Gazprom and the snarling bear

Prospect ^ | 02/06/2006 | Anthony Robinson

[Tailgunner Joe]

Lenin defined communism as "Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country." Vladimir Putin takes a similar view. An updated slogan for Putin’s regime might read "Kremlin power plus control of the oil and gas industry."

Europe received a taste of how the Kremlin might wield that power at the start of the new year when Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas company, reduced the pressure on pipelines carrying gas through Ukraine to western Europe. ...

It should not have come as a surprise. Gazprom, which was semi-privatised in the early 1990s by senior managers of the former Soviet ministry of gas, is no stranger to a "Bolshevik" style of negotiation. Its former boss, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was appointed prime minister by Boris Yeltsin and used Gazprom money to fund a political party called Nash Dom-Rossia – "our home is Russia." Wags quickly renamed it "Nash Dom-Gazprom."

In recent years, Gazprom has often cut gas supplies to Georgia, at the Kremlin’s request, and built an expensive and ecologically risky gas pipeline under the Black sea rather than pay transit fees through the Caucasus. It is planning to build a similar pipeline under the Baltic to Germany rather than pay transit fees to the Baltic states and Poland.

When President Putin succeeded in persuading Gerhard Schröder to take a lucrative, high-profile job as chairman of the supervisory board of this 1,200-km long Baltic pipeline, dark historical memories were reawakened in some. The pipeline agreement was quickly dubbed the "Schröder-Putin pact" – a bitter reference to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact whose secret provisions led to the division of Poland and Soviet reoccupation of the Baltic states.

[Thunder90]

Putin is a Soviet. Same principles apply.