Speculation swirls around today’s sudden resignation of Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s chief ideologue who had thought up “sovereign democracy” and invented the Nashi youth groups. He name-dropped Lacan and Derrida and even allegedly wrote a novel called Almost Zero. And now he might have become just that.

Did he jump, or was he pushed? What role was played by the government’s corruption probe into Skolkovo, the innovation hub with which he was associated? And what does all this mean for the future of prime minister Medvedev, in whose camp he supposedly belonged? These are all interesting questions, the answers to which may (or may not) emerge in the coming days and weeks. Certainly, there will be a plethora of theories to discuss at the pub.

But what might Surkov’s departure tell us about the direction of Putin’s latest presidential term?

In what remains the most astute rumination on the man, Peter Pomerantsev described Surkov’s “mixture of charm, aggression and bribery” as the key traits that allowed him to shape “not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.”

Surkov’s own slippery subtlety became the template for building a society that was both liberal and repressive, that allowed people to become wealthy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams but where the sanctity of private property, as Khodorkovsky discovered too late, remained ultimately contingent on a tsar’s political whim.

The crux of Surkov’s system was a kind of passive repression, which used techniques of divide and conquer, disorientation, political confusion, arms-reach intimidation and material bribery to leave people too dazed, dazzled and distracted to successfully mobilize.

Surkov went so far as to praise members of the opposition.  Even the populist, pro-regime Komsomolskaya Pravda acknowledged today that Surkov is anything but a “silovik” type hard man.

He “disliked primitive decision-making and preferred not to bluntly push,” write Alexanders Grishin and Gamov in their appraisal of his resignation, “but rather to achieve his aims through more complex sequences of moves.”

This strikes me as the fundamental way in which he has become obsolete: Putin seems to have decided that he has no more need for an ideology. His recent flagrant show trials of Pussy Riot and now Alexey Navalny demonstrate an unprecedented disregard even for the trappings of legitimacy with which to cloak pure power.

That’s not to discount the possibility of his eventual return. After all, his political death has been announced prematurely before.

It’s no coincidence that the same day as he stepped down, the Christian Science Monitor reported that more than 30 NGOs have now been ordered to declare themselves “foreign agents,” with more than 500 others being investigated across the country.

Besides such iron-fist policies, Surkov’s trademark tactics of infiltration, cooptation and sophisticated sabotage suddenly appear not just anachronistic, but positively quaint.

As a Russian who first came to America as a small child and later spent his university years in Cambridge, Mass., I felt particularly gripped by the ongoing Boston bomber saga. There remain so many questions about why these two brothers, to whom the U.S. had given shelter, passports, schooling and acceptance, turned so violently and tragically against their adoptive land.

But one additional question that I’ve been puzzling over has been: Who let them into the U.S. in the first place, and on what merit?

At the risk of sounding like a ranting Tea Party activist, I believe that the Tsarnaev tragedy should also be seen as an extreme consequence of America’s deeply hypocritical, two-tiered immigration system.

Maybe I’m just bitter. It took me a year of trauma to be allowed to come to study in the U.S. Despite the fact that I had a full scholarship to a major university, had lived in the U.S. when my father had studied there before and never overstayed a visa, and had done everything by the book, I was denied entry twice, forced to defer college and apply again the following year. The nearest thing to an explanation I’d ever received that that it all happened “right after September 11.” Except it was a full year later, and Russia had nothing even remotely to do with the attacks. If anything, my country’s leadership fully shared the Bush administration’s less-than-cuddly approach to the Muslim world.

And yet we are now learning that the Tsarnaev brothers received asylum in the U.S. in 2002, asylum from a (then more or less) democratic country! Sure, they hailed from a war torn region, but this was almost 10 years after the outbreak of the Chechen war, and they never even lived in Chechnya!

For far too long, the U.S. authorities have been using all their resources to interrogate, abuse, discourage and thwart legitimate visa applicants while credulously treating self-proclaimed asylum seekers with kid gloves, so long as they came from countries with which America was not getting along. This may have led them to miss a series of red-flags concerning the Tsarnaevs, which would likely not have happened had they been in the U.S. on visas or as illegal immigrants.

