I doubt this will lead to any demonstrations for freedom of the press there, sadly.

The independent Russian press is dead. The hard simple fact of the matter is that Putin, along with soaring Asian demand for oil and natural gas, have given Russians what they have desperately craved for more than a quarter century: a bit of prosperity, political stability, a glimpse of an economic future that is not entirely desolate. Russia is finally moving in the direction that so many businessmen and journalists advocated during the early 1990's: a Pinochet-style regime that respects private property and brutally suppresses any source of "instability", beginning with the political opposition and the press. Not quite fascism-- Russia's military and security forces are so colossally corrupt, incompetent, rudderless and feeble as to prevent any effective use of state violence toward any internal or external end-- but a kind of criminalized capitalism along with the sort of farcical "fearless leader" worship that leads the state to organize bands of bully boys roving the streets of Moscow and other cities to beat the gavno out of anyone guilty of lese-majeste toward Comr-, er President Putin.

A side note: look at the utter shamelessness of the western pimp-banks (Morgan Stanley et al) now rushing in, carpetbags at the ready, to Sheremetyevo to bless Putin's regime and rake in placement fees now that the Russian risk premium has declined to normal levels. Have any of the Bushies noted this glaring contradiction between global capitalism and democratic aspiration? Anyone bother to recall Havel's wise admonition: "better a sick Russia than a healthy Soviet Union"?

Did the Times really call Volgograd "a central Russian city", as if their readers would probably not have heard of it? (Sorry, I can't check myself: they won't let me register -- not that I've tried all that hard.) Did they really not mention that Volgograd was known as Stalingrad from 1925 to 1961? Surely most of their readers know _that_ name, and would recognize that it is more the equivalent of a Pittsburgh than a Peoria or a Podunk. (Wikipedia reports a population just over 1 million.) Also, I would have put it in southern, not "central" Russia.

Russia, South Africa, Japan-- these locales matter less to Pinch's Times than the locales of the West Village and West Hollywood. In that lifestyle guide that is the new NYT, there's more coverage of gay issues, the great American kulturkampf, and real estate prices in the blue towns than there is of those faraway nations, no matter how big, of which the core readers of the Times know nothing.