The Soviet art of socialist realism used to be defined as “socialist in substance, national in form.” Threats to prevent the construction of a trans-Caspian gas pipeline by military force are also a form of Kremlin art: bluff in their substance, even if brutal in their form. Pursuant to President Dmitry Medvedev and the Russian Security Council’s October 14 decision (see EDM, October 21), Moscow is undertaking diplomatic and political countermeasures to the EU-planned gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Europe. Russian naval exercises in the Caspian Sea, May 2011 Statements by Medvedev and the Russian foreign ministry claiming that trans-Caspian...