Eastern Europe

In May, FP and our readers enjoyed going through the many, many silly acronyms in use around the world, including PIIGS, STUC, MILF, and MANPADS. But last week's agreement between Nigeria and Russia on a joint gas venture has a name that tops all of those for awkardness:

It probably seemed a good idea at the time. But Russia's attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time -- after the new company was named Nigaz.

The venture was agreed last week during a four-day trip by Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev to Africa. The deal between Russia's Gazprom and Nigeria's state oil company was supposed to show off the Kremlin's growing interest in Africa's energy reserves.

Instead, the venture is now likely to be remembered for all the wrong reasons -- as a memorable PR blunder, worse than Chevrolet's Nova, which failed to sell in South America because it translates as "doesn't go" in Spanish[...]

An article in Brand Republic pointed out the obvious: that the name has "rather different connotations" for English-speakers.

Stan Marsh sympathizes.

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

The worldwide recession has hit Russia's economy harder than most. The World Bank expects the economy to contract by almost 8 percent this year, its stock market has the dubious honor of being the first bear market since a worldwide stock rally in March. Now, the number of places to escape the doom and gloom is about to shrink significantly, as Russia plans to effectively shut down the entire casino industry on July 1.

The government is shutting down every last legal casino and slot-machine parlor across the land, under an antivice plan promoted by Vladimir V. Putin that just a few months ago was widely perceived as far-fetched. But the result will be hundreds of thousands of people thrown out of work.

And in a move that at times seems to have taken on almost farcical overtones, the Kremlin has offered the gambling industry only one option for survival: relocate to four regions in remote areas of Russia, as many as 4,000 miles from the capital. The potential marketing slogans — Come to the Las Vegas of Siberia! Have a Ball near the North Korean Border! — may not sound inviting, but that is in part what the government envisions.

All the same, none of the four regions are prepared for the transfer, and no casino is expected to reopen for several years. As of July 1, not even two decades after casinos began proliferating here in the free-for-all post-Soviet era, the industry’s workers will be out on the street.

“This is shaking my life to the core — such a blow for me and my family,” said Irina Mysachka, 32, a single mother who is a supervisor at the Shangri-La Casino in Moscow, which appears as orderly and preened (if your tastes run to fire-breathing neon dragons and other Oriental kitsch) as any similar luxury attraction in the United States.

“The authorities are taking this step without thinking at all,” she said. “They have not considered what this decision means for the workers. With the crisis, it is going to be very difficult for us."

The law behind the restrictions was introduced in late 2006, and there appear to be reasons both honest and not-so-honest behind it.

The gambling industry here does not have the loftiest of reputations, and many Russians will not grieve for it. Still, many of the 40 or so casinos in Moscow sought in recent years to behave more respectably, even as hundreds of slot-machine parlors retained a seedy, enter-at-your-own-risk feel[...]

The industry has been largely unregulated, and especially in recent years, almost anyone could get a license, for as little as $50. Russia is not a strait-laced place - rates of smoking and drinking are high - but an outcry about gambling ensued. "It is not only young people, but also retirees who lose their last kopecks and pensions through gambling," Mr. Putin said in 2006.

His plan was announced during a spy scandal between Russia and its neighbor Georgia, and the timing suggested that Mr. Putin was in part seeking to wound the Georgian diaspora here, which is said to have an influential role in the industry.

Shorter Russia: what happens in Moscow is Georgia's fault.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Schwirtz of the New York Times reported Tuesday on some, uh, innovative crime fighting techniques of Russian police in St. Petersburg. To catch a man seeking to kill his boss, police faked the murder in public, all the way down to staged blood and media reports, and arrested the culprit when he delivered money to an undercover officer for the completed hit. 

As Schwirtz highlights, this could be why so few Russians trust the media or the police.

Such elaborate sting operations are not uncommon in Russia, where the police routinely manipulate the news media in criminal investigations, said Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police detective here who is now the deputy director of a St. Petersburg Internet news agency, fontanka.ru. In his previous career, Mr. Vyshenkov said, he once had a journalist agree to publish a fake article to coax a suspect to divulge information about accomplices.

