I have no idea if Navalny makes these decisions himself. Perhaps his spokesperson, Anna Veduta, chooses whom to block. (Though I am still able to follow her tweets.) In any event, I’m more than a little surprised to find that Russia’s greatest champion for transparency has disabled my Twitter account’s access to his.

Has anyone else out there been blocked by Navalny?

Пруфлинк.

Note to readers: this post sparked an entertaining conversation on Maria Baronova’s Facebook page, where she shared the “Twitter block” story. Oleg Kozlovsky, a rather unpleasant man to put it mildly, seems to think I’ve reacted pettily by publicizing Navalny’s behavior. Stanislav Yakovlev (aka Ortega) also shared this post, though he mistakenly writes that I somehow represent the American Enterprise Institute. (I did work there between 2009 and 2011 as a humble research assistant to Dr. Leon Aron, but I never represented the organization.)

This Friday thru Sunday, I’ll be attending the 44th annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in New Orleans. This is the third year in a row that I’ll be going, and I went ahead and searched the convention program for panels and roundtables of interest to scholars and watchers of Russian contemporary politics. I hope to attend as many of these as possible, and I thought I’d share my list, as my interests likely overlap with people out there who study all things Russian and newsy. Hopefully this will be of use to those who want to know who’s up to what in the field, and better yet maybe some of you will also be in New Orleans, and will look me up.

Hope to see some of you there!

Best wishes,
Kevin

Session 6 – Friday – 1:45-3:30 pm

6-01 Piecework: Interwar Soviet Montage in an Expanded Sense – Audubon
Chair: Jindrich Toman, U of Michigan
Papers: Alla Vronskaya, MIT
“‘Montage in Architecture’: Movement and Rhythm in the Architectural Theory of Soviet
Rationalism”
Kristin E. Romberg, George Washington U
“Certification for Kazimir Malevich: Aleksei Gan‘s Constructive Criticism”
Katerina Romanenko, CUNY Graduate Center/Pratt Institute of Technology/Kean U
“Representation of Soviet Celebratory Parades in Women’s Magazines of the 1930s”
Disc.: Christina Kiaer, Northwestern U

6-15 Intelligence Support of Policymakers during the Cold War; Case Studies From CIA Archives – La
Galerie 1
Chair: A. Ross Johnson, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Papers: Peter B. Nyren, CIA
“Role of Intelligence in Reagan’s Policy Toward the USSR”
Terry Alfred Bender, Raytheon Corporation
“Contribution of Intelligence Reports to Understanding Preparations for Martial Law in Poland”
John Bird, Bird Company of Newport, Inc.
“Resolving the Missile Gap; Contribution of Intelligence to Policy”
Disc.: Mark Nathan Kramer, Harvard U
Jack F. Matlock, Columbia U

6-21 Business-State Relations in Russia under Putin and Medvedev – Mardi Gras Ballroom A
Chair: Harley D. Balzer, Georgetown U
Papers: Tina Jennings, St Antony’s College, U of Oxford (UK)
“Business Associations and the Kremlin: Consequences of the Yukos Affair”
Yuko Adachi, Sophia U (Japan)
“The Rise of State-Controlled Companies under Putin”
Stanislav Markus, U of Chicago
“Institutional Weakness and Business Aggression: Raiding under Putin”
Disc.: Peter Rutland, Wesleyan U

Session 7 – Friday – 3:45-5:30 pm

7-02 Political Humor in Russia Yesterday and Today – Bacchus
Chair: Mark Yoffe, George Washington U
Papers: Dennis Ioffe, U of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
“The Many Faces of Political Humor in Moscow Conceptualism”
Alexis Monique Zimberg, Georgetown U
“Anonymous Mockery and Unabashed Political Critique in Post-Soviet Graffiti”
Julia Bekman Chadaga, Macalester College
“The Scene of the Crime: Policing, Performance, and Political Humor in Contemporary Russia”
Disc.: Elizaveta Gaufman

