Forget a war victory over Georgia or the reset with the Obama administration. The greatest foreign policy coup Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has pulled off in his nearly three years in power has been the rapprochement between Russia and… California.

For the Kremlin’s closest ally abroad is neither Obama nor Hugo Chavez, but Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dima made friends with Arnie back in June, when he stopped by California looking for tips on his pet project – recreating the Silicon Valley outside Moscow at a place called Skolkovo. Now Schwarzenegger is in Moscow for a return visit to lecture about the importance of Russian-American business ties and endure the Russian president’s Terminator II impressions.

He seems to be enjoying the trip. Since he arrived this afternoon the intrepid governor has been hanging out with marines at the U.S. Embassy, delivered an address at the ambassador’s residence and taken a ride on the Moscow metro.

How do I know all this? Because, true to Medvedev’s hi-tech, forward looking, silicon chipped vision of Russia’s future, Arnie put it all on Twitter. “People in Moscow apparently love their public transit,” he tweeted with a picture of himself grinning in a crowded carriage. That’s right, Arnie, we do – and all  the stations are mobile enabled, meaning you can tweet from underground. Tech or what?

All this is the product of a new Russian foreign policy announced back in May via a document leaked to Russian Newsweek. From now on, the policy document said, Russia would be unashamedly pragmatic – and cooperative – in pursuing common interests with its Western partners.

So it’s a deal. California bottles and exports to Russia the entrepreneurial, innovative spirit, and Moscow can show L.A. and San Francisco how to run a transport system that is nothing less than a cathedral to the Soviet dream. Everyone’s a winner.

And if that doesn’t work out, maybe they can exchange man power. Half of Silicon Valley was and is run by Russian immigrants and their children, after all; now Medvedev is slashing immigration red tape for foreign managers in a bid to lure talent the other way.

Speaking of which, Moscow needs a new mayor, and Arnie’s second and final term as governor of California ends in January.

Common interest, or what?

And he’s gone.

The inevitable has happened, rather more dramatically than I expected. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has gone but not with a sensible resignation and a quiet retirement in a nice post. Oh no. The Kremlin made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. And he refused it.

“I’m not going to resign of my own accord,” he told reporters yesterday morning.

“Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov is dismissed from the post of Mayor in connection with the loss of confidence of the President of the Russian Federation,” replied President Dmitry Medvedev in a decree he signed 24 hours later.

That was around 8 am Moscow time. Since then, Luzhkov has stormed out of United Russia, the ruling party which he co-founded, announced he will remain in politics, and has vowed to fight for a return to gubernatorial elections.

That’s big, and it’s not the outcome Medvedev and Putin wanted. Opinion polls (and that tried and tested gauge of public opinion, taxi driver chatter), show Luzhkov has largely lost the confidence of the electorate that he used to command. But he still won three elections before gubernatorial elections were abolished in 2004. And while not massively popular anymore, he’s not really reviled either – Muscovites are more ambivalent about him than hostile. And when the Kremlin came after him, there seemed to be a reservoir of residual sympathy he could still tap in to – a short notice poll by the Echo of Moscow radio station Monday found some 60 percent of Muscovites backed his decision not to resign.

This means two things. Since Luzhkov has vowed not to bow out of politics, we can expect a new and serious bruiser on the political scene taking on the Kremlin – if he is not destroyed, Mikhail Khodorkovsky-like, by criminal investigations into his murky financial arrangements. He’s not likely to be welcomed by the liberal opposition, for whom he has long been an enemy (though there has been a tangible softening of feeling in those quarters since the Kremlin turned on him), and he’d probably never unseat Medvedev or Putin. But he does have the potential to become a significant new force in the featureless landscape of contemporary Russian politics. That’s something to watch, especially in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.

Secondly, he has said that he’ll fight for the reinstatement of elections, apparently because he thinks he could win them. I’m not so sure of that – my personal feeling is Muscovites are weary of him, and his impressive approval ratings have at least been in part due to the lack of media coverage for any potential challenger. But judging simply from Internet chatter and my own acquaintances, they do think that if he is to be replaced, they should damned well be the ones doing it. I’m not saying anyone’s going to be lying down in front of tanks to demand the right to vote for their mayor – but there’s definitely a certain sentiment in the air.

And that is why today was not an ordinary day in Russia.

Like most Muscovites – and I use the term advisedly, for since only third generation dwellers of the Russian capital can claim the title neither I nor our soon to be former mayor qualify – I was pretty appalled at Yuri Luzhkov’s washing his hands of the smog crisis this summer. His defenders might be right that there was little he could have done to stem the fires causing it, but his departure on holiday at a time when the rest of us were choking was not, shall we say, politic. Even Stalin is meant to have stayed in Moscow as the Germans closed in, and they got as far as the IKEA store in Khimki. Luzhkov took a holiday in Austria when the flames were still a hundred kilometers off. Not a great image, that.

