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Whenever I write about something touching on my experience of communism, I get a few kind commenters encouraging me to share more of it. I rarely do so, as busy life takes over. Still, today I managed to post an article on my other blog, Media Influencer, that I felt was perhaps not coherent enough or too personal for Samizdata.net. For those interested, follow the bananas...

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Putin is sending shivers through the world with his attempts to strong-arm the Ukraine back into the Kremlin's zone of influence and no doubt more and more column inches are going to be directed at this emerging crisis.

Yet it seems to me pretty obvious that that Russia, circa 2006, is almost hilariously weak to be throwing its weight around. The Russian economy is pathetic for a would-be imperial seat of power, running about half the size of India based on purchasing power. Its GDP per capita is about the same as such mighty global players as South Africa, Mexico and Trinidad. The antics of its kleptocratic and economically illiterate former KGB leadership makes the place less attractive to investors by the day. Frankly you would have to be crazy to put your money in Moscow. Even its military has repeatedly demonstrated that it is inept and corrupt in equal measure. All this talk of Russia's importance is vastly over-stated. In short, Russia needs to be treated with respect, but only the sort of respect you give a drunk with a knife as he staggers down the street.

The price of gas sold to the Ukraine is currently below market levels but the cackhanded way Russia has handled this makes it pretty obvious that markets are the last thing on Putin's mind. But perhaps he is to be applauded for massively strengthening the hand of pro-nuclear power advocates with his preposterous posturing. Even the turgid political class of western and eastern Europe can now have few illusions that it makes sense to rely on an unstable place with delusions of grandeur for their energy supplies. Methinks it might be time for those with some spare dosh to invest some of it in nuclear energy stocks.

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I am travelling in Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the moment and internet access is rather hard to find. This all too brief internet lifeline is a welcome fix to help alleviate my OWLS (On-line Withdrawal Lamentation Syndrome). Horror is a foreign keyboard.

But at least the locals in the deepest rural Moravia are helping me get over the internet withdrawal shakes by stuffing me full of splendid pastries, for which this part of the world is rightly famed.

Interesting glimpses of the recent communist past abound but are becoming less visible by the year.

Remember a time before the internet? Hard to believe, I know! My hosts used this to listen to broadcasts from the West.

I am with the original samizdat people from whom I took so much inspiration and the reason I came up with the name for this blog.

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Today is the 16th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution or of the day when it all 'officially' started on Friday 17th November, 1989 at a demonstration in Prague. (There was one in Bratislava the day before but did not get initially much recognition.)

It was the death of a student, beaten by the Secret Police (or not so secret police), at the Prague demonstration that day that has pushed the students and actors across the country to articulate political demands, go on strike and start protesting in the streets daily. The theories behind this 'final straw' are many and varied - some argue the murdered 'student' was an agent provocateur who meant to start the ball rolling and enabled the powers-to-be orchestrate a peaceful, if not just, demise of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Time will tell the real story, I am here to remember mine.

At the time, 17th of November 1989 did not feel any special - there were some demonstrations before and usually were thinly spread around various anniversaries of dissident occassions. There was no indication that this is to be any different. With a flurry of activity from the dissidents, barely reported by the media and as usual, with more details broadcast by the heavily jammed Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.

I was then a teenager, with a twist - I knew that I had no control over my future and that I faced two choices only. In order to blend in, accept the evil around me in exchange for a semblance of a 'normal' life. Or follow in my parents' footsteps and forsake all that is considered good and rewarding in a healthy society, such as higher education, travel, even family and potentially freedom. I may have been very young but, alas, not young enough to be blind to the full horrors of such life. After all I had seen those around me living with similar decisions. As it happens, that choice was not real - having been part of the dissident movement, I was weighted, marked and tagged as the enemy of the state. I belonged to the dark forces undermining the society - a phrase so beloved of the communist media.

I remember the nervous elation of the 'now or never' moment, as we walked to the main square to meet thousands of others who felt the same. It was a powerful sensation to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people knowing that they are there for the same reason - an experience unprecedented in a fractured and diseased society under communism.

It was not until Monday, 27th of November, when the two-hour general strike took place, that we were sure that tanks will not be rolled out to face us. This was not without reason as on November 23rd the army declared its readiness. To do exactly what, we dared not speculate. At demonstrations between the two dates the list of those supporting the General strike was read out. There was a sense of profound relief when workers from a factory appeared on that list. We knew then that the communists had lost the propaganda war and a loud cheer reverberated across the square.

But the fight was not truly over until December 10th, when the first federal government since 1948 was appointed that did not have the Communist majority. We went to the streets once more, most of us looking for and looking forward to the sensation of true solidarity that had already started to fade. And the rest is history...

I find that my memories lack the nostalgia compulsory for any survivor of such social and political upheavals. My life has certainly changed beyond recognition as a result of the 1989 events, nevertheless I find it very hard to get dewy-eyed about my 'revolutionary credentials'. I do treasure the experience of seeing thousands upon thousands of individuals come together in a collective action that has changed the world around them. That was genuine no matter whether it was sparked off by manipulation or whether what followed in the aftermath was far less heroic.

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This is a picture of front page of a benign 'cousin' of the infamous Pravda (or more like a foundling on the same porch). It is a local paper that covers the small area of the Old Town of Bratislava, thoroughly local, post-communist, and reflecting the concerns of the local populace. Did I mention that it was local? The headline reads:

Two Bratislava districts (equivalent of local councils) have raised average wage above 25,000 [crowns].

What struck me was the active tense of that sentence – as if the local government had any control over what wages people get paid. I am told that the current Prime Minister was going around the country on a bicycle during the election campaign promising to double wages for everyone or words to that effect. Nothing extra-ordinary for a politician but people were actually disappointed after election when the wages did not double. When challenged he pointed at the fact that the wages did go up but nobody was fooled because they knew damn well that the cost increased as well. This did not seem to occur to them when the guy was making the promises though.

There seems to be the perception that the government still somehow doles out the wages as well as fiddles the cost of everything. Well, they sort of do but not in a good way. I also note the difference between the West and the post-communist East – people in the former talk in terms of rising cost of living and price inflation, people here think of terms of size of salary. I think it reflects the difference in mentality – it is thinking of how much you have rather then how much you can do…

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The convincing win by the anti-leftist coalition in Poland's elections would seem to be one in the eye for the statist left.

However the perils of the left/right labels are on prominent display here: Civic Platform Party is clearly on the side of the angels in most ways, being pro-market, pro-privatisation and generally in favour of liberty and a smaller state (though sadly they seem to think the €uro is actually a good idea).

Yet the senior partner in the winning team, the Law and Justice Party are really old style paleo-conservative statists, comparable to various European Christian Democrat parties. Although the Law and Justice Party are perhaps a bit more reactionary and stasis oriented than most Christian Democrats (and as a result no great fans of free-markets), at least that right-stasis orientation gives them a healthy euro-scepticism.

It will be interesting to see how this coalition manages to square its various circles or even holds together at all.

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It is splendid news that the trapped Russian submariners have been rescued from the dreadful fate that overtook the Kursk a few years ago. Fortunatly the Russians did not stand on their pride as they did the last time they suffered a subsaquatic disaster. This time they seem to have fairly quickly accepted the help that was offered to them by many navies around the world.

Although the Royal Navy's robotic sub was the prime mover of this rescue, it was really a very international effort with the USA and Japan providing vital assistance in the rescue. Hopefully this more enlightened approach by the Russian government and military authorities admitting they could not effect the rescue themselves is a sign of institutional change at the top, but the cynic in me wonders if it was not just a domestic political calculation that the embarrasment at having to have their submariners rescued by Western naval personnel represented less political damage than another scene on the television of angry family members on the dockside grieving over their dead sons.

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Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing.

Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore.

Perhaps one should call this the "Yukos Effect." In many respects the seizure of the oil firm's assets by Putin's Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters - its owner was a decidely shady character - but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers.

Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet.

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The decline of post-Soviet Russia continues apace and an article on the Weekly Standard site points out that one of the major exacerbating factors in that decline is Vladimir Putin. The crushing of the media, the confiscation of a large company because it was owned by a political rival on trumped up charges, the failed attempt to direct the result of the Ukrainian elections and the pathetic reaction by the Kremlin to the Beslan atrocity are described at the key indicators of the probably terminal decline of the current regime.

The article is summed up at the end from a very narrowly 'American policy' perspective but the most interesting point for me was author Ander Aslund's contention that the Putin regime is not long for the world. Whilst the Russia of 2005 may be a banana republic without bananas, political instability in a nuclear power that may well be unable to protect its nuclear weapons (Russia's corrupt and famously inept military are somewhat like the 'Keystone Cops' with live ammunition) is something that is of interest to the rest of the world. I wonder when the focus of attention will start shifting away from the Middle East...

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The Ukraine faces a choice between living in Vladamir Putin's shadow or living under the shadow of more locally sourced rascals. Yes, I wish the protestors well in their attempt to prevent Russia's pet poodle Viktor Yanukovych from stealing an election but in truth I do not know enough about the alternatives to Yanukovych to get any real enthusiasm for what is going on.

The fact that anti-government people have a tendency to 'disappear' in the Ukraine is cause enough to want to see the end of Yanukovych and his supporting but the notion that 'democracy' is possibly being subverted is not any real cause for excitement to me per se, given that any alternative to Yanukovych (and the pretty strange Leonid Kuchma) will no doubt use democratic processes to turn the Ukraine into just another highly regulated EU-satellite 'aid crack' addicted state.

So sure, good luck guys, just try to make sure you are not changing Moscow's iron handcuffs for locally made ones with a velvet lining imported from Brussels.

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I had never seen the infamous GULAG system; the Soviet authorities were not keen to document their crimes. But in 1946 they incarcerated an artist, Nikolai Getman, and he survived.

Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.

Getman explains what happened to him:

In my third year I was called up to join the Red Army, which was where the war found me. I saw military action in the 24th Army. On Victory Day I was on the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, a lieutenant technician. Marshal Tolbukhin sent me to Romania as an art specialist to serve on the Soviet Commission for the return of art treasures stolen by the Germans.

I returned home to Kharkov in October 1945 where I became one of the millions of Stalin’s victims. My crime was meeting with other artists in Dnepropetrovsk, where I was visiting my father, and exchanging memories of what we had seen in the towns we liberated. Remnants of fascist propaganda, posters, leaflets, cartoons. One of the artists took a cigarette box and drew a caricature he had seen of Stalin with a play on the abbreviation SSSR (USSR): Skoro Smertrt’ Stalinskomu Rezhimu (Sudden Death to the Stalinist Regime). An informer reported the sketch, and the whole group of us were arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. I was arrested on October 12, 1945. In January 1946 I was convicted and sent to Taishetlag in Russia’s Irkutsk Oblast.

The Dnepropetrovsk Oblast court condemned me under article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. In Russia this is known as article 58. I was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and five years’ suppression of civic rights. I spent about eight years in Siberia (Taishetlag) and Kolyma (Svitlag). Labor camps records show that I was held in custody for seven years, ten months and eighteen days. I was freed on August 30, 1953.

From the very day I was released, I began to implement my plan to paint a series of pictures on the theme of the Gulag, but because this was a forbidden topic, I had to do my civic duty in secret. And so, in complete secrecy, beginning in 1953, I painted pictures about camp life that I recreated from memory. I told no one about this work—not even my wife—because this sort of activity was punishable by imprisonment or even death. I undertook the task because I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not be forgotten.

Getman produced 50 paintings about the GULAG, and they can be viewed here. I must advise that some of the paintings are extremely distressing, since Getman simply tried to recreate what he actually saw. However, they are also of huge historical value as a rare record of what the horror of Soviet 'justice' actually meant.

Getman dedicated his works thusly:

I dedicate my collection to the memory of those who survived the Gulag and to those who did not. Light a candle in memory. The living are in need of it more than the dead. Bow your heads.

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Much has been and will be written about the appalling tragedy of Beslan school and its children held hostage by Chechen terrorists that came to a bloody conclusion two days ago. What I want to remind the western observers just how different the world is on the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. There is much disregard for human life and for individual suffering or fate. We often complain here about the state's natural tendency to override the individual and point out where the balance between the two needs to be redresses. But what happens in Russia (and many other non-Western countries) is beyond the finely tuned scale we apply to western governments.

The contempt in which the Russian government and the ruling class in Russia hold individual life is profound. Perhaps contempt is the wrong word since one would need to recognise something has value in the first place in order to deny it to someone out of contempt for them. Individual human life is not intrinsically valued by the Russian society. The lives of the family members, relatives and the loved ones, of course. But it is not expected that the faceless collective will or even should take heed of others' suffering.

My brother and his two children are in there. His little girl, Lera, is three. His son, Shamil, is nine. They really didn't have to do this. To storm the building. With all those children inside. They shouldn't have done it. But they are the government and we are just ordinary people.

This was a cry of one of the relatives waiting outside the besieged school when the Russian troops starting firing their machine guns. Whether he was right or wrong on the Spetsnaz tactics in particular or hostage situations in general is beside the point, it was the acceptance of his or anybody's powerlessness in the face of the Government.

The ruthlessness of the Russian state and its President is echoed by Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6, in his opinion piece.

Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn't even bother to interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: "It went to the bottom." About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.

The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don't move him in the least. He regards them as "normal wastage" - a hardly noticeable price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember all too well from my own days in the organisation.

Western governments offered sympathy to Mr Putin and the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the massacre had tested his faith. But the European Union called for an explanation of how this tragedy could have happened. The Russians described the request as blasphemous.

For once, I agree with the Russians. Sort of.

