A Letter From London
(As President Obama prepares to visit Russia in July)

Dear Mr. Obama,

As you are probably still receiving thousands of letters and messages from all over the world, congratulating you with your first 100 days in office, or with each consecutive day that followed – such are the misgivings of being a popular leader - I do not want to sound like another of your well-wishers and repeat the same meaningless phrases like, ‘Keep up the good work, Mr. President’, or ‘Wishing you all the best in saving the world.’

In fact, I would rather prefer to say that I greatly sympathise with you for inheriting such a mess from your predecessor. I personally think that the world has greatly underestimated the destructive powers of George Bush Jr. The dire state of the U.S. economy and the crisis in Afghanistan alone would have made Bush an outstanding failure as American leader. But that great man went much further and left a trail of disasters in practically every other area. Very impressive for a man who could not even string sentences and words together properly.

Although, looking on the brighter side, Mr. President, Mr. Bush’s disastrous reign did make it possible for you to win the election last year and get the American people firmly behind you. In all honesty, Mr. President, you should be grateful to your predecessor. I may even suggest that you keep a photo of him somewhere in your filing cabinet, just to remind yourself of the man who made is possible for you to get to the White House. Because make no mistake, people will be inadvertently comparing you to Mr. Bush and thinking: ‘Absolutely no comparison. The new man wins by a mile.’ Which cannot be at all bad for your image, can it?

But that is all beside the point, Mr. President, and the point being that we are all counting on you to restore the damage caused to the world by years of neglect and tomfoolery. We are all hoping that you will put pressure on those banker boys and give an example to the rest of the Western nations how not to give in to the blackmail of the money men. I suspect that you are probably besieged by these smooth talking financial high-flyers who are telling you how they have ditched their nasty ways and are now managing their financial affairs, that is taxpayers’ money, in a responsible way, blaming all those home-owners and people who took out bank loans generally for letting them down in a big way.

‘Yes, sir, Mr President,’ I can see one of these bankers saying to you at some high powered meeting in the White House, ‘we were sure let down by the folks in the sub-prime mortgage market. We gave them our all and they treated us real bad. Can we have another trillion dollars, please, to compensate for the sense of betrayal that is still preventing us from doing our jobs properly?’

Please, please, Mr President, do not fall for their tricks. They can save their banks by getting just part of their own ‘savings’ that are stashed away in all those off-shore accounts. They do not even have to spend all of their money. Just a fraction of it, and their banks would be revived.

It is so important that the people around the world see you as a fair President, a man, who does not give in to blackmail by the big boys of finance and business. And I guess a lot of people in the United States are also hoping that you will make the right decisions and get the guys on Wall Street to share the responsibility for the current mess with the rest of the nation.

And now let me turn my sights on U.S. relations with Russia, being a former Kremlin advisor, and warn you about some of the pitfalls that may await you in your dealings with the leaders in Moscow, there being two there at the same time ruling the great nation in tandem, as they call it themselves.

Let me tell you something about the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: he has a tough job of being President and yet not really deciding anything. He has been brought into the Kremlin for a brief period of time and all the decisions are taken for him by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is poised to return to the job that he loves and enjoys so much – running Russia as head of state – at some point in the near future, possibly even this year. I do not know whether you noticed it during your meeting with Mr. Medvedev in London at the G20 summit but he is a man who does not really say much of substance and prefers to make general statements that do not contain any specifics. And you might have even noticed that he is a bit edgy and tense and tends to respond to jokes with a very strange strained laugh.    

Mr President, it is not Mr.Medvedev’s fault that he is like that. It is just that he feels the constant presence of his great mentor, Mr. Putin, anywhere he goes and he often feels that he is simply no match for that man’s wisdom and experience. And these thoughts sometimes make him seem a bit clumsy and confused. He should not be really blamed for the strange things that are going on in Moscow and beyond it. Yes, sure, he did send you a strange congratulatory message last year on your victory in the election, but I suspect he did not really read it and grasp the meaning of it. He probably did not have the time to do that, having received the text from Mr. Putin’s office and told to forward it on at once. So you should not hold it against him, really. And he had nothing to do with that war against Georgia and cutting off the gas supplies to the West in January. That was all Putin’s doing.

As for Mr.Medvedev’s personal qualities, well, he has always been a quiet man, a man whom nobody really remembers much, even when he was Head of the Presidential Administration under President Putin several years ago. I once tried to call him and give him some advice over the phone, but his people told me that he was afraid of talking to strangers over the phone and that he needs to have the permission of his mentor, Mr Putin, to discuss anything with anyone.

So that should tell you, Mr President, that Mr. Medvedev is, technically speaking, a thoroughly Soviet politician who likes to speak vaguely, in well rehearsed clichés, and is not prone to make any decisions without consulting with the man at the top first. Which in this case sounds a bit odd, of course, as he is the President of Russia and is, technically speaking, sits at the very top himself.

So my point about your future dealings with the Kremlin is not to expect any quick responses to anything you offer and basically assume that the man you will be dealing with may not be there for long. So even during telephone conversations with President Medvedev expect long pauses to occur, as he consults with his mentor. 

Another important point to keep in mind about Russia’s leadership is that it is very Soviet in its mentality. Top government officials still talk in the same strange mixture of communist propaganda, patriotic clichés and meaningless phrases that only they themselves can understand. National interests, in their perception, are always closely linked with their personal interests and their prosperity. Anyone, whom they perceive as a threat to that prosperity, is treated by them as an enemy of Russia. I stress here, not just their personal enemies but enemies of the Russian people. That is why when President Bill Clinton once said publicly that he was not at all happy with American government credits and loans to Russia ending up in Swiss banks accounts, the people in the Kremlin took it very personally and never really liked Mr Clinton since then. So I suggest that you keep this in mind, just to avoid any misunderstanding with the current leadership.

As regards the economy, Russia at the moment is going through a meltdown period when most of the industry has stopped, when the banking sector is practically paralysed and the people are not even paid on time, if one can call the current salaries in the public sector and pensions as ‘payments’. In fact, they are so small that many people consider them irrelevant for their survival. I use the word ‘survival’ intentionally, because Russia is the only European country with the population decreasing steadily every year by 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. It is expected that by the year 2050 Russia’s population will go down from the current 142 to around 100 million, especially if Mr Putin comes back to the Kremlin and stays on for the next 12 years there or even longer.

Energy rich Russia is proving to be an unreliable supplier, having been unable to increase oil and gas production in the last several years, so in that field you’d better depend in your future plans on oil and gas fields in some other part of the world. Especially as a huge chunk of Russian gas that is being exported by Russia to the West actually originates in Turkmenistan and not in the vast spaces of Siberia, as many people seem to think.

And finally, a few words about the Russian military threat...

To be continued...

To learn more about Alexander Nekrassov visit: http://www.stirringtroubleinternationally.com/about/

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