But public opinion has nothing to do with Luzhkov’s imminent departure. In fact, the first inkling ordinary Muscovites had of their mayor’s impending downfall was a documentary aired on the federally controlled NTV television channel last Friday night, which belatedly exposed all the corruption, callousness and eccentricities that Moscow’s taxi drivers have been chatting to their passengers about for years.

The smear campaign continued as other state owned channels tried to pretend they had only just noticed that the mayor is corrupt, until the attacks reached a hysterical fever pitch on Saturday night with a character assassination of Luzhkov’s wife (and Russia’s richest woman) Elena Baturina. It doesn’t take much to assassinate Baturina – she’s not the most photogenic lass, and she’s already universally maligned for pocketing billions through state contracts that her husband pushed her way. But the producers at NTV went one better: they found a gibbering alcoholic who claimed – in barely comprehensible sentences slurred between shots of brandy – to have been her first love in school.

Distasteful is not the word. The entire spectacle, in fact, has been simultaneously fascinating and revolting.

Fascinating because, as Russian television stations are not staffed by suicides, they don’t do hatchet jobs on singularly powerful members of the ruling elite just because they feel like it. So anyone who so much as watched the trailer for the NTV documentary knew immediately that they were witnessing political warfare in progress, a spectacle as gratifying in its savagery as in its novelty: the Kremlin had taken its quarrel with City Hall outside. Now it was Medvedev and Luzhkov in their shirtsleeves, slugging it out in a pub car park with their women screaming “Leeeve it, Yuri, he ain’t worth it!” Or at least as close as we’ll ever get to that.

Revolting because, like most pub fights, it comes down to who has the most mates and the dirtiest moves. The fight was never fair – the publicity campaign employed a combination of stale city gossip and gratuitous yellow “journalism,” and wasn’t even a bid to win over public opinion (this may be wrong, but it is quite legal – the mayor of Moscow counts as a regional governor, and regional governors are appointed by the president, not elected). It was more of an announcement that the mayor’s fate had been decided, an assertion of Medvedev’s muscle. Kremlin sources are already briefing journalists that Luzhkov is going. All he has been left with, apparently, is the choice of deciding the nature of his departure.

While he thinks it through, he has gone back to Austria, with his wife, to celebrate his 74th birthday. Editors are readying political obituaries and pundits are trying to work out what unknown bureaucrat the Kremlin will deem harmless enough to replace him. No one, of course, has bothered to ask the ten million odd people he will govern what they think.

Not that anyone’s going to miss him much. But it leaves Muscovites – and even, I tentatively claim, we transient visitors whose grandparents were not born in the city – with a conundrum. Luzhkov’s name has been synonymous with Moscow since 1992, running it through a political machine that I have it on fairly good authority even the Orthodox Church regards as a mafia, and was impenetrable to outside (read Kremlin) interference. He infamously (well, according to NTV) spent more on his saving his bees than on helping the disabled during this summer’s fires; but he has also made a crucial difference to Moscow’s elderly by paying them several thousand more rubles a month on top of their paltry federal pensions. He rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, destroyed by the Bolsheviks; but cheerfully demolishes old Moscow to make way for (often his wife’s) sky scrapers. For good and ill, Luzhkov made hectic, glorious, menacing, overpriced, post-Soviet Moscow what it is.

Things just aren’t going to be the same without him.

And the mayor of Moscow, of course, is on holiday.

“What problems? Have we got an emergency situation in Moscow, a crisis situation, what’s the problem in Moscow?” Yuri Luzhkov told Life News when he was challenged about it. “It is Moscow’s problem? Is the crisis in Moscow?”

Well, mayor Luzhkov, I personally feel like I’ve burnt through several decks of cigarettes, my gut is unsettled and my eyes are burning through the side of my head. Everyone I know is complaining of the same symptoms. The streets are crammed with a dense, gray-white smog, and you can’t walk for more than a couple of minutes without feeling nauseous. Getting on the metro is like descending into Hell – at some stations it’s impossible to see the bottom of escalators from the top. On the major roads traffic jams trail off into a hazy invisibility. And in case it slipped your notice, it was 36 Celsius today, and I can’t remember when the mercury last dropped into the 20s.

But don’t take my word for it, ask Moscow’s morgue workers, who told the Life.ru news site that they’ve seen “as many bodies today as we normally get in a week.”

No comment from the authorities on that one just yet.