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The situation in Beslan in Russia has ended in predictable horror. Whilst Russian behaviour in Chechnya has never been a model of surgical restraint, I have yet to hear plausible accounts of Russian forces rounding up children, blowing them up and then shooting survivors as they try to flee.

The horrors of September 11 2001 have receded into being little more than a 'televisual curiosity' in many circles in the USA. However the Russians have been getting regular reminders about the nature of the enemy with whom they are at war, an enemy by no means unconnected from Al Qaeda.

In Beslan, one of the surviving terrorists was kicked to death by enraged civilians after being dragged out of an ambulance and I suspect this is just a hint of what is to come on a far greater scale. The political pressure on Vladimir Putin to move against anyone even suspected of sympathies with Chechen Islamists will now be overwhelming.

Coming on the heels of the destruction of two Russian domestic airliners, a great many Russians will probably see the extermination of Chechnya as simply a matter of survival and I fear Chechen innocents will be given about as much consideration as those Chechen terrorists gave the innocent Russian children of Beslan.

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We don't breed them like this over here:

FORGET eBay. If you want to buy a dysfunctional boiler house, an international airport, a tea plantation, an oil terminal, a proctology clinic, a vineyard, a telephone company, a film studio, a lost-property office or a beekeepers' regulatory board, then call Kakha Bendukidze, Georgia's new economy minister. His privatisation drive has made him a keen seller of all the above. And for the right price he will throw in the Tbilisi State Concert Hall and the Georgian National Mint as well.

If only he could get his hands on the BBC!

Next year—if not sooner—he will cut the rate of income tax from 20% to 12%, payroll taxes from 33% to 20%, value-added tax from 20% to 18%, and abolish 12 kinds of tax altogether. He wants to let leading foreign banks and insurers open branches freely. He wants to abolish laws on legal tender, so that investors can use whatever currency they want. He hates foreign aid—it "destroys your ability to do things for yourself," he says—though he concedes that political realities will oblige him to accept it for at least the next three years or so.

I hear that HMG has kindly offered to take in any unwanted taxes and resettle them here in the UK.

As to where investors should put their money, "I don't know and I don't care," he says, and continues: "I have shut down the department of industrial policy. I am shutting down the national investment agency. I don't want the national innovation agency." Oh yes, and he plans to shut down the country's anti-monopoly agency too. "If somebody thinks his rights are being infringed he can go to the courts, not to the ministry." He plans, as his crowning achievement, to abolish his own ministry in 2007.

Up until a few years ago, this country was run by communists.

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In that marvellously bonkers publication Pravda, it is being reported that the Ukrainian sports authorities are blaming their lack of medals at a gymnastic event on the fact their Russian rivals brought in people with paranormal abilities to sabotage the Ukrainian competitors.

According to the federation's governing body, evil-minded Russians hired psychics, people with extrasensory abilities in order to paralyze free will of Ukrainian gymnasts during competitions. Such statement of the federation received wide publicity among Ukrainian media sources, reports PrimaNews.

[...]

The federation also informs that "Russian mobs" brought fifteen paranorms to Kiev, including famous Russian medium Alan Chumak. They were seated in VIP seats on the stadium and somehow paralyzed the will of Ukrainian sportswomen; that is why the latter lost.

To hell with the gymnastics! If they can do such things, then they simply must organise special events in which paranormals compete to see who can paralyse the will of the other first!

No Officer, I am not drunk, I had my will paralysed by Russian paranormals!

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My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party's campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.

I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.

From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers' intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.

What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.

[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]

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I recently gave a presentation in Bratislava, Slovakia, on the evils of 'competition policy' and the 'entry and exit costs' economic model, which is little more than an excuse for more business-killing government intervention.

My first trip there in 1991 had been as economic and political adviser to that country's Prime Minister when Slovakia was part of the Czech & Slovak Federal Republic (1989-1992). In those days, talking about a single tax band, a competitive advantage of Slovakia compared with Germany, why an independent Slovakia would actally reform better than under Prague tutelage and so forth was often like trying to explain Switzerland to a Pol Pot survivor.

The first photo that I took in 1991 was of the Iron Curtain seen from the Austrian side, a forest of trees leading up to the jagged line of a forest of rotting concrete.

This time on the way back I took a coach from Bratislava to Vienna airport. The following photos show the turnaround.

Slovakia’s ruling coalition: conservatives and libertarians
(photo taken at Bratislava bus station)



This Slovak election poster for the EU parliament
seems to get the message. (Sorry about the
quality but I snapped it out of a coach window
on a bend, outskirts of Bratislava)



Austrian Social Democrats know what they stand for:
No privatisation!
(dotted all over the Austrian countryside North of Vienna)

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Over at the excellent libertarian group weblog, Cattalarchy, there is a fine and thoughtful collection of articles, which was published a few days ago, to mark the May Day parades of old socialists with a wide-ranging broadside against what communism has wrought. I urge folk to fire up some coffee and take time out to read them all.

With all that fine material in mind, I was stunned to read a screed in the latest edition of The Spectator by ultra-rightwinger Peter Hitchens. As well as saying some decidedly uncomplimentary things about former South African President and anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, a topic to which I may return later, Hitchens also bemoans what he claims has been the lack of any real improvement of life in countries which have been released from communism.

Really? Have there been no improvements at all? I mean, for a start, surely a declared Christian like Hitchens should be glad that fellow believers are no longer persecuted as they were in the old days of Communism. The Gulag is no longer in operation. Members of the KGB no longer drag you off in the middle of the night. And yes, key parts of the economies of those nations are not just recovering, but offering some of the tastiest investment opportunities in the world today, as this article illustrates.

There is a priceless passage in which Hitchens even refers to the elderly generation in the former Eastern bloc who miss the good old days of guaranteed jobs, even if that era came with bread queues, bureacracy and compulsory military service. That's the spirit! None of this messy and vulgar capitalist nonsense, with all that bothersome choice, and ugly advertising, noisy department stores and red light districts.

I honestly do not know what to make of folk like Hitchens and whether he has any coherent political philosophy at all apart from a desire to shock what he thinks is the received wisdom (not always a bad or dishonerable urge, mind). A few weeks back he wrote a superb article shredding the case for state identity cards, of the kind that any libertarian would be proud to write. Yet a few issues later we get a gloomy piece almost pining the days when half of Europe was run by the communist empire of the Soviets.

Weird.

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One of the reasons for slightly less output on this august blog is that two of the editors and the inimitable Gabriel Syme were off meeting other sinister Illuminati in Prague for a fine Czech beer or six.

No prize for guessing where the Illuminati meet in Prague

Prague, like Bratislava, is known for its splendours...

Hot... steamed in fact

One of the upsides of the dire weather was that many of the usually crowded tourist attractions were almost deserted.

We meet one of the leading central European bloggers, Tomas Kohl (on the right)...

Tomas sinks some fine Czech Pilsner with Adriana and Gabriel Syme

Tomas told us the best place in Prague to see its famous chicks...

More Prague chicks

Prague is a city in which the splendours of Western Civilisation pretty much kick you in the teeth...

We found a design we really liked for the new Samizdata.net HQ's front door...

The locals know a thing or two about about what makes life great...

... and a thing or two about what makes life suck...

Which perhaps explains the Czech sense of humour...

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Notwithstanding the result of the Spanish election that David so poignantly blogged about yesterday, one thing that the commentators note is the turnout. Apparently, the extra 3 million voters who turned out to vote were spurred by the terrorist attacks and disgruntled by the Aznar government's handling of the information in the aftermath. It transpires that the popular opinion in Spain was against supporting the US in the conflict with Iraq and the country's participation in the 'Coalition of the Willing'.

The BBC commentators have a field day - the 'power of democracy' has been demonstrated and the Spanish voters have chosen a socialist government. It don't get better than that. It is a dream come true.

Oh, wait. The Russians have elected its President. In an extraordinary and widely predicted result, the former KGB agent crushed his closest rivals by securing 70 per cent plus of the vote, according to preliminary exit polls:

Russians overwhelmingly turned their backs on western-style democracy yesterday, voting for stability and a strong hand at the helm by giving four more years in office to President Vladimir Putin.

Although there was a small chance of under 50 per cent turn out, the Russians were forcefully encouraged to exercise their democratic rights, or else:

Officials are trying to bolster interest with patriotic advertisements showing Soviet-era rockets blasting off and glossy pictures of model Siberian mines. Others exhort parents to vote for the sake of their children.

Some officials have used bribes, threats and other schemes. Last week hospitals in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk put up notices saying they would refuse to treat patients who could not prove they had registered to vote in hospital.

So in one country we have a socialist government taking over as a result of democratic elections that were influenced by terrorist attack whose horror is still fresh in the people's mind. In another, an overt authoritarian has cemented his already powerful position for another four years. I doubt very much that either election was determined by anything resembling rational discourse. No, I am not naive and do not expect every single voting decision to be rational or even sensible, however, the events of yesterday point to the other extreme.

[Retiring back to his cave, mumbling something about "emotionally incontinent" times...]

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Sometimes when I feel the need to see the world through very strange eyes indeed, I wander over to the Pravda website for a bit of paleo-collectivism using language little different from Soviet days. I am rarely disappointed.

There is a splendid example of entertaining pretzel logic in slightly fractured English called West against Russia. The article discusses that the fact many articles appear in the western media which are critical, unflattering and disparaging regarding modern Russia and particularly Vladimir Putin. The author of the article, Mikhail Chernov makes it clear that the western reports are not just reportage but are a campaign and 'Russian experts' know why this is happening:

The main task of the new media campaign is making Vladimir Putin (who will probably be elected for the second term) not legitimate in the minds of Western audience. Meanwhile, some Russian experts believe that toughening the position of the West did not result from Russian political events and certain economic interests in Russia. The EU and the USA increased their criticism of Russia because of the crisis of the "Western" model of social order and simultaneously express their rejecting Russian social order model in this way.

So western criticism actually has nothing much to do with Russia, it is just a facet of the crisis of our social order, hence...

Many Russian experts believe that moving Western politics into anti-Russian direction is inevitable. Director of Pamir-Ural research group Alexander Sobyanin said that there is no special plan to undermine Russia. Western elites do not think bad about Russia and are not going to bring Russia down.

Quite so, there is not much interest in 'bring Russia down' anywhere other than Chechnya. In truth, western elites (whatever that means) do not really tend to think overmuch about Russia at all. But the fact Russia is seen as a far of basket case by most western elites is not the thrust of the article at all. Quite the contrary in fact.

According to Mr. Sobyanin, sharp increase of anti-Russian propaganda resulted from the crisis of the Western society elites. "The elites of only three countries were in the mainstream of the global economic and social development in the last century - Russia, the USA and Great Britain. The world entered the stage of changing dimensions - it has to abandon outdate absolute "financial criteria" and elaborate the new paradigm of development. Implementing changes will be accompanied by wars and social conflicts. Anglo-Saxon elites are not ready for this yet", said Alexander Sobyanin. He believes that there is a chance that Russia can elaborate new, alternative algorithm for global development (in last century it was socialism), and for this reason the West perceives Russia as the dangerous ideological competitor.

Well I did tell you that I go to Pravda because I enjoy reading things that are surreal. This appears to say the thing that is wrong with the Anglo-Saxon model is that it looks at the ecomony in economic terms! And so what is this 'new paradigm of development'? It is not spelled out so let me guess: economics must be managed politically for fairness and efficiency in order to avoid 'wasteful competition'? I am just speculating here but who feels brave enough to disagree and tell me this is not at the root of this 'new paradigm of development' being hinted at? The notion that Russia is a source of a viable economic algorithm likely to challenge 'Anglo-Saxon' capitalism is quixotic to put it politely... laughable to be a bit more blunt.

As Russian civil society exists only precariously, the Russian social model is simply that of subordinating 'social' interactions to politically regulated interactions strongly influenced from the top. In short, the Russian social model is 'people being told what to do'. The socialist 'ownership' based method of doing that has simply been replaced with the more effective fascist style 'control' based method. Which is to say, rather that nationalising everything, the Russian state simply regulates things and imposes controls on what people can do with what they nominally own.

This is of course also the approach of regulatory statists even in Britain, the USA and elsewhere in the west, but unlike those places, Russia has the 'advantage' of a civil society with no significant intermediate organisations between it and the state, moreover it is a society conditioned to a top down approach by centuries of Tsarist autocracy followed by Communist totalitarianism. The article then goes on to talk about how in the 'Anglo-Saxon' way, it is competition which defines our civilisation:

Western model" implies having certain "agreement" accepted by the society. One of the backbones of this agreement is competition between individuals. Russian tradition does not recognize competition as positive factor because competition awakes low instincts in people and does not improve the quality of products, but, on the contrary, worsens their quality.

Which no doubt explains the huge flood of high quality Russian products sweeping the world. That pesky toleration of individualism will be the undoing of us poor Anglo-Saxons. In reality, that there are any successful businesses at all in Russia is testament to the ingenuity of individual Russians and their ability to operate in spite of the 'Russian model'.

Quite apart from the fact this utter tosh claims to be 'reasoned analysis', the fact that the people who think of themselves as Russia's elites still think in such delusional terms shows the extent to which things have not yet recovered intellectually from that nation's poisonous past. Who needs The Onion when you have Pravda? Sorry, but there is only one kind of Russian model that has any interest for the rest of the world.

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Via the constantly diverting Dave Barry comes news of the state of the popular arts in Russia.

You know those nesting dolls they have there. Putin on the outside. Undo him and you get the Fat Drunk Guy, undo him and you get Splotchtop, then another Fat Drunk Guy, then Andropov, then Brezhnev, and so on down the list of the Soviet Hall of Shame. This could all be in the wrong order and I could well have left out a couple of Drunk Guys, but you get my drift. Those dolls, is what I mean. Well, now they have nesting dolls with rock star faces on them.