Historically, it was Russian Jews who were the main beneficiaries of this largesse. Even during the 1970s, it was highly debatable whether all the Jews who claimed asylum to the U.S. were really victims of special discrimination or simply ordinarily oppressed Soviets looking for a better life in a richer country. And who can blame them — who wouldn’t want to swap a dreary, cold, authoritarian country where a doctor makes less than a taxi driver in America, where the same doctor can be a millionaire? The fact is that while these disproportionately highly educated emigrants were actively encouraged to come to the states with no questions asked; while some were certainly victims of discrimination, others who are now living in the U.S. still joke about all the fibs they told the asylum officers. I have personally met several Russian speakers at college who told me that they emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1990s, even the early 2000s, on asylum visas, claiming persecution, a full decade after Gorbachev lifted all restrictions on Jewish emigration. Over time, as relations with Putin’s Russia deteriorated, other groups have been added to the list of asylum candidates, and the cycle continues.

There’s an entire novel written about this by one of Russia’s most acclaimed novelists. The main character in Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an interpreter who translates for Russian asylum seekers in Switzerland. Many, in fact, are from Chechnya.  And many of their stories are made up. At one point, an asylum seeker is told: “According to our instructions, improbability in statements is grounds for affixing this very stamp. So you’ll have to come up with a better legend for yourself and not forget what is most important: the minor details, the trivia.”

Of course, I’m not suggesting that all Jewish and Chechen asylum seekers are inherently untrustworthy (and I also realize how much this disclaimer sounds like the famous “I’m not a racist, but…”).  Many are, of course, victims of the enduring anti-Semitism and anti-Caucasian discrimination that continues to plague Russia. But there exists a perverse incentive to exploit the loopholes, and it can have security implications.

Imagine: You live in a poor, dirty, corrupt, dangerous and oppressive country with few opportunities for personal advancement. If, looking to make a new life and make some money for your family, you hop on a boat, or fly with a tourist visa and try to avoid going back home, or stow yourself away on a plane, or hide under a truck as it crosses the U.S. border, and you are caught, you will be immediately deported. This is the fate of most would-be immigrants from poor countries, like Mexico, or regions such as Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But, if you live in a poor, dirty, corrupt, dangerous and oppressive country with few opportunities for personal advancement, and want to make a new life and some money for your family, and your country is either an enemy of the U.S., such as Cuba or Iran, or you are part of an ethnic group that is viewed in the U.S. as a “David” oppressed by a Russian “goliath,” then you can walk in on the red carpet.

You’d be stupid not to make sure you get put in the second group, by hook or by crook.

Earlier this year, CNN reported on the trend for Mexican would-be immigrants to pretend to be Cuban in order to be allowed into the U.S. One man provided fake Cuban birth certificates and, like the character in Shishkin’s novel, instructed his clients how to correctly answer the authorities’ questions:

In one conversation with a confidential informant recorded by investigators, Morejon demanded thousands of dollars in payment for Cuban birth certificates and provided advice about how to answer questions from immigration authorities who might ask why he has a Mexican accent.

“‘Uh, because I work with a lot of Mexicans and I caught it (the accent) …’” period,” Morejon said, according to a transcript of the conversation filed in federal court. “You are Cuban … from today on … 3:25 in the afternoon you are entering the United States and you are Cuban.”

The fact is that the asylum seekers from Cuba, or the Chechen or Jewish ones from Russia, and the illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere are all oppressed by the same things — lack of money, lack of potential, and therefore, lack of freedom — just as they all want the same thing: a better, safer, more successful life.

But the U.S.’s ideologically-induced blindness to this fact continues to think of all the first category asylum seekers as inherently good and trustworthy, and to view the second category of immigrants as inherently threatening, dangerous and dishonest. This way of thinking discriminates against hard-working, would-be immigrants who happen to not be from, say, Cuba, but still want to contribute to the U.S. economy, and feed their families or attend its universities. It also makes it easy for “bad guys” to take advantage of this situation.

As a result, we see people like Tamerlane Tsarnaev escaping without so much as a slap on the wrist things that would have easily seen other kinds of immigrants or visa holders deported. As the New York Times reports:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s record also showed that he had been involved in an episode of domestic violence in 2009. His father, Anzor, said in an interview on Friday in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives, that Tamerlan had an argument with a girlfriend and that he “hit her lightly.”

Under immigration law, certain domestic violence offenses can disqualify an immigrant from becoming an American citizen, and perhaps expose him to deportation. But the Homeland Security review found that while Mr. Tsarnaev was arrested, he was not convicted in the episode. The law requires a serious criminal conviction in a domestic violence case for officials to initiate deportation, federal officials said.

In the wake of the Boston events, the U.S. has to start looking at reforming its irrational immigration and asylum systems as a national security priority.

He was the original oligarch: a talented mathematician who had used his smarts and ruthlessness to amass an enormous fortune in the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Eventually, he became one of Russia’s most powerful men, a courtier to former president Boris Yeltsin.

