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Election in Russia

Kinda funny, they held the Russian presidential election on my birthday. Exit polls are showing Putin with a 69-percent landslide. No surprises there. At this point, Putin has consolidated so much power that the inter-party politics are almost a sideshow. The politics to watch are the internal struggles within the aptly-named All-Russia party. The problem is that those battles are all happening behind closed doors. To figure out what's happening, you have to look at changes in policy, and then try to extrapolate which faction has just won an internal battle.

For example, when Khodorkovsky was arrested, most people took it to mean that the hardline ex-KGB faction had gained the upper hand. But it's all so murky that it's almost impossible to figure out what's really going on unless you have the ability to do some deep research. Most of the analyses on Russian politics have been pretty poor lately, even coming from heavy-caliber sources like the BBC. Not that I can do much better from Copenhagen...

Ugh. Well, anything to avoid thinking about my birthday. Sorry I've been a bad correspondent to everyone lately. I've been swamped with work and just... tired. My friend Natasha says she feels like going to the North Pole. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.