The really cunning one would be a set of different Elvises, starting on the outside with Very Fat Elvis just before he died, and working back via Las Vegas Elvis, GI Elvis, to Original Elvis. But I do not think they have yet got around to doing that.

Nevertheless, I love it. Says it all. Think who the dolls used to be, and now look at them. Another triumph for capitalism.

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There is an article in the Telegraph titled Slovakian troops sent in to stop gypsy riots that reports what is happening but makes no comment on what seems to me the key underlying reason it is happening:

Thousands of police backed by 2,000 soldiers in the ghetto towns of eastern Slovakia appeared to have temporarily ended attacks by mobs forcing their way into food shops. Near 100 per cent unemployment has brought thousands of Roma gypsies out on the streets

[...]

Demonstrators in one town gathered peacefully, shouting: "We want to eat." Others said their families were starving since the cuts [ in state unemployment benefits], meant to prepare the country for European Union entry, were implemented on Jan 1.

Tibor Tutak, 39, said: "We know stealing isn't a solution but I cannot let my children go hungry. What has happened so far is nothing compared with what will happen if the government doesn't do anything."

Roma leaders threatened further trouble unless the Bratislava government rescinded dramatic welfare reductions which have halved the incomes of many families. Unemployment among some gypsy communities is close to 100 per cent.

It is regrettable for anyone to go hungry but for 100% unemployment to prevail amongst significant sections of the gypsy community in Slovakia, that is not bad luck or economic vagaries, it is a lifestyle choice. What is more, what Tibor Tutak is actually saying is that he dislikes having to do the stealing himself, given that he and his community had gotten used to having the state do it for them. The fact is no one owes anyone else a living by right at their expense, particularly not if they decline to participate in the economy as anything other than parasites. The forceful official Slovak response seem entirely appropriate to me and I hope they do not even consider allowing themselves to be shook down for larger the 'welfare' payments.

No one is forced to live in a gypsy community in this day and age... yes, I know some people will bring up the infamous walls built Czech authorities after years of complains by local people. These were designed specifically to keep gypsies away from the rest of the community in a town near Ostrava a few years ago, but that was hardly an enforced ghetto in the traditional European sense of the word, as there were no laws compelling gypsies not to live elsewhere.

I also realise gypsy communities are on the receiving end of considerable prejudice and discrimination, though it needs to be said that not all of the reasons for the wider community's hostility towards them are baseless. The gypsies are a separate cultural group and are certainly entitled to live according to their ways... provided these ways are not based on theft, be it directly or via the state and therein lies the issue at the heart of what is happening now in the Slovak Republic. Let me give the last word to Czech blogger Tomas Kohl who writes what the Telegraph article conspicuously did not:

These people are not victims of reforms. They haven't been wronged by the government today, but when the State decided it's a good idea to subsidize people for not doing anything and punish them when they moved a finger, it's like giving away dope, making everyone addicted, then halving the supply.

Is there an easy way out? No. Yeah, I could say just abolish the idea of Caring Government, and it has certain utopian appeal I like, yet there is no political force there that would be capable of doing just that. Unless they send in an infantry regiment, the unrests can continue for a long time, until the underclass moves west, to countries where they still give lunches away for free.

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Wired reports that Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday. The prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make "any missile defense useless," Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.

This exchange of statements has an air of nostalgia about it:

Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn't be seen as Russia's response to U.S. missile defense plans. "The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defense because we designed this thing."

In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. "If you're in that business -- intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads -- you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses."

I suppose the signs of new era are the following bits:

Putin said that Russia has no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. "We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow."

Baluyevsky said that Russia had informed the United States about its intention to conduct the experiment and added that U.S. officials issued no objections.

We shall see.

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For some years, I have preferred to take my holidays around the Baltic (herewith classified as Eastern Europe, because it is north east of the British Isles and the Finns come from the Urals anyway). Larking about in the Nordic and Baltic countries always includes a visit to the local museum concerning the Second World War and the Resistance. These museums often give a snapshot of the the way these countries view themselves, their place in the world and their history.

The most disappointing museum that I ever came across was in Helsinki, Finland. Their military museum, near the Lutheran Cathedral, included an exhibition covering the Finnish contribution to the Second World War which finished at the end of the Winter War. The wartime alliance with Germany from 1941, which one could view as a necessary defence against Stalinism on the grounds that my enemy's enemy is my friend was excised from their exhibition. This was the state of play in 2000 and I haven't been back to the museum since, so they may have extended the scope since but the omission at that time was rather surprising.

Sweden and Estonia did not appear to have any specialised museums on this subject. Sweden does not need one, due to its policy of neutrality, and Estonia had a room with inscribed pebbles and rusting armour that doubled as a centre for folklore. For me, Tallinn was more rewarding for curries and beautiful women than for museums. However, the City museum that I missed in Tallinn does cater for the history of the Estonian resistance against Nazi and Soviet oppression.

Denmark was objective and attempted to provide a social history of occupation rather than a celebration of resistance. It always astonished me, once I had gone to the museum, that Denmark held a unique democratic election under Nazi occupation in 1943. They smuggled their Jews to Sweden whilst attempting to maintain the norms of a liberal democratic state under military occupation. Denmark also had an active resistance movement and sited their museum in the gracious environs of the Churchillparken. I do not think they succeeded in protecting their country from Nazism but who are we to say that such an endeavour was not a moral response under these extreme circumstances.

The two countries that most impressed me were Latvia and Norway.

Latvia has faced its history without any qualms. There are museums on its military history and on the Gulag. Both are well worth visiting. For me, the devastation that was wreaked on Riga only became clear after visiting this museum with its exhibitions on how the city was fought over three times: first the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again. More telling to me was the honesty with which the Latvians faced up to their own role in joining the SS and co-operating in the liquidation of the Jews. My family never faced anything like this because they were British and, therefore, this reflection is alien to me.

As for Norway, I have never seen Germans move around a museum so rapidly. If you wish to define a people that love freedom, look no further than Norway. The Resistance Museum starts by telling you how Britain is the last beacon of liberty in a barbarous continent. I was hooked. The Norwegian sacrifices during the Second World War are second to none. Their resistance, their merchant navy and their armed forces probably contributed more than the French. If any country should have been given a sector in Germany to occupy after 1945, it was Norway.

This is an anecdotal survey and I am sure there are errors and omissions. However, it provides a flavour of how countries exhibit their past and indicates that they are aware war and occupation have shaped their history. If you are ever in these countries, visit these museums.

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I found this gruesome story in a letter to Editor in today's Telegraph:

Sir - Julius Strauss's report on the lost prisoners of the Soviet gulag (News, Jan 3) reminded me of a wartime experience.

As an 18-year-old seaman aboard an escort destroyer out of Scapa Flow in 1943-44, I recall that, after shepherding the convoy in the Kola inlet north of Murmansk, we moved to the small dockside at Polyarni.

During one of our arrivals, when some of us were stretching our legs ashore, a well thrown snowball caused me to stagger against a snow-covered stack of logs. I recovered my balance to find that I was hanging on to a human foot, naked and frozen.

We found that the stack was not of timber, but of human bodies, laid five upon five, approximately 30 to a stack, piled along the jetty. We surmised that they were casualties of the war to the south, could not be buried in the frozen ground and had been moved by rail to an ice-free port for disposal at sea.

Having read your report, I am inclined to suggest that they had perished in the gulag Vorkuta, not far to the east.

From:
Leslie James Cousins, Petersfield, Hants

The article mentioned in the letter talks of horrendous conditions of gulag prisoners at the Vorkuta camps.

Even in the context of the times, the suffering at the Vorkuta camps was extreme. In the winter, temperatures on the tundra can drop to minus 50C.

Inmates were provided with ill-fitting, poor quality clothes and forced to work 12 or 14 hours a day on a starvation ration. During the 1940s and 1950s a million prisoners passed through the Vorkuta gulags, according to Memorial.

At least 100,000, perhaps many more, died. They were buried in the rock-hard permafrost or simply left by the roadside to be covered by snow.

Many of the survivors are now trapped by poverty as the hyperinflation following the end of communism wiped out their meagre savings. For years Vorkuta was a political gulag. Today it has become an economic gulag.

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Having returned to the land of hope and glory after almost two weeks of hectic holiday season and a limited access to internet, I have the need to blog of things I have seen.

I spent Christmas in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. After such splendid reviews of the town here on Samizdata.net, I was wondering whether it would live up to his impressions during the cold winter days. The Christmas markets in the centre of town, a tradition established in 1993, have a certain magic that increases with copious quantities of hot mead and wine.

The crowds are impressive, with density matching that of any western shopping experience. There are many international brands present, many a multinational appearing in the 'small town with big potential'. The most impressive sight, probably because most unexpected, was the vista alongside a new road by-pass relieving the centre of Bratislava of heavy traffic. The road is lined with enormous warehouses, hypermarkets, showrooms for car makers such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Nissan, Audi, Jeep, Chrysler, there is Fuji Film and Coca-Cola. Driving along you could be in any western country. In the centre of town I have seen designer shops frequented mostly by the rich even in the West. I believe I caught a glimpse of Bang and Olufsen. Whatever you think of the brand, it is a huge leap for the design-conscious of Bratislava.

This all is very good and a superficial visitor might conclude that Bratislava represents a successful marriage of the charm of a small provincial city with a multinational presence and that Bratislava benefits from its proximity to Vienna without being reduced to a charmless suburb of its larger and more internationally renowned neighbour. Perhaps I should leave it at that and spread the good word without digging underneath the surface. Unfortunately, I stayed there long enough to encounter what lies beneath or, as we Samizdatistas would say, in the metacontext.

What I found is that the whole edifice rests on very shaky foundations. I have two reasons for such a strong statement. One is cultural and the other legal. The first means that although individuals in former communist countries are entrepreneurial in ways that make western businessmen look as adventurous as bank clerks, there is very little of what in the West we understand by 'commercial culture' underpinning the markets. I suppose in Hayekian terms, this would be similar to the concept of "the extended order" - the impersonal relationships that allow culture and trade to flourish among strangers.

People set up their own companies or take over former state businesses without understanding where their livelihood is coming from - the markets, i.e. the customers. They are mostly after the status of a 'businessman' and of owning a business, without appreciating that the entire point of their existence is to meet a portion of market demand, that is, attract customers. Business seems to revolve around those who own them and their company's business processes, such as they are, are designed to suit them, not the customer who seems to be almost an after-thought. Although there certainly are companies in the West that fit the above description, at the same time there is also an explicit understanding in the western business culture about what drives the markets. It is also a matter of degree and the proportion of the businesses that behave in the 'non-commercial' way.

One of my favourite examples can be found in a major department store in central Bratislava. The ground floor is arranged in a manner identical to a standard Western department store - cosmetics and perfumes. It is full of the leading brands exactly as in most western department stores. The decor and arrangement is indistinguishable. However, that is where the similarity ends. The service is non-existent - the shop assistants, if their attention can be attracted, are either unpleasant or overbearing, trying to force the overpriced goods on you. (In my experience most western goods are on average 1/3 more expensive that in the West. How any of the locals can afford to buy them on a regular basis given the average monthly wage of around £220 ($395) is a mystery I have not been able to solve.)

The bit that got to me most was the fact that the display and sample items were all tied to the counter with a wire! This was presumably to stop customers from stealing them and undoubtedly the managers saw this as a neat solution to the problem of disappearing sample bottles of expensive perfume and to erosion of their profit margins.

It would have been difficult to explain to the store managers that this is an unacceptable treatment of customers since it amounts to treating every customer as a potential thief. It would have been impossible to explain that it matters that they are not treated as such and that good will generated by a company is as important as the tangible product and service is sells. And it certainly would not make any sense to them if there were told that selling cosmetics and perfumes is about selling experience, impression and generally impressing a positive association on to the customer. Hence the emphasis on packaging, advertising, expensive poster campaigns etc, etc, etc.

This is because communism succeeded in one thing - it made the countries under its yoke truly materialist. Things and object take on a far greater importance if you can barely afford them and have to work very long and hard to purchase them in the first place. Under such conditions they loom far more in such people's lives then in a consumerist society that treats most products as disposable.

Marxism also managed to make its 'theory of labour' pervasive in the business metacontext or culture. Service and experience do not count in market transactions as they cannot be measured and therefore priced. By the same token human labour does not count for much either. Your time is not economically valuable and so service industry was non-existent under communism. It is now emerging under the influence of Western businesses but it does have a long way to go.

The second issue I have is with the legal framework. There seems to be very little reliance on the contract between transacting sides. The market exchanges do not seem to be underpinned by strong contracts, i.e. the contracts are there but when things go wrong, their effective enforcement is almost non-existent. It takes about 5 years to get a court hearing, which makes the legal redress irrelevant. This in turn, means there is very little legal experience in handling business disputes with law-making severely lagging behind. Legal infrastructure is increasingly influenced by the EU requirements, which is no foundation for a thriving free market. The inadequate legal provisions affect the labour market and employment relations that further undermine development of a sound commercial culture.

Now there is time for a disclaimer. I wrote the above paragraphs on the basis of my own impressions and knowledge. I know that there are individual businesses in Slovakia that are doing 'everything right'. I know that there are many reasons why the situation is the way it is - such as the fact that Slovakia is more influenced by the Austrian and continental business practices that are rather different from the Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial culture. The intention is not to be negative about Slovakia and its economic development. The regular readers may recall that I cheered the Slovak government's decision to introduce 19% flat tax rate.

