Finally, the UVB-76 App You’ve Been Waiting For

Check it out on iTunes.

“Is ‘World of Tanks’ the Belarusian ‘Farmville?’”

Read Peter Savodnik’s story about the online video game that is taking the industry by storm, here, in Businessweek.

“Meet Pussy Riot, Russia’s Punk Protestors”

Read Peter Savodnik’s story on a Russian punk rock band called Pussy Riot here, in Businessweek.

The Search for the Right Masha: A Siberian Story

Peter Savodnik, at Middlebury College, tells a story about winding up at a late-night party in a Russian village in January. Audio clip

Confusion at Spaso House

President Obama likes to portray himself as a realist when it comes to foreign policy. No longer does the United States meddle in the affairs of other countries in the name of some highfalutin principle like democracy. Under this president, America has assumed a more practical — more realistic — policy that will endear us to friend and foe alike. Whether this is honorable or, in fact, in our long-term interests is not germane here. What is germane is the fact that the president appears to be flouting this policy in Russia.

When President Obama announced, in September, that he was nominating Michael McFaul to succeed John Beyrle as U.S. ambassador to Russia, he broke with a tradition that predates the 1991 Soviet collapse. Prior to McFaul, U.S. ambassadors in Moscow had been career foreign service officers. (This is not the case everywhere. The U.S. ambassador to China, for example, is usually a political appointee.)

One of the reasons for nominating a career foreign service officer was that a seasoned diplomat, it was assumed, would avoid the pitfalls that might engulf someone less sensitive to local mores. While this hardly guaranteed good U.S.-Russian relations, it seems to have worked. For decades, Americans were ably represented in Moscow by intelligent and skilled ambassadors who knew how to further U.S. interests while not alienating the Kremlin.

No doubt, the new U.S. ambassador, Mr. McFaul, knows a great deal about Russia. He previously taught political science at Stanford and served as the administration’s chief Russia adviser at the National Security Council. But he seems sadly unaware of how Russians — at the Kremlin, Foreign Ministry and, just as important, outside the vlast, or power — respond to U.S. officials who show up in Moscow lecturing Russia about…Russia.

This has been made clear by the ambassador’s frequent tweeting, which is embarrassing and, more to the point, bound to stoke fears inside the Russian government that the United States is plotting to overthrow the Putin regime via social network. (The State Department’s nonstop talk of Twitter diplomacy is generally assumed, at the Kremlin, to be code for revolution-via-handheld-device.)

Now comes the announcement that the U.S. ambassador will be appearing on Ksenia Sobchak’s talk show, Gosdep (which means, conveniently, “State Department,” in English). Sobchak is the former Paris Hilton of Russia; in what appears to be a very well timed transformation, she’s recently become a leading voice of democratic opposition lambasting the regime that once made her famous. (For more on Sobchak, see here.)  

Never mind that one would have to speak excellent Russian to negotiate Sobchak’s show, which aspires to the combativeness and intelligence of, say, The McLaughlin Group while retaining an MTV vibe. (We don’t really know how well McFaul speaks Russian because, weirdly, he usually tweets in English.)

The real issue here is that Sobchak’s show is unmistakably pro-opposition, and any U.S. ambassador who appears on it is signalling his allegiance with the forces that the Kremlin is convinced (rightly or wrongly) want to destroy it. In other words, the senior envoy of the president who prides himself on his realpolitik is pulling a Dick Cheney, champion of neoconservatism. Recall that when the vice president, in 2006, gave a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania slamming Moscow for abandoning democratic reform, Western reporters were quick to criticize him for his insensitivity to political sensibilities in Russia. Now the Obama administration’s man in Moscow is going directly to the opposition — a far more grievous offense than giving a speech in a neighboring country — and there’s nary a peep from the international press corps.

The White House and its emissary in Russia ought to figure out which policy they plan to adhere to, and then, if they feel so inclined, they might share that with their fellow Americans.

UVB-76 Article

Check out Peter Savodnik’s article on UVB-76, in German, in Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin here.

“Enigma” Podcast Available on iTunes

Listen to the free podcast of Peter Savodnik’s story, “Enigma,” from the October 2011 issue of Wired, about a mysterious shortwave radio station that’s been broadcasting from Russia since the days of Leonid Brezhnev. To see the full text of the article, click here.

