Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1647

September 5:

Josef Stalin appears to back in vogue in Russia's capital. The Hindu reports that, almost five decades after public statues of the Soviet dictator began to be removed from public view, a new series of eight "Socialist realist" statues have been installed at one of Moscow's busiest Metro stations. The new display at the Kurskaya subway stop features slogans such as "For the Motherland! For Stalin!"

Russian authorities claim they headed off a major terrorist attack in Moscow with the death of five militants in the Caucasus. The radicals, London's Guardian newspaper reports, were killed in the restive republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia as part of official security sweeps by local law enforcement authorities. Two of the militants reportedly were carrying explosives and train tickets to Moscow when they were killed in a shootout with Russian agents.


September 7:

AFX News reports that, after years of frosty diplomacy following the fall of Saddam Hussein, ties between Moscow and Baghdad are slowly returning to normal. A clear sign is the recent visit to the Iraqi capital by Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko, which featured consultations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, and Electricity Minister Karim Waheed. The meetings yielded a commitment from Iraq - long suspicious of Russia for its support for Saddam Hussein's regime - to hold discussions about reintegrating Russia into Iraq's energy sector, from which Moscow has been virtually sidelined since the end of the Hussein regime in 2003.


September 8:

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has surpassed Saudi Arabia in oil exports, Bloomberg News reports. According to data from Russia's Energy Ministry, Russia's oil and refined petroleum exports rose from 7.25 million to 7.4 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2009, while Saudi exports fell from 7.39 million to 7 million barrels daily. The news is unexpected; back in December, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin told OPEC that the Kremlin was ready to play ball with the cartel by limiting production and thereby buoying international oil prices. But the Russian government appears to have had second thoughts about the arrangement. According to Bloomberg, new tax breaks provided by the Kremlin to emerging oil fields in Siberia has increased production and exports on the part of Russian oil majors - posing a challenge to OPEC efforts to reduce inventories and maintain caps on global production.


September 9:

Russia has taken a major step toward reconciling with the brutality of its Soviet past. The Associated Press reports that a book on the horrors of the Soviet network of forced labor camps known as the Gulag, once banned by the Russian government, is now required reading in Russia's schools. According to Russia's Education Ministry, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" has been added to the curriculum for high school students throughout the country. The long-forbidden book has now been embraced by Russian authorities as part of "the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history," the AP reports.


September 11:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has launched an unexpected broadside against the Russian economy, London's Telegraph reports. In a 4,000 word article published on the liberal news website gazeta.ru, the Russian leader took a series of critical jabs at the state of his country's economic health, decrying its "humiliating" dependence on oil and natural gas, condemning its "chronic" corruption and stressing structural financial problems that continue to impede Russia from becoming a global power.

The move has raised eyebrows among Russia-watchers in the West, who see the ideological salvo as an effort by Medvedev to reassert his political identity in juxtaposition to his mentor, Russian premier Vladimir Putin. "In recent months, he has been more Putin than Putin," Sam Green of the Moscow Carnegie Centre tells the Telegraph. "This may be an attempt to reassure liberals."