I am also not saying that Slovakia and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe are doomed because they fail to exhibit certain features that I consider crucial for economic development. What I am describing is the current situation as I see it in the context of my understanding of what makes free markets and free trade work - individual freedom, property rights, legal framework with effective contract enforcement and generating trust between strangers for complex market transactions. To my eyes the capitalism in Slovakia had all the trappings of the western sort. But without sound institutions and legal infrastructure supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals in such countries, it will be a rather cardboard prosperity.

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The scale of Russia's disillusionment with western-style democracy became apparent yesterday as the country's two largest pro-western parties were all but wiped out in parliamentary elections.

President Putin's United Russia came out the clear winner with 37 percent of the vote and a majority in the new State Duma and will most likely end up controlling two thirds of the Duma enabling the president to change the constitution at will. This may not be a revolutionary change from the past as the constitution was rendered feeble and Duma castrated by Yeltsin. Another quarter of the seats will be shared by anti-western reactionaries nostalgic for the days of Soviet superpower status.

The election made clear one thing - that I have argued here on Samizdata.net in the face of indignation by some commenters - Russia is not (and was not) heading the right direction. The reasons for this are more fundamental than Putin's taste for power or Yeltsin's penchant for gestures of a 'Leader of Mother Russia'. Although they both fossilised what was wrong with the political and state institutions in Russia, their attitudes and actions originated from the country's political and social values and traditions and were often supported by the majority.

Here are some quotes that sum up the political development in Russia:

Yesterday's election shows what the people actually think: they are stridently nationalist, want wealth redistributed and have little interest in liberal or democratic values. An analyst at a financial firm, Aton

It is a sad day for liberalism. The liberals in Russia are finished in the short term. Igor Mintusov a political campaign consultant at Nikkolo M

Our main impression of the overall electoral process was one of regression in the democratisation of this country. Bruce George of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The first two statements are spot on, the last one confuses democracy with liberal values. The Russian elections were probably democratic alright. It is freedom, liberal constitutionalism, individual and civil rights that have suffered a defeat in Russia. My point is that they were not even taking part.

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Look, matey, I know a dead protocol when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now:

Russia says it will not ratify in its present form the Kyoto Protocol designed to mitigate global warming.

"The Kyoto protocol places significant limitations on the economic growth of Russia," presidential aide Andrei Illarionov told a conference in Milan.

The landmark environmental pact cannot now enter into legal force, especially since the US has also repudiated it.

It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This protocol is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off it's mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PROTOCOL!!

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Some 'amazing' news from Russia - President Vladimir Putin has met with the country's richest business people and warned them that unless they share their wealth they risk losing it. He told them they must use their wealth to help reduce poverty, saying there is a line between wealth and political power. Seems like an offer they can't refuse...

Sounds familiar? You bet. Putin used to be the head of KGB and I expect no less of him. His career since the fall of communism did nothing more than reinforce his old communist opinions and prejudices. It is possible that his 'talking to' to the 800 businesses could be, just could be, a very clever PR ruse to appeal to the Russian people who have to struggle to make the ends meet in a whole new and 'free' post-communist fashion whilst the nouveau rich flaunt their wealth. But I do not really think so. It is worse than that, he actually believes it. The few politicians from the former communist bloc who are perceived as 'englightened' by the West are more often then not paleo-communists whose rhetoric has turned communitarian, or outright anti-capitalist. This is what Putin told a packed Hall of Columns in the House of Unions that included at least five billionaires:

[Businesses] must aim their efforts at developing a system of new social guarantees for the population in line with the new demands of the time. [We must join] forces to make the lives of people economically sound so that they have plenty to live on.

Bye-bye the lip-service to individual property rights whilst economic future of Russia circles round the drain as her dozen billionaires and several thousand millionaires have begun the process of moving their money off shore. God speed, 'comrades'.

I am sure that these 'gentlemen' are no lambs. In fact, I am certain that their money does not come from honest business. Most likely they grew obscenely rich on rigged privatisations - they happened to be at the right place, right time, with nastier thugs at their command. From what I have seen so far it seems to me that Mikhail Khodorkovsky might not of the same ilk but I do not know enough about him to stand by that conclusion.

Nevertheless, the way to tame the 'oligarchs', as they are affectionately known in Russia, is not making them hand-over their money. Just make them subject to the same laws as everyone else (I hope it is obvious that Yukos is not Russia's Enron). That would, however, require strong institutions such as courts and legislature upholding laws in general and contracts between individuals in particular. This is profoundly lacking in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The Russian state machine is toxic. It may have divested itself of the evil ideology, but it continues to trample over the individual. Rights and justice are considered Western luxuries or, better yet, a clever propaganda by the Western politicians to mask the strings pulled by the military-industrial complexes. Tinfoil hat material? I do not think so - not enough tinfoil in Russia for the lot of them.

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Last week the Slovak Republic passed a tax reform law introducing a flat tax rate at 19 percent for income and value added tax (VAT) with effect from January 2004. The Finance Ministrer, Ivan Miklos, hopes that such a vast reform will spur further economic growth and attract more investments.

Tax reform, and tax rates at the lowest possible level for everyone is an important motivation to attract investors. It is a strong and positive signal for the inflow of foreign investments.

Flat tax, the abolishment of taxation on dividends, and profit shares that are included in the tax reform is the correct way of supporting those who want to invest. This is a fair, horizontal aid from the state that sets the same conditions for everyone.

It seems that the Slovaks have done their homework and the Finance Ministry proposes the reform arguing that the flat tax or a tax similar to this one has been introduced in 33 countries, GDP growth in these countries is two times higher than in others and quoting examples of effective unified tax in New Zealand, Estonia and Hong Kong.

Apart from changes in income taxes and VAT, the reform will abolish gift tax and inheritance tax by the end of 2003 and introduce a flat 3-percent real estate transfer tax in 2004 with a chance to abolish it later on. In my book these qualify as glimpses of common sense, as exhibited in the statement of Peter Papanek, the spokesman for the finance minister:

Those taxes represented multiple taxation of property that was already taxed once.

An article in the Slovak Spectator explains that for corporations this means a lower income tax compared to the current rate of 25 percent. Individuals, nowadays taxed progressively within the range of 10 - 38 percent (the percentage increases with higher incomes), will all pay the same tax rate. Two current rates of VAT, a reduced one at 14 percent and a standard one at 20 percent, will be unified from the beginning of next year at 19 percent.

This is all interesting and very good news for Slovakia indeed. Now if they only got their social security payments and national health contributions in order... Nevertheless, the country is certainly moving in the right direction and it is probably worth keeping on one's radar.

via Teekay's Coffeeshop

And Slovak babes are not bad either

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Tomas at Teekay's Coffeeshop has an excellent post on how the Czech police decided to go after the oldest profession and benefit from register all hookers in a special database. The software for this essential exercise was provided by the UN.

After raiding 475 nightclubs past weekend in a well-meant effort to combat organized slavery, the Secretary of Interior Mr Gross (nomen omen) came up with this idea that prostitutes are to be monitored. The official goal is to find out about the movement of prostitutes within the EU.

Police will enter the data about anyone who looks like a hooker, after checking and recording data on your citizen ID card (it's mandatory to bear it at all times). Main source of data will be nightclubs and bars of certain sorts, but the police isn't limited to these venues only.

Central European babes are not known for their coy dress sense

Apparently, it is enough for a girl to wear something 'crazy' for her to end up in the National Hooker Registry. And there is no recourse, just as there are no rules, no checks, no appeal. Tomas concludes:

The next step will be regulated legalization: with all of them registered and monitored, the State will make a liberal gesture and allow some prostitution. Carefully controlled, with price limits, annual re-registration, you name it. Of course, it will also be much easier to monitor the customers of such services, and that could come in handy, too, right?

I think he may be on to something there...

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According to our good friend Iain Murray, the Russians have really put the boot to cherished theories at the World Climate Conference.

According to Iain, the head of the Russian Academy of Scientists said the only effect of dropping Kyoto "would be on several thousand people who make a living attending conferences on global warming".

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Whilst sitting in a café surrounded by all of Bratislava's Central European splendours and pondering how to get my treasures back to London...

...I could not but notice how all that history has interesting effects on the local arts...

Of course there are many local inspirations, not just the historical ones...

We decided to just try and take my new prized possession, my dragon, on the aeroplane with us. The artist obligingly packed it up in a most expert manner and we just took it with us as luggage, praying that it did not get crushed on the bus to Vienna or smashed into matchsticks by the baggage handlers...

...Arriving back in London , we took a cab home and were welcomed by a very liberty-friendly message en-route...

Finally back home, we unpacked the new love of my life and is was... perfect!

Nice to be back but I shall certainly visit Bratislava again ... for the artworks of course

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Continuing my tales of Bratislava...

One of the things I very much enjoyed was the food. Although a short visit of only a few days does not give my views much authority, I have to say that both the home cooked meals and restaurant victuals were really rather good. One restaurant in particular was so good that I would have to say it would make my top ten must-eat-at places anywhere I have been... and all modesty aside I am extremely well travelled. This splendid place is called Café Zichy (formerly known by the name 'Harmonia'). The venison in plum sauce with puréed chestnut was sublime. I was also introduced to the splendours of Demänovka, the excellent local firewater. The service at the Zichy was informative and agreeable without being intrusive: the place is a mandatory visit when in Bratislava!

Another thing that caught my eye...

...is that if you pay attention, you can find interesting and idiosyncratic art all over the place. Some of it very modern and some of it very old indeed...

But as I have mentioned before, Bratislava is filled with the sort of distractions that can make a person miss such details...

During my meandering around the cobbled streets, I encountered the first dragon I saw in Bratislava: a rather fine golden dragon which happens to be the mark of a pharmacy...

...and although I did not know it yet, it was the first indication I was about to fall madly in love, but more about that later

Whenever I visit a new city, I always pay attention to the graffiti and political posters as I always believe it is worth seeing what 'the others' are saying. When I was passing though Vienna airport a few days earlier the only graffiti I saw was 'EU NEIN' engraved on the flusher in the men's room...

Compared to Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other part of the Slavic world in which I have considerable experience), Bratislava has much less of a problem with graffiti or flyposting. It was mildy interesting therefore that in Slovakia the only political posters I saw were for a rather incoherent group of 'anarchists' and a nameless call (in English) to 'smash the reds'...

Warning sign number one... these 'anarchists' are waving their flags on May Day.

There may have been other political posters but the distractions on the streets of Bratislava are many and varied...

I saw an interesting sign of the transformations going on in Slovakia when I visited a carpet warehouse with my hostess, the mother of my travelling companion. The warehouse was until quite recently the Factory of MDZ (Medzinarodny Den Zien, or International Women's Day)... an old style communist industrial collective. I was much amused to see that under its new capitalist management, it was advertising Astroturf, a quintessentially American product.

During our meanderings, we wandered past a rather typical gated Austro-Hungarian era courtyard and noticed a small sign directing us to something called 'Gallery F7'. Being curious by nature, we went in and found at the far end, an exhibition of the work of an artist called Jozef Borovka... and that is where I well and truly fell in love.

Borovka's work was just fantastic. He is an extremely talented Slovak artist working in wood, stone, oil and pen and I would have happily walked off with almost every item that was on exhibit. As it happened, that day was the last day of the show and so we contacted the artist and arranged to purchase several of his works. The first we acquired was a superb and whimsical bison made of 5 kg (11 lbs) of stone with antlers made from a coat hook, the second was a pen and ink drawing of a rural house in the Slovak countryside, the third was a female torso in mahogany on a large brass base...

...and the last piece was a table... but, oh, what a table! This was the true object of my undying affections: the finest Dragon in Bratislava.

However seeing as we were flying on Air Berlin, which is El Cheapo No Frills Cattle Class Airlines personified, actually getting a honking great cherry wood, mahogany, glass and brass table that was very fragile back to London was rather a major problem. We explored shipping it back via DHL but that proved to be prohibitive on the grounds of price, so we retired to the many and wonderful cafés of Bratislava to ponder what to do and admire the passing parade...

More to follow...

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Following some rather personally difficult times, I was recently whisked off to foreign parts by a friend who decided I very badly needed to get out of London for a while to get my head together. And so, a day after a funeral and one of the worst days of my life here in London, I found myself on an Air Berlin BAe-146 aeroplane heading, indirectly, for Bratislava, the capital city of the Slovak Republic.

Due to the hasty nature of the flying arrangements, my friend and I travelled via Mönchengladbach (that's near Düsseldorf, in Germany). As it happens, that 30 minute stop-over allowed me to see something to delight any aviation enthusiast... an airworthy Junkers 52!

From Germany we headed to Vienna, where we were picked up by my traveling companion's mother and thence a short drive across the Austrian border to Bratislava.

Although I was very keen on getting a break from my surroundings, given that my friend had never really described Bratislava fondly (having grown up under communism does have that effect), I must say I did not have very high expectations, given the grey and bleak preamble I had received (I suspect my colleague is in no danger of being offered a job by the Slovak Tourist Agency).

Blimey... I was really in for a surprise!

Although surrounded by the expected outer layer of ghastly public housing (but then are any major cities on the west not similarly blighted?), Bratislava's inner city is simply gorgeous.

The inner city is almost entirely unspoiled by the pox of post war modern architecture, yet it far from being a moribund museum: it positively pulsates with life and exuberance.

On my first evening, I saw one of the old main streets lined with sidewalk cafés, bars and restaurants, with a bright laser beaming overhead, originating from one of the old city wall's bastions, striking a modern artwork suspended on a wire high above at the far end of the street from the bastion and being thus deflected down another street where it ended on yet another glittering suspended artwork.

But it quickly became apparent to me that there is more to this little gem on the Danube than splendiferous architecture. I had always thought that Amsterdam and Zagreb were locked in mortal combat to see which had the most beautiful women per square kilometer but now I realize that those two august cities were just battling it out for second place. I do not think I have ever seen as many extraordinarily attractive young ladies in my life. Bratislava is, to use the technical term, seething with babes.

