Andrei Kolesnikov
Foreign Affairs, May 26, 2022

If a Ukrainian grandmother with pro-Russian views did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her — or at least that is what the Russian government decided in April. At the time, Anna Ivanova inhabited a village near Kharkiv. One day, mistaking a group of arriving Ukrainian soldiers for Russians, she took out an old Soviet flag and waved it vigorously at them to remind them of their shared past and try to deter them from destroying the village. Instead, the Ukrainian forces, outraged at the sight of the hammer-and-sickle, took the flag from her and trampled it.

Caught on video, the episode was immediately seized on by the Kremlin. Soon, “Granny Anya” as she was called — though she’s only 69, the same age as Putin — was adopted as a potent symbol of local support for Russia’s “special operation.” Here, apparently, was living proof that the people of Ukraine were desperately waiting to be “liberated.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, despite Anna Ivanova’s efforts, her own home was later damaged in a Russian mortar attack, and for some time she and her husband were both in a hospital in Kharkiv. “It was really miserable of Russia to attack us,” she said, in a statement she recorded from her hospital bed. Now, she and her husband have returned to their home village, Velikaya Danilovka.

None of that matters, of course, in Moscow. Under the supervision of Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s public relations mastermind, a monument to Granny Anya was swiftly constructed and unveiled in the devastated port city of Mariupol, and her image has become ubiquitous in Russian war propaganda.

This war is full of paradoxes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists he is fighting against a country that is overrun by Nazis, yet among the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the Russian advance were 78 Holocaust survivors who were evacuated — to Germany. Ninety-one-year-old Vanda Obyedkova survived the German occupation of Mariupol in World War II only to die during the Russian siege of the city in 2022. In Kharkiv, 96-year-old Boris Romanchenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was killed when a Russian shell hit his apartment building. During World War II, the Ukrainian soldier Ivan Lisun was one of the Soviet soldiers who helped liberate Belarus and Poland from the Nazis. Now his own home in the Kharkiv region has been destroyed by the Russian army.

Granny Anya is a character from the Kremlin’s world of paradoxes, a world in which history itself has been turned inside out. As her story makes plain, after nearly three months of deadly violence, the Russian regime has struggled to find coherent, positive symbols for its “special operation” in Ukraine. It has not captured any Nazis (although the Duma would like to present captured fighters of Ukraine's Azov Battalion as such) and has also failed to come up with a clear reason for what it is doing. Instead, it has plunged an entire country into a fantasy realm, where words and deeds have opposite meanings: Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, for example, invented the concept of “liberal fascism.” Maria Zakharova, the legendary Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, now reports that George Orwell’s 1984 was written about Western civilization. And now the Putin regime faces a more daunting challenge still: how to imagine a victory out of a war that has brought the country to the brink of disaster.

FROM VICTORY TO FANTASY

The annual May 9 holiday, when Russia commemorates the Soviet victory of 1945, was once a day of solemn remembrance. It is also the only holiday that unites nearly all Russians. After Putin came to power, the May 9 celebrations began to take on a more pompous character, but he kept them open to the rest of the world. On the sixtieth anniversary in 2005, for example, he invited U.S. President George W. Bush to attend in person. In recent years, however, as Putin has increasingly built his legitimacy around the idea that he alone is heir to the Great Victory, the celebrations have been transformed into a bombastic military show. It is an infallible tactic for a dictator: by equating his own actions with the Soviet triumph over Nazism, he implied that any criticism of him amounted to criticism of the sacred victory in 1945.

By the time it rolled around this year, the holiday had evolved to the point where a significant proportion of Russians anticipated it with unconcealed dread. In Moscow, there were rumors that Putin would finally declare the “special military operation” an actual war, and that he would announce a general mobilization at the celebrations themselves, just as Stalin sent soldiers off to the front directly from the Revolution Day parade on November 7, 1941.