Boris Berezovsky went on to survive assassination attempts and even the wrath of Vladimir Putin, as a result of which he has lived in self-imposed exile for the last 13 years.

But ironically, unlike his protege Alexander Litvinenko who had succumbed to mysterious Polonium poisoning, the Putin regime against which Berezovsky has so forcefully crusaded does not seem to have played any part in his demise.

It came, instead, at the hand of the new generation of oligarch: early reports suggest that Berezovsky took his own life shortly after the failed lawsuit against pro-Putin billionaire Roman Abramovich had left him ruined and broken.

His time may have long gone. But, as the headline on the front page of Russia’s Gazeta.ru exclaims: “Berezovsky has taken many secrets to the grave.”

They said it couldn’t be done. But at last, the Kremlin and some of its fiercest liberal critics have found themselves on the same team. The fact that the issue in question is their opposition to the proposed Cypriot bank levies says as much about the regime as the opposition.

Try to guess who said the following:

Such “confiscation of someone else’s money…unfortunately, was well known and familiar in the Soviet period”.

And this?

“European civilisation, which was once based on the sanctity of private property, has now become based on socialism. And socialism always ends in confiscations”.

The first was Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. The second was the histrionically anti-Kremlin Yulia Latynina, writing in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Of course, a crackdown on Cypriot bank accounts could cause a shock for the Russian economy. After all, according to Moody’s estimates:

• Russian banks’ cross-board loans to Cypriot-based Russian companies totaled $30-40 billion at the end of 2012 – that is equal to 15-20 percent of Russian banks’ capital base in Russia, and 5-6 percent of their gross corporate loans.

• Russian corporate deposits in Cyprus totaled an estimated $19 billion at the end of August – an amount that is equal to 7 percent of all the corporate deposits in Russia, excluding current accounts.

And there are certainly many sound moral reasons to oppose Cypriot plans for a punitive tithe on banking deposits, as well as creative ideas for a political response from the Kremlin.

Yet the fury of Russia’s elites, whether in government or in the opposition, to the proposed move seems disproportionate and out of step with public opinion. Even among the relatively educated and affluent readers of Novaya Gazeta, the largest response to a poll asking whether the tax is fair was a resounding 41 percent that agreed with the statement “Serves them right. Honest people don’t keep their money in Cyprus”.

What’s happening in Cyprus doesn’t concern the average Russian, even the average Russian liberal, who can only dream of having the $100,000 required to get taxed at 9 percent, let alone of opening an offshore account to keep it in. Yet for many in both the government and the opposition, it hits close to home. After all, there are just as many millionaires in ranks of the opposition — Nemtsov, Sobchak, Lebedev, etc. —  as there are in the United Russia party they criticize. Maybe some of them have even had heated political debates about Russian democracy while queuing to check their bank accounts in Nicosia. In recent years, the ferocity of the struggle between the Kremlin and its establishment critics has obscured the fact that both are privileged, unrepresentative, pro-capitalist elites.

More than anything, the reactions to this episode remind us that in many ways, the Russian government and the mainstream opposition are two sides of the same coin: They may be divided on many things but see eye to eye on the fundamentals.

Today is 60 years since the death of Joseph Stalin. How do we know this? Well, it’s on the front page of the BBC, there’s an article in the Telegraph, Reuters, the Atlantic and pretty much everywhere else. Except Russia itself, that is, where the event hardly attracted any attention whatsoever.

It was not on the front page of any of the major papers, from the populist tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda to the liberal Gazeta.ru to the opposition Novaya Gazeta. At best, it was a story tucked away in the margins, overshadowed by the arrests in the Bolshoi acid scandal and Russia’s tougher stance on North Korea.

Many of the stories in the western press follow this familiar template: Stalin continues to live on in Russia, his legacy egged on by the authoritarian Putin.

A representative passage from Reuters:

“Support for Stalin has risen in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gutted the social safety net, damaged national pride and left many Russians longing for the perceived order and stability of the Communist era.”

Most “commemorative” articles are lazy journalism: just recycle old material from previous anniversaries, and you’re golden. But the latest crop of Stalin pieces is particularly bad.

Perhaps out of wishful thinking or the belief held by many casual observers of Russia that Putin’s government must obviously go hand in hand with an insidious Stalinism, most of these articles ignored an interesting development: Support for Stalin may have risen since 1991, but it has actually fallen during Putin’s reign.