Bratislava is pretty much the place that puts the central in Central Europe and thus to say it has 'a lot of history' would be rather like describing Mt. Everest as 'rather large': true but misleading. Bratislava is super-saturated with history. On many regular houses one finds plaques commemorating events or people. I was delighted to see that a generation of communism failed to erase the memory of those Slovaks who went west rather than east to fight fascism, and did so with their Czech brethren in the British RAF.

But amidst the endless barrage of historical morsels to take in were the similarly endless procession of...

The sheers scope and sweep of Bratislava's history does make it hard to absorb. Fortunately the city is fairly visitor friendly, with some nice little museums and fairly un-sanitised sights to clamber over.

There seems no shortage of people who want to keep the city's history alive and some rather entertaining rascals seemed to take delight in noisily marching though the city's cobbled streets with their drums and strange local bagpipes, bawling bawdy songs and firing off matchlock guns and thereby making the alarmed tourists spill their Café Lattes over their chinos

The Slovaks take queue-jumping at the cash machines very seriously

And then there are the other distractions...

The locals were friendly (other than one old woman who worked at Bratislava Castle and who clearly had not noticed that Communism had collapsed and the capitalist customer is not the enemy anymore) but one must remember that the Lesser Carpathians are not all that far away, which does mean that you do occasionally run into vampires

Fortunately the locals are very willing to share their expertise in dealing with such matters and they showed me a 'quick-and-dirty' way to ensure the safe completion of one's meal without getting bitten on the neck.

More to follow...

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On B.B.C. Radio 4's Today Programme (on Monday's show - if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.

The B.B.C. journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were "illegally cut down" and the timber "illegally imported into Western European countries".

I noticed something about the B.B.C. man's remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the 'national parks' or the 'national forests' - never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.

Whether forests are owned by old aristocractic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck - ownership (as opposed to licences, or 'rights to' or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.

Of course the B.B.C. man did not notice this - he just claimed that things would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.

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An urgent memo to the people whose job it is to monitor so-called 'greenhouse gases': there appears to be more than enough hot air over Central Europe to keep the Kyoto balloon aloft:

Russia came under pressure from the European Union at the weekend to ratify the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gases, amid fears that Moscow's commitment may be wavering.

Yes it is probably 'wavering' because the Russians (in common with everybody else) know that the Kyoto Protocol is a bad idea which has been touted as the solution to a non-problem. If the Russians have got any sense they will consign the whole boondoggle to the shredder.

The protocol, which is backed by the EU but opposed by Washington, needs the support of the Russians to reach the threshold of backing required for it to come into force. Although Moscow announced last September that it would ratify, it has so far failed to do so, raising fears that the entire international effort to combat climate change could be stalled.

The keyword here is 'fear'. Not fear of environmental catastrophes or other such fantastic nonsense, but a (justified) fear among Europe's political elite that their dirigiste economies will not be able to compete in a truly global marketplace.

Altero Matteoli, the Italian Environment Minister, called for enhanced cooperation with the US and Russia, as well as with emerging economies,such as India and China.

'Cooperation' is a euphamism for 'submission' and what Mr.Matteoli and his ilk require is for potential competitors to hobble themselves with pointless and damaging regulatory burdens that slap a lid on industrial and technological development. The only other method of halting decline is root-and-branch reform of the Europe's stagnating economies and that is not going to happen.

Kyoto is not about 'saving the Earth' or 'improving the quality of life' or any other enviro-mentalist nostrums. Kyoto is a deeply dishonest contrivance; a device for propping up an arcane and protectionist 'old' Europe.

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Citizens of the Czech Republic, about to vote in the referendum on their country's entry into the EU, were shocked to find in their inboxes yesterday an email from their Prime Minister. Is this e-politics? They do not think so and they certainly are not impressed. The Prime Minister spamming, er, addressing the nation.

A Czech blogger comments on AcidLog:

I don't know who thought up the campaign, but I know that if a commercial product were marketed this way, the company would be doomed.

He also provides the text of the email. Judge for yourselves:

Dear citizens,

The moment of a serious decision is close, which should be made by each of us confidently and independently. It is a decision that is beyond the boundaries of the everyday political disputes and squabbling. We are deciding the future of our country for decades. Those who say that the decision we make this Friday and Saturday is a 'draft' one are wrong. This is not the case. The referendum is binding and the result will determine whether the Czech Republic enters the European Union or whether it will chose a long period of isolation. Every one of us has experienced a moment in his life when an opportunity was missed and it never came back.

Vladimir Spidla
Prime Minister

Although the blogger intents to vote yes, he lists a number of arguments used by the anti-EU campaigners: the EU's murky financial management, scandals regarding selection of agencies (presumably refering to allocation of EU contracts), the idiotic pseudo-documentaries on TV insulting the viewers' intelligence, the scandal with real EU citizens (perhaps some local affair), leaflets full of newspeak and arguments notable by their absence and concert by one of the divas of Czech pop.

Despite the obvious sarcasm, it seems that the level of anti-EU campaigning in the 'New Europe' is pitifully inadequate. They have a lot to overcome as the EU propaganda gives a powerful incentive to the average Czech citizen. Tomas Kohl explains:

People from UK or abroad know little about the quality and range of arguments presented here to convince the public to say Yes. Instead of focusing on heavy issues like economic and monetary policy, questions about sovereignty, foreign relations, the government plays the game of nonsense issues and tries to lure us with sweet promises of a better tomorrow.

Following are the main selling points of the ongoing pro-EU propaganda, paid by taxpayers:

The borders will disappear, people will be able to travel freely
We'll be able to study in EU countries for free
We'll be able to work anywhere in the EU
We'll get a large chunk of money from Brussels
More security

Tomas's appeal to the British is touching:

I just pray the Brits won't accept that damn Constitution that is coming their way. Britain has been the most prominent power player holding Europhile madmen from doing the worst things for some time. If they lose, we can elect conservative party in 2006 and it won't matter anymore. Guys, wake up!

Yeah, let's wake up and do something... It might be a good idea to notice the countries that we know so little about and care even less. After all they did come out in support of the Anglosphere, incurring the wrath of Chirac in the process and jeopardizing the candies he was graciously considering handing out to them. The civil societies there are still very fragile and without a heavy-weight ally they stand no chance against the EU Federasts.

Another Czech blogger sums up his thoughts on the issue in a graphic succinctly named "Entry to the EU".

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Instapundit links to this UPI report:

WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.

"In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an 'appropriate and serious review' of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times," Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.

Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award," Nynka wrote.

The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine -- a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others -- has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented -- and potentially immensely embarrassing -- procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.

The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the "Harvest of Sorrow" by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.

One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.

So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty – Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?

Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What's Up, Doc?, Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called "You're The Top" or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to "The Great Duranty". Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it's Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?

It's not that I'm opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren't murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies - merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.

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Asks b3ta.com:

Men: Like looking at pretty ladies? Like laughing at bad translations of Russian mobile phone conferences? You're in the land of luck as this site combines both.

It certainly does. Eldar Murtazin is impressed, and Andreas Von Horn (that's what it says) translates:

Year by year, visiting CeBIT, catch myself at idea, that they have better organization, and exhibits for the first time are shown exactly at this exhibition, instead of wandering on the world, turning in an antiquity. But there is one big advantage of the Russian exhibitions and of SvyazExpocomm as one of the most appreciable, there are excessive plenty of beautiful girls on one square meter of the area. The last year one my foreign friend after visiting the exhibition has left in prostration and has told, that knows where to look for a wife. Girls in city centre which caused the genuine interest and remarks in the excellent form, have simply ceased to exist. The friend all the rest three days has spent at the exhibition, and according to him has not been sorry at all about it.

On results of the first day has collected about 500 photos of girls from various stands, a part from them we'll publish in this picture story. I can not give up to myself such pleasure, and the reputation needs to be supported, in fact the tradition began the last year. To try listing all photos is senseless, further are photos that have appeared by will of case beside and have pleased me.

For knowing people and visiting the exhibition not the first year, CBOSS name talks a lot about, but I beg to assume, that in the last turn about billing. However, judge, I in my turn dream to shake hands with the person, which selects girls for this company!

Ah, those wacky foreigners.

   

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I'll bet that the EUnuchs are beside themselves with glee now that they have managed to co-opt the Pope:

Just three weeks before the EU membership referendum in Poland, Pope John Paul II has recommended that his compatriots join the European Union.

Sure to be seen as a benediction by many in Poland. Does the Pontiff not realise that the EU is the work of the Devil?

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Matthew Maly writes in with a remarkable tale of malfeasance and cover-up from stretching from the Ukraine & Russia to the corridors of power in the United States

Four years ago, I alerted the US Department of Defense about $20M grossly mismanaged and/or stolen from Defense Enterprise Fund (DEF), a US-financed program to convert the former Russian producers of weapons of mass destruction (anthrax, nuclear, etc). A Department of Defense Audit proved the theft, but the guilty American managers were not even reprimanded.

When Vector Plant of Novossibirsk, the Soviet Army's prime facility for producing militarized anthrax and smallpox spores, asked for just $1M to convert itself - DEF did not have the money. When DEF COO was purchasing his private apartment in Moscow, DEF had a million dollars to finance it.

Just recently, I caused Defense Threat Reduction Agency to lower the number former Soviet WMD scientists said to be converted by DEF to peaceful pursuits from 3370 to 1250, a 66% reduction! But the real figure is no more than 200 scientists, not a good result for a $67M program.

A more complete description is here. For the full story, please go here and then click on "DEF".

After my letter of concern, I was immediately blacklisted for US-financed assistance jobs in the NIS which was a professional and financial catastrophe for me. I am extremely frustrated that there has been four (!) intentionally inconclusive investigations of DEF, each refusing to look into my allegations. The Pentagon admits that the money is gone and that a $67M program is dead, victim of gross mismanagement, they do not disprove my letter, but they do not remove my name from the blacklist either.

Matthew Maly

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Political assassination is becoming something of a national pastime in Russia. The latest victim is Sergey Yushenkov , a Liberal Party deputy in the Dumas who was gunned down yesterday outside his apartment building in Moscow.

Russian Liberals are 'Liberal' in the European sense of the word, not the American sense i.e.

He was a strong proponent of military reform and favoured the creation of a free market in Russia when many deputies were dragging their feet.

Of course, murder is always murder regardless of the opinions held by the victim, but in this case Russia has lost one of the genuine good guys and at a time when they need all the good guys they can get.

There are no indications as to who carried out the murder or why.

R.I.P. Mr.Yushenkov.

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That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of 'progressive socialism' it is hardly a surprise.

What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba'athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf.

To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba'athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light?

What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba'athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin's good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services.

It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid.

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Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Tuesday that it was unlikely Moscow would abstain on a U.N. vote on authorizing war against Iraq and strongly indicated it will use its Security Council veto to stop it if necessary.

At a joint news conference with Jack Straw yesterday the Russian softened his stance slightly. "The Iraqi issue is one that is unlikely that one of us would abstain...We have not ruled out using a veto over the crisis."

The French/Chirac's interests in Iraq have already been examined in some detail but I am yet to see a comparable analysis of the Russian motives. At the moment it seems that Russia is giving itself ample room to support America and Britain in future military action despite declaring its opposition to war in Iraq.

It is clear that Moscow expects to extract maximum amount for its support of military action in the UN. Perhaps the price has not been high enough. They will want guarantees that Russia's economic interests in Iraq will be preserved, particularly its contracts to develop rich oil fields once sanctions are lifted.

Also, Iraq is one of Russia's traditional allies. Russian hardware makes up 95 per cent of Iraq's arms and the two developed strong ties in Soviet times. It is hard to believe that they do not see that they would be much better off supporting the US and the UK in its strategy.

The problem seems to be not only the Russian government's need to protect huge investments and deals already made but also its inability to recognise that the kind of blackmail Iraqis are trying on them, is not necessarily 'understood' by the Bush administration.

Last year, a week before Christmas, a row broke out between Russia and Iraq when Baghdad declared "null and void" a £200 billion deal with Lukoil to develop the West Qurna oil field.

Russia's energy and foreign ministries reacted furiously to the news. Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, said the cancellation was to punish Lukoil for negotiating with America over its future interests in the region. Given Iraq's record, the cancellation of the deal was probably a crude attempt to blackmail Moscow into offering greater diplomatic support during the crucial developments in the UN in the coming months.

At that time Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, called for talks on the deal. If America had offered Moscow the guarantees it was seeking for Lukoil, the balance of power (or rather of obstructiveness) might have looked rather different today. Russia's aim is to get the US to convince it that Saddam's downfall would be to its economic advantage. Or in other words, pay them now or in future lucrative contracts, or else. Who said that the UN was a street market of sordid bargains?

Update: Earlier today on MTV, Mr Blair said that in a post-conflict Iraq, the country's oil should go into a UN supervised reserve which would be for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Oh dear, oh dear...

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As an anti-statist, free market capitalist libertarian, I am often 'accused' of being on the political right. Yet as so many libertarians will tell you, many of my ilk refuse to accept the statist left/right axis as having any relevance to us. One only has to listen to a pro-immigration libertarian such as myself and then listen to most Tories in the UK/Republicans in the USA to see an issue which shows the differences.

We often find that neo-conservatives agree with libertarian antipathy to Marxist and Keynesian state centred economics and the wealth & liberty destroying regulatory state. Yet to think that advocating laissez-faire makes us 'right wing' is to misunderstand just how large the cultural and philosophical gulf is between most true (i.e. capitalist) libertarians and most conservatives. Conservatives are about conserving, they are about continuity above all else... however libertarians are about liberty, conserving it where it can be found but also tearing down whatever impeeds it, regardless of whose sacred cows get gored in the process. We may wish to conserve what is objectively good but otherwise we are as Promethean as the Marxist left.

