Spreading democracy abroad: A duty, not a whim

The question whether or not the new American administration should continue former President Bush's plan of promoting democracy around the world has been up in the air for years and seems now to be getting its answer. As I mentioned in my previous post, there has been no reaction from the Obama administration to the new charges being brought against jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky once the country's richest person and owner of the most transparent company in Russia. 

I was looking for any proof that this silence was just an accident and instead found an article that suggested the opposite. As reported in an article entitled "Quiter approach to spreading democracy abroad" from the New York Times:

Four years after President George W. Bush declared it the mission of America to spread democracy with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” his successor’s team has not picked up the mantle. Since taking office, neither Mr. Obama nor his advisers have made much mention of democracy-building as a goal. While not directly repudiating Mr. Bush’s grand, even grandiose vision, Mr. Obama appears poised to return to a more traditional American policy of dealing with the world as it is rather than as it might be.

The logic of the new administration is understandable. The fight against totalitarian regimes in the world unfortunately seems to have would up bringing more tangible costs than benefits at this point. But nevertheless I think that not trying to promote democracy in other countries is the same as not trying to help a person who is about to commit suicide. It may look to him for the moment that you aren't acting in his interests, but in the end he will be thankful if you save his life.

Don't press the black button

A month ago Joe Biden announced that the new US administration wants to "press the reset button" in its dealings with Moscow. I was reflecting on that and couldn't really understand what that could mean. I never saw any real problem with America's relations with Russia. Russia's relations with the whole world seemed crazy to me.

I'm looking forward to see how the renewed relations with Russia will work, but there is one thing that I already don't like.

In a recent article in the New York Times about the new trial of imprisoned Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovky there is no mentioning of any US reactionto the new charges being brought by the Russian government.

When the presidential election campaign in the US had just started, I remember feeling great sympathy toward John McCain because of his position toward Russia. That is a man, I thought, who really understands what's going on in that country, who wouldn't play its nasty games. I ended up preferring with Obama of course, but continue to respect McCain just for his position on Russia.

As US electoral sympathies of Russians on the whole, there were no real preferences to be seen either toward Obama or McCain. It looked like people didn't like either. I remember listening to Radio Freedom in Moscow (one of the two independent radio stations in Russia. It is financed by US State Department) when a listener called to express his views about the American presidential campaign and said: "I think America is in a real crisis if they can't find any white guy to be president..." Although Russia didn't like McCain for his harsh critiques of Moscow, it wasn't able to consider a black person as an option.

Although McCain seemed more explicit in his positions toward Russia, it was difficult to say who, McCain or Obama would be a better option for those in Russia who look for American support in Russia's road to democracy... It was, however, clear that Obama doesn't bother too much about other countries - he was much more concerned about his own, and that couldn't provide Russian democrats with much hope.

I remember Hillary Clinton not being able to pronounce President Dmitry Medvedev's name.

Now she will be able to personally find out that not only his name is inarticulate.

I'm not sure that "resetting" relations is a good thing to start with. It looks like many people in the US have a really distorted picture of what's going on in Russia. In a recent article about Obama's secret letter to Medvedev, Slate magazine gave Obama extra 25 points for that on its "The-Change-o-Meter" and wrote:

Obama's proposition is a significant shift from previous attitudes about Russia, and murmurs in Moscow suggest Obama's extended palm is a welcome change from Bush's clenched fist. The 'Meter slides up 25 points for burying old assumptions and engaging with a nation whose power and prominence is steadily growing.

Are you guys reading any news from Russia? It seems like you will soon be sending secret letters down a black hole!

Don't make a deal with the devil

Several days ago The New York Times wrote about a "private letter" that Obama sent to his Russian counterpart Dmitriy Medvedev where he allegedly offered the Russian president a deal: Russia stops helping Iran in its nuclear program and the US in exchange stop its plans to build a high tech radar facility in Eastern Europe.
The news sounded strange to me from the very beginning. It looked like a joke: a secret letter, an attempt to make an agreement with a country that has never proven to respect its promises  (not in the least because the country itself never knows what it will look like even in a few years)... But The New York Times sounded pretty optimistic:

Mr. Bush never accepted a Moscow proposal to install part of the missile defense system on its territory and jointly operate it so it could not be used against Russia.Now the

Obama administration appears to be reconsidering that idea, although it is not clear if it would want to put part of the system on Russian soil where it could be flipped on or off by Russians. 

Mr. Obama has been lukewarm on missile defense, saying he supports it only if it can be proved technically effective and affordable.Mr. Bush never accepted a Moscow proposal to install part of the missile defense system on its territory and jointly operate it so it could not be used against Russia.

Now the Obama administration appears to be reconsidering that idea, although it is not clear if it would want to put part of the system on Russian soil where it could be flipped on or off by Russians. Mr. Obama has been lukewarm on missile defense, saying he supports it only if it can be proved technically effective and affordable.