7-17 Commerce, Commodities, and Russia‘s Role in Global Trade – (Roundtable) – La Galerie 4
Chair: Martina Winkler, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Germany)
Part.: Ryan Jones, Appalachian State U
Erika L. Monahan, U of New Mexico
Matthew P. Romaniello, U of Hawai’i at Manoa
Heidi M. Sherman, U of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Ilya Vinkovetsky, Simon Fraser U (Canada)

Session 8 – Saturday – 8:00-9:45 am

8-33 Revisiting the Color Revolutions – (Roundtable) – Preservation Hall Studio 10
Chair: Andrew Konitzer, U of Pittsburgh
Part.: Julie George, CUNY Queens College
Vladimir Gel’man, European U at St. Petersburg (Russia)
Paul Goode, U of Oklahoma
Jill Ann Irvine, U of Oklahoma
Serhiy Kudelia, George Washington U

Session 9 – Saturday – 10:00-11:45 am

9-04 No Boundaries for the Russian Government Corruption – Balcony J
Chair: Pavel Ivlev, Consultant
Papers: Vladimir Rimskiy
“Corruption in the Russian Education System”
Evgeniya Khilji, Eurasia Foundation
“Corruption and Nepotism in Russia (Case Studies)”
Alexandra Kalinina
“Corruption in Russia as a Business: Putin‘s Palace Case Study”
Disc.: Ekaterina Mishina, National Research U Higher School of Economics (Russia)

Session 10 – Saturday – 1:30-3:15 pm

10-02 Recent Past as a Scholarly Challenge: (Re)reading 1990 – (Roundtable) – Bacchus
Chair: Irina Dmitrievna Prokhorova, New Literary Observer (Russia)
Part.: Alexander Etkind, U of Cambridge (UK)
Ilya Kalinin, New Literary Observer (Russia)
Nikolay Koposov, U of Helsinki (Finland)
Alexei Yurchak, UC Berkeley

10-19 Building Civil Society in Contemporary Russia? Activism in RuNet in Pre-& Post-Election period
(Roundtable) – La Galerie 6
Chair: Egor Panchenko, Russian State U for the Humanities (Russia)
Part.: Arseniy Khitrov, National Research U Higher School of Economics (Russia)
Elena Morenkova, Université Panthéon Assas – Paris 2 (France)
Alexander Solovyev
Vera Zvereva, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)

Session 11 – Saturday – 3:30-5:15 pm

11-07 Russian Regional Politics Under Putin 2.0 – Balcony M
Chair: Peter H. Solomon, U of Toronto (Canada)
Papers: Darrell L. Slider, U of South Florida
“Decentralization Revisited: Kozak, Khloponin and Proposals to Weaken the Vertical”
Joan T. DeBardeleben, Carleton U (Canada)
“Regional Elections in Russia: Do They Make a Difference?”
Paul Goode, U of Oklahoma
“Nationalism and Regime Legitimacy in Russia‘s Regions”
Disc.: Robert W. Orttung, George Washington U
John F. Young, U of Northern British Columbia (Canada)

11-19 Manufacturing Soviet Ideology: Institutes and Mechanisms, 1953-1985 – La Galerie 6
Chair: Ethan M. Pollock, Brown U
Papers: Nikolai Mitrokhin, Bremen U (Germany)
“What Could a Party Bureaucrat Learn at the Academy of Social Sciences of the Communist Party
Central Committee in the mid-1950s-1970s?”
Alexander Titov, U of Birmingham (UK)
“A Triumph in Defeat? The Ideological Commission and Party Ideology during the Thaw”
Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, Wesleyan U
“Their Strength is Our Weakness: Religious Studies at the Soviet Institute of Scientific Atheism”
Disc.: Stephen Bittner, Sonoma State U

11-20 Regions and Cities of the Russian Federation: Verifying and Networking Data – (Roundtable) -
Mardi Gras Ballroom B
Chair: Tomila V Lankina, World Resources Institute
Part.: Leonid Iosifovich Borodkin, Moscow State U (Lomonossov, Russia)
Irina Nikolaevna Ilina, National Research U Higher School of Economics (Russia)
Carol S. Leonard, U of Oxford (UK)

