As you know, West Europe gets gas from Russia, or if they get from other ex(soviet) countries, the pipes go by way of Russia and allows Russians to control the stream. There are many things which Russia directly or indirectly controls, so better not to play games with them. Keeping in mind history of Russian empire, the title you chose, “Colonel President Emperor” is just appropriate to anyone standing at its wheel, be it today Putin or anyone else.

My real space space is remote and small as relations to power go, but online, the presence is larger — at least wide — and the correspondence reaches from Riyadh to Islamabad but here with a stop in eastern Europe.

Writing about Russia and democracy, the Lithuanian writer had this to note:

Keeping that in mind, one shouldn’t expect from Russia too much in this direction. For instance, Lithuania is one of the main exporters of dairy products to Russia. This time, because Lithuania keeps the EU presidency and some of EU (anti-Russian) decisions, the long line of cars on the border to Russia were suspended for indefinite time. They were kept in line of waiting already about two weeks, so that losses from this delay cost millions of Litas (LT monetary) and also roubles to Russians, but who cares?

Related: Russia halts Lithuanian dairy imports before EU summit – Yahoo News – 10/7/2013.

Our conversation had started with noting in the library here the presence of Hedrick Smith’s Soviet Era classic The Russians and the possibility of it being out of date.  In riposte and with some awareness of Persian “escape methods”, I suggested that the constituents of autocratic regimes find ways to diminish their own presence — today we might call it “footprint” — in the same while finding workarounds to get the things they need, including, for example, home fermentation of grapes in place of bringing home a bottle of wine for supper now and then.

Russia, so I have read in mail, “is just too big to be democratic and free.”

Is it true?

I don’t know.

However, the world does see Putin’s oligarchy and Soviet hangover getting some testing.

The Khodorkovsky affair just isn’t disappearing from world view; Pussy Riot may have drawn the law as would have similar miscreants in as liberal a realm as Sweden, but with uncanny political alacrity, the pussy rioters have pushed the focus away from youthful rebellious and tawdry behavior and put it brightly, firmly on the old jails and rather disturbing persistence of Gulag values.

With those ghosts inhabiting Russia’s atmosphere — again: another aristocrat gathering power unto himself with the leveraging of an immensely critical natural resource into a system of equally great patronage; again: control of the media — just watch that RT spin on Syria; again: the Gulag and unchecked gulag practices, albeit on this round no Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn need be about for the global press plus Facebook work just fine.

Continues my correspondent:

Some Russian politicians, like Zherinovsky, more than once openly admitted that to re-occupy the Baltic states, if Russia wanted, is a matter of 15 minutes. How much truth is in that is less important, as you understand, than it is an open threat. True, such information never came from Putin or officialdom, only from separate politicians. The fact that they are break-away republics in Russia is not forgotten.

At the moment, and I hope my correspondent will access another book in the library here — Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin — Russia would seem to be having a difficult time occupying itself, arrangements being terribly skewed in Moscow and unresponsive, so has been my impression drawn from Ben Judah’s book, outside of select circles.

(Not that I don’t enjoy aristocracy myself but do at the moment understand the necessity of begging around for funding, work (research and editorial functions), or really good, appropriate, and responsive advice).

Still, with money tied up in private systems and beyond the purview of the public and public assigns — i.e., out of sight of cold, dispassionate, ineluctably honest accountants and auditors — the conversation turns toward post-Soviet, now contemporary, regional and international corruption or, plainly, theft.

I am personally surprised that such abundant export is towards Russia when it could be directed to the west, not east. There are many EU limitations, which, being an EU member one has to keep. Some of them are limitations on export and, as far as I understand by the parallel to the EU “help” in billions of euros to the Palestinian Autonomy, those limitations are being “solved” by monetary influx to those countries without actually being interested where the money goes.

Related: Articles: The Unsurprising Corruption of Palestinian Authorities – 10/17/2013.

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How is that for timing?

Michael Curtis’s article for American Thinker, a conservative publication, could not be more on the money, so to speak:

“The new 2013 report of the Court reveals that $2.7 billion in direct aid to the Palestinians between 2008 and 2012 could not be accounted for and appeared to be lost. In addition, EU investigators who visited Jerusalem and areas on the West Bank were unable to obtain information or speak to Palestinian officials about corruption in the areas they controlled.”

Perhaps we have reached a point — post-Soviet, post-Cold War, and post-Afghanistan — in which warfare has become a half measure: nothing’s over!

It has been said of invention and perfection that it’s the last 10 percent of the work that consumes 90 percent of the effort.

Perhaps those involved with managing disruptive forces (now equipped with advanced small arms everywhere) should give the end of the end of “the job” that much more thought.  Whether in Russia, in which the failure of capital-C Communism has become equally the failure of capital-D Democracy, or in Iraq, in which the power of language, grandiose promise, and magical thinking have jerked reason sideways with continuing deadly effect, it would seem the end of war is not the apparent cessation of hostilities but rather an observable and measurable shift in broad cultural consciousness.

When the place thinks and speaks differently — and one may hope with a greater courage and humanity — then, wherever it has taken place and whatever it is or was, it’s finished.

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