By Mark Ames

“[Charles] Manson told me that he personally believed in law and order. There should be ‘rigid control’ by the authorities, he said. It didn’t matter what the law was - right and wrong being relative - but it should be strictly enforced by whoever had the power. And public opinion should be suppressed, because part of the people wanted one thing, part another.”   - Vincent Bugliosi, HELTER SKELTER

There is a grand conspiracy going on here. It’s a feel-good conspiracy, a conspiracy of optimism that is designed to make Putin’s Russia appear to be on the right track. And through a combination of repetition and co-optation, it’s working.

My friends in the expat corporate world tell me that a surprisingly large number of top-level Westerners believe in Putin’s Russia. They talk of his achievements, though exactly what his achievements are they can’t name. They just “feel” that things are finally getting better.

What has Putin done since taking power? The only law he passed that might interest the Corporate Elite is the outrageous lowering of the top tax bracket. But even that is nothing but a bait-and-switch; a tax minister in Putin’s regime, Ilya Klebinov, openly admitted last August that the only reason they lowered taxes was to get more rich people to file, so that the government could fuck them once out in the open. In other words, the only positive change is nothing but a poorly-planned ruse. Klebinov’s admission not only raised questions about Putin’s intentions, but more importantly, about what idiots his band of crooks are compared to the uber-swindlers who served under Yeltsin. At least they had the common sense to wait until they after they’d swindled their billions before going public and bragging, “Miy ikh kinuli.”

Beyond the tax cut, we’ve got the same ol’ shitty Yeltsin-era narrative, although few journalists bother mentioning it anymore: capital flight has soared since Putin took over as president, the banking system is still a crime-infested joke, industrial production growth has come to a screeching halt over the past two months, the government is stacked full of the same corrupt swine as before, the population is shrinking faster than a coke fiend’s penis, while human rights and freedom of speech— both vital to business interests such as transparency and the fight against corruption— are as dead as... dead.

The reason that everything is still shitty here is simple and obvious: there has been no fundamental change. The Putin regime is merely a consolidation of the Yeltsin regime, a consolidation which required a few symbolic sacrifices at the top in order to save the klepto-bureaucratic structure as a whole. To paraphrase Mayor Luzhkov’s description of Putin’s alleged crackdown on the oligarchs, corruption and decentralization: “All that’s going on is that they’re taking away property from one out-of-favor group, and redistributing it to a new favorite.”

So why does it “feel” better?

Because They say so. They, as always, is the press. And the press is serving its age-old function as Collaborator Number One, PR conduit, worm bait, and cover-up artist all-in-one. It’s an incredibly depressing and scary thing to watch, when you’re right here in the middle of it all as we are. It can really make you think unpleasant thoughts about the way liars should be dealt with.

The eXile has tried to keep a running tab on the list of Vichy collaborators in the press world who have been selling this regime to the next batch of suckers. It’s a list that has grown, a tireless list whose success is not just in numbers of collaborators, but in the sheer volume of output. News reporters and organizations are falling into line as fast as Europe fell to the Nazis—and in most cases, with just as much “resistance.”

The latest to succumb appeared in the last issue of The Russia Journal, where I was horrified to see a beaming John Helmer, former Australian Communist and anti-Yeltsin gadfly from the lowly Moscow Tribune. Gone is the grave intertwined-finger pose of yore; the new collaborator-Helmer is all teeth now. His new boss, RJ publisher Ajay Goyal, brags about his connections to the Kremlin and is proud to have been photographed shaking Putin’s hand right around the same time that The Moscow Times was being evicted from its offices following its expose on voter fraud in the presidential elections.

I’d always had a soft spot for Helmer, seeing him as one of life’s fellow fuck-ups who’d never fit in with The Man. In fact, it was Helmer who first suggested to me over breakfast in the fall of 1998 that The Russia Journal was a PR front for the Kremlin reformers.  Perhaps Helmer’s problem all along was that he’d always wanted to sell out to The Man; finally, through this human offshore shell company named Ajay Goyal, he found someone willing to buy him out.

It gets uglier: On February 9th, Goyal, who up until two years ago was a computer parts shuttle-trader between Moscow and India, will be giving a lecture at the Chekhov Cultural Center entitled, “The Negative Image of Russia in the Western News Media”. Helmer’s first column for the Journal, with the cynically comic title “Tyranny of Cream Sauce”, argued that Putin is a good tyrant because he’s putting food on everyone’s table, and therefore, everyone (such as that pesky Swedish ambassador) should shuttup and stop complaining. Like most of the collaborationist press, Helmer argues that Putin’s ratings are high because he’s genuinely popular, and not because he’s created a monolithic propaganda machine which rivals the Soviet Union’s. Arguing that Putin’s high ratings are due to his successes is as disingenuous as arguing that the Kosovo War’s popularity in the West was proof of that war’s righteousness.

The Moscow Times has gone collaborationist too, pushing out the sometimes-left-of-center editor Matt Bivens in favor of pliant Lynn Barry, who gave the FSB the green light to use a cudgel on human rights activists a couple of weeks ago. Just this week they brought back disgraced ex-columnist Peter Ekman out of the doghouse to play Kremlin lapdog in arguing that the attack on NTV was and is a purely business matter, and has nothing about politics.