Back then, there was justification for such measures: the Soviet Union was fighting a defensive war against an attacking enemy that posed an existential threat to the country. Today, however, a general mobilization, in a war that continues to lack a coherent aim or endpoint, would have been unpopular, even among those who support Putin and the “special operation” — and even among the lazy warmongers who have for three months cheered on the unfolding catastrophe but have no intention of going to die in the trenches themselves. Perhaps aware of the potential backlash and the danger of even heavier losses of untrained and unmotivated soldiers, the Kremlin has decided against a full mobilization. And instead of World War II, it must content itself with a more logical analogy for the “special operation”: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But that’s something the regime will never admit.

Russians have gotten used to raising their voices. On the Kremlin-controlled TV channels that are now one of the main methods for shaping public opinion, talk show hosts shout instead of talking. Quarrels with friends and relatives are fought using decibels rather than facts. The propaganda, meanwhile, is as primitive as could be: through its own aggression, Russia is defending Ukrainians from neo-Nazi enemies and it is liberating territory from the “Banderites,” supporters of the WW II-era Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. There is also now a new argument: the West is waging a war against Russia using “Slav” hands. The most fervent Putinists now call Ukraine a “secessionist entity” and openly talk of “de-Ukrainianization” of the Russian World.

Putin has turned Victory Day into his own personal holiday, but even Russians could see that this year’s edition came without a victory, and that he was utterly alone. No other leaders came to this year’s celebrations, not even the long-time rulers of Russia’s Central Asian allies. This time, Putin was isolated, embittered, and spouting nonsense about a “pre-emptive strike.” And instead of “Never again!” — the holiday’s sacred underpinnings — we now hear “We can do it again!” This is the slogan of Putin’s core supporters, the people who, several years ago, started putting “To Berlin!” stickers on the back of their Mercedes. Less clear, though, is whether Russians are ready to contemplate just what exactly Putin has “done again.”

WHERE’S MY COUNTRY?

In March, 81 percent of Russians in a Levada Center poll said they supported the “special operation.” By April, that figure had dropped to 74 percent. Putin’s approval rating has also plateaued, and his trust rating — how many Russians say they trust him — has also fallen slightly. But although no one is quite sure what might define victory, 73 percent of respondents say they believe Russia will achieve it. Not many respondents believe Ukraine could win, although 15 percent say that “neither side could prevail.”

These numbers indicate a kind of equilibrium taking hold: aggressive Putin supporters still want to see a stepped-up campaign by the Russian army and the takeover of Ukraine, completely disregarding the stated goals of the operation, which, however, change all the time. On the other hand, Russians who are more skeptical or concerned about the direction of the war would settle at this point for a peace treaty. Still, more than two-thirds of respondents in the Levada Center poll believed that the operation is proceeding successfully, although 50 percent chose the more evasive answer “largely successful.” When asked to define success, most respondents dutifully indicate the same dreary mantras about everything going to plan and territories being liberated from fascists and Banderites. Among the 17 percent of respondents who do not consider the operation a success, many cite the drawn-out nature of the military campaign and the fact that large numbers of civilians and children in Ukraine and Russian soldiers are getting killed.

Whether they think it is a success or not, however, Russians overwhelmingly blame the war on the United States and NATO; just seven percent of Russians blame their own country. Yet even this deliberate blindness is no salvation from creeping doubt: 82 percent of respondents say they are worried about events in Ukraine, and in most cases the reason for that worry is not the “Banderites,” but the death, suffering, and destruction theat has taken place (46 percent) and even the fact of the war itself (26 percent). In other words, an indirect question reveals how great Russians’ emotional and psychological concerns are about what has happened to their country since February. This is despite relentless indoctrination by the official Russian media and the state.

It’s unlikely that Putin understands the extent to which he has pulled the rug out from under his own most fervent supporters, who are looking for ways to justify the unfolding nightmare. Russian psychologists have already noticed a precipitous increase in patients suffering from chronic anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. Increasingly frequent clashes with reality are starting to force Russians out of the comfort zone of Putin’s propaganda.

In daily life, the war has become a familiar backdrop, but a depressing one that people wish would disappear. Many yearn for the old normal, but the new normal is here to stay. Nor do people realize that the new normal is abnormal, and will remain so for years to come. No one seems to doubt victory, but it is conviction based more on self-hypnosis than actual facts.