In the Daily Telegraph article Britain risks huge influx of east Europe migrants by Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, we see loaded language even in the title: 'risk'. How about calling the article:

'Britain opens doors to those formerly oppressed by Communism'

or maybe:

'Britain steals a march on Continental Europe in grab for east European labour'

But no. The thrust of the article is that only the wonderful Tories want to 'protect us' from the Eastern Hordes.

Ministers said that allowing migrant workers from these countries into Britain at the earliest opportunity would help the economy. But Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, challenged the Government to explain why it had not made use of the transitional arrangements. "We live in a small and crowded island," he said. "Why does the Government consider it appropriate not to have transitional controls when other EU countries have imposed them."

Well it just so happens that the Telegraph article I am quoting from actually links to an article here on Samizdata.net from the Telegraph external links sidebar (cheers, guys!) called Why do people think that Britain is overcrowded? It really is not overcrowded and the idea we are somehow not going to be able to assimilate other Europeans is laughable. Oliver Letwin does not really care about providing the British economy with high initiative eastern European workers and entrepreneurs, he is just concerned with playing politics and attacking anything the dismal Blair government does, even when it is entirely correct.

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Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something - anything - just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday's Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:

Poland and the EU

From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson

Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.

Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.

Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.

Yours etc,

RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.

December 3.

It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.

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It now apears that the number of victims of the Moscow theatre siege has risen to 117. It also appears that all the victims were killed by the gas that was used to overcome their terrorist captors.

Unarguably that is a terrible price to pay but I am forced to agree with Dale Amon that the Russian authorities had no other plausible options open to them. Faced with not being able to win them all, they settled for not losing them all. Decisions do not come any harder than that.

Negotiations, however framed, were a non-starter. To even commence them would be, and be seen as, a capitulation; a reward to the terrorists for their audacity and enterprise and a guarantee that every public venue in the civilised world would, henceforth, be eyed hungrily for the prospect of a repeat performance. Negotiations don't always save lives.

Like it or not, the Russians have now established the template for dealing with these situations and, regardless of the whining in the mainstream media, it's a template that will be followed, albeit improved upon. It is also a message to every terrorist nutjob in the world that all they can expect in return for their 'heroic' efforts is a miserable, pointless death. I wonder how many other planned terrorist 'operations' of this nature are, even now, being hastily reconsidered? The much-feared Russian proclivity for brazen ruthlessness has, for once, worked both in their favour and ours.

They have a saying in Russia: if you're going to die, then die with music. It means go out with a bang, go down fighting, make sure your death has meaning. Whilst it will not constitute even a meagre crumb of comfort for the bereaved, I do not believe their loved ones died in vain. By their tragic deaths, many, many others might avoid an equally grisly fate.

I cannot bring myself to glorify an event which led to the deaths of so many people who went out to enjoy a musical evening. But I think it appropriate to pay them tribute by acknowledging that they died with music.

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That 80 or more hostages have been killed is dreadful but the fact 750 were saved is a triumph.

But there are some very stark lessons here.

In 1995, a related Chechen group took over 2000 people hostage in a hospital in Budyonnovsk. After an initial attempt to free the hostages was botched with considerable loss of life by the Russian forces, a deal was cut by then Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin that agreed a cease-fire in the Chechen war and allowed the hostage takers to escape in return for the safety of their captives.

And of course that was proof that you can indeed get the Russians to cut a deal if you are daring enough and willing to slaughter enough innocent civilians.

Well I hope that Vladimir Putin has just signalled a complete rejection of that mind set. As terrible as it is that so many hostages have died, the fact is the Chechen terrorists who did this are now either dead or facing a very grim time indeed in a Russian jail... and were given nothing for their pains by the Russians. That is the only message that must be sent to terrorists everywhere, to do otherwise is to motivate such people to cause more horrors in theatres, hospitals and homes. The enemy may not fear death itself but I suspect they do indeed fear pointless death.

So whatever the cost, in the long run it is cheaper in lives to never negotiate (other than as a tactical ruse). Give them the death they desire but nothing that would further their aims, no matter how small.

Russian commando with SV-98 sniper rifle

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My initial hopes, that the storming of a theatre just outside Moscow (the name of which doesn't appear to be published anywhere, incidentally) by a gang of heavily-armed Chechenhawks was merely the execution of a piece of bizarre and shocking performance art, have now ebbed away.

"I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living,"

"Even if we are killed, thousands of brothers and sisters will come after us, ready to sacrifice themselves," said a female among the group, only her eyes peering from a head-to-toe black robe."

As substitute for hope, I now have the tangibly queasy feeling that this is all going to end very badly.

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I'm back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host's first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.

Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia's answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner's death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn't seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.

Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner's death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.

Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life.

The USSR, being the USSR, decided a few years later, in the early sixties, to start repopulating the area, and damn the consequences in terms of human disease, which were appalling too. The USSR was no lover of jazz, but it was willing to use jazz for its own higher purposes, such as to add a dash of glamour to an otherwise wholly dreadful human environment where it nevertheless wanted people to live, and so various showbiz acts were despatched to the area, including a jazz band lead by Karel Krautgartner. And, according to my host, Krautgartner wasn't the only one to die at about the age of sixty, of cancer. They all did. That's right. The entire band later died prematurely of cancer. And this after a visit lasting hardly more than a few days.

Now I don't understand the technicalities of thermo-nuclear pollution, but it seems that it is not something that is evenly spread. It concentrates itself in particular places where it finds it particularly easy to hang around, and as a result there was one happy exception to the collective, delayed death sentence that the band later found itself condemned to.

One of the band members took a more, let us say, American jazzman's view of his responsibilities, and passed on the sight-seeing aspect of the trip, choosing instead to stay stuck in his hotel room consuming a continuous supply of cigarettes and alcohol. As a result he lived about a decade longer than the others.

I love that. A man's life is prolonged by his addiction to alcohol and nicotine. True, he eventually died of throat cancer brought on by smoking too much, but even so: hurrah!! Smoking And Drinking Can Sometimes Seriously Protect Your Health.

I treasure this story, because it seems to me to sum up, in a way that is downright artistic, the whole multi-faceted achievement that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – its obsession with punching militarily above its weight, its proneness to huge accidents; its indifference to human life, including human lives appropriated from far away countries; its hatred of everything popular and western but its willingness to succumb to such things for its own over-ridingly vile purposes; the spectacular poisoning of the environment, far, far beyond the worst of the petty pollutions committed by Western corporate capitalism; the way that the most intelligent thing to do if you got swallowed up in it was to get blind drunk; and the way that it all eventually collapsed amidst a hurricane of plummeting life-expectancy statistics. It's all there. (Only the arctic death camps are missing, but they've been well covered by others.) And I treasure being a Samizdatan and having somewhere to put the story.

What I don't know is how well known it already is. My host reckoned this hadn't been written about before, not with regard to these particular musicians anyway. But there must be a mass of reportage of the explosion itself and general surrounding miseries, especially now that the USSR's successor government has finally admitted that the thing did happen. Samizdata readers are pretty hot on the technicalities of weaponry, so maybe there'll be some good comments and the story will grow somewhat. I hope so. It's important to keep reminding ourselves what a good thing it was that the Cold War was won, mostly without severe explosions, by Civilisation rather than by its opponents.

(Come to think of it, fellow Samizdatan Dale Amon knows about weapons and about this kind of music, the way I know about neither. I wonder what he may have to tell us.)

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What with the England - Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait's visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours - the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian's perception of himself up-side down:

For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world's true sophisticates.

Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday¹. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.

"We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn't in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground... To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now."

Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn't yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day - Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.

The truth is that Slovakia is neither a hidden gem of sophistication a là Brian's post nor a den of primitive and dangerous louts. It is a country suffering from the effects of long-term isolation under communism and a history of neglect and bashing by its bigger and 'superior' neighbours. The symptoms are standard and predictable - a severe inferiority complex coupled with an outrageously inflated sense of importance. So, a single conversation can contain scathing criticism of all things Slovak, from politics to your next door neighbours, as well as a vociferous defence of the Slovak ways as the best, never admitting that there may be something better outside your immediate world and interpreting behaviour of the outside world as if Slovakia was its focal concern. The result of such an autistic worldview is usually a breeding ground for conspiracy theories...

Makes sense, if you ask me. The racist abuse hurled at the England players is based on the same fear of the unknown, fear of the 'different' that could undermine one's ill-fitting but comfortable understanding of the world, like a tight but well-worn shoe. In Slovakia this fear goes hand in hand with the desperate need to feel superior to someone and so any reason, however 'out-dated' or primitive, will do.

But while I may have some understanding for the Slovak struggle for identity, I do have a problem with the Slovak media and its approach to the incident. I haven't had a chance to find out what 'ordinary people' think but no doubt Brian will be happy to share his first-hand experience, given half the chance.

In what is to be the first ever fisking of Slovak news, I will quote from an article by Pravda, a mainstream newspaper in Slovakia:

"This type of abuse will probably never stop. I have experienced racism since I played in the under 21s" said Heskey calmly to the British media.

Calmly, my foot. And even so, how does Heskey's 'calm' make the behaviour of the crowd less primitive?!

However, Beckham was not hiding his disgust of the Slovak fans' behaviour in the stadium Slovan in Bratislava: "Problems with our fans is one thing but the most significant moment was the racist behaviour towards our players. We tried to ignore it but it simply wasn't possible to screen it out completely."

As if Beckham's glossing over the England football fans, who indeed were causing trouble, and his insistence that the behaviour of the Slovak fans was worse, disqualifies him as biased and renders his judgement irrelevant. How subtle!

And finally:

A classic definition was attempted by the England coach Eriksson: "This should not be possible in the year 2002. It was horrendous and shouldn't have happened."

Yes, bring on the sarcasm and screw unbiased and unloaded reporting!

It is the reaction of those whose identity and sense of worth is built on emotional rather than rational grounds and Slovakia certainly does not have the monopoly on this phenomenon, which can be found in any society. The difference is in the significance and effectiveness of the historical straws at which the society in question can clutch. Hence the well-known obsession of the English with World War II, the anti-German banter being a source of instant and cheap superiority to any English football hooligan.

To be fair, this kind of knee-jerk reaction is not confined to the simple or provincial mindsets, it is rife amongst the 'sophisticated' western socialist commentators, journalists, politicians, intellectuals etc., obviously, its manifestations far more 'civilised' than the racist booing of the Slovak football crowd.

The socialist beliefs and rhetoric of the 'chattering classes' act as a psychological salve, soothing their champagne-soaked consciences as well as making them feel virtuous about defending the poor of this world. Overflowing with 'noble' sentiment and love of the humankind, they truly hate us - the heartless capitalists thriving on child labour, the cold-hearted free marketeers spurning the warm cocoon of the state love, the beastly gun-wielding hawks supporting military action against our enemies, so obviously evil and warped for we disagree with them! The old "Workers of the world unite!" has been replaced with "Do not think, emote!" And to hell with those who make them confront the results and consequences of their idiotarian mental processes. There is always room for a new definition of the 'class enemy'!

¹ = I am not concerned about the force used by the Slovak police against violent England football fans set on making trouble since that is the only way to deal with them. Also, I do not think shooting of two England fans outside a bar in Bratislava demonstrates anything but more stringent, albeit not entirely PC, attitudes towards security. They were shot by private security guards...

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Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Yesterday and the day before, I did a couple of talks in the local high school, with my friend the teacher supplying not so much translation as translatory clarification as and when needed, because my audience had a pretty reasonable understanding - and this is the whole point of what I'm about to write - of English. I spoke about the British attitude towards the EU, and explained why the Euro-debate has become steadily more fierce.

One of the reasons for this fierceness is that the Internet has made the idea of participating in the Anglosphere more appealing, and the idea of a unified Europe corresponding less appealing, to the British. But yesterday morning, before I embarked upon this bit of my talk, I asked how many of my audience had themselves used the Internet during the previous week. Most hands went up. Then I asked: how many of you used only the Slovak language? All hands went down. All of them. Not only that, there was a distinct murmer of disapproval that I should even ask such a question. Only use Slovak internet sites? What a bizarre idea.

What this interchange illustrates is that the Internet means something rather different to us language-phobic Anglos compared to how people like these educated young Slovaks experience it. In Britain, physical travel is easy, but learning other languages is an unfamiliar drudgery. We can travel, physically, but don't need to travel linguistically, so to speak. Not everyone speaks our language, but enough do to make our monolinguistic attitude reasonable, if often impolite.

But for Slovaks it's the other way around. Learning another language is relatively easy, and an obvious thing for any educated person to do, starting with English. Travelling is hard, because so expensive, and because the obvious place to go, to Western Europe, is made so difficult for them. So the Internet is for them, for now, their escape to the big wide world. To use only Slovak on it would be to behave like those idiot British tourists who turn up in Timbuktoo and sulk if they can't get fish and chips. The Internet, for us Anglos, is a different way to divide the world. For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world's true sophisticates.

I also sensed a very different attitude here, and especially among these young, bright Slovaks, towards the EU. For them, the EU is indeed a threat to Slovakia. Their worry is that Slovakia will become a small colony in a large empire.  But what the EU means to them personally, or could mean, or they hope could mean - and asking about this produced another huge show of hands - is the chance of people like them to seek their fortunes elsewhere than in little old Slovakia. Instead of making do with crummy au pair jobs, they might soon be able to go West and make real lives for themselves, in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London. The EU, for them, is the hope of freedom.