Session 12 – Sunday – 8:00-9:45 am

12-17 Substance Abuse in the Soviet Union: Youth, Reform and Repression – La Galerie 5
Chair: Karen Petrone, U of Kentucky
Papers: Seth Franklin Bernstein, U of Toronto (Canada)
“‘Lifestyle Cannot Be Separate From Politics’: Degeneracy and Purges in the Komsomol, 1936-
1938″
Mark Schrad
“Vodka, Gorbachev, and the Politics of Reform in the Late Soviet Union”
Brandon G Miller, Michigan State U
“Substance Abuse in the 1960s”
Disc.: Sean Guillory, U of Pittsburgh

Session 13 – Sunday – 10:00-11:45 am

13-06 Managing Subjectivities in Socialism and Postsocialism – Balcony L
Chair: Saara Maria Ratilainen, U of Tampere (Finland)
Papers: Suvi Salmenniemi, U of Helsinki (Finland)
“Self-Help Reading in Russia: Governmentality, Psychology and Subjectivity”
Julie D. Hemment, U of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Technologies of Kindness in the Provinces: the Promotion of State-Run Youth Voluntarism in
Russia”
Tuomas Laine-Frigren
“Psychological Discourse and Subjectivity in Late Socialist Hungary”
Disc.: Charles Walker, U of Southampton (UK)

Session 14 – Sunday – 12:00-1:45 pm

14-18 Youth and Social Stability in the Russian Federation – (Roundtable) – La Galerie 5
Chair: Denise Mishiwiec, Social Science Research Council
Part.: Cynthia J. Buckley, U of Texas at Austin
Nicole M. Butkovich Kraus, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Jessica Mason, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Becca McBride, Vanderbilt U

Catherine Fitzpatrick, an hero of our tiem. (Twitter avatar.)

Upon actually reading Fitzpatrick’s opus, I was less than thrilled to learn that she picked all the wrong reasons to assault my work. In less than 4,000 words, let’s right those wrongs and explore some actually justified assassinations of my stuff!

First, as I pointed out in a probably-a-bad-idea comment on Fitzpatrick’s blog, I’m not the one who compared Russian Law 89417-6 and SOPA. The Russian Presidential Council on Human Rights drew this comparison in a public statement that was signed by none other than Ludmila Alexeyeva, a woman Fitzpatrick lists as her “political grandparent.”

Second, I am said to have “bashed” Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev, who supports the Internet legislation. Fitzpatrick, who openly opposes the law, writes that “Ponomarev in fact has comported himself entirely honorably in the last year.” She is, of course, referring to his recent protest activities (oddly, this anti-Soviet crusader singles out Ponomarev’s support for the rabidly leftist and Stalin-adoring Sergei Udaltsov), but most importantly Fitzpatrick misinterprets a particular quote I inserted into my GV post. I noted that Ponomarev defended Law 89417-6 by citing the fact that its first blueprint was drafted by an online society. That group, The League for a Safe Internet, first proposed a more limited blacklist than the one now being considered by the Duma, to be managed by an NGO, though the parliament now wants to delegate that authority to Roskomnadzor. What Fitzpatrick misunderstands is that Ponomarev’s statement was on July 6, the day that the deputies approved the new, harsher version of the law. In other words, Ponomarev was endorsing not the original “soft” blacklist, but the revised legislation! You know, the one with “no judicial oversight” (a mischaracterization, as blacklisted sites can appeal the decision in court) and “concepts antithetical to human rights” (such as “anti-extremism,” like racist hate speech).

Third, fourth, and umpteenth, this steaming pile of lazy reading-and-research fails to scratch the surface of perfectly legitimate criticisms of my own work. For instance, I suggest that a new office in the Presidential Administration, “For the Application of Information Technology and the Development of e-Democracy,” was created as a counterweight to Deputy PM Surkov and Communications Minister Nikiforov. But where’s the proof? Just because I couldn’t find a public statement about the Internet law doesn’t mean that the presidency hasn’t signaled a more defined position on the issue, perhaps also ambivalent about the law’s current wording.