INTO THE DUSTBIN

In my own family on Victory Day, we remember my wife’s grandmother, Maria Shatilova, a correspondent who covered the war from the frontlines; my uncle, Eduard Traub, who volunteered to fight and was killed at the age of 18 at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, the largest tank battle in history, in which the Soviets defeated nearly a million of Hitler’s troops; and my grandfather Ivan Kolesnikov, who made it home from the war, having fought in the 43rd Latvian Guards Rifle Division, which liberated Riga. (Putin, by equating 2022 with 1945, has provoked a more complicated attitude toward the memory of Soviet liberation in Latvia itself: the Latvian parliament has now decided to demolish the Monument to the Liberators, erected by the Soviets in the 1980s.)

As part of the effort to indoctrinate young Russians with Putinism, Russian schools have for years asked children to write letters to or from the front, as if they were living when the war was taking place. When my daughter was told by her middle school to write a letter from the front in the voice of her grandfather (even though children of her age could only possibly have a great-great-grandfather or a great-grandfather who fought in the war), I suggested that she instead write a letter in the voice of her great-grandfather, David Traub — from the Gulag prison camp in Russia’s Far North where he was sent for “counterrevolutionary activity.”

But in today’s Russia, we’re not supposed to remember those people. They don’t fit into Putin’s holiday. This is why, before the “special operation” began, his regime decided to destroy the most important civic organization in the country: Memorial, the Moscow-based non-governmental organization that worked tirelessly to preserve the public memory of Stalin-era repression. Stamping out this history by closing down Memorial at the very end of 2021 has made it possible to go even further in 2022. It was the elimination of Memorial that paved the way for the “special operation” in Ukraine. Our collective memory has been replaced with a prosthetic, imaginary history.

In my family, there are victims of all the Soviet tragedies of the last century: World War II, the Siege of Leningrad, and Stalin’s repressions at home. No one can take that away from my family, or from many other Russian families. Putin and his entourage have now brought back that feeling of disaster and dread to Russia. Once again, we find ourselves ensnared by history, even as it is being erased. Of my late parents, for whom the victory over the Nazis meant everything — they were just finishing school in — we now utter the terrible words: “Thank goodness they didn’t live to see this.”

Putin has turned everything upside down. He has destroyed all the achievements of recent decades, including his own. He has accomplished the exact opposite of his stated goals: instead of demilitarizing Ukraine, he has caused the country to arm as never before; instead of keeping NATO away, he has brought it right up to Russia’s borders; instead of making Russia great again, he has managed to transform it, and his people, into a pariah nation. Trying to impose his version of the nation’s history, he deprived it of its history. And by depriving it of history, he amputated the future. Russia is now at a dead end, a historical dead end.

– PeaceMeal, May/June/July 2022

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Timothy Frye
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021

For 21 years, Vladimir Putin has reigned supreme over Russian politics. A skillful manipulator of public opinion, he wields the blunt force of repression against opponents at home and the sharp power of cyber-operations and espionage campaigns against enemies abroad. Increasingly, Western analysts and officials portray him as all-powerful, a ruthless former KGB man who imposes his will on Russia from behind dark sunglasses. This narrative, which the Kremlin goes out of its way to reinforce, is tempting to believe. Putin has jailed the closest thing he has to a political rival — the opposition leader Alexei Navalny — and crushed a wave of protests by Navalny’s supporters. Putin’s intelligence agencies brazenly hacked the U.S. government, and his troops are gradually eroding U.S. influence everywhere from Libya to Syria to Ukraine.

But if Putin is unrivaled at home, he is not omnipotent. Like all autocrats, he faces the dual threats of a coup from elites around him and a popular revolt from below. And because of the compromises he has had to make to consolidate his personal control over the state, Putin’s tools for balancing the competing goals of rewarding elites who might otherwise conspire against him and appeasing the public are becoming less and less effective. He has weakened institutions such as courts, bureaucracies, elections, parties and legislatures so that they cannot constrain him, meaning that he cannot rely on them to generate economic growth, resolve social conflicts, or even facilitate his peaceful exit from office. This leaves Putin dependent on the fleeting commodity of personal popularity and the hazardous methods of repression and propaganda.