Russia, by the way, is absolutely not seen as a problem for these people. The idea that Slovakia might be joining the EU as some kind of long-range defence policy, in case Russia ever gets strong again, was dismissed with contempt.

Slovakia is, I understand, on the latest EU list of countries who are due to be engulfed in 2006, or some such year. I just hope that things for these young people turn out the way they hope, and that they haven't been swindled.

You can also see, however, why older Slovaks might rationally dread the EU, as the great vacuum cleaner that will suck the brightest and best of their children out of their country and leave the place a tired old dormitory country for impoverished oldies, visited only by vastly rich tourists, who then proceed to rebuild Slovakia as a tourist country instead of a real country.

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Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Here at the only Internet cafe in Bratislava that I can find, I am struggling with a crazy Eastern European keyboard and what are for me the difficulties of using yahoo. It's an arkward combination, not made anz easier bz the fact that whenever I tzpe z I get y and whenever I tzpe y I get z. So it comes out as zahoo unless I concentrate verz carefullz.

But enough of trivia. I got to Bratislava last Friday and leave next Monday, and so far it's been great. I have lucked into a classical music festival, the initials for the Slovak title of which are BHS. So when I went to the concert on Saturday, I thought, oh no, they´ve done a truly tacky sponsorship deal. But all was well.

The concert however was dull, I thought.  The solo pianist, Ivan Moravec, is world-renowned, but frankly he made his two pieces, the Franck Variations for Piano and Orchestra and the Ravel Concerto, sound to me like run-throughs. Maybe it was me. Maybe it is that he looks like a waiter. Whatever, everyone else seemed happy.

But then on Sunday, there was Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the Czech Philharmonic in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. It was sold out of course, but I went along anyway, and a Japanese gent sold me a ticket, for the Slovak equivalent of about £6 sterling ($9 US). Unbelievable. As was the performance. For once all the flim-flam of classical musical ovations - a loud a pretentious 'bravo' as soon as the last chord went silent, vast gobs of flowers for the lady solo singers and even for the gentleman conductor, constant returns to the platform for more applause, rhythmic applause - all seemed entirely appropriate.

Ashkenazy is a tiny man, but his conducting both made the absolute most of each passing musical moment and made the piece as a whole - and what a whole it is - all hang together. He has the ability that all the best conductors have of being able to flap his stick arm about like a madman, while keeping not just his torso but also his other arm absolutely immobile. So the flapping arm dealt with the here and now, while the rest of him made sure that the 'paragraphing' of the music, so to speak, still made sense. The only problems were the ensemble of the trumpet section, which wouldn't do if they ever try to turn the evening into a CD, and the coughing of the audience, ditto times five. The trumpets were otherwise excellent, and their occasional fluffs mattered to me not at all, but the coughing made me think murder. But, the vital silence that happens just before the chorus starts to sing in the final movement was, against all the odds, truly silent. When the choral singing did get underway, it was magnificent.

The hall of the Slovak Philharmonic is really too small for the tremendous din that went on inside it that night, but for me this only added to the impact. No way could I play this piece as loudly on my CD machine, because the neighbours would have me expelled mid-way into the first movement.  Concerts in such halls are often marred by traffic noises, but this was a concert I can imagine having seriously threatened the concentration of passing motorists.  It's a huge piece, with no holding back, especially in the first and last movements. Mahler is out to borrow the very voice of God. So all in all, it was the complete and perfect opposite of the night before, and a memory to treasure for a lifetime.

What has all that to do with the usual pre-occupations of Samizdatistas, such as the ongoing War on Terrorism? Well put it this way: it's what is being defended.

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Is it right, on the day when most minds (certainly the minds of most Samizdata readers) are focussed on a war that is very much in progress, to think also about an earlier one, the Cold one, the one that ended, approximately speaking, around 1990? I hope so. Like everyone I have my "what I was doing", my "how I heard about it" and my "how I felt as I watched it" stories concerning today's recollections of a year ago. (Someone rang me. I was at my desk. I didn't like it.) But, rightly or wrongly, appropriately or inappropriately, I choose also to ruminate today upon events from an earlier time. (And besides, I cannot possibly do better than Perry's photos, or David's inspired "root causes of American anger" posting of last Sunday.)

So anyway, in the latest issue (October 2002) of Gramophone, there's a letter concerning the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877-1960), from Professor William Lee Pryor of the University of Houston. Here's this letter in full (but with apologies for the absence of Hungarian accents):

In his review of some orchestral music by Dohnanyi (June, page 44), David Gutman writes, 'I wonder how many readers are still bothered by the bizarre trajectory of the pianist composer's wartime career.' This is no doubt a veiled allusion to false charges brought against this greatly maligned musician during the Second World War. I knew Dohnanyi well and would like to respond.

Prior to this event, Dohnanyi was the most important figure in the musical life of Hungary. He was not only a world famous pianist, composer, conductor and teacher, but was also head of the Franz Liszt Music Academy, the music director and chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the head of music for the Hungarian Radio, and a member of Parliament. Inevitably, second-rate musicians blamed him when they failed to succeed as they wished. A man who had gained such prominence is bound to acquire many enemies and they became his detractors once he fled Hungary during the Russian invasion. They said he was a Nazi, anti-semitic and anti-Communist. Only the latter was correct. It seems to be forgotten that he also left Hungary during the brief Communist regime of Bela Kun in 1919. Before the Soviet Union's takeover in the Second World War, he, along with the other members of Parliament, singed an anti-communist document. The new government never forgave him for that.

He was not a Nazi sympathiser and never belonged to any political faction. Nor was he anti-semitic. The facts are that when they wanted him to purge the orchestras of its Jewish players, he disbanded the group altogether. But the rumours of his anti-semitism would persist and follow him for the rest of his life.

Happily, Jews have been among Dohnanyi's chief defenders. Edward Kilenyi, who had studied with Dohnanyi in Budapest, was a major in US Army Intelligence during the war and he conducted an official, extensive examination of the various charges brought against his old teacher. The result was a complete exoneration for Dohnanyi. The leading Jewish-Hungarian composer of the perio, Leo Weiner, wrote a letter from Budapest in which he repudiated the anti-semitic charges against his former colleague and this was published in The New York Times. Sadly however, some people always want to believe the worst.

You get the sense that Weiner's letter defending him wasn't the first Dohnanyi related stuff in the New York Times, don't you?

I tell you at once that, although I know nothing else about this business other than what I learned from Professor Pryor's letter, I find the story he tells entirely convincing. I quote the letter in full because, first, so far as I could tell from the Gramophone website, no direct link either to it, or for that matter to the David Gutman review, is possible (although I'd love to be corrected about that).

And second, I quote the letter in full because I liked it, and liked especially that Pryor didn't just defend Dohnanyi against the false accusations of Nazism and anti-semitism, but proclaimed him truly as the courageous anti-communist that he clearly was. This is (a) clearly true and important and excellent and good to remember, and (b) it also explains why all the lies were told. He wasn't a Nazi. He wasn't an anti-semite. But because he was anti-communist, the communists said that he was a Nazi and that he was an anti-semite. That’s what communists did, and through the sheer momentum of these things, they still do. Four decades after Dohnanyi's death, the din of the enormous communist lie machine still echoes and still continues to spread lies.

I wonder what, if anything, David Gutman will have to say for himself in later issues of Gramophone. Was he merely yet another innocent victim of the communist lie machine, in that he merely, unknowingly, allowed the mud ("bizarre trajectory") to stick to Dohnanyi, or was he doing his nasty little bit deliberately to refresh the mud, so to speak?

I realise that communism did far nastier things to far more people than merely tell a lifetime of lies about Ernst von Dohnanyi. But it's all part of that huge and horrible story.

This latest war looks like being a long and complicated one also, with lots of cold spells. I wonder how many other good people will likewise find themselves, through a combination of envy and ideologically motivated malevolence making use of such envy, being denounced as bad, merely because they too happened to live in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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The Blogger Bash is tonight, so I got myself in the party mood this morning by reading how David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky had responded to Adriana's griefometer posting.

He tried it on Soviet Communism, but deliberately took it all a bit seriously and tastefully, ignoring for example how very uncute lots of the victims of Soviet Communism were.

Now, this griefometer is just a silly game, isn't it? A bit sick perhaps? Well, consider this: 100 million killed over 80 years is about 3,422 per day. Or one "World Trade Centre". Every day for 80 years.

What's really sick is that the communists' ideological soulmates infest almost every academic institution in the western world. And I am still waiting for them to apologise.

Have a nice weekend.

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Although Prague has been hit hard by the worst flooding of the Vltava in a century, at least there has been some good news for the despondent staff at Prague's zoo. After having been forced to put down several highly prized large animals when it became clear they could not be moved to higher ground in time to avoid drowning, returning zoo employees were astonished to discover Slavek, an 18 year old hippo, waiting for them on the second floor of a zoo building in an exceedingly bad mood.

Don't just stand there gawping, feed me, damn it!

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It seems that Estonia is well on the way to becoming a shining example of robust capitalist virtues... and high tax Finland is concerned it will turn into a tax haven (article will only be available on-line for a short time for non-Baltic Times subscribers).

In Finland, corporate income tax is 29 percent while in Estonia it is 26 percent and there is no tax on reinvested corporate profits. The personal income tax rate is progressive in Finland and may reach up to 60 percent; in Estonia it is set at 26 percent.
[...]
"Estonia certainly wants to preserve the comparatively low taxation level for a long time," Kallas said. "I suggest other countries move toward decreasing taxes rather than pressuring others to increase theirs."
[...]
But it is hard for Finland to decrease the tax rate while trying to uphold a social-welfare system, he said, and so it is difficult for the country to compete internationally on low tax levels. He suggested that the EU set tax standards to avoid harmful competition between member states.
[...]
Viialained said that taxation was an internal matter for Estonia, but EU negotiators should have considered the issue more carefully.
[...]
"When Estonia is a member of the same union, then the common internal market is not totally (the country's) own business any more," he said. "That is why I hope Estonians understand our criticism.

Of course they understand EU criticism, a simpleton could understand it! The political classes in places like Finland (and France and Germany) do not want the owners of capital to have access to less kleptocratic taxation within the EU as that would endanger the system of pork barrel and kick backs they depend on for their perks. Oh if only more former communist nations would follow Estonia's brave example and turn their back on the toxic social democratic model of the European Union.

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I've read Perry's link to the checkered history of the UPA with great interest (see previous Samizdata.net article). There is much students of the period miss simply because of the vastness of the Eastern Front and the greater perceived relevance to our own history of the Western.

Most striking in the Weisenthal Centre's brief history of the hatreds, treacheries and double-dealings of the period and area is how well it is brought to life in the guise of real people in Harry Turtledove's wonderful alternate history series, "World War". I won't spoil any of it for those who have not read the books, other than to say he puts human faces and motives to the many players of that vast historical drama of the twentieth century.

I highly recommend the books to anyone and particularly to those interested in WWII. Not for the history itself - it is an alternate reality - but to get inside the heads of the people behind the facts.

No one is a monster in their own mind - and sometimes not even in their own time.

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Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who opposed both the Nazis and the Red Army (whom they regarded as occupying Russians) from 1942 until they were largely crushed by the communists in 1953, are to be accorded the same rights as former Red Army veterans by the Ukrainian government. It is interesting that the Russian government regards this as an affront even after all these years, calling the UPA 'bandits' for having the audacity to defend the Ukraine against all comers.

However although the UPA opposed both the Soviets and Nazis, they were also implicated in the mass murder of Poles and Jews and do not really fit comfortably into the 'clearly-the-good-guys' category, a fact surprisingly absent from several reports on the recent hostile reaction by the Russian government to the Ukrainian decision to grant surviving UPA veterans full military pensions.

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On my recent holiday in France I took with me a biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the one by D. M. Thomas (subtitled "A Century in His Life", first published Little, Brown and Company, 1998). Before that I had been reading Solzhenitsyn's own The Oak and the Calf (which came out in 1975), and now I'm reading his Invisible Allies, which came out in 1995.

These latter two books are Solzhenitsyn's answer to the question: "How on earth did you do it?" The first puts Solzhenitsyn's own exploits centre stage. The second names some of the many names that could finally be named safely, without endangering lives. He did a lot himself. And he had a lot of help.

It was partly being a contributor to Libertarian "Samizdata" that prodded me into this reading burst. I quite understand why Perry gave the name "Libertarian Samizdata" to Libertarian Samizdata – messages that go under the radar and past the editorial defences of the official statist oriented big media, and so forth. Nevertheless I do feel a bit uneasy decking myself out in the word that originally meant people risking their very lives, all day, every day, for years on end, copying and distributing the real Russian literature of those times. The worst that can happen to us is a few hostile e-mails.

This reading has, of course, stimulated a million thoughts, but one thought in particular relates to Adriana Cronin's point about how Stalin, his henchmen, his successors and his middle managerial puppets throughout the Soviet empire were prone to believe their own bullshit.

Simply: Why didn't they just kill him? Solzhenitsyn was making a monumental nuisance of himself. So why, as soon as he started doing this seriously, didn't they just take him out the back of somewhere private and have him shot? They had their chances, as Solzhenitsyn himself relates.

There are many reasons. Western "pressure" was indeed crucial. And Solzhenitsyn was a literary and political tactician of genius. This was no dreamy, socially dyslexic wimp we're talking about. This was a man who, until they arrested him for being incompletely reverent about Stalin, was a highly effective and courageous Red Army artillery officer, and the military metaphor he uses to describe his "battles" with Soviet officialdom is relentless and entirely appropriate. He writes particularly memorably in The Oak and the Calf of "encounter battles", involving not only him and his Soviet enemies, but also, operating independently, the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.

