The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was… [recently] presented with the Russian Order of Friendship, for his “outstanding contribution to the cooperation and friendly relations between Russia and the UK”

The honour, which was awarded by Russian presidential decree by President Dmitry Medvedev, was presented by the Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, His Excellency Mr Yury Fedotov, who said “What the Archbishop is doing helps tremendously to establish better understanding and to set a better climate in relations between Russia and the UK.”

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Though not even two decades have passed since the Soviet state collapsed in 1991, the Orthodox Russians who came to France to flee communism say they’re starting to view Moscow with mistrust again. The reason: the recent move by Russia to take control of a dazzling Orthodox cathedral built in Nice during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, which some opponents say is part a wider, nationalistic power play by Moscow to regain symbols of Russia’s historical, cultural and religious grandeur abroad.

The tussle centers on the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas ”” a breathtaking church topped with spires and domes that was built in 1912 on land that Nicolas’ grandfather, Alexander II, had purchased a half century earlier. Initially intended as a place of worship for the Russian aristocrats and industrialists who flocked to the Côte d’Azur before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the cathedral became a spiritual and cultural focal point for the mass of exiles who fled to Nice during the Soviet era. Since the fall of communism nearly 19 years ago, the so-called “white Russian” community and its offspring has been joined by Russian jet-setters who’ve grown extremely wealthy under the country’s current leadership and bought pricey mansions in Nice to use as their second homes. (See a brief history of Russians and vodka.)

To the Russian diaspora, as well as the 85,000 paying tourists who visit the church every year, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas has represented a slice of Mother Russia on the shores of the Mediterranean. And that’s exactly the logic the Russian government used to win a court case in France on Jan. 20 that recognized Moscow’s ownership of the church. The Nice Russian Orthodox Cultural Association (ACOR), which managed the church under a 99-year lease it signed with the czarist regime in 1909, had maintained that it effectively inherited the cathedral when Russia’s royal family was executed during the revolution. But the court upheld the Russian government’s position that since the czarists had bought the land and built the church using state money, the cathedral remains the property of the Russian government, meaning that Moscow could legally reclaim it now that ACOR’s lease has expired. Decades of Soviet uninterest in the property, the court decided, did not undermine Russia’s entitlement to it today.

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On the second day, we were driving in a small bus from our hotel to a reception, and drove by a theater with a sign in Russian that read “Kosmos Cinema.” I pointed to it and said to the co-pilot, look, that’s the ‘World Theater.'”

In a flash, our interpreter jumped from her seat in the front of the bus and ran back to me and said, “On your entry forms you all said that you didn’t speak Russian. How can you read that?”

I was startled, but said, “I can read Greek and the letters are a combination of English and Greek letters. I thought that was a reasonable translation of Kosmos Cinema.”

“Why did you learn Greek?” she asked.

“To understand the Bible better,” I replied.

See looked nervously at the other “guide” (guard) and then dropped her voice to a tiny whisper and said, “I have read ‘The Cross and the Switchblade.'”

From then, we tried to steal a moment of conversation here and there in which she talked about being a Christian, despite the persecution that would come if it became known.

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If 2009 was all about recession, for Wall Street, 2010 will be all about recovery. One of the first signs of this will be seen in bankers’ pay packets. January will be the month when investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and the more diversified conglomerates such as Citigroup and Bank of America, release details of what they intend to pay the “masters of the universe”.

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The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

In the last two years, Internet-based attacks on government and corporate computer systems have multiplied to thousands a day. Hackers, usually never identified, have compromised Pentagon computers, stolen industrial secrets and temporarily jammed government and corporate Web sites. President Obama ordered a review of the nation’s Internet security in February and is preparing to name an official to coordinate national policy.

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When the U.S. government imagines the global future, the term BRIC features prominently. The concept was created in 2001 when researchers at Goldman Sachs identified four critical emerging powers””Brazil, Russia, India and China. By 2050, claimed these experts, the BRIC powers would be challenging the U.S. for worldwide economic supremacy. U.S. officials have taken this forecast very seriously. Hillary Clinton recently listed these four “major and emerging global powers” as vital partners in any future attempts to solve the world’s problems.