Those who acknowledge these vulnerabilities frequently note that Putin is “playing a weak hand well.” But Putin has dealt his own hand, and it is weak primarily because of the tradeoffs inherent to regimes like the one he has built. Eventually, he will have to decide whether to continue the same balancing act, skillfully playing his weak hand even as it gradually diminishes his power, or try to strengthen his hand by introducing economic reforms that will threaten his core constituencies in the security services, the bureaucracy, and the private sector.

Putin was buoyed by an oil-fueled economic boom that sharply raised living standards in his first decade in office and a wave of nationalist sentiment following the annexation of Crimea in his second. As the sheen on these achievements has begun to wear off, however, Putin, in his third decade in office, has increasingly come to rely on repression to neutralize opponents both big and small. This trend will likely intensify as Russia’s problems mount, accelerating a cycle of political violence and economic malaise that could stymie Putin’s great-power ambitions and test his political skill.

The narrative of Putin as all-powerful is sustained in part by analysts who believe that to understand autocracy, one must understand the autocrat. Putinologists analysis makes for a compelling story of Putin’s Russia, but it does not explain all that much. After all, Putin was just as much an ex-KGB man in the early years of this century, when he favored liberal economic policies and better relations with the West, as he is today, with his strident anti-Western stance. More important, Russian politics follow patterns common to a subset of authoritarian regimes that political scientists call “personalist autocracies.” Studying this type of system, rather than studying the man himself, is the best way to understand Putin’s Russia.

Personalist autocracies are, as the name suggests, run by lone individuals. They frequently have political parties, legislatures, and influential militaries, but power over important personnel or policy decisions always resides with one person at the top. The former Soviet space has proved especially hospitable to personalist autocrats: such leaders currently rule Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Globally, personalist autocracies are now the most common type of autocracy, outnumbering both one-party regimes, such as those in Singapore and Vietnam, and military regimes, such as Myanmar’s.

Personalist autocracies exhibit a host of pathologies that are familiar to Russia watchers. They have higher levels of corruption than one-party or military autocracies and slower economic growth, greater repression, and less stable policies. Rulers in personalist autocracies also have a common toolkit: they stoke anti-Western sentiment to rally their base, distort the economy to benefit cronies, target political opponents using the legal system, and expand executive power at the expense of other institutions. They create new security organizations that report directly to them and appeal to popular support rather than free and fair elections to legitimize their authority.

These tendencies are readily explicable when one considers what personalist autocrats stand to lose if they leave office. The leaders of military dictatorships can retreat to the barracks, and the heads of one-party dictatorships can retire to plum posts in the party, but personalist dictators enjoy their wealth and influence only as long as they stay in power. And once they relinquish it, they are at the mercy of their successors, who rarely want once formidable rivals waiting in the wings. Over the last 70 years, personalist autocrats who lost power have tended to end up in exile, in jail, or dead.

The similarities between Putin and other personalist dictators do not end with his worries about removal. Like his Filipino, Hungarian, Turkish, Venezuelan and Central Asian counterparts, he has gradually eroded the powers of the legislature, subdued independent media, subverted elections, and usurped authority from previously powerful regional officials. Last year, Putin pushed through changes to Russia’s constitution that will allow him to run for office in 2024 and 2030. Given the potential downsides of leaving office as a personalist autocrat, this effort to prolong his rule came as little surprise. Faced with similar term limits, every personalist autocrat in the former Soviet Union has made the same choice.

But by undercutting the kinds of political institutions that constrain executive power, Putin has reduced certainty about policy and increased the vulnerability of elites. As a result, investors prefer to park their capital in safe havens outside Russia, and many young Russians have taken their significant human capital abroad. Even superrich Russians feel vulnerable: they hold far more of their wealth in cash and have more volatile incomes than do their peers in other countries, and they have resisted the Kremlin’s calls to bring their capital home.