But here's another reason they didn't kill him. They didn't kill him because killing him would have contradicted their idea of what they thought they were doing.

It wasn't just "idiot savants" (D. M. Thomas' killer phrase) like Jean Paul Sartre and his ilk who swallowed Soviet lies about happy smiling people marching joyfully into the cornfields and the steel factories; they believed this drivel themselves, if not as a complete fact exactly, then certainly as an aspiration. To have killed Solzhenitsyn would have been to admit to themselves that all this socialism-with-a-human-face nonsense was indeed nonsense, and that they were just old-fashioned, self-serving tyrants whose rule was based on brute force and nothing else.

Looking at the larger picture, the tendency to believe their own lies was a major part, not only of their failure to handle the likes of Solzhenitsyn, but of their failure period. The Soviet Empire fell apart because it was founded not only on the deception of others, but on self-deception self-inflicted by and on its own rulers. They didn't, in the end, con us. Not enough of us, anyway. But they did con themselves.

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This morning on the tube (a mode of shifting vast crowds of people from one place to another, aspiring to the name of London's underground transport system) the person sitting next to me was drowsing over an article in an issue of today's newspaper called The Soviet threat was a myth. That really caught my attention so I spent the rest of the journey trying to work out which newspaper was gently resting on my neighbour's lap. Many furtive glances later I discovered it was The Guardian, a left-wing (to put it mildly) daily. Shock horror but no surprises there with regard to the title then... Nevertheless, I was intrigued and decided to read the online version as soon as I could get to my computer.

The conclusion of the argument was predictable and I am now torn between a point to point response to Andrew Alexander, the author of the article, who apparently is writing a whole book on the subject and just a few well placed words of wisdom, backed up by my personal experience, that would put him in his place. Something tells me that the latter approach would not satisfy the discerning Samizdata audience, so I will briefly highlight the most contentious of Mr Alexander's statements and assumptions.

The conclusion that Stalin had no intention of attacking the West and that therefore the West is to blame for the Cold War just doesn't hold. Just because the orthodox view of the Cold war as a 'struggle to the death between Good (Britain and America) and Evil (the Soviet Union)' may seem today as a simplistic 'Manichean doctrine', it does not follow that the Soviet Union's actions such as installing communist governments throughout central and eastern Europe can be interpreted merely as a frightened response of the war-weary Russia to the speeches made by Churchill (the Iron Curtain speech of March 1946) and Truman (the phrase 'stand up to Stalin with an iron fist').

There are two lines of reasoning employed by those who challenge the Cold War orthodoxy, often combined to achieve greater emphasis. One is examination of the internal ideological struggles of Stalin with Trotsky and other opponents within the communist camp such as Tito and Mao to point out that Stalin was not driven by ideology. The logic blind spot is obvious here - Stalin's version may have been different from the others but not necessarily less virulent and aggressive. And so, this flimsy and unsupported conclusion is then applied to his foreign policy and in combination with the realpolitik school of thought used to argue that Soviet Russia was acting in its national interest. The forceful communisation of central and eastern Europe is transformed to a natural reaction of a state defending its territory and security. By extension, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were necessary as part of the 'cordon sanitaire' around Russia and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however brutal, were 'aimed at protecting Moscow's buffer zone'.

Where does one start?! Rather than getting into a detailed discussion about the validity and interpretations of this or that surviving historical evidence of Stalin's world view (which I plan to do anyway at some stage), I think it is important to point out the power of one's own propaganda, especially when carried out in the Soviet proportions. Most students of communism tend to forget that it may be impossible to resist such intense and pervasive 'brainwashing' (including your own) without a deeply rooted alternative world view. So, how can we assume that Stalin was not susceptible to the effects of his own megalomaniac personality cult? Here my personal experience comes in handy as I remember only too well how insulation and ignorance create a breeding ground for a warped perception of reality and how those who perpetuate it fall victims to their own lies. Therefore, to attribute a perspective of an international relations academic to a dictator of Stalin's calibre who wielded an 'unlimited power' over human lives using an elaborate ideology and a totalitarian regime is at best naive, at worst... well, let's not be beastly to the Guardianistas in this enlightened day and age...

The most we can acknowledge is that there is no hard evidence (as yet) to prove or disprove the claims that Stalin had a masterplan for invasion of Europe and that only the determination of the West had prevented the Red Russia from taking over the world. However, to say that 'any post-war Russian government - communist, tsarist or social democratic - would have insisted on effective control at least of Poland, if not of larger areas of eastern Europe, as a buffer zone against future attacks' as Mr Alexander does, is just plain wrong, bordering on a serious lapse of judgement. The balance of power argument cannot possibly apply in the case of democratic Russia, as Germany, the main threat to Russian security, had been defeated by democratic countries and subjected to forceful democratisation by the US. The only way such an argument can be made, is if it contains an implicit assumption that communism is a morally equivalent (or morally neutral) alternative to the Western democratic regimes. Welcome back to meta-context!

And meta-context is where I want to remain for the moment in the Cold War debate as I do believe that its origins are not as clear as the orthodox or revisionist interpretations would have us believe. The methodology of discovering the causes of the Cold War is crucial as I believe this period of history to be steeped in meta-contextual clashes and misperceptions. This is not to ignore the moral dimension, far from it, but merely separate it from the rubble of the usual academic discourse that hides so many skeletons in its own meta-contextual closet.

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I have gone straight from the buzz of London to the grey nostalgia of Prague and am now sitting in an internet cafe named appropriately Globe. I can hear English being spoken as this is a favourite place for the English-speaking ex-pats and my inner Anglospherometer is telling me that it's time to blog. I have been in Prague for two days now and given that this place is in a different world in terms of mentality and time, please take the following comments as potentially confused ramblings of a travelling blogger...

In the short time I have been here I have managed to cover a multitude of activities - checked out (no pun intended) what is new in Prague since my last visit two years ago, visited a monstrous museum of modern art (previously communist archives, the building, not the pictures, obviously...), had a blazing row about nationalism and political discourse in the Mittel Europa and managed to send two Jehovah's witnesses on their way amicably and within twenty seconds! I am particularly proud of the last one...

I have been thinking about the best way of debating in a place like Central Europe where a Western style of discourse does not create the expected responses. Roll on the popularisation of shared meta-contextual discourse...! The usual evolution of an argument from a thesis through antithesis to a synthesis, does certaintly not apply here. A statement is made, often categorically, so a thesis is born. However, presenting an anti-thesis is dangerous as the aforementioned blazing rows are certain to ensue....What is needed is some kind of validation of the grains of truths carefully exctracted from the original statement. This is interesting (and frustrating) but I think it springs from the need of the Central Europeans to assert their intellectual identity by having it first recognised by their debating opponents. Then, perhaps, room for sneaking an anti-thesis in is created, en route to a wonderful and all encompassing synthesis, providing ample justification for gallons of lovely alcohol to be consumed. As a second thought, who needs shared meta-context when you have alcohol?

On my wanderings through Prague I have been walking along Wenceslas Square, the main square where the 1989 demonstrations of the 'Velvet Revolution' took place. I noticed that some shops are hiring people to walk around holding large placards to advertise their wares. This is a familiar sight in the West, especially in Oxford street, the main shopping street in London and I have often looked upon these as another sign of 'unbridled' capitalism. Here the locals tell me in a voice dripping with moral satisfaction that such advertising is going to be banned soon as it insults the human dignity. Mindful of my debating experience in this place, I meekly pointed out that perhaps these people may be quite content to earn some money by an activity that does not involve much effort and that by banning it, they will be deprived of the opportunity to have their human dignity offended at a price they are prepared to be paid... As expected I did not get far but I have acted as the lone voice of free market and capitalism. Today, I have seen a girl reading a book whilst at the same time holding a large sign advertising an Irish Pub... So much for insulted human dignity!

I have another three days to go and depending on my ability to access the internet and my mental stability, I may blog again. If not, once in London I will no doubt find plenty to write about privacy and security, computers, markets and other far less nostalgic topics.

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I always believed that I would have to live a very, very long time indeed to witness better laws in Russia than we have in Britain. Well, I am a mere sapling of 40 and, to my not inconsiderable amazement, that day has arrived.

"On Friday the State Duma passed amendments to the Criminal Code that are to increase the rights of the Russians for self-defense. For example, a new norm has appeared: “if an attack has posed a threat to the life, the harm to the assailant can not be treated as a crime"

Contrast this to the situation in Britain, where, despite a right to self-defence being enshrined in law, the police act with almost indecent haste against any citizen that manages to successfully take advantage of it. And, lest we forget, British citizens may have this wonderful theoretical right to self-defence but they are forbidden to wield so much as a toothpick to exercise it with.

I would like to believe that this change of heart by Russian politicians has come about as a result of some great degree of enlightenment but the truth seems far more prosaic.

"The crime rate has considerably increased in Russia, and law enforcement authorities fail to cope with it. The passing of the amendments means, the government, probably rather unwillingly, has to shift the defense of lives on the people themselves"

Facts on the ground have a knack of knocking high-minded ideals off of their lofty perches. If people feel themselves to be in danger they will defend themselves regardless of what the laws say and that puts politicians in a dilemma: do they preside over a state of mass disobedience and resultant loss of legitimacy or do they relent and give the people what they demand?

The answer from Russia seems to be that they relent and give the people what they demand. But, we all know what people are like; give them an inch they demand a mile. Now that Boris and Irina have a meaningful right to defend themselves they will beg the question, what with? How long, I wonder, until the State Duma is 'reluctantly' allowing Russians the right to bear arms?

A point of principle all Libertarians understand as a given is that self-defence is a right not a licence. It it is not within the gift of politicians either to bestow it or expropriate it. But I would be churlish to nitpick over this news. Given the way Russia was ruled just a few short years ago, I can only applaud enthusiastically.

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The sterile environment I refer to is the mind of Jaroslaw Kalinowski, the leader of the Polish Peasants Party, junior partner in the ruling centre-left coalition currently de-structuring Poland's economy. Yet much to my delight he is calling for the complete abolition of the EU agricultural subsidies that suck up 80% of the EU's stolen budget.

Naturally this is not because these barely reformed socialists have suddenly become converts to real world economics but because they are starting to realise that they are going to be wiped out by subsidized Western EU agriculture and if the primitive and inefficient Polish farmers cannot get the same subsidies, they it is better to eliminate them for everyone in order to level the playing field where far lower Polish labour costs can off-set the large and highly mechanised Western European farms advantages even without subsidies.

Of course as that is such a utterly rational course of action, there is no chance whatsoever that the EU will adopt it. If not even the USA can bring itself to treat farmers like everyone else I suppose the whole world is doomed to eventually vanish under a mountain of unwanted food that is paradoxically over-produced and yet over-priced to the consumer. Madness.

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See how eager people are to demand that they have a right to your money? Polish farmers are upset because they are not going to get to steal tax money from the rest of Europe the moment they join the European Union. They will have to wait until 2013 to join the undead legions of European subsidy vampires.

Poland’s agriculture minister Jaroslav Kalinowske has declared "It is about ensuring guarantees for an equal partnership for Polish garniture. If we don’t all play under the same rules then our farmers will vote against European Union membership," reports the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.

Yes! It would be wonderful if that happened and Poland did not sign away its future. Of course if the farmers do indeed scupper Polish EU membership, they will be doing so for all the wrong reasons but as anyone who has lived through a war will tell you, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Whilst nothing the EU does ever surprises me, it often amazes me that even in the USA the farmers can rob the rest of the country not only in terms of subsidies but in terms of artificially inflated prices. How can the 'left' who claim to have the interests of the common people at heart accept that food should be made more expensive by government action? For rich and bourgeoise people, the cost of food as a proportion of their wealth is utterly trivial. Yet for the poor, that is obviously not the case and so various forms of state assistance becomes important to avoid going short of food. In a democratic nation or super-nation, this naturally produces a dependent class who will always vote for the people who provide that state assistance, even though in reality those self same people are actually the ones responsible for the food being so expensive in the first place. The vampire bites and produces a mindless legion of bloodsucking followers.

About this funny vampire picture: I think I might have gone out with this guy a few years ago. I find this on Communist Vampires website that Perry mentioned in earlier posting.

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I read Perry de Havilland and David Carr writing in Samizdata how Britain must resist the EU and defend its civil liberties against Blair's rapid elimination of traditional constitutional common laws. Yet at least some of the UK media also realises this and there is surely a possibility to fight the tide of creeping repression and backdoor Euro socialism. But if a powerful and rich country like Britain, with long traditions of freedom, has found itself in a situation with enemies of liberty within and without, what chance does the Czech Republic have against Brussels? What chance Poland? What chance Hungary?

When these countries join the EU, they will find their advantages of low labour costs are quickly legislated away in the interests of French and German Trade Unions, and they will be left to compete with the Western Europeans but with antiquated infrastructures and underdeveloped services. Worst of all, they will have their developing culture of liberty that started growing post-Communism, smothered in socialist inspired EU 'directives'.

And I see many people in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia who just cannot wait to be swallowed alive by these same people. No sooner do they finish slaughtering each other so that they can have self-determination for their respective societies, than they are cueing up to surrender everything they have won at such a terrible cost...and to who? To a bunch of smarmy Eurocrats in cheap suits who promise the same thing as Natalie Solent wrote about regarding Africa.

The EU will seduce the political class with 'largess' and make them good little 'subsidy slaves'. It makes me despair how we will ever see proper capitalist systems develop to provide us with lasting liberty and a decent standard of living, if even Britain has ended up where it is now. The economy of just Greater London is considerably larger than all of former Yugoslavia...what chance do small Slavic societies have of ever developing a wealthy capitalist order once we are under the influence of that increasingly authoritarian bureaucratic nightmare in Brussels?