"On the whole, United Russia is still a left-center party, not a right-center party, as was planned when it was created," said Kudrin, who is also a deputy prime minister. "And only, I repeat, thanks to certain work by the government, and by Putin personally, have we been able to maintain that balance."

Thanks to the creative mind of the writer Rudyard Kipling ,once upon a time there lived the python Kaa. Somewhere in the jungles this was. Kaa was large and frightful. He could hypnotize the Bandar-log monkeys with just his hissing. The Bandar-logs rustled like leaves in the wind in response, lightly shaking and silently walking right into the jaws of the insatiable Kaa.

In the year 2009, while the Council of Judges of Russia was examining a new redaction of the Code of Judicial Ethics, Constitutional Court judge Anatoly Kononov declared about laying down authority [announced his retirement--Trans.] from 1 January of the year 2010. Serving as the motive was his interview, in which the judge recounted about how they had forced another member of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Yaroslavtsev, to abandon the Council of Judges after a public criticism of the Russian court system.

How did the matter end? They dismissed the judges, like they had earlier dismissed the judges Sergey Pashin, and many others. The Code they will no doubt adopt, they will report that they have updated-modernized-reformed themselves... (This is now once again, how many times already, a fashionable topic in the speeches of the Russian leadership). And - that's it. We will drive right past this - judicial - bus stop too without stopping. As we have already driven past the police one, the prison one... We keep driving further on - into the happy shining future with today's power forever.

So what about the new Code? Why does it need changing? Turns out, with the objective of "elevating the trust of society in the judicial system, ensuring the competence, independence and impartiality of courts as a condition of due dispensation of justice". That is, until now the trust of the people, competence and independence were just fair-to-middling?

It gladdens, of course, that the elaborators of the new Code intend to make use of a multitude of international documents. Among them are the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct (an annex to a resolution of the Economic and Social Council of the UNO (ECOSOC) of 27 June of the year 2006).

I have read these principles. They're good. But what have they to do with our Russian reality? It clearly won't jibe with these principles.

In particular, the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct proceed from such an understanding of «independence, impartiality, honesty and probity, compliance with established standards of competence and good faith, under which the following of high standards of judicial conduct is regarded in the capacity of a means of reinforcing public confidence in the judiciary, which is fundamental to the maintenance of judicial independence (item 1.6). (All the principles are here).

Have we got the trust of the people in judges? This is a rhetorical question, as you understand. (By the way, about some judges one can read here).

Ah, but trust in "excommunicated" judges - that certainly exists.

What I'm saying is that the Code is not going to save Russian justice, which has discredited itself time and again. The body of judges in its majority - this is my conviction, based on my own experience of interacting with them in courts many a time - is hopelessly sick and unfit for the dispensation of judicial justice. It is, in the most direct sense, grovelingly dependent on the executive power. And its ultimate death-knell will be the idea of the Putinite times - to introduce into this body former chekists and procurators.

Putin and Medvedev don't resemble the large and frightful Kaa in any way - they're too small. So why do many judges, like the Bandar-log, crawl to the hissing of the powers, get hypnotized to the point of losing sense of reality?

Not for them the Bangalore Principles; no, they are adherents of the Bandar-log principles...

Russian foreign policy is based on a truly weird combination of nostalgia for the old Soviet Union and the imperialism of the Tsarist Empire. Russian politicians and academics use the term "sphere of influence" in the late 19th-century sense of the ruler's right to control the external and domestic policies of neighbouring states. One of the strangest aspects of the new Russian ideology is the revival of the old Tsarist symbols to include the double-headed Romanov Eagle - complete with crown-- displayed on official buildings and in the Russian parliament.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about all sorts of matters, from Putin, to the controversy over his passport, to energy, to Europe and energy, to Kaliningrad, to the effects of the economic crisis, to the militia and OMON, to the military and the effects of the reforms, to Khodorkovsky.  After a while, he smiled and said that he didn't want to sound so negative, so I suggested that we talk about politics and economics in the US instead-which ended with me apologizing for negativity.

I then took Oleg on a brief tour of some of the sites in St. Louis, notably Forest Park.  Hopefully he's now boarding his flight back home.

All in all, an enjoyable morning.  One amusing moment came when he asked me about how my blog came to be named "Streetwise Professor."  I told him that it derived from a combination of (a) the fact that "the Street" refers to the financial markets that I had originally intended to blog about exclusively, (b) the fact that I'm a professor, and (c) my punk rock inclinations.  He smiled and said that he liked the title because it makes him think of street protests.