“It’s got absurd,” said another health worker. “People close all the windows and doors in their apartments, and air cannot circulate at all. Their health suffers, but the only thing to do is drink more fluid and if possible include a fan.”

The key phrase there is “if possible.” Moscow’s shops ran out of electric fans about a month ago. A friend of mine bought one of the last ones. It cost her 100 dollars. The waiting list for AC installation runs until October.

There’s no escape. Office workers have been issued with gauze face masks and sent home en masse, but at my work the supposedly skeleton staff who stayed on were augmented by those whose apartments are even more over heated, hazy, and nausea-inducing than the office. The smoke may seem to seep through the leaky, Soviet-built concrete walls, but at least there is air conditioning, free face masks and, courtesy of the management, a “breathing room” – where you can put on a gas mask for a few minutes when breathing the unfiltered smog gets too much.

But Moscow is only the frying pan. A couple of hundred kilometers east and south, as far is Mayor Luzhkov is concerned, is the “problem” – the fire itself, thousands of homeless refugees and whole villages burnt to the ground. If here it’s unpleasant, out there the situation is by all accounts simply horrific.

The only option is to flee further afield, and Muscovites are following their mayor’s lead with a vengeance. Long distance trains headed west – anywhere to the west – are completely booked to bursting. The roads to the airports are crammed. Flights are being rescheduled because of poor visibility.

Me? I’m off to the Pacific coast. In Vladivostok, they say, it’s 25 degrees and sunny.

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

Former Russian chief-spook Nikolai Kovalyov complains that the FBI’s case against the 11 alleged Russian deep-cover spies arrested across the United States on Sunday and Monday has all the elements of a “bad spy novel.” Personally, I think it makes a cracking read.

Lovers of the great John Le Carre will note with satisfaction that agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, really do call their headquarters “Moscow Center,” that they like dead letter drops and use brush passes. Admirers of the late, great Graham Greene will appreciate the FBI’s account of the hapless spies’ genius, half-panicked response to a demand from a dissatisfied Center (how I love writing that) that agents start citing sources for the information they gather – “just put down any politician from here!”

Those who prefer the eroticism and glamor of Ian Fleming get Anna Chapman, the “femme fatale” “spy beauty” who “drank with billionaires” and who The Sun, lost in an orgy of its signature bawdiness, reported was born in the small Russian town of Odnoklassniki – a Russian social networking site – before realizing the mistake and calling her real home town of Volgograd a “remote backwater.” A little harsh for a city of over one million.

Then there are the dozen and a half ways of accounting for the alleged spies’ sudden arrest, its timing, and the global reaction. It’s obvious to everyone in Russia, for example, that it was the work of rogue republican elements in the FBI wanting to undermine Obama and his “reset” with Russia. Equally clever Westerners have got it into their heads that, on the contrary, it’s actually a cunning ploy to strengthen the hand of Obama’s new best friend President Dmitry Medevedev against his secret-service connected mentor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (who, as if you need telling, served in the KGB and stuffed his government with fellow ex-spies).

Neither plot has the subtlety of Le Carre or Green, I grant you, or even the grandiose imaginings of Fleming, but in the right hands I reckon either version could make for a pretty enjoyable airport paperback.

Which, if you actually care about what all this means, is about all these theories are good for. First of all because anyone who claims to able to discern anything at all about the incredibly opaque relationship between Putin and Medvedev is either deluded, or a liar, or exceptionally handy with tea leaves and a crystal ball. And secondly because the reactions of both regimes have actually been extremely conciliatory. The State Department’s chief Russia hand told reporters “we’re not going to forgo the opportunity to pursue our common interests because there are things we disagreed on,” and Putin, the ultimate target of this cunning White House plot, hopes “the positive developments that have accumulated recently will not be damaged.” At least, that’s what he told Bill Clinton.

The real story, if you’re wondering, is how incredibly restrained everyone has been. There have been no threats of retaliation from the Russians and no signs of retribution – like the ritual expulsion of diplomats – from the Americans. Putin has for once bitten his usually caustic tongue. It’s almost enough to make you believe that the “reset” of relations between Moscow and Washington announced with much fan fare over a year ago really is working.

If that’s not exciting enough for you, you can carry on leering at Anna Chapman’s breasts (today she finally managed to reset her Facebook privacy settings, after the proverbial horse had well and truly bolted). Or settle down in front of a warm fire to read the 37 page complaint compiled by the FBI. It’s a bit short for a novel – but I guarantee you’ll enjoy the read.

To say details are still hazy would be an understatement. So far most of the first hand accounts seem to have come from wire correspondents, but by far the best coverage I can find is from Neweurasia.net, a commendable citizen journalism site with links to the equally commendable Demotix.