Meanwhile, I cite an article by journalist Andrei Babitskii, who (a day before the RuWikipedia blackout) lambasted Russia’s Internet companies for remaining ‘unforgivably silent’ about the looming RuNet blacklist. Babitskii has been kidnapped, interviewed terrorists, and battled Putin’s ‘bloody regime’ for years, but there is plenty of contrary evidence to his claim that Russian tech companies kept silent about the Duma’s draft law. While LiveJournal and VKontakte publicly endorsed RuWikipedia’s stunt, the executives of Yandex, Russian Google, Mail.ru, and others have been dishing out condemnations to the media for weeks. Why not assail me for burying this story? Wasn’t it unfair of me to downplay the heroics (or the honesty, or whatever one wishes to call it) of the RuNet giants?

All this is to say that my delight this morning was short-lived. I like a good trolling as much as the next guy. In this age of video and doodads, it’s always nice to know that somebody out there is reading — even if she’s doing so through clenched teeth and cracked spectacles. But when criticisms miss their mark, and fall instead upon misunderstandings and misreadings, my excitement slips into disappointment, and any service to readers transforms into a boring misrepresentation of a thing that wasn’t ever really read in the first place.

• 15 May 2012, Russia: Duma Deputy Wants Criminal Liability for Extremist Tweets
• 11 May 2012, Russia: Yavlinsky Stir Reveals Opposition Rift
• 7 May 2012, Russia: Violence Plunges Opposition into Debate About Tactics
• 4 May 2012, Russia: Varlamov’s Failure in Omsk
• 27 April 2012, Russia: Putin Proposes Contentious State Power Grab in Siberia
• 21 April 2012, Russia: Liberal Democrats Join Opposition to Ulyanovsk NATO Hub

For the New Books Network, I’ll soon be publishing a new NBN interview with Richard Sakwa, author of the recent book The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession.

Stay tuned for more updates. Once I’ve settled more at Global Voices, I intend to restart my AGT activity, publishing more op-ed style pieces here.

(10 April 2012) Russia: Astrakhan Becomes Opposition’s New Rallying Cause

(13 April 2012) Russia: Ilya Varlamov, Omsk’s Blogger-Mayor?

Understanding Russian Politics tackles all the biggest components of Russian statecraft and social transformation over the past twenty-five years. In my interview with Professor White, we discussed topics as current as President Medvedev’s 2012 legal initiative to liberalize political party registration in Russia, as well as the role the previous winter’s street demonstrations played in prompting such reforms offered by the Kremlin. In this context, White addressed the constitutional legacy of Yeltsin’s super presidential state, and explained why Putin’s economic policies have deviated from the extreme market liberalism of Russia in the early 1990s. Our conversation finished on the subject of Russian foreign policy and domestic interest groups, highlighting the roles that competing schools of thought play in policymaking today.

You can listen to the interview at NBN here.

Subscribe to NBN via iTunes.

Earlier this week, on April 3, 2012, a Kemerovo court convicted blogger Dmitri Shipilov of violating Article 319 of the Criminal Code, “insulting a state official in public.” As a result, he was sentenced to eleven months of community service, with ten percent of his earnings earmarked for the government’s treasury. Shipilov’s crime was authoring two blog posts in November 2011 that each lampooned the region’s governor, Aman Tuleyev, as well as members of his staff, often in colorful language.

Read the rest at the Global Voices website, found here.

Only the good die young ... and are reborn!

‘A Good Treaty’ has been my primary blogging platform for more than two years now. As of today, that is no longer the case. For the most part, my research will now appear at Global Voices. (I’ll continue to repost my GV reports to AGT, as well as my New Books Network interviews.) To the readers who have stuck with this blog since I started it back in 2010, I extend my warm thanks!

While my research-based reportage is relocating to RuNet Echo, AGT is by no means kaput! In the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring new styles and modi operandi for the blog, and I welcome any constructive feedback. Is there any type of blogging that you’d like to see implemented in the ‘new’ AGT? As my future work at GV is dedicated to monitoring the Russian Internet (mainly the RuNet blogosphere), I am considering returning AGT to its original emphasis on U.S.-Russian relations.

That’s just one idea, anyway! I’m inclined to restore AGT to a more personal voice, so in that spirit please feel free to transmit your thoughts, either in the comments or by email.

