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Lebedev seems an unlikely person to make that case. A few weeks earlier, near the center of Moscow in a stately pink building where he sometimes works and sleeps, Lebedev gave me a condensed history of the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - the beginnings of post-Soviet capitalism, the rise of the oligarchs, the loans-for-shares scandal, his acquisition of National Reserve Bank, the rise of Putin, the fall of the oligarchs, his 28% stake in Aeroflot, the Khodorkovsky affair, the forthcoming launch of his restaurant in London, the end of democracy...
...taken from them at any minute, and the only way they know to secure their fortunes is to endear themselves to the state - to become cheerleaders for it. "Russia is ruled by the same people who own it," says Masha Lipman, a political analyst at Moscow's Carnegie Center. "It's not even a legitimate question to ask whether the 'oligarchs' ... work 'for the Kremlin,' for it is sometimes impossible to draw the line between the 'oligarchs' and the Kremlin...
...this year, following the killing of yet another Novaya Gazetta reporter. "Medvedev ... said he's a full supporter of the Gulag Memorial project," Lebedev says. (Memorial was the most important human-rights group to emerge from the perestroika era. For years it has pushed for a monument in the center of Moscow recalling the victims of the gulag.) Putin, Lebedev says, would never back anything that subtracted from the Soviet record. "I think Putin thinks that this commemoration would spoil the everyday spirit," Lebedev says. "Stalin, for them, represents the state, and sometimes you can see Putin as sort...
...lacking experience in interrogating jihadis, turned to experts from a military school where soldiers are trained to resist torture. These experts came up with a range of "coercive" interrogation techniques, including the now infamous waterboard. When these methods were employed at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the methods led to an angry confrontation over their legality between interrogators from the FBI and the CIA. Eventually, the FBI withdrew from the interrogations - a less-than-amiable divorce, so to speak...
Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, an independent think tank, said the trip "was pretty successful in the sense that he managed to reassure the leaders of these countries and to not make any statements which would seriously influence the Russian leadership." The problem in "Russian-American relations in this part of the world is to keep certain expectations and not to aggravate," he said...