The term “Asian Century’” was minted in 1988 in a joint communiqué issued by India’s prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the Chinese chairman Deng Xiao Ping at the end of a Sino-Indian summit meeting meant to reconcile the two countries after decades of antipathy and one border war. Twenty-two years later the term has outlived its creators and no longer seems like the hyperbole it was then, but rather a simple statement of fact. For those who believe in globalisation, China has assumed something of the same status cargo cults had for some south west Pacific islanders. And if your principal source of news is the business media, you will be hard pressed not to believe in the Indian miracle.

Why shouldn’t you? It is not just the professional pitchmen of CNBC or Bloomberg news who routinely make these claims. Leading figures in the business world – from Goldman Sachs’s embattled chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, who has said he views India as one of world’s most promising markets, to the very un-embattled Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital (the Silicon Valley investment firm that took Google public) – are equally convinced that the 21^st century will have India at its centre.

Whether this turns out to be one more case of the popular delusions of crowds, in the manner of Holland’s 17^th-century tulip mania or the South Sea Bubble in 18^th-century England, or instead is borne out, is anything but clear. But it is beyond doubt that the triumphant idea of India’s inexorable rise stems as much from a clever PR campaign by the Indian government and business establishment (to the extent that they differ at all) as from a cold calculation of growth rates and market share, impressive though these unquestionably are. Indeed, the only previous example of such a successful national “re-branding” was that undertaken by New Labour in the aftermath of Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 – Cool Britannia, the so-called Millennium Products’ initiative, and the rest. But that already had been prefigured by reports by the Design Council – A New Brand for a New Britain, and Demos – Britain: Renewing our Identity, which further blurred the lines between nationalism and commodification.

For India, the first effort at such rebranding had been mainly directed at a domestic rather than an international audience. It came in the form of “India Shining”, which started as a pitch to attract tourists but almost immediately was picked up as the campaign slogan for the then ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party in the run-up to the 2004 general election.  In it, pride too became commodified. As the campaign’s designer, Prathap Suthan, creative director of the Indian branch of the New York-based Grey Worldwide advertising agency, put it at the time, “India Shining is all about pride. It gives us brown-skinned Indians a huge sense of achievement.  Look at the middle-class and they tell the story of a resurgent India.”...

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A few weeks ago, a group of Vietnam Old Hacks returned to Saigon; I can’t quite bring myself to call it Ho Chi Minh City. They came back to mark the 