Another question: where was all this creative crimefighting after the broad daylight murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya? On Monday, the Russian Union of Journalists released a report condemning Russian authorities for failing to protect journalists.

Dan Senor and Christian Whiton have an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal with some suggestions for how the United States could effectively help the reformists in Iran. It's a tricky subject and creative thinking is certainly welcome (my colleague Chris Brose has weighed in on this), but Senor and Whiton's bold declaration that "Our own experience with dissidents around the world is that proof of concern by the U.S. government is helpful and desirable" worries me a bit, paritcularly in their choice of Ukraine's 2004 Orance Revolution as a model:

Mr. Obama should deliver another taped message to the Iranian people. Only this time he should acknowledge the fundamental reality that the regime lacks the consent of its people to govern, which therefore necessitates a channel to the "other Iran." He should make it clear that dissidents and their expatriate emissaries should tell us what they most need and want from the U.S. This could consist of financial resources, congresses of reformers, workshops or diplomatic gatherings. The key is to let the reformers call the shots and indicate how much and what U.S. assistance they want. Simply knowing we care, that we are willing to deploy resources and are watching their backs -- to the extent we can -- often helps reformers.

The 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a model. In that case the West joined Ukrainians in refusing to accept the results of a stolen election. This combined effort helped to force a final run-off vote that reflected the people's will. In Iran, this would mean not only redoing elections but also allowing a full field of candidates to run. As with Ukraine and the Soviet Union before, Mr. Obama could at least make it clear that the U.S. will separate the issues of engagement and legitimacy. Our engagement of the Soviet Union in arms-control talks did not prevent us from successfully pressing human-rights issues and seeking an alternative political structure. So it can be with Iran. Engagement without an effort to talk to the "other Iran" would not only be a travesty but tactically foolish as well.

Not every revolution is a "color" revolution. The visuals from Tehran may resemble Kiev in 2004, but the message from the streets is different. Both are nationalist movements in addition to democratic movements (as most successful democratic movements are) but Ukrainian and Iranian nationalism are very different beasts.

In Ukraine that nationalism could be directed against a government dominated by an outside power, Russia. The orange coalition (like the Polish Solidarity movement, which Senor and Whiton also cite) welcomed overt U.S. signs of support because it counteracted the support the pro-government forces were receiving from the Kremlin. The coalition billed itself as pro-Western.

In Iran, the protesters are crying allahu akbar from the rooftops and marching behind a fairly conservative hero of the 1979 revolution. They're protesting a probably rigged election, yes, but the nationalist rhetoric coming out of the movements leaders is not about rejoining the West but about protecting the Islamic state from Ahmadinejad's corrupt and bungling rule. 

On a more practical level, U.S. NGOs were involved in the run-up to the Ukrainian election, supporting poll monitoring and training activists so when the trouble started, they were in place to help out. This is certainly not the case in Iran.

This is not to say that a Mousavi presidency wouldn't be better for the United States, or that the U.S. government shouldn't be seeking out ways it can help (Evgeny Morozov has one novel idea) but it seems odd to assume that the young people marching in the streets of Tehran would welcome the outspoken support of the U.S. president just because other young people marching in other streets have welcomed it in the past. 

AFP/Getty Images 

I'm way late to the story of the Russian military historian who posted an article on the Defense Ministry's website blaming Poland for starting World War II by objecting to totally reasonable Nazi demands. Here's the key exceprt from Col. Sergei Kovalyov article, “Inventions and Falsifications in the Assessment of the Role of the USSR on the Eve and at the Start of World War II”:

“[The war] was begun as a result of the refusal of Poland to satisfy … extremely moderate demands such as including the free city of Danzig in the Third Reich [and] permission for the construction of extra-territorial highways and railroad, which would connect East Prussia with the rest of Germany.”

Sounds reasonable. Not surprisingly the ministry is now distancing itself from the article.