sites. This is one reason to believe that the attack against Georgi was isolated - it made use of a botnet, or a network of infected computers. During the war last year, by comparison, the overload came from thousands of volunteers making multiple requests from their own machines.

Such hacking also provides deniability. Because it is so easy to launch a DoS attack, it is easy to scoff at the idea that the Russian security services are coordinating these things. Who’s to say it’s not a bunch of bored 13-year-olds? No one has ever been able to prove a link between the patriotic hackers and the state. Even the Estonian government had to admit that there was no conclusive evidence of Russian government involvement in the 2007 attacks.

Maybe it is a bunch of bored teenagers - in fact, most of the hackers probably are. But researchers who watch the forums point out that even if the cyber-armies are rag-tag, there is a clear hierarchy to their organization. The vast majority of forum members appear to wait for instructions from an informal leadership. That led Jeff Carr, an IT expert who ran an investigation into the Georgian cyber war called Project Greygoose, to identify a “three-tier approach” to the Russian model of cyber warfare. “There’s what the Kremlin wants; there is an organized structure in terms of funding and authority that extends down through the leadership of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, and there is a general population of unaffiliated hackers who will join in just for the exercise or the opportunity,” he said.

The problem with that extrapolation is that it is, well, an extrapolation. Although Nashi members have been implicated in cyber attacks in the past (a Nashi commissar in Transdniestria, a breakaway region of Moldova, claimed to have taken part in the attacks in May 2007) and it is certainly the kind of stunt Nashi or their rivals in the Young Guard might pull, the shroud of plausible deniability is impenetrable.

Georgi has written a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asking him to bring whoever has attacked his blog to justice, or “if it is not made by Russian hackers,” to “prove it.” If Medvedev wanted to, he probably could; the authorities can be fearsome in dealing with hackers who damage the Russian economy. But their attitude to the self-mobilized “patriotic” hackers is best summed up by a press release issued by the Tomsk Region directorate of the Federal Security Service when the students trying to bring down Kavkazcenter were caught in 2002. Their actions, said the FSB, did “not contradict Russian law,” but were “the expression of their political orientation, which is worthy of respect.”

That is partly simple hype. For journalists, anniversaries are life buoys to cling to when the sea of international news falls unexpectedly calm. Editors - and not just Russian editors - stockpile stories in advance like emergency rations. So barring one of Russia’s ubiquitous August disasters, this week was always going to be dominated by re-runs of war footage, animated battle maps and interviews with veterans.

The state-owned Vesti television station, for example, is meant to be a news channel, but it spent most of Friday rebroadcasting year-old footage. The same Georgian rocket launchers shelled Tskhinvali, the same Russian tanks rolled down dusty Ossetian roads, and the same South Ossetian civilians wept as their villages burned. At intervals of about 45 minutes Russian representatives in the United Nations denounced the Georgian attack and Western complicity in it.

It may have been the sheer power of repetition that made it was hard to remember that this is an anniversary, not a reenactment. The effort to give a historical twist to the coverage was only more confusing - again, the same footage, but this time in back and white with the cigarette-burn blotches and streaky distortions of a mid-twentieth century newsreel.

Whether or not that was a conscious attempt to elevate August 2008 to the same historical footing of May 1945, or just the work of a producer with a sense for the dramatic, the effort put into it and the time devoted to it points to one important fact: for mainstream Russian media organizations, and the officials who control them, the propaganda war they fought last year is not over.

Despite their decisive victory in the land war, the Russians have always been incredibly frustrated by their failure to replicate that success in the “information war” - the propaganda battle for hearts and minds. Why on earth, officials, talking heads and indignant bloggers all ask, can no one understand that Mikheil Saakashvili is a maniac, that the Georgians started it, that the 58th Army was, in President Dmitry Medvedev’s phrase, on a “Peace Enforcement” mission?

They blame all kinds of things - censorship and bias in the Western press, Georgian duplicity and manipulation - but seldom the fact that Western news agencies could only report from the Georgian side of the lines because the Russians wouldn’t let them into their zone of operations, or that Saakashvili speaks fluent English and went out of his way to make himself available to interview-hungry Western news organizations.

Part of the reason for the soreness on this point is that Russian officials felt they were playing by all the rules of modern crisis management. “We quite promptly began to supply current information on how the events were unfolding,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Vesti in an interview on July 28 that has been re-broadcast in segments ever since. “But of course, use of the world information space was beyond us - probably in the first place because we do not have the kind of capabilities available to those who decided unequivocally to take Saakashvili’s side.”

Lavrov did admit that the Russians themselves “could have been more active” in their PR efforts, and for the past week they seem to have been making up for that. Both the mainstream media and the Russian state have rolled out the same faces and tactics they fielded last year in an effort to get that point home once more.