The New York Times' coverage of Russia always looked to me a bit strange, if not stupid. It wrote about the growing wealth of Russia while I, as an alumna of the best university of Russia able to speak two foreign languages fluently, tried to get a job at a foreign company for a salary of 1000 dollars a month in Moscow - the most expensive city in the world. When I came to the US people kept wondering what I was telling them about the way Russian people really live. They thought the streets were paved with gold while most of the regions of the country don't even have any roads...

Anyway, even knowing how strange New York Times' picture of my country could be, I was surprised by their optimistic tone this time. And here is what I have to say about all that.

There are two things to think about when you talk about any serious international agreement with Russia:

1. Russian international politics is just a continuation, an appendix of an internal politics that usually is used by Russian officials as a means to spread political PR inside the country. 

The story with the missile defence that the US was trying to build in 

Poland and Check Republic was a real gift from God for Russian officials. They loved it more than you can imagine and exploited this topic every now and then to show the Russian people who the real enemy is. Russian officials are the last people to be interested in ending the tension with US about that issue.

2. Russia's international weapon trade (including trade with Iran) brings the best opportunity for corruption. 

Imagine that you are a manager of a company with a lot of 

money in a country where there is no law, no person to control your actions. Imagine that you as a manager want to sell something very expensive to another company in another country with a similar manager and similar rules. If you have a particularly fantastic imagination, you already see yourself as one of the richest people in the world. Now try to imagine how you would view somebody who sends you a letter asking you to abandon all that in exchange of something that you don't really want... That's the way Russian officials see Obama now.

As a continuation The New York Times published yesterday another article where Dmitry Medvedev made an obscure comment about the letter:

“If we talk about some bargain or exchange, I can say that the issues were not raised in this way, because it’s counterproductive,” Mr. Medvedev said at a news conference in Madrid, where he was meeting with the Spanish prime minister.

“What we are getting from our U.S. partners shows at least one thing, that our U.S. partners are ready to discuss the issue,” he said. “That’s good, because only a few months ago we were getting different signals — that the decision has been made, there is nothing to talk about, that we will do everything as it has been decided.”

Obama and his Russia advisers should understand as soon as possible that they speak a language that is not understood in Russia and that they deal with a different political system and different mentality. They should know they won't gain by trying to deal with a criminal band by the same means one would deal with a choir of boys in a local church. 

Studying Communication Studies

A couple of weeks ago I was in a company of my friend's acquaintances when they were having a nice intelligent conversation about journalism. By some chance somebody switched TV to the FOXnews channel and the conversation among those highly liberal people became not only much bitter than it was before but also quite emberrassing for me.

"I'm wondering what did they study?" my friend asked pointing to the talking head on the screen  with disgust. "They must have got a degree in something but they don't quite understand anything!"

"I bet they have a degree in Communication," answered somebody.

"No doubt, indeed," everybody else agreed.

Luckily for me, my friend didn't revealed my embarrasment by telling everybody that they had just qualified me to apply for job at FOX.

Unfortunately for me and for everybody else who studies Communication, this opinion is rather a rule than an exception. 

If you search Google for Communication Degree the most popular results you would get would pose or answer the question "What can I do with a degree in Communication?" 

And as I understand it, this question is just another way to express uncertainty about what actually the field is.

Last week the Communication degree was relatively oftern mentioned in the news. A student of communication appeared on Obama's Forth Myers Town Hall Meeting to ask a question. Here is a video you might find amusing:

"I want to be a broadcaster or a disc jokey," he says honestly. And here it is, public understanding and attitude to what communication is and is meant to be.

Although this video makes me laugh every time I watch it, I find it less then funny to feel embarrassed every time I introduce myself as a graduate student in Communication.

According to Wikipedia, Communication Studies is

academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics; for instance, the transmission of messages from one point to another through some medium of dissemination--such as face-to-face or conversation, television broadcasting, or the reading of records--but also with how institutions like libraries maintain information over time, how audiences interpret information, and the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of related topics.

I think the main difficulty for people to understand what the field actually is, lies in the concept that was of such a big concern for one of the discipline's pillar - Marshal McLuhan. He expressed that concept in the widely known phrase "Media is the message". The essens of this concept is mentioned in the Wikipedia article by the word "processes".

Communication studies processes of human communication but not its products or objects. It studies how different types and technologies of communication change with time and influence our culture.

I remember one of my professors at Fordham University Lance Strate said that communication studies the medium of human life, its culture similar to how biologists study medium and culture of life of microorganisms. This metaphor could give you a good illustration of how the field if actually important. Unless you think that studying bacterial life is more important than studying the life of humans.

The liberal bias of new media isn't working on the Russian soil (with the Russian soul)?

Every time I think about the opportunities new media such as blogs and social networks open for political participation of citizens, for the development of democracy, and how big the role was that they played during the last presidential elections in the United States, I ask myself: 

What is the present and future of this media in Russia? 

Are they able to play any significant role in the change of power there? 

Are they playing any important role in the democratization of the country right now?