Will Anyone Ask McFaul About the Reset Before He Becomes Ambassador?

Apparently, the Senate is on the cusp of confirming Michael McFaul, whom President Obama has nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Russia. Never mind that this marks a departure from tradition. (In recent decades, American ambassadors in Moscow have been career foreign-service officers; McFaul is a political appointee.) The future ambassador has the background one would expect of America’s top diplomat in the former Soviet Union. He studied Russian and international relations at Stanford, he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he was the leading voice on Russia policy at the National Security Council. He was publicly lambasted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky (which is always a good thing) and advised President Boris Yeltsin on his 1996 campaign (which suggests he knows a thing or two about domestic politics in post-Soviet Russia).

But all that is mostly beside the point. What truly matters is what kind of job Mr. McFaul will do once he’s ensconced at Spaso House. His record at the NSC is not encouraging. 

As special assistant to the president, Mr. McFaul spearheaded the so-called reset in relations between the United States and Russia. We can quibble about how, exactly, the reset has furthered U.S. interests. The only thing that is really important here is Iran. Russia does not matter that much to the United States: We don’t buy a lot from the Russians; we don’t sell a lot to them; we no longer fear Russia’s nuclear missiles; we don’t even have a vociferous, ethnic-Russian constituency in the United States that might lobby for this or that initiative or law (like, say, the Armenian diaspora). The one big thing that Russia has to offer us is its influence in Tehran. The Kremlin, in keeping with Soviet tradition, prefers sleeping with the bottom-feeders of the world, which means it’s happy selling arms to Syria, conducting joint military exercises with Venezuela and building a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, in Iran. And this means the Russians have leverage, which means that, presumably, they could do something to halt Iran’s march toward a nuclear arsenal. 

So, America’s No. 1 job when it comes to Russia boils down to: Getting the Russians to act against Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs — diplomatically or otherwise. (Voting for sanctions at the United Nations, which almost no one believes will prevent the Iranians from acquiring an atom bomb, doesn’t count.) So, evaluating America’s policy vis-a-vis Russia entails asking just two questions: What is Russia doing to stop Iran? And to what extent can we attribute that to the reset? 

There’s little evidence that Russia is doing much. (Iran appears to be charging ahead with its nuclear-weapons program, indicating that whatever Russia is doing isn’t helping.) And that means there’s little, if any, evidence that the reset was worth its price tag: alienating allies in central Europe, allowing Russia to expand its influence in the post-Soviet space and ignoring the Russian state’s ongoing consolidation of power.

This is what Mr. McFaul should have to answer for when the Senate takes up his nomination.

Engage the BRICs

Suggestion for all Republicans running for the White House: Start talking about the BRICs — the big, rapidly growing, emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China. That’s where the future is happening, and if we want the future to return to America, we ought to pay attention to what they’re doing in places like Beijing and Mumbai. We should also bear in mind that closed or even partially closed political systems — for example, those in China and Russia — will have a much harder time, in the long term, sustaining their growth. Americans are inclined to think that we’re always on the verge of being eclipsed by someone else. In the eighties, it was the Japanese; today, it’s the Chinese. Better to engage than to fear. Better to embrace the dynamism of the BRICs than to worry about what comes next.

Two preliminary proposals:

1. Eliminate, or dramatically scale back, visa restrictions for all BRIC citizens with a graduate degree. Russia, for example, is teeming with engineers, physicists, computer programmers, biochemists and mathematicians who make, at best, a few hundred dollars each month. These people would be a tremendous boon to the United States. But not just the United States. The federal government spends millions of dollars every year, via the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, trying to make places like Russia more democratic. The best way to make regimes democratize is to force them to compete for their human capital. Right now, Russia doesn’t have to compete for its human capital because, for the most part, it’s trapped in Russia.

2. Slash the U.S. corporate tax rate in half, from 35 percent to 17.5 percent. We can debate all day long the justice and desirability of a more progressive or regressive tax code, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to redistribute some of the wealth (and no, Governor Perry, Social Security should not be abolished), but this much should (by now) be indisputable: Corporations will go wherever they have the easiest time making money, i.e., creating jobs. One of the great advantages that corporations, big and small, working in BRIC countries enjoy is the “slipperiness” of those systems. Corruption and a certain vagueness when it comes to the commercial-legal regulatory regime make for a much more energetic and fast-moving climate. Things happen, and fast, because there are no rules, or the rules are poorly enforced. We should be happy that bribe-taking is not nearly as prevalent in the United States as in the BRICs, but we should be very troubled by the relative cumbersomeness of doing business here. Creating things — widgets, jobs, capital, whatever — should be easier in America. We can start with our corporate-tax rate.