According to yesterday’s poll by the Levada Centre, the fraction of people who believed that Stalin was “undoubtedly positive” halved from 18 percent in 2003 to nine percent today. Half of Russians continue to harbor more or less positive attitudes to Stalin, but the cooling of the love is noteworthy.

What’s more, the poll also contradicts another widespread notion: That seemingly pro-Stalin stunts by the government, such as the plan to rename Volgograd back to Stalingrad, have served to rehabilitate the dictator. Nearly half of respondents called the renaming an attempt to whitewash Stalin’s repressions and detract the public from corruption scandals and other pressing concerns.

But mostly, Stalin these days elicits a shrug. Young Russians I have spoken to just don’t care about him; for them, the entire USSR belongs to some prehistoric period. As a Georgian woman was quoted in the Stalinist-trawling BBC article as saying:

“Young people don’t like Stalin, of course [because] our young people are not interested in history.”

Perhaps the only people clinging to Stalin’s legacy are Western journalists, devoted to the idea that the mustachioed murderer’s ghost still haunts Putin’s Russia when in fact, he’s long become irrelevant.

Is this the face of Russia’s next president?

According to a report quoted in today’s Moscow Times, Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin has become the favorite to succeed Putin in 2018.

Sobyanin?

“Sobyanin is a figure who could please both the main tycoons in the energy industry and those who took part in dividing the spoils inherited from [former Mayor Yury] Luzhkov’s Moscow,” Yevgeny Minchenko, head of Minchenko Consulting Group and lead author of the report, said by phone. “In the eyes of the elites, Sobyanin has an established, positive track record. They see him as a mediator who can safeguard their interests.”

Apart from Sobyanin’s relative international obscurity, this conclusion is not a surprise. As Putin’s former chief of staff before being appointed mayor of Moscow, the Siberian native and career apparatchik is known for his longstanding loyalty to the president.

But there is one very interesting aspect to the fact that Sobyanin’s name is being thrown around as a possible successor to Putin. Consider this article in the Economist:

The choice of Sergei Sobyanin…is not a surprise [and] fits the logic of Russia’s main political trends. Putin…has every reason to be confident in Mr Sobyanin’s personal loyalty. The two men have history. In 2005 Mr Putin made Mr Sobyanin, then the governor of the oil-rich Tyumen province, the chief of his presidential administration. When Mr Putin became prime minister in 2008, Mr Sobyanin followed him and was made his deputy. Back in 2000, when Mr Putin became president, Mr Sobyanin, as a member of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, had helped him to get rid of Yury Skuratov, Russia’s prosecutor-general. In 2004 Mr Sobyanin was among the first regional governors to support Mr Putin’s abolition of regional elections.

Mr Sobyanin, a tight-lipped bureaucrat rather than a public politician, is a man of the Putin era. He has a reputation for being an efficient manager and… is not entangled in corruption scandals or controversies. In fact, very few stories about Mr Sobyanin exist at all. He is said to have tightly controlled the media as a regional governor, gave almost no interviews, and even photographs are hard to come by. Sobyanin’s name is…closely associated with the natural-resource sector. As the governor of Tyumen he worked closely with the country’s largest oil companies, including TNK-BP and Lukoil. He even persuaded some of them to register their headquarters there and pay taxes into the local budget, which made Tyumen one of Russia’s wealthiest regions.

Mr Sobyanin may well be considered for prime minister. 

Nothing sensational — that is, until you consider that this article was written not this week, but in 2010! The very fact that the observations above are still valid today, two years and all those anti-government protests later, is that Putin’s power and ability to set the political agenda have remained largely unchanged. The only prediction that the Economist appeared to have got wrong is that Medvedev somehow survived.

But wait, what’s that?

“According to Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former Kremlin insider, Sobyanin could be made prime minister as soon as the fall if Putin decides on a major reshuffle of Medvedev’s Cabinet.”

This weekend the Russian Orthodox Church held its Bishops Council at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

In his speech to the assembly, president Putin said that, of course, Russia is not a theocracy but:

“We are a secular state of course, and cannot allow state life and church life to merge” he continued, “but at the same time, we must avoid too, a vulgar and primitive interpretation of what being secular means.

“Traditional values, believers’ religious feelings, and people’s rights, freedoms, and dignity must all be protected by both the power of public opinion and the power of the law,” Putin said.

He also said that the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religions of Russia must be involved in “important areas such as supporting families and mothers, raising and educating children, youth policy, resolving the many social problems we still face, and strengthening patriotic spirit in the Armed Forces.”