The answer is much less then clear. 

Despite all the stories about Russian officals trying to control the Internet, we should confirm

 that Internet in Russia is still pretty free. First of all because Russian authorities and special services don't have any software to control information flow online. And second, because most of the people whose voices contemporary Russian establishment is concerned about during the election periods, don't use Internet or don't trust (by the force of Soviet habit) any information that comes from an "unauthorized" source.

However, most of those who use Internet in Russia don't hesitate to register their own blogs and 

profiles on social networks. According to the 2007 report by Russian web

 search server Yandex, there are 3,1 million of blogs in Russian Internet segment. That means that there is one blog for every 10 Russian speaking users (there are 30 million Internet users in Russia according to the information on the CIA web page). Not bad, taking into account that the same statistics for the whole world is approximately one blog for every 60 people.

Despite this optimistic view, there is no strong aspiration of users in Russia to use their freedom of speech online to solve their political problems. If you try to find a discussion about current political events on Russian Internet, I wouldn't recommend you to go to any popular Russian social networks (Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, or MoyKrug). Non of them has any application that would allow you to easily post a link from an article or express your support of a politician. Non of them has a substential group created by users for political discussion. 

But I wouldn't recommend you to look for any political discussion in Russian blogs either. Especially if you believe in a liberal bias of the new media as much as I still do. I wouldn't recommend you to look there not because there is nothing discussed about politics, but because what is discussed is usually even more regressive in the sense of democratic and liberal discourse than what you can see on Russian television controlled by the state.

I'm wondering if that means that the new media by themselves can't give a big hope for Russian modest democratic movement? Is the question again lying not in what are the media that are used, but who is using the media?

(Images used: 1. Official logo of Livejournal; 2. Picture from a protest action in Moscow against the censure in mass media on January 31, 2009 - by Denis Bochkarev)

Russian Internet in 2008

Russian Internet media "Zagolovki.ru" ("Headlines") - a web source that daily gathers and thematically sorts articles from various Russian newspapers and magazines emphasizing those with especially smart and funny headings, have summarized what the year 2008 meant for Russian Internet. Here is, according to them, a list of remarkable events that happened:

1. The parliament, the Internal Affairs Ministry, and the Public Chamber (an institution that was created by Putin that represents "cultural elite" of Russia - the members are directly and indirectly assigned by Putin but have no real power) announced their plans of legal regulations

 for the Internet. They plan to regulate the Internet through the mass-media law. According to it all media that have more than one thousand consumers should be officially

 registered. The officials say not only news web sites should get registered but also blogs, online diaries, forums, chats, and dating sites.

2. The new Russian president Dmitry Medvedev addressed in one of his speeches the problem of Russian segment of the Internet. He said that it should be cultivated. In the same speech Medvedev noted that government should not interfere in what was going on the Internet unless it violated Russian laws...

3. During a parliamentary discussion on rising crimes against immigrants in Russia, an Internal Affairs Ministry official emphasized that the best way to prevent the crimes was to intensify governmental control over the Internet. During the very session a legislation was presented that would allow closing web sites that would be accused in publishing "extremist content".

4. In a short time after that a web site www.ingushetia.ru that informed about news from a rebellion region of Russia Ingushetia in a way that opposed Ingushetia's official information, was closed. The method of IP-address filtering was used. In three months the owner of the web site Magomed Evloev was "accidentally" shot to death in a police car in which he was put by police officers without any clear reason. 

5. One blogger was determined guilty for criticising militia in his blog comment. Another blogger - a member of an opposition movement - is still on trial.

6.  The Minister of Internal Affairs came out with a legislative initiative to qualify Internet as a mass media.

7. Criminal case was open against Internet users who on the pages of their blogs falsely informed that the president of Tatarstan (region of Russia) died.

8. The registration on the most popular Russian social network odnoklassniki.ru (classmates) became paid.

Russia fights financial crisis... with censure

If you live in America or in Europe and are used to watching television every day, you probably think that nobody in the world now knows for sure how to deal with the current economic crisis. But you would think differently if you lived in Russia.

First of all if you watch television or read mainstream newspapers in Russia, you must know that the economic crisis has affected all countries in the world except for one (guess which one) "because its officials have taken all necessary actions to prevent it".

And second, Russian officials took measures to make sure people believed that.

According to an article on the web page of Russian newspaper "Kommersant" the Russian "General Prosecutor's Office joined the fight against the financial crisis. It issued an instruction for its attorneys in different regions of the country 'to prevent the information attacks on banks'". Inspection of different media outlets started yesterday in different regions of Russia. The attorneys are examining media reports for signs of "fomentation of financial crisis" and "destabilization of the situation in the region".

Web site URA.ru became the first target for the officials after writing about banks. During an interrogation its editor was asked how the web site got its information about banks.

The General Prosecutor Office's spokesman explained that they "don't censor", but just "verify the accuracy of information".

The newspaper mentions that the first person who spoke about "information attacks" that can "destabilize the social situation" was Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.