Free Republic

Twenty-first-century Russia may look like a liberal democracy, with elections, law courts and parliament. In truth there are two parallel states. One is for show. The other is almost completely corrupt, with part of it run by a clique of secret servicemen who owe their allegiance ultimately to the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and the small group of former KGB thugs who surround him. Stay in with them, and you stay safe. Fail to pay your dues, and you risk personal destruction. ....the so-called siloviki, the strongmen who control modern Russia, with a career background in the intelligence or security...

Moscow, February 4, Interfax - President of the Cuban State Council and the Council of Ministers Raul Castro met with Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill in the patriarchal chambers of the Christ the Savior Cathedral on Tuesday evening. Castro was the first foreign leader Patriarch Kirill has met with in his new capacity. Last October the Russian Orthodox Church has awarded Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his brother Raul for their contribution in building an Orthodox church in Havana and interreligious cooperation. The former Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Kirill (the present...

The Russian Orthodox Church will choose tomorrow between three alleged former KGB agents as its next spiritual leader. More than 700 priests, monks and lay representatives will decide who should become the new Patriarch in the first Church election since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The contest at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow pits the favourite, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, against two rivals who also rose through the heirarchy at a time when the Church was under strict Communist control. Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, 59, is in charge of economic affairs, and Metropolitan Filaret...

Gazprom would have to use extreme measures to make Ukraine return to the negotiations table, says Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller. Ukraine has declined every Russian proposal concerning a new gas agreement and is continuing to steal Russia’s gas destined for Europe. Speaking at a media conference on Sunday, Aleksey Miller said that Ukrainian disagreed to pay the average European market price of $US 418 per 1,000 cubic metres for Russian gas. They also didn’t like the proposal to receive gas from Central Asia for $US 370 as well as the offer to pay $US 250 per 1,000 cubic metres –...

It’s hard to overemphasize Gazprom’s role in the Russian economy. It’s a sprawling company that raked in $91 billion last year; it employs 432,000 people, pays taxes equal to 20 percent of the Russian budget and has subsidiaries in industries as disparate as farming and aviation. ... When Mr. Putin was still president, he used Gazprom’s wealth and economic might to fight political enemies inside Russia, to reassert influence over former Soviet republics, to gain leverage over Western European countries by increasing their dependence on Russian gas, and to wrest Russian energy assets back from foreign companies. ...Mr. Putin denied...

The Kremlin has made little secret that its energy policies are unlikely to change in the wake of the 2 March presidential poll. Russia's president-elect Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly pledged to sustain what he has described as political "continuity." The first deputy prime minister still serves as chairman of the board of natural gas monopoly Gazprom and has tended to defend the gas giant against what he has called unfair criticism by the West, including claims of "energy blackmail." From 3 March, Gazprom cut gas supplies to Ukraine by 25 percent, and the following day it again limited gas supplies...

WHEN one of the top directors of Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas giant, was recently summoned to a meeting with his chairman, the billionaire executive did not go to the company’s lavish new head offices in a high-rise south of Moscow’s city centre. Instead his chauffeur-driven limousine and chase car crammed with armed bodyguards headed straight for the Kremlin. After a brief walk along the building’s eerily silent corridors, which run along sumptuous, gilded halls, he was ushered into the office of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s deputy prime minister and close protégé of the president, Vladimir Putin. But what outsiders could...

Under Mr. Putin, the handful of people who run Russia also own it. Government officials are on the board of Russia's largest state-run companies. First Deputy Premier Dmitri Medvedev is chairman of the board of Gazprom, Igor Sechin, deputy head of the Kremlin administration, is chairman of the Rosneft oil company, and Igor Shuvalov, an assistant to the president, is chairman of Russian Railroads. The capitalization of Gazprom is $236 billion, Rosneft $94 billion and Russian Railroads $50 billion. It is estimated that the people around Mr. Putin control companies that account for 80% of the capitalization of the Russian...

WASHINGTON -- After his KGB spy days and before becoming President of Russia, Vladimir Putin busied himself by writing a PhD thesis at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. The seminal, 218-page work - "Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations" - still guides his economic thinking today. In it, Mr. Putin floated the idea of nurturing "national champion" companies and harnessing Russia's natural resources to create an economic superpower. No matter that experts say large tracts of Mr. Putin's dissertation were blatantly plagiarized from a KGB translation of a 30-year-old textbook by two University of Pittsburgh...

Russia today is honoring workers in the state security agencies -- a professional holiday better known by its Soviet-era appellation, "Chekists' Day" -- as the legacy of the KGB grows increasingly commercial -- and criminal. The mysterious murder of former security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko is once again shedding light on how the Soviet-era KGB has evolved in contemporary Russia. Before it was disbanded in 1991, the KGB was a massive organization, employing over half a million uniformed officers as well as a network of millions of informers. A highly disciplined and militarized service, it controlled almost every aspect of life...

VERKHNYAYA SALDA, Russia -- The orange glow of molten titanium ingots illuminates the cavernous factory, one of several Soviet-era facilities that sprawl across 5,000 acres in this small city east of the Ural Mountains. The hot metal will soon be fashioned into dozens of parts destined for Boeing's new aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner. [...] Now it is the headquarters of VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest manufacturer of titanium, the strong, lightweight metal that is a basic element in the aviation industry. [...] "The state has decided it's time to gather all the stones that were cast away; it's all according to...