The social conservatism inherent in having the Church play a greater role in family life (with “fathers” notably absent from the equation), schooling and, somewhat counter-intuitively perhaps, the war machine, is nothing new. But, while the Russian state has actively promoted the Church since the early Yeltsin years, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the statement was the legal element.

Putin’s statement confirmed that some of the most bizarre parts of the prosecution’s case against members of Pussy Riot — namely that their actions contravened medieval church law — may not have been the surreal aberration they seemed at the time.

In fact, the following day, Patriarch Kirill also spoke in favor of giving legal weight to religious doctrines.

Russian news sources reported that Kirill “backed the idea of criminal prosecution for blasphemy similar the Pussy Riot’s punk performance in Christ the Savior Cathedral”; he was quoted as saying that

“The law must protect not only symbols of secular importance, but also objects with sacred meaning for the believers and guard their religious feelings from insults.”

The Russian Orthodox Church has been in the news these days. Last weekend, the Financial Times published a long profile of Father Tikhon Shevkunov, who is said to be Putin’s personal confessor; while the latest issue of the Economist reviews a new history of religion after the fall of communism.

The FT noted the paradox that, while “only a small minority of Russians attend church regularly” the ROC has become one of  the country’s most trusted institutions. Geraldine Fegan, author of the book reviewed in the Economist, was quoted as saying that “Putin wants to capitalise on Orthodoxy’s image of permanence, even as his own legitimacy crumbles.”

Certainly, there is an intimate relationship between the church, the Kremlin and big money. After all, Yeltsin financed the church, in part by granting it the right to import and sell tax free cigarettes) while the most avid sponsors of new houses of worship over the past 20 years have been oligarchs. And many senior members of the church hierarchy have themselves become quasi-oligarchs, driving expensive supercars, wearing Swiss watches and living in multimillion dollar apartments. Today, it has become very fashionable among the megarich to have their own personal confessors — the latest badge of elite status.

However, while we know that the church, state and the army have refashioned the old tsarist three-legged stool, it is much harder to see which of them wields the most power in the equation.

In short, is Putin using the church, or is the church using Putin?

As the embrace between them becomes ever closer, the key power struggle to come may no longer be between the Kremlin and the liberals, but rather Putin and his Patriarchate.

No, this was not Putin’s congratulatory letter to Hagel on his nomination.

“The worst thing we can do, the most dangerous thing we can do is continue to isolate nations, is to continue to not engage nations. Great powers engage.”

Foreign Policy compiled a list of “Ten Hagel Quotes You Need to Know,” including the above quote from a keynote speech at the Israel Policy Forum in New York City in 2008. Hagel, FP notes, has put himself at odds with a large section of  Washington and Congress by advocating engagement — not militaristic chest thumping (Russia is “without question our number one geopolitical foe,” anyone?) — in dealing with adversarial states.  His “clear-eyed and pragmatic approach,” said Russian expert Cliff Kupchan at the Eurasia Group and interviewee on “Great Decisions in Foreign Policy” on PBS, puts him on a similar track with Clinton and Panetta. He’s a realist.

And with Putin’s new brand of anti-Western, anti-American campaigns, it’s probably the best to not threaten the Kremlin too much.  The fallout from the Magnitsky bill, continuous struggles over missile defense, Russia’s relationship with Iran and Syria, all have set up Russia, particularly Putin, as an adversarial force, not an ally.  (Putin, granted, is not doing his part to win favor in the West.)  Although the row over the Magnitsky bill and Russian adoption ban probably won’t tumble into security issues, Hagel would probably agree that the trick is continue to engage Russia so as to prevent continued deterioration in ties — not isolate the country altogether.

After all, what would be the good of isolation? In “A Republican Foreign Policy,” Hagel lists Russia as one of the four vital relationships that “will be critical to global stability and security.” Additionally, as he said on Russia Today in 2009,

“There isn’t a great issue, a great challenge, a great threat that faces Russia, the United States, the world today that’s not interconnected — whether that’s proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or whether it’s terrorism, the economy, the environment. These are all global issues, and we’re all going to have to work together to find answers.”

Well, good. Hagel’s in line with the administration’s Russian agenda (for the most part) and seems willing to work with the issues at hand, not turn them into an all-out battle of the wills. And even if Putin’s veering towards toppling off his rocker, we’ll at least have a cool-headed secretary of defense.  And in the  midst of conflicts in Syria, the exit out of Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear obsession, and talks about America’s decline, perhaps that’s what we need right now.

Okay, I know everyone has had enough of the Depardieu story by now, but that’s no reason to pass up an opportunity for blatant self promotion!