Without strong formal institutions to legitimate his rule, Putin relies on great personal popularity to deter challenges from elites and keep protesters off the street. Over the last 20 years, Putin’s approval ratings have averaged a remarkable 74 percent, and there is little reason to believe that Russians are lying to pollsters in large numbers. But these high approval ratings were largely driven by the economic boom that doubled the size of Russia’s economy between 1998 and 2008 and the unique foreign policy success of annexing Crimea in 2014. Since 2018, Putin’s popularity has wavered. His approval ratings remain in the mid-60s, but Russians express far less trust in him than they have in the past. In a November 2017 poll, when asked to name five politicians they trusted, 59 percent of respondents named Putin; in February 2021, just 32 percent did so. During the same interval, support for a fifth Putin term fell from 70 percent to 48 percent, with 41 percent of Russians surveyed now saying that they would prefer he step down.

Putin is constrained not just by his need for high approval ratings but also by the challenges of governing a modern society with an unwieldy bureaucracy. Russia’s enormous size and bureaucratic complexity mean that Putin inevitably must delegate some decision-making authority to lower-level officials, all of whom have their own interests. And because Russia’s state institutions are weak, Putin must also work with powerful businesspeople who are more keen to make money than to serve the state. As Putin’s authority is channeled down through this chain of bureaucrats, businesspeople and spies who may or may not share his preferences, slippage inevitably occurs, and policies do not always get implemented the way he would have preferred.

The problem gets worse when the Kremlin seeks to maintain plausible deniability. To covertly supply rebels in eastern Ukraine, for instance, Putin partnered with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch who allegedly funded a band of private mercenaries that maintained indirect ties to the Russian military. In July 2014, however, these rebels appear to have inadvertently shot down a Malaysian commercial airliner, killing almost 300 passengers and crew members.

In order to camouflage its cyberattacks, the Kremlin similarly relies on hackers who work for private-sector front companies but who answer to the Russian security services. In 2016, it was the sloppiness of these hackers that allowed the United States to identify Russia as the source of the Democratic National Committee hack. The Russia analyst Mark Galeotti has dubbed the Kremlin’s outsourcing of dirty work to groups with murky ties to the state “adhocracy.” This method of statecraft hides Moscow’s hand, but it also loosens its grip on policy.

The Kremlin struggles with more mundane tasks, as well. In 2012, Putin issued a detailed set of targets to increase economic growth, improve bureaucratic efficiency, and support social programs. That these decrees were poorly formulated was one indication of the bureaucracy’s weakness. But even more telling was the lack of follow-through. On the five-year anniversary of these decrees, Sergei Mironov, then the head of the Kremlin-friendly party A Just Russia, reported that the bureaucracy had implemented just 35 of the 179 decrees monitored by his committee in parliament. Autocrats have long struggled to elicit honest information from their subordinates and make sure their policies have taken hold, and Putin is no exception.

Imperiled and constrained by the very compromises that enable them to amass power, personalist autocrats struggle to balance defending against the two main threats to their rule: coups by the political elite and protests by the public. Those in the leader’s inner circle typically have a stake in the regime’s survival. This is true of Putin’s cronies, who have become rich beyond their dreams. But these elites also pose a potential threat. Cronies can capture personalist autocrats who lean too heavily on them for support. Moreover, rare is the political insider who thinks he could not do a better job than his boss, if given the chance. According to the political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, between 1945 and 2012, leaders of nondemocracies were more than twice as likely to be replaced by an elite coup as by a popular revolt.

Autocrats also face threats from below in the form of protests. The “color revolutions” toppled rulers in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Few worries animate the Kremlin more than the possibility of a popular uprising, and many analysts argue that it was the large protests against corruption and electoral fraud in 2011 and 2012 that prompted the Kremlin to sharply increase the penalties for attending and organizing protests.

These dual threats put Putin in a bind, because steps that might reduce the risk of a coup by elites can increase the risk of a popular revolt, and vice versa. Investment in the security services that buys the loyalty of elites may necessitate cuts to social services that stoke popular anger and risk igniting protests. Conversely, generous social programs that placate the public and forestall a revolt may require cuts to state spending that anger regime insiders and make a palace coup more likely. In general, Putin must walk a narrow line between allowing his cronies to engage in enough corruption and self-dealing to keep them loyal and promoting sufficiently broad-based economic growth to keep the public from protesting.