The BRIC theory has political, strategic and military implications, but it also raises intriguing questions about the world’s religious future. The BRICs will be the scene of intense debates about faith and practice””about coexistence and rivalry between different faiths; about the proper relationship between religion and state power; and, conceivably, about the use of religious rhetoric to justify an imperial expansion.

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned major powers on Wednesday against intimidating Iran and said talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme was “premature”.

Putin, who many diplomats, analysts, and Russian citizens believe is still Russia’s paramount leader despite stepping down as president last year, was speaking after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Moscow for two days of talks.

“There is no need to frighten the Iranians,” Putin told reporters in Beijing after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

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It is still far from certain whether Russia will support tough new UN sanctions against Iran.

In his talks with President Barack Obama in New York Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev’s language was equivocal.

He said sanctions “may be inevitable”. He certainly did not promise Russia would support them….

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Why did Obama change the plan?

In his announcement, the president gave two reasons for the change in policy:

First, the latest intelligence indicates that Iran is concentrating on short- and medium-range missiles rather than long-range missiles.

Second, technological advances in land- and sea-based interceptors and sensors mean they can now be more effective in defending Europe. Obama also said the new approach, using advanced versions of the SM-3 ship-based missile being developed for use by the U.S. Navy, will be more cost-effective and offer the military more flexibility.

For the next two years, the United States will deploy the sea-based Aegis weapon system, the SM-3 interceptor and sensors such as the Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance system to monitor threats, the White House said. More advanced systems will come later.

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Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through.

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

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President Obama arrived in Moscow Monday for a summit with Russian leaders aimed at reaching an agreement to cut stockpiles of nuclear warheads, but also expected to touch upon the war in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism and the jousting for influence in other post-Soviet countries.

The summit comes less than a year after the conflict in Georgia caused the worst tensions between the United States and Russia since the end of the cold war. Since taking office in January, Mr. Obama has called for a “reset” in relations, and the summit will offer the most telling evidence so far about how difficult it will be for him to achieve this goal.

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said over the weekend that he was “moderately optimistic” about the possibility of success at the summit, noting that under President George W. Bush, relations between the two countries had significantly worsened.

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Russia’s population is shrinking alarmingly, its death rate double that in most developed countries. Conflicts in its north Caucasus republics have flared again. Its armed forces are woefully ill-equipped and poorly trained. Mr Putin has kept control by unleashing a virulent brand of anti-Western “patriotism”””the latest textbooks are as tough on America as they are soft on Stalin””and thuggishly silencing the opposition. Last year in a pretence of democracy Mr Putin installed Dmitry Medvedev (Mr Obama’s supposed host) as president while he himself became prime minister.

In the long term Mr Putin’s refusal to modernise his country will weaken Russia. Yet the place Mr Obama has to deal with now is still a potent force. The largest country on earth, Russia stretches from Europe to China. It is the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. It has a seat on the UN Security Council and of course that nuclear arsenal. Above all it has the capacity to do both great harm and some good….

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Last week the four leaders of the Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) formally met together in their first summit. I have been asked a number of questions about the event. First, did I really think this would ever happen? Second, would it have happened if I hadn’t created the acronym? Third, what real purpose did it serve, and fourth, where do I think the Bric path is heading?

I’ve also beeen asked a couple of supplementary questions: why these four countries and why not Indonesia, Turkey or indeed Iran? And do I think the global credit crisis has changed the picture from our prediction a number of years ago, that the combined GDP of the Bric economies could exceed that of the G7 countries before 2040?

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With public hugs and backslaps among its leaders, a new political bloc was formed yesterday to challenge the global dominance of the United States.

The first summit of heads of state of the BRIC countries ”” Brazil, Russia, India and China ”” ended with a declaration calling for a “multipolar world order”, diplomatic code for a rejection of America’s position as the sole global superpower.

President Medvedev of Russia went further in a statement with his fellow leaders after the summit, saying that the BRIC countries wanted to “create the conditions for a fairer world order”. He described the meeting with President Lula da Silva of Brazil, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, as “an historic event”.

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says the world needs new reserve currencies.

Medvedev told a regional summit Tuesday that the creation of new reserve currencies in addition to the dollar is needed to stabilize global finances.