Many thanks again,
Kevin.

With Russia’s sixth presidential election having reached its preordained conclusion, what remains unclear is how Moscow’s already seething political opposition will respond to the prospect of six more years of Vladimir Putin.

If the protests continue, will they be met with harsh reprisals? That was the route taken in Belarus when Alexander Lukashenko won a fourth consecutive presidential term in 2010. Police intervened as soon as demonstrators assembled the night after the election, and hundreds of protesters along with seven presidential candidates were jailed.

Alternatively, could we see a repeat of Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution”, when demonstrators camped out in downtown Kyiv and the authorities backed off, allowing a re-run of the election, which the opposition won?

In the Russian case, neither wholesale repression nor revolution is likely. After the State Duma elections triggered demonstrations last December, the Kremlin cannily abandoned its initial response of arresting protesters, and started issuing permits for demonstrations. Since then, the opposition has generally cooperated with the authorities in limiting their protests to officially sanctioned locations and times. The March 5 demonstration was approved for Pushkin square, about one mile from the Kremlin, and participants were only arrested after the officially-designated time had elapsed.

If protests continue in their current pattern — peaceful gatherings at approved locations — then the opposition movement is likely to subsume into the background noise of Russian urban life. Opposition figure Aleksei Navalny has suggested that the time is ripe for escalating the level of confrontation, by protesting directly in front of government buildings and daring the authorities to crack down. Last week he wrote on Twitter, “Only Lubyanka. Only hardcore.”

This approach would indeed trigger a vigorous state response — but this is more likely to splinter than to unite the opposition. Unlike Ukraine’s Orange protesters, today’s Russian opposition has no candidate around whom it could organize a mass and prolonged movement. The runner up in Sunday’s election was the Communist Gennady Zyuganov – who has been a staunch critic of the anti-government wave of liberal demonstrations. A second difference is that the Ukrainian opposition had powerful allies within various branches of the state apparatus, paving the way for key judicial and security officials to switch sides, or at least sit on the fence. In Russia, in contrast, the executive is united around Putin.

It is more likely that Russian protesters will face a situation similar to the aftermath of Ukraine’s 1999 presidential election, during the failed “Ukraine without Kuchma” opposition movement. Those demonstrations began as a delayed response to Kuchma’s reelection to a second term and were aided by a series of corruption scandals. Activists kept the effort alive for months, but government interference and a handful of violent skirmishes ultimately soured public support for the movement.

The Kremlin’s approach to the wave of liberal demonstrations has been to wage a counteroffensive, staging large pro-government rallies populated by youth activists, labor unions, and state employees — whose attendance is widely speculated to be influenced by financial incentives and administrative pressures. Combined with the practice of forcing the opposition into divisive compromises about permits, the big pro-Putin rallies aim to exhaust the public’s patience for mass demonstrations, while fostering infighting within the opposition. At the same time, in a recent series of newspaper articles Putin laid out a mainstream populist agenda that shows he has not lost his ability and willingness to engage with the concerns of ordinary Russians. The election result suggests that he has succeeded in luring them back into supporting his continuation in office.

Most likely, then, we are in for a battle of attrition, which will ultimately be won by the Kremlin in the elections offseason.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Mankoff’s primary focus is on explaining the origins and engine of Russia’s post-Yeltsin resurgence in geopolitics, as well as exploring possible trajectories for its future development. This book is wonderfully structured, breaking down the production and execution of Russian foreign policy into chapters on its general contours, its internal influences, and Russia’s relationship with the United States, as well as its neighbors in Europe, China, and the former Soviet regions. In this interview, Mankoff and I had a particularly interesting conversation about Russian domestic interest groups and the impact of their competition on foreign policy-makers. Mankoff also applied the lessons of his book to the recent friction between Russia and the West over events in Libya and Syria. Given the byzantine nature of Russian policymaking, as well as the continuing record of disagreements and mutual confusion between Russian and Western observers about certain geopolitical hotspots, Mankoff’s book is a welcome study of the opinions and pressures that shape Russian foreign policy.

You can find the interview at NBN here.

Subscribe to NBN via iTunes.