The new, slimmed down Moscow Times has overnight devolved into what one dissident Russian journalist told me was “an English-language Vedomosti,” referring to Independent Media’s business newspaper, which it jointly publishes with The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. Vedomosti’s deceptive shtick is to present the world of Russian business as something normal and familiar: business as a matter of strategic acquisitions, shareholder concerns and competitive marketing, rather than what Russian business is really all about: theft, murder, corruption, smoke-and-mirrors, milking an enterprise dry then disappearing with the funds overnight, tax evasion, shell games, siphoning money offshore, and screwing anyone idiotic enough to believe the Vedomosti version of the way things are done.

The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have a strong interest in keeping that facade up, or they risk seeing their investment in Vedomosti sink. Therefore instead of telling its readers like it is here, they sell the same crap in their own newspapers. That’s why you have the FT’s John Lloyd singing the praises of Roman “The Philanthropist” Abramovich, including a half-page drawing of Abramovich as a weary Santa Claus doling out gifts to the Chukhotka savages, instead of the reality which is the other way around. Or the Journal’s Alan Cullison pushing the tired old lie this past week of Putin-as-Pinochet, a lie intended to sucker in Western investors who fondly remember how Pinochet’s helicopter interrogations brought them handsome profits. (Amazingly, Cullison uses Konstantin Kagalovsky as his chief positive source on the Putin-Pinochet story, without once mentioning that Kagalovsky was at the center of the BoNY money laundering scandal!)

Michael Wines published a piece recently in The New York Times about vhat a vanderful Jew-loving president Putin is, a piece reprinted in The Moscow Times. No mention of the pro-Putin Kursk governor whose thugs beat up a Jewish opponent, no mention of Putin’s ties to Zavtra editor Alexander Prokhanov, or to David Duke’s cozy new relationship with the Putin-controlled Russian Duma. And no mention of Gusinsky. Almost at the same time that Wines published his Putinshtein article, the Kremlin’s web site, strana.ru, published a piece claiming that Jews themselves believe that anti-Semitism has ceased to exist in Putin’s Russia. Oy vey! Obviously, the point of painting Putin as Jew Lover No. 1 is to counter Gusinsky’s claim that he is a persecuted Jew. Wines, it seems, is willing to do the Kremlin’s bidding.

The tyranny of optimism goes much further than just the usual press suspects. Last weekend, on a drive down Dmitrovskoye Shosse, I saw a government billboard featuring two healthy young boys with a Russian flag in the background, and the headline: “We’re Lucky And We’re Talented!” Indeed. They’re lucky to be alive, considering the death-to-birth ratio. It would be almost funny if it weren’t so depressing, this sick imitation of Soviet propaganda.

Kiriyenko’s Union Of Right Wing Forces, along with the Ministry of Culture, is holding a $120,000 contest for movie scripts which show Russia in a positive light. So even the cutting-edge bourgeois intellectuals are in on the conspiracy of optimism.

The list goes on and on, right down to the unbearably bourgeois character of Moscow’s nightlife. The surface of this city, once so menacing and alien, has become familiar. All of the danger and savagery is being swept into the unreported margins; you can even miss it these days if you want to.

Russia is turning into Reagan America, only without the GDP to give at least some basis to the happy lie. It’s a horrible imitation of both optimism and Soviet glory, in a country without a single recognizable thing to celebrate. And yet it’s working.

And that’s the logic behind this conspiracy of optimism. Russia watchers may remember that as the financial crisis built in 1998, everyone from Michael McFaul to Anatoly Chubais publicly declared, to use McFaul’s words, that “The perception of reality is more important than reality itself.” Many of the reformers who influenced Putin’s regime and his subsequent control over the media (such as Gleb Pavlovsky) took McFaul’s and others’ words to heart. The experience of the Kosovo War only reinforced that. That false perception of reality, which kept Western public opinion in favor of a disastrous and evil war, eventually translated into a positive reality—Victory. It’s a late 20th Century revision of the old Marxist axiom: a change in perception leads to a change in reality.

Take for example Los Angeles: a clique of corrupt landowners in cahoots with LA Times publisher Harrison Otis conspired 100 years ago to sell that dusty basin of rock and desert as a modern paradise - and eventually, it worked.

Will it work in Russia? Absolutely not. Los Angeles has year-round sunshine and borders one of the most beautiful stretch of beaches in the world; Russia is eleven time zones of mud, ice and mosquitoes.

But they’re trying to impose optimism here anyway. And that’s the truly bad news.

One of the greatest things that attracted me to Russia in the early 90s was its relative absence of hypocrisy. In America, you either smiled, or you were disappeared. In Russia, at least, you had the right, the duty even, to point out every horrible, miserable detail in life, politics and fate.

Living in a city where unabashed misery was the rule helped to calm down the demons in my head. Lately, they have been returning with a vengeance.

Putin’s Russia is quickly becoming an unbearable place to live. A disaster wrapped in a lie wrapped in an imitation of a lie.