In today’s International Herald Tribune, I ask whether the fat Frenchman may not simply be the corporeal embodiment of modern neoliberal capitalism.

And now to feel less bad about that, let me recommend three articles actually worth reading on the subject, by the brilliant Peter Pomerantsev and Julia Ioffe.

As a third of young Russian graduates consider fleeing Russia for better opportunities abroad, Putin has received a welcome boost to his deadly whataboutist arsenal. An enormous, large-nosed, drunk boost. Its name? Depardieu. He may not look like Dean Reed, but hey, it’s the best we can do for now.

‘Maybe some of our misguided hipsters want to leave’ the president can now triumphantly declare, ‘but meanwhile, one of your most successful and iconic  stars is clamoring to escape TO Russia! Who’s got the brain drain now?’

In December, Putin offered Russian citizenship to Depardieu after the cinema legend threatened to renounce his French citizenship over President Hollande’s plan to introduce a steep 75% income tax for the rich.

Today, the actor announced:

“I filed a passport application and I am pleased that it was accepted. I love your country, Russia – its people, its history, its writers. I love your culture, your intelligence”, missing out the bit about loving Russia’s flat 13% tax rate.

He then called Russia a ‘great democracy’. In fairness, Depardieu was probably, er, pissed at the time. Not only that, but he must have also been unaware of the new restrictions on alcohol sales!

But enough of this. As a fellow proud bearer of a Russian passport (not dual-citizenship), allow me to welcome the esteemed Frenchman into our rarefied world.

Here are just some of the wonderful pleasures that await this confirmed epicurean.

1) Needing to pay $100 and wait at least a week for a Schengen visa to go to Europe, even for a day. And you might want to also reconsider that weekend trip to New York…

2) Having to wait weeks or months for a replacement passport in case of loss.

3) Getting a complimentary body cavity search at the immigration queue of most international airports.

4) Compulsory military service for everyone up to 28 years of age in one of the world’s deadliest (to its own servicemen, that is) armies.

But look on the bright side:

- Visa free entry to such top tourist destinations as Belarus, Burma, Syria and Guinea Bissau; as well as to some of the world’s most sought after unrecognised breakaway enclaves: Transdniestria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia!

- No more agonising decisions about who to vote for in the presidential elections!

- Many embassies still have awesome Soviet mosaics and other retro relics on the inside!

- No danger of being exploited  by a romantic partner for your passport!

- No one will ever try to steal your passport!

So, welcome to our club, Comrade Depardieu!

How you usher in the new year says a lot about a country.

In the capital of capitalism, Americans huddle amidst the neon billboards of Times Square; according to wine-growing tradition, the Spanish eat a dozen grapes; Italians tuck into a stuffed pig trotter accompanied by lentils, symbols of good fortune and prosperity reflecting the culture’s deep love of food and the land.

Russians, for their part, gather in front of a televised address from the Kremlin: the New Year will come only when Putin says it will.

Here is him last night

And this is his first one, back in 1999.

At that time, Putin said that Russia “chose the path of democracy and reforms.”

 ”Freedom of speech. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of mass media. Property rights… These basic principles of the civilized society will be safe under the protection of the state.”

Twelve years on, there was a lot less hair on Putin’s head, and less time in his speech for such references to rights and freedoms. Instead, the president said this last night: “As we face the future, we naturally hope for positive, joyful changes.” It was a tellingly cryptic remark, at once seeming to give hope for reforms while faintly faintly suggesting, with the next sentence, that such hopes are naive and somehow irresponsible:
“Our personal plans are inseparable from Russia, from our heartfelt, noble feelings toward our Homeland.”

Perhaps the only thing we can be sure of in 2013 is that come December 31, Putin will be once again back on our festive screens. Of course, that’s what everyone thought Yeltsin would be doing in 1999.

Heads are rolling in Moscow.

Over the past two months, two Russian ministers and the chief of the army have lost their jobs.

The October resignation of regional development minister Oleg Govorun was but a prelude to the recent high profile ousting of the reformist defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov. The latter ostensibly fell victim to a corruption investigation that also includes tantalizing parallels to the Petraeus scandal.

Now, Sergei Ivanov, head of the presidential administration, has also come under fire over massive embezzlement that took place in the development of Glonass, Russia’s botched answer to GPS, during his tenure as deputy prime minister.

Today, the Financial Times reports that “investigators raided the homes of two people at the top of a state telecoms group on Tuesday, as a Kremlin-backed anti-corruption drive narrowed in on members of the Russian elite.”

What’s going on?