On President Obama’s “Libya Triumph”

Michael Tomasky’s latest dispatch, “President Obama’s Libya Triumph,” is embarrassingly dim-witted. Among Tomasky’s many utterly inane assertions:

1. President Obama’s handling of the recent turbulence in the Middle East resembles the approach favored by President George H.W. Bush vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Please. Every policy springs from an idea or theory about how the world is, how it ought to be, and what the United States can or must do to progress from the one to the other. George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama may have arrived at a similar “what” — they may have employed restraint to arrive at some unstated goal — but that was largely accidental. The “ought” to which Bush subscribed, which was the same “ought” to which every president since Truman had subscribed, was that of a world free of authoritarianism, including Soviet authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the “what” — the policy —that emanated from that “ought” was the same policy other presidents had employed, that of containment. By contrast, President Obama’s “ought” has been vaguely etched (see point No. 2) and, at most, seems defined by a general sense of (or support for) American retreat. How else should we interpret the president’s Iranian olive branch, Russian “reset,” jettisoning of plans for a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, and his widely reported criticisms (while overseas) of U.S. foreign policy. (Partisans can debate whether these amount to an “apology.” What matters is that they signal retrenchment.) In other words, Bush’s reluctance to meddle in Soviet affairs and Obama’s uncertainty about how to handle the Middle East may bear some superficial resemblance. But just beneath that veneer reside great differences in attitude toward America and American power. To draw any parallels is to confuse the meaning of both men’s actions.

2. Obama should be praised for his “doctrine of no doctrine.” According to Tomasky, Obama is wise to avoid hewing to some set of principles that might prevent him from seeing the nuances that separate one country from another. Actually, this is a terrible idea. Indeed, Tomasky misses entirely the whole point of doctrines, which have much less to do with other countries and their nuances and much more to do with our own. Presidents articulate visions for America not to describe a situation in some faraway land or how America ought to behave when that faraway land misbehaves. They do so to communicate to the whole world who, exactly, we are, and what we believe in. This is critical because it bolsters the democratic process — Americans should know what ideas inform their president — and because, ideally, it strengthens relations with our allies while putting our foes on alert. A doctrine is not a policy; it is a value system. Presidents and their advisers may apply that doctrine well or badly — they may derive good or not so good policies from their doctrines — but we should not confuse the two.

3. While Libya was a good war, intervening in Syria would be bad. When it came to Libya, Tomasky says, the United States had an “R2P,” or “responsibility to protect.” (This is a frightening bit of shorthand. Will pundits soon start writing exclusively in Twitterese?) Since the Assad regime has not threatened to massacre thousands of Syrians the way Gaddafi threatened to massacre thousands of Libyans, the United States has no R2P in Syria. Interesting that. The United States has a checkered history when it comes to defending humanitarian interests abroad. That’s because, not unreasonably, our presidents have avoided humanitarian interventions that did not also serve some non-humanitarian cause. Never mind Assad (who may not be overseeing a genocide but is willing nonetheless to murder plenty of his own people). What about the many countries we have declined to bomb (or are declining to bomb) because doing so would undermine other U.S. interests? Where was President Obama in Darfur? The Ivory Coast? And when, exactly, does an “R2P” begin and end? Are there parameters to our moral obligations? Or is President Obama’s “doctrine of no doctrine” so nuanced or elastic — or unprincipled — that it’s impossible to say? The U.S. intervention in Libya not only marked an abuse of power (The president promised this would last days; it’s been months; if anyone’s upset about that, consult with White House counsel.), it also made American intentions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, murkier. It confused; it complicated. (This was exacerbated by the president’s odd, apparently contradictory comment that the United States now “leads from behind.” How does one do that?) No, the truth is that Libya cannot be so easily delimited from Syria. U.S. involvement in the one makes it that much harder to avoid the other — or to say, clearly and convincingly, why it is we do the things we do. The president hasn’t explained that much to the American people.