November 7:
The State Duma has voted unanimously to suspend Russia’s participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports. The bill, which now goes to the parliament’s upper house, backs a decree issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin in July announcing Russia’s halt to its participation in the treaty after a 150-day mandatory waiting period. The CFE Treaty limits the deployment in Europe of heavy weaponry such as tanks and artillery.
A top official in the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, has called for a “Civic Council of the Russian Nation” analogous to the Zemsky Sobor of 1613 that ended the Time of Troubles, to be held after next year’s presidential election, NEWSru.com reports. According to Sultygov, the council would adopt a “Civil Unity Pact” formalizing “the institution of national leader... as the basic element in a new configuration of power” and thereby invest Vladimir Putin with “civil and political control” over the legislative and executive branches through “the parliamentary majority of the Party of Putin” – meaning United Russia.
[Editor’s Note: Putin is running in the December 2nd State Duma election at the top of United Russia’s federal list of candidates.]
November 8:
Russia has expelled three senior Georgian diplomats following a similar move by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on November 7th, Reuters reports. Saakashvili expelled three Russian diplomats after accusing Russian intelligence of fomenting Georgia’s current political crisis. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin called on Georgia to apprehend and punish those who attacked two Russian correspondents during a crackdown on an opposition protest in Tbilisi on November 7th, Interfax reports.
Russia recorded the highest rate of Internet growth in September this year, with the number of unique visitors in the country rising by 23 percent to hit 14.6 million, Equimedia.co.uk reports. Meanwhile, Computerworld reported on November 7th that the Russian Business Network, a notorious hacker and malware hosting organization operating out of St. Petersburg, has gone off the air. The magazine quoted Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro, as saying the move appeared to be voluntary. “No one knows why they’ve done this, but I think they’re down, not out,” he said.
November 9:
Vedomosti reports that a survey taken by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank among 28,000 people in 27 countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, plus Mongolia, found that roughly 50 percent of the respondents in each of the countries surveyed except Russia expressed support for democracy, while only 36 percent of the respondents in Russia said they support democracy. Russia also had the highest percentage of respondents who said they prefer authoritarianism (33 percent).
November 12:
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has publicly praised George Blake, the Cold War-era spy who betrayed dozens - if not hundreds - of Western agents while working for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency. “The information provided by Blake was always acute, precise and extremely important,” SVR spokesman Sergei Ivanov told the Associated Press. Blake, who escaped a British prison for the Soviet Union in 1966, gave an interview to the English-language cable network Russia Today that was broadcast on November 11th, his 85th birthday.
On November 2nd, President Vladimir Putin posthumously conferred the Hero of the Russia medal on George Koval. According to the New York Times, the Kremlin described Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the Manhattan Project’s secret plants, adding that he “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”