Corruption is one of the biggest worries facing average Russians. According to a recent Levada Centre poll, 80% of Russians consider it to be one of the country’s biggest ills. It is also increasingly a source of political discontent — Alexey Navalny, the unofficial leader of the opposition, rose to prominence as an anti-corruption crusader.

A social scientist quoted in the liberal-leaning online newspaper Gazeta ru suggests that Putin, worried about becoming contaminated by the negative feelings held by the people about the ruling class as a whole, has decided to kill two birds with one stone: bolster his personal popularity by appealing to the public’s anti-corruption sentiments as well as taking the opportunity to settle some scores within the elite itself.

And there is little doubt that the latest anti-corruption drive is firmly controlled from the top. Today, Gazeta ru reported that the Kremlim has told investigators to back off from launching a full-scale criminal probe into Serdyukov, despite the widespread belief that there is enough evidence to to do so.  ”It’s not 1937,” Putin said shortly after Serdyukov’s ouster, hinting at a desire to stop short of an outright purge.

Nevertheless, the main purpose in removing the former defense minister had much less to do with his alleged financial improprieties than with giving a gesture of support to the siloviki from the military industrial complex. They had been baying for Serdyukov’s blood ever since the reformer wanted to form an independent military police force and reduce spending on domestically produced weapons. He also crossed a line by cheating on his wife, the daughter of “longtime Putin ally and former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who currently serves as chairman of the natural gas monopoly Gazprom.”

But one thing the anti-corruption drive is not, for the time being at least, is a strict showdown between coherent factions. After all, Serdyukov was until recently favored by Putin. Yet it does point to an increasingly visible bureaucratic feud that may yet spill over into something altogether more volatile.

The real question is whether flirting with anti-corruption will help bolster Putin’s waning popularity, or unleash forces that he may ultimately be unable to control.

Looks like Putin’s infamous crane flight has claimed another victim.

Two months after his unauthorised sequel to Fly Away Home, which reportedly resulted in several of the endangered birds getting killed and maimed, the Russian president has mysteriously cancelled a spate of domestic events and foreign engagements. Word on the street is of a back injury sustained while flying the motorised glider. Karma, anyone? Or maybe he was craning his neck too hard during the flight, eh readers?

Much has been written about the venerable Soviet tradition of covering up leaders’ health woes. And it’s difficult to avoid the irony of a leader so keen to constantly show himself as a vigorous and healthy man that he ends up bedridden as a result.

There are other, more painful ironies.

Putin came to power promising to break the oligarchs’ stranglehold over the country. Today, Moscow has the world’s highest concentration of billionaires.

He promised to clean up corruption; instead, Russia has slipped ever further down the rankings.

He promised to end capital flight, beat Russia’s dependence on natural resources, and restore patriotism and national pride. Yet a new report by a respected think tank declares that Russia now essentially exports only three things: petrochemicals, money, and people.

The youth have are losing faith: 41% of those aged 18-24 admit to having considered emigration.

Another Levada Centre poll found that nearly half of all Russians no longer want Putin to stick around beyond 2018.

There are signs that he is aware of this looming sea change. He has cancelled his annual Q&A session with ‘the people’ – the official excuse was the cold weather; the ‘actual’ excuse was his bad back; but perhaps the real reason was a real fear of being booed again on live television.

It’s telling that he now feel it necessary to clamp down on the internet – after 12 years of not fearing  the web – and beef up the anti-treason laws. Putin knows his time is up. He can feel it in his joints. Perhaps his injury is psychosomatic?

Yet all that is for the future. For now, he won the elections and subdued the unrest on the streets. The opposition remains scattered and uninspired. But Putin’s new limp neatly underscores the increasingly widespread realisation that he has in fact become a lame duck.

“The more choice of different candidates there was, the better United Russia did. We’re not afraid of democracy; we need democracy”. With these words, prime minister Medvedev greeted the happy news that despite greater choice and wider opposition involvement compared to December’s parliamentary vote, UR ended its electoral slump on Sunday.

The opposition did not do well in the mayoral and regional elections. All five of the contested gubernatorial races went to the party of power. That was not necessarily surprising given the intensive ‘filtration’ undergone by candidates: in order to get onto the ballot, they essentially had to get approval from ‘above’.

However, what was shocking was that even in towns where was more of a genuine contest, the opposition didn’t fare much better. The most eagerly anticipated race – billed as the litmus test of national attitudes – was for the mayor of Khimky, a commuter town outside Moscow famous for last year’s forest protests. At around 20%, opposition candidate Evgenia Chirikova got only half as many votes as the pro-Kremlin incumbent, despite her support from famous dissident blogger Alexey Navalny. Even more depressingly, and particularly for such a highly hyped contest, voter turnout was a depressingly low 25%.