Kyrgyz Internet servers are said to have been shut down at around 8 AM local time yesterday, and Internet access problems have contributed to a fog of contradictory rumors – the Daily Telegraph was just one of many to earlier report the untimely demise of the Kyrgyz interior minister, but a source in the capital Bishkek this evening told me that that he had only been “horribly beaten” and was currently in the care of a local human rights organization.

Whatever the truth, by late Wednesday it was looking increasingly likely that Bakiyev’s government had effectively lost power. A Kyrgyz journalist who spent most to the day on the streets of Bishkek told me that the main television channels appear to be in opposition control, and that opposition leaders have begun to set up “proto-ministries” while Bakiyev and his allies have effectively “disappeared.” By late Wednesday the opposition had claimed de facto control of the country.

Few definite things can be said at this stage, except Bakiyev’s willingness to risk bloodshed is in stark contrast to the relatively peaceful 2005 Tulip Revolution that overthrew his predecessor, Askar Akayev. Some 17 people have been confirmed killed by the Kyrgyz ministry of health, but reports elsewhere put the death toll as high as 70. In an interesting footnote Akayev himself has taken to opportunity to turn pundit, turning up on the Echo of Moscow radio station and the BBC Russian service to call on Bakiyev to resign peacefully.

It will take at least another 24 hours for the fog to clear. For now, I refer you to this background piece on Bakiyev’s dubious reelection last summer, and Twitter, which is providing some of the best real time information (as well as the most misleading rumors). #freekg is the main tag.

In Moscow a couple of hundred people gathered on Pushkin Square for a meeting that I listened to on the Echo of Moscow radio station. That may sound lazy – I live about twenty minutes walk from Pushkin Square, and I could easily have trotted down there, despite the rain. But these kinds of protests are not uncommon in Moscow, and they tend to unfold in a depressingly predictable manner – the same few hundred (at most) protesters who usually show up gather at some Moscow land mark; they are surrounded by twice that number of police backed by a menacing phalanx of twelve-feet-high paddy wagons; several tens of people are arrested, slung in the back of said trucks and carted down to the station to be fined for taking part in an unauthorized protest. Echo, as usual, had a correspondent down there giving live updates of the protest’s inevitable progress and demise via his mobile phone. I decided I wouldn’t be missing a scoop if I sat this one out.

Besides, I wanted to stick by my radio because something much more interesting was happening in Kaliningrad, the small slice of Russia that by an accident of history lies wedged, half forgotten, on the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland (to my great irritation I had been there just a week earlier to interview local opposition figures, but work had obliged me to return before the big protest scheduled for the 20th). While everywhere else opposition leaders struggled to get half a hundred onto the streets, there about 3000 people showed up to make demand democracy and make unflattering references to their governor’s perma-tan despite opposition leaders telling them to stay at home.

But Kaliningrad was always going to be the show-piece event of Saturday’s protests. In January an alliance of activists there had brought 10,000 people onto the streets, and before they called it off – ostensibly over fears of violence – the leaders of the movement had been saying they could bring 30,000 out on Saturday. As it was, even the self-organized protesters who ignored their leaders amounted to the biggest of any of the actions on Saturday.

There are those, in Kaliningrad and elsewhere, who like to say that by the end of the year there will be protests like this across the country. Without trying to tempt fate, they’re probably wrong. Kaliningrad is special – it’s people are more likely to have traveled to Poland or Germany than to Moscow, and even the local authority figures like to brag about their comparatively “open” and “democratic” mentality in contrast to the rest of the country (and it is worth noting that the  local police have met the protests with a restraint entirely alien to their colleagues in Moscow). They had also, thanks to an import-based economic boom, become accustomed to some of the highest living standards outside of Moscow. With the onset of the financial crisis the local economy has fallen further and faster than anywhere else in the country. If this is a revolution, it’s likely to be a local one.

That said, one would not want to down play the level of discontent in the country. In Kaliningrad, I interviewed opposition leader Konstantin Doroshok alongside a journalist from the bizarre Russian internet portal Pravda.ru, who in appropriate style spent the entire interview accusing Doroshok of being unpatriotic, irresponsible, and jeopardizing his credibility by associating with well-known CIA stooges (as he insisted liberal opposition figures like Gary Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov are – a widespread, and not a little anti-Semitic, conspiracy theory pushed on the Russian Internet). Afterward, I asked him whether he really believed those accusations. “Of course, everybody knows the opposition is an American front,” he said, predictably if bizarrely. More surprisingly, he added, “problem is, everyone also hates [ruling party] United Russia.”

Photo by World Economic Forum

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.