Putin likely knows that he could boost economic growth by charting a less assertive foreign policy. He continues to challenge the West, and the United States in particular, to boost his popularity among nationalist voters. But as with all of Putin’s strategies for managing threats to his rule, stoking patriotic sentiments comes at a cost — in this case, broad-based economic growth.

Like all personalist autocrats, Putin has relatively blunt tools for managing the tradeoffs inherent to his position. He has succeeded in exerting control over the media, but he is no master manipulator. If he were, public opinion would more closely mirror the Kremlin’s line on foreign policy. The Kremlin has also conducted a noisy anti-American campaign in recent years, but Russians are about as likely to hold a positive view of the United States as they are to hold a negative view. According to a January 2020 opinion poll, two-thirds of Russians believe their government should view the West as a partner rather than a rival or an enemy. Attempts by the Kremlin to shift blame for Russia’s economic malaise to foreign countries have largely fallen flat, and few Russians believe that their government is capable of improving their economic situation. In what Russians call “the battle between the television and the refrigerator,” the latter is winning.

Putin retains the trump card of force, a card he has played with increasing frequency as the economy has stagnated and the warm glow of the annexation of Crimea has faded. Since 2018, the Kremlin has dealt with political opposition far more harshly than in the past, making it harder for independent candidates to run for even local office and using force against protesters as a rule rather than an exception. In late 2020 and early 2021, the Kremlin further restricted protest activity, sharply increased penalties for unsanctioned protests, expanded the definition of “foreign agents,” and made slander on the Internet punishable by up to two years in jail. The arrest of Navalny, his sentencing to almost three years in prison, and the brutal treatment of those protesting on his behalf are the logical extension of this repressive trend.

Skillful repression has helped keep Putin in office and pushed the political opposition to the margins, but it has done little to resolve the underlying problems that threaten his power. It has not promoted economic growth, strengthened property rights, or reduced corruption. On the contrary, it has made the problems worse by empowering the security services and the corrupt government officials who benefit most from them, and it has encouraged the flight of human and economic capital, which are essential to economic growth and good governance. Emblematic of this issue is the fact that in 2018, Russia spent more on prisons and less on prisoners than any other country in Europe.

The parliamentary elections slated for September are likely to be fraught. Approval ratings for the ruling United Russia party are lower than ever, and so the Kremlin will need to clamp down on the opposition while also keeping the regime-friendly Communist Party and Liberal Democratic Party in the fold. And relying on excessive voter fraud would be risky. After a stolen election last year, neighboring Belarus saw months of protests, a fate the Kremlin would like to avoid.

Looking further down the road, the expectation that Putin will stay on as president past 2024 will only reinforce Russia’s economic stagnation and heighten popular frustration over the Kremlin’s inability to raise living standards or improve governance. The result will most likely be a steady increase in pressure on the regime and in repression against its opponents.

Russia remains a great power, albeit a diminished one. Although Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union at the height of its global power, would be appalled by the country’s current military capabilities and geopolitical status, Boris Yeltsin, who inherited a country in collapse, would view them with envy. Russia’s nuclear might, geography, and seat on the UN Security Council ensure that it ranks among the great powers — as do its educational, scientific, and energy prowess. The country has more college graduates as a proportion of its population than almost any member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It produced an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, and it will provide Europe with low-cost energy for years to come and remain a major player in global energy markets. Those who dismiss Russia as a regional power are mistaken.

Putin faces no immediate threat to his rule. He is a deft tactician with considerable financial resources facing a disorganized opposition. Yet no amount of shrewdness can overcome the agonizing trade-offs of running Russia the way he does. Cheat enough in elections so that you don’t risk losing, but not so much that it signals weakness. Rile up the base with anti-Western moves, but not to the extent that it provokes an actual conflict with the West. Reward cronies through corruption, but not so much that the economy collapses. Manipulate the news, but not to the point where people distrust the media. Repress political opponents, but not enough to spark a popular backlash. Strengthen the security services, but not so much that they can turn on you. How the Kremlin balances these tradeoffs will determine Russia’s immediate future. But the trend toward greater repression over the last four years, and its likely continuation, does not bode well for Russia or its leader.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)