Of course, there was intimidation and voting violations, skewed press coverage and other dirty tricks. But nevertheless, how can the opposition hope to triumph at the national level when they can’t even muster enough votes on their “home turf” of Khimky, an educated and affluent town conducive to their message?

Part of the opposition’s problem is that most people believe that, for better of worse, the only way to get things done in Russia today is through the support of established power. As such, Khimky voters suspected that because of her adversarial relationships with the Kremlin, Chirikova would not be able to attract money and jobs to the town as well as her well-connected and Putin-friendly opponent. As the Moscow Times put it, several voters said they voted for Shakhov, instead of the opposition, because he had political ties. “Shakhov has leverage in powerful circles,” Alla Nikolayevna, a woman in her mid-40s, said while leaving a polling station.

A few days ago, the Economist wrote that “Ms Chirikova’s success—or lack thereof—on Sunday will be a measure of how far the opposition movement has come in penetrating the world of official politics. As Ms Chirikova herself says, she is taking part “not just in local elections, but elections on a federal level.”

Looking at the results, the opposition had better hope she was wrong.

A recent article in one of Russia’s liberal newspapers described the tragedy of Putinism as the President’s fear for the worst when it comes to change, and an expectation of the worst when it comes to people.

I thought about this for a while and had to agree. But then I thought about Russia and Russians. Here is a country with a seemingly endless supply of stoicism. A country that revolted only once in its history and even then, it was only a small group of utterly unrepresentative intellectual fanatics (with a command of marketing uncannily savvy enough to think of calling themselves the Bolsheviks, or the Majority).

No amount of suffering, it seems, is too great for Russians to endure: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, serfdom, the pogroms and poverty of late tsarism, the Red Terror, the White Terror, the Great Terror, World War II, the Gulags, the rationing, the shelling of the White House, privatization  mass pauperisation, the mafia, the “sale of the century,” Chechnya, and now Putinism. Surely any other people would have long said, “basta!”. But not Russians.

I’m going out on a limb here but my suspicion is that the core belief underpinning our famous stoicism (masochism?) is actually a deep rooted pessimism — that things could always be – and may very easily become — much worse. That might sound crazy, but unfortunately seems to be a position constantly reinforced by Russian history.

Think the Civil War was bad? Well, here’s Stalin! Don’t like Gorbachev? Just wait till you see Yeltsin! And after the latest “improvements” undertaken over the last 12 years, it’s hard to blame Russians for their aversion to change.

And what about the corollary – expecting the worst of people? Unfortunately, that also seems to be a pretty deeply rooted Russian trait. Anyone ever seen a Russian smile at a passerby on the street? In fact, random kindness or even friendliness from a stranger is invariably met with suspicion, fear or, at best, condescension — because “only a fool smiles for no reason.”  That’s one reason why Russians tend to think Americans are all driveling idiots — because they smile all the time, like “ne-normalnie.”

A typical Russian retort to allegations of such fabled chilliness is that “unsubstantiated” or “unprovoked” displays of positivity are somehow “false” or “fake” – traits frequently associated with Western modes of public interaction. I’ll smile if I have something to smile about, Russians might say. Or, I’ll be friendly to you if you’re my friend, instead of wasting it on strangers. Indeed, one of the things many Russians who end up in America find hardest to navigate is the practice of calling seemingly mere acquaintances friends. It is a source of great pride and even cultural superiority to many Russians that while (or even, because) they ration out friendliness, kindness and smiles only to the most deserving recipients; when it is given, it is intense and selfless to an almost harmful degree. Fundamentally, however, the idea that we only smile when there’s something to smile about, and are only nice to people we know as meriting kindness, reflects a very pessimistic set of assumptions. The default mode is one of dour guardedness; the default approach to others is circumspection. Unworthy of smiles until proven otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent.

In his approach to change, to dissenters and outsiders (intellectual, cultural or territorial), is Putin merely channeling this fundamental cultural trope?  Could it be that one reason why he remains more or less liked when his party and his entire government are nearly universally despised is that most Russians see in him “one of us”? It is a feeling Gorbachev – the optimist, the believer in people’s better angels, the man who smiled not just at strangers, but at Reagan! – never managed to achieve.

None of this is to say that Russians deserve our horrible president because we are horrible people; only that maybe we are reluctant to punish Putin’s worst traits because we recognize them as our own. Deep down, we know that Putin’s a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.