First up was Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, who on Wednesday called a press conference to reprise his August 2008 role as spokesman for the Russian war and describe how one year ago Georgian pilots used aircraft with Russan markings to attack a column of refugees fleeing Tskhinvali. A report he had apparently held onto for the past 12 months.

Then, on Friday, the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor’s office announced it had finished collecting evidence of war crimes committed by Georgian forces in preparation for a case against the Georgian leadership at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

In between all this various junior ministers emerged to warn that Russia would not rule out sanctions against anyone who tried to re-arm Georgia, that no aggression would be tolerated, that Saakashvili’s “revanchist” tendencies should be guarded against. The Communist Party and the Liberal Democrats organized demonstrations outside the Georgian and U.S. embassies. Pro-Kremlin Youth groups held a candle lit vigil at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.

Even the more legally dubious elements of the propaganda war resurfaced. On Thursday cyber attacks aimed at silencing a Georgian blogger temporarily crippled Facebook, My Space and Live Journal. It is impossible to know whether that attack was ordered by the Russian security services - plausible deniability is one of the great attractions of denial of service attacks - but seeing what  Russia’s “patriotic hackers” have done to Russia’s enemies in the past several years, there’s not much need to.

Polls released this week confirm that the Russian public needs no convincing that last year’s intervention was justified on humanitarian grounds, so one would assume that all this is for the benefit of a foreign audience. From Moscow it is difficult to tell how much of it is getting through. But it gives one an eerie feeling that the war is being fought all over again.

The helplessness in Dmitry’s voice needed no explanation. Every summer, the Russian army drafts high school graduates. And while compulsory national service is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon, the Russian draft is uniquely dreaded. Tales of squalor and the abject brutality of officers, NCOs and older conscripts make military service not only unpopular, but something to be avoided on principle.

Dmitry himself, for example, never did his service. Nor does anyone else who can avoid it. There are various time-honored loopholes. You can get a certificate of incapacity from a doctor; you can go to university (officially this only delays your service - graduates are meant to serve once they finish their studies. In practice this rarely happens); or as a last resort, you can go into hiding.

Any combination of these tactics can keep you out of the military until the age of 27, when you are no longer eligible for the draft. Dmitry, an actor now in his late 20s, first went to university, and then managed to get a certificate of medical incapacity when he graduated. Other acquaintances  have spent years moving from place to place in a cat-and-mouse game with the army.

But this year escape has become more difficult. Faced with an ever-shorter period of service  and a shrinking pool of recruits, the military has clamped down on draft dodging.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education this year introduced a new system of standardized testing (the Unified State Exam, or EGE in the Russian acronym) for high school graduates. The idea was to provide a single, authoritative and and impartial test to replace traditional university admission exams. Instead, it sparked a row that has been going on all year.

A survey by the Levada Center earlier this year found that around forty percent of Russians thought the EGE would lead to poorer standards and would not stamp-out corruption. Students say success largely depends on luck (”one person gets an easy variant, and another gets a hard one,” said Ksenia Paskal, who sat the test this summer). Teachers say the idea is sound in principle but has been introduced too quickly and has turned the final year of school into solid exam cramming. And parents (especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg) say that other parents (especially in the regions) are buying their children unfair grades.

But high school graduates are finding that even high overall scores in the new EGE do not guarantee a place. That’s partly because the most prestigious universities, like Moscow State and St Petersburg State, have insisted on retaining their entrance exams for certain courses. But the darker suspicion is that it is because the less scrupulous have been buying off examiners. The Ministry of Education admitted last week that some  regional test administrators had “inflated the results.” The Republics of the North Caucasus have picked up a particular reputation for falsifying grades.

Despite the seeming fairness of the EGE (it is meant to be taken on equal terms by everyone who finishes school) students with disabilities are exempt. And just as forging 100 percent marks in the EGE is possible, so is forging a medical diagnosis - or so the stories go.

“My son can’t find a place because all these people from the republics [i.e. the North Caucasus] are coming along with ridiculously high grades,” said one mother whose son passed the EGE this summer. “And now suddenly every other applicant is ‘disabled,’” she added darkly. Her son has done very well, but has not been able to get even a fee-paying place at his chosen university (there is even more competition for free courses). It means he is facing the prospect of military service, and the shock in his mother’s voice was palpable.

That shock underlines a basic truth about conscription in Russia. The law says that all men must serve, but the reality is that legal loopholes like university, and illegal ones like bribes and nepotism, skew the draft heavily in favor of the middle class - to the point where parents from a certain background never dream that their sons will have to serve. With the army determined to draft some 700,000 boys in 2009, many more may have to face that unpleasant reality this year.