Undercurrent

Norway’s political and business elites are engaged in a strategic game with Russian interests, with high stakes. Although so different in size, both countries are energy giants. Today it’s revealed that Gazprom is interested in buying into Aker Kværner, the biggest private oil engineering group. State-controlled Statoil and Hydro are in the process of merging, and both have been trying for years to become partners in the big Russian Shtokman gas field. There are some questions emerging from this intensive alliance-building at the state level with Putin-dominated Russia. How close can the alliance and the ties become before it starts to be a problem? How bad can the human rights situation in Russia become before it starts to become intolerable for a self-proclaimed human rights champion like Norway?

Voices sounding warnings are coming from the independent fringes – such as the blog document.no and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. Contrast this with the media. There’s not a lot of forceful, investigative reporting from Russia. Could it be that the media are also a bit fascinated with the strategic game going on with Putin’s men? So much so that a highly interesting figure like Garry Kasparov and his work with “The Other Russia” is dramatically under-reported. In an interview (subscription required) with the Wall Street Journal today, Kasparov lays out his plans for a left-right alliance of anti-Putin parties with the goal of finding an alternative candidate to beat Putin’s – or Putin himself – in the 2008 presidential election:

It is composed of groups that would normally be at political odds — democrats like Mr. Kasparov, nationalists, socialists, even Bolsheviks. Mr. Kasparov predicts that the Communist Party will join up before the end of the year. “There’s still a lot of distrust,” he says, with more than a modicum of understatement. “It’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. The big advantage of the Other Russia, and I think it’s our biggest accomplishment, is that we’ve established the principle of compromise, which was not yet seen in Russian politics. It was always confrontation. It was a mentality of a civil war. We eliminated it.”

The principle of compromise, so indispensable to democracy. And listen to what he says about what will happen if the “other” candidate wins:

The victory of the Other Russia candidate destroys the legacy of any institution built under Putin. You have to start from scratch. You have to call new [parliamentary] elections. You have to introduce new laws. You have to undergo judicial reform. You have to destroy censorship.” In short, you have to start over, back to where Russia was before Mr. Putin took over, building democracy, block by block.

In such a scenario, what will be the options for an official Norway “married” to the Putin system through Gazprom & co?

Partly this is a classic knowledge problem. Do we have the knowledge in Norway – in academic institutions, in the media, in companies – to deal with today’s Russia at this level? Does the general public and the political system get enough substantial information from the media and other sources to be able to understand enough of what’s going on? Certainly I don’t have the answers, but the questions should be debated.

Returning to Kasparov, how is “The Other Russia” going to get its message across when the media are so tightly controlled by Putin?

“The role of Internet is growing,” he says. “Mobile telephones are not unique anymore, not even in rural villages.” But — and the master chess player may have too much confidence in the analytic abilities of ordinary Russians here — “more important is growing malcontent. People are getting really unhappy. And if they’re unhappy, they’ll listen.”

Tags: democracy, russia, vladimir putin

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 13:22 and is filed under Media and democracy, Undercurrent in English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.