Personal liberties and potential prosperity are parts of a society also seeped in graft that operates across police, state and commerce, writes SEAMUS MARTINin Moscow
THE RUSSIA that succeeded the Soviet Union has been criticised for a lack of individual freedoms and praised for a return of stability which has helped the economy to boom.
Moscow is now a paradoxical city where national TV is strictly controlled by the State but local radio and some newspapers are free to comment. The internet is even more advanced than in Ireland with free Wi-Fi available in almost every restaurant, bar and cafe.
Bloggers such as Alexei Navalny whose Navalny.LiveJournal.com exposes corruption among the authorities have gained near-hero status among Russians with the money to afford the equipment and the time to spend on the worldwide web.
The strength of the ruling tandem of the president, Dmitry Medvedev, and prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is the growing prosperity of the population and personal freedoms that are limited by western standards but better than those allowed to the populace in Soviet times.
Their ever-growing weakness has been the inability to curb the corruption that has permeated almost every aspect of Russian.
A few days ago, I took the local train, the elektrichka, from Moscow to the writers’ village of Peredelkino to visit the grave of a man I knew in my time as Moscow correspondent of this newspaper.
Yuri Shchekochikhin was an investigative journalist and a deputy in the Russian parliament (the Duma) for the pro-western Yabloko party.
He died mysteriously in 2003 when investigating fraud by members and former members of the internal security services of the Russian Federation. At this grave, near the burial place of the great Russian writer Boris Pasternak, I observed the tradition of raising a glass of the Armenian brandy we had shared from time to time at his office in the Duma.
On my return to the Kiev station in downtown Moscow while I was checking through the arrival gates, there was an attempt by a young woman to snatch the handbag of another woman. A man remonstrated with a group who appeared to accompany the would-be thief and was told he would “know what fear is like”. Undeterred, the man saw two policemen in the distance and brought the attempted theft to their attention. They did nothing.
There seemed little doubt that the police and the crooks were in league.
There were intimations of collusion too on August 8th when a gang of wreckers stormed an unoccupied historic building in central Moscow at 6am, locked neighbouring residents into their houses and destroyed the old building.
When I got there early that morning, the police stood by as the wreckers blocked the street to passers-by. The presentation of my official identification as foreign correspondent was greeted with a sneer.
The “gorillas”, as locals call them, took over the role policing the street near Patriarch’s Ponds, one of Moscow’s most beautiful areas. It would, in most places, be protected by orders preventing development. It is a bastion of the old Soviet intelligentsia. In the past, it housed the residences of the author Mikhail Bulgakov and the great poet Marina Tsvetayeva. And a few minutes away in an earlier age, Anton Chekhov practised medicine from a little house that is still preserved.
Bulgakov set the opening of his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, at the Patriarch's Ponds, where Muscovites still gather to relax at weekends and when they are on holidays to watch the world go by.
The demolition of the house in the area has attracted the attention of the Russian media and of a group of young people determined to fight corruption and preserve the architectural heritage of one of the few places where the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Moscow remains.
In this particular case, the “developer” happens to be the son of a high official in the Moscow city government who plans to replace the little 19th century building with a nine-storey monster designed in the appalling architectural kitsch style that has dominated new constructions in Russia.
The protesters represent the first fragile growth of a new civil society in Russia. They have gained a victory since the old building was demolished with the intervention of the public prosecutor who has stopped construction on the site. The defiance of the residents and particularly that of the young protesters who have no memory of Soviet times is a ray of hope in the new Russia.