From: "Robert Harneis" <r.harneis@wanadoo.fr>
Subject: VLADIMIR PUTIN MAGICIAN MOUSE OR MONSTER?
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006

Permit me to comment on 'Vladimir Putin. Magician, Mouse or Monster' by Edward Lucas, who ought to know his Russia. He writes,"Mr Putin is the first Russian leader since Peter the Great to have thesimple advantages of being punctual, efficient, fit, sober and concise."

He seems to have overlooked Catherine the Great, who did pretty well and reportedly often walked ten miles a day. As I understand it Peter the Great was not terrible famous for sobriety. More serioulsy he seems unable to grasp that attempting to re-establish strategic positions recklessly abandoned by his predecessors is not only normal but inevitable. The Russians are agressive he says but it is the United States that now entirely funds the Georgian army and is desperate to rush the Ukraine into NATO. How does he think the USA would react if the Russians constantly stirred up trouble in the former Mexican possessions in the south west of the United States? In addition it would help if he and others did not consistently refer to the Soviet Union and Russia as if they were one and the same thing.

Robert Harneis
European Correspondent

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Nice to hear a voice of reason...

(Has he been reading ET?)

BTW, there was an interesting (and admittedly quite anti-Putin) article in the last Atlantic about Kasparov (yes, the chess player) mounting some opposition movement to challenge Putin.  Worth a read, but I don't think it is online yet.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Well, well, well.  That comment, coming from "contributing editor, Atlantic Monthly", just after AM put one of the most blistering pieces regarding Russia behind their subscription firewall:

Russia Is Finished: The unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance, by Jeffrey Tayler, Atlantic Monthly, May 2001.

If Starobin is serious about his position, he should arrange to put one the sharpest ctitiques of Russia, published by his own magazine, in front of the firewall where it's been for years.  Or arrange for permission to publish it where the world can still see it.

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The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
W. Churchill