Medvedev has made the proposal before. It reflects both the Kremlin’s push for greater international clout and a concern shared by other countries that soaring U.S. budget deficits could spur inflation and weaken the dollar.

Airing it at a summit meeting underlined the challenge to U.S. clout.

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Where his radical contemporaries anticipated a day of renewal after a night of destruction, Dostoevsky could spot nothing but darkness in the nihilistic dawn. He dealt with the subject in Demons in the early 1870s, but the book did little to calm his fears about the damaging power of persistent unbelief. As a result, he came to the writing of The Brothers Karamazov still filled with anxiety concerning the destructive power of nihilism over Russian culture and the Russian family. Dostoevsky took the collapse of the family system in particular to be the symptom of a deeper catastrophic loss of established values that had resulted from the sudden decline, among the educated, of faith in God and in Jesus Christ. In The Brothers Karamazov, the novelist set out to reaffirm explicitly Christian values by demonstrating “their linkage to the supernatural presuppositions of the Christian faith, which for Dostoevsky offered their only secure support.”

— Roger Lundin, Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 155

Russia on Saturday sternly warned its foes not to dare attempt any aggression against the country, as it put on a Soviet-style show of military might in Red Square including nuclear capable missiles.

The display to mark the 64th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II came amid renewed tensions with Georgia after NATO’s decision to hold war games in the Caucasus country infuriated Moscow.

“We are sure that any aggression against our citizens will be given a worthy reply,” President Dmitry Medvedev said in a speech in Red Square side-by-side with powerful Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

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A congressionally backed panel said today that religious freedoms were deteriorating in Russia, Turkey and four other nations that were added to a watch list of countries where people’s rights to worship as they please or not to worship at all are at risk.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom also named Nigeria as a “country of particular concern,” joining 12 other countries that the commission considers the world’s worst violators.

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Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in the Wilson Quarterly (“The World’s New Numbers”), notes that Russia’s declining fertility is magnified by “a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term — hypermortality.” Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, alcoholism and the deteriorating health-care system, a U.N. report says “mortality in Russia is three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women” as in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report, Walker says, “predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually.” Be that as it may, “Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.”

According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia’s population, which was around 143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as 115 million in 2030.

Marx envisioned the “withering away” of the state under mature communism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the world may be witnessing the withering away of Russia, where Marxism was supposed to be the future that works. Russia, he writes, “has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.”

“History,” he concludes, “offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.” Demography is not by itself destiny, but it is more real than an arms control “process” that merely expresses the liberal hope of taming the world by wrapping it snugly in parchment.

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The Kremlin published its priorities Monday for an upcoming meeting of the G20, calling for the creation of a supranational reserve currency to be issued by international institutions as part of a reform of the global financial system.

The International Monetary Fund should investigate the possible creation of a new reserve currency, widening the list of reserve currencies or using its already existing Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, as a “superreserve currency accepted by the whole of the international community,” the Kremlin said in a statement issued on its web site.

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Russian President Medvedev has said he’s willing to discuss the proposed US missile shield with Washington. But he added that any deal linking those talks with negotiations regarding Iran would not be productive.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s comments came in response to a New York Times report that US President Barack Obama had written a secret letter to his Russian counterpart offering to halt the planned missile shield, which would be located mainly in Poland and the Czech Republic, in return for Moscow’s help in stopping Iran from developing long-range nuclear weapons.

The Russian president welcomed the “positive signals” coming from the Obama administration with which he said he hoped to reach “agreements.” “Haggling,” however, was “not productive,” added Medvedev on Tuesday, March 3.

The Russian president also said Obama’s letter had not presented the issue in such a way.

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President Barack Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday.

The letter to President Dmitri A. Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by top administration officials three weeks ago. It said the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.

The officials who described the contents of the message requested anonymity because it has not been made public. While they said it did not offer a direct quid pro quo, the letter was intended to give Moscow incentive to join the United States in a common front against Iran. Russia’s military, diplomatic and commercial ties to Tehran give it some influence there, but it has often resisted Washington’s hard line against Iran.

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Russia held out an olive branch to President Barack Obama today by suspending plans to deploy missiles in Europe, according to a report in Moscow.

An official from Russia’s General Staff in Moscow told Interfax news that the move had been made because the new United States leadership was reconsidering plans to establish a missile defence shield in eastern Europe.

Deployment of Iskander short-range missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads, was being suspended in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in response, the unidentified official said.

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The interim leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen as a modernizer who could seek a historic reconciliation with the Vatican and more autonomy from the state, was overwhelmingly elected patriarch Tuesday.

Metropolitan Kirill received 508 of the 700 votes cast during an all-day church congress in Moscow’s ornate Christ the Savior Cathedral, the head of the commission responsible for the election, Metropolitan Isidor, said hours after the secret ballot was over.

Kirill defeated a conservative rival, Metropolitan Kliment, who received 169 votes, Isidor said. Another 23 ballots were declared invalid.

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Russian natural-gas exports through Ukraine to Europe halted for the first time in three years, threatening to create shortages as freezing weather spurred demand for power.

The two sides blamed each other for the disruption. OAO Gazprom, Russia’s gas-export monopoly, cut off all gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine at 7:44 a.m. Kiev time today, according to Ukrainian utility NAK Naftogaz Ukrainy. Gazprom Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Medvedev said Ukraine shut off a fourth pipeline after closing three others yesterday.

The move, stopping all deliveries to Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, came after a halt in supplies to the Balkans yesterday and cuts to other countries. The dispute has already spread further and lasted longer than a similar conflict in 2006 which interrupted shipments to Europe.

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Gas supplies from Russia to Europe plummeted overnight with four countries reporting a complete halt as the dispute between Moscow and Ukraine over payment rates dramatically worsened.

Kiev said that Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, had cut the flow by 60 per cent following Vladimir Putin’s threat yesterday to punish Ukraine for allegedly stealing fuel it is supposed to allow to transit through its pipelines en route to Europe.

The Bulgarian Government called a crisis meeting at 7am this morning and appealed to all consumers to limit their usage as the gas stopped flowing at around 3.30am on the coldest night of the year, as it did to Greece, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

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For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument — that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. — very seriously. Now he’s found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he’s been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. “It’s a record,” says Prof. Panarin. “But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.”

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it’s his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis.

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Appearances can be deceiving. Six months ago, when Dmitry Medvedev was inaugurated as Russia’s new president, many hoped there would be a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations.

The soft-spoken lawyer has never worked for the KGB. His reputation as a liberal seemed to contrast sharply with his predecessor, Vladimir Putin.

However, for the past six months it seems that President Medvedev has been working hard to dismantle his liberal image and revive memories of the Cold War.

Putin had a reputation for being tough, but it was under Medvedev that Russia used excessive force against Georgia, occupying part of its territory and crushing its military. Medvedev then defied world opinion by accusing the United States of instigating the war and by recognizing the independence of Georgia’s two separatist regions.

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Yet the Church of England has not collapsed – not quite, anyway. And the result of the Archbishop’s sabbatical in the United States is a splendid book on the wild, strange genius of Dostoevsky.

I was very glad to hear that he is quite unrepentant about having taken time off to write about the great Russian.

Rowan Williams says: “I think it is important that anyone in this sort of position does not become reactive, so your thoughts aren’t determined by what’s just come off the computer. And to keep that alive you need some sort of space.

“And I think it is some part of this job to try and keep stirring the cultural pot, even in a very limited way, and to say: when we are having all these debates about faith and atheism and science and so on, don’t let’s forget what lives of faith actually look like imaginatively, in ways that really serious writers and artists portray them, because if your view of religion is confined to a few fundamentalist platitudes, there’s no debate there. Yes, just to remind people that some imaginatively serious non-trivial, non-Pollyannaish writers have lived with this. Yes, it’s worth doing.”

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“Terrorism, child abuse, absent fathers and the fragmentation of the family, the secularisation and the sexualisation of culture, the future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature of national identity – so many of the anxieties that we think of as being quintessentially features of the early 21st century are omnipresent in the work of Dostoevsky, his letter, his journalism and above all his fiction. The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other is left painfully and shockingly open and there seems no obvious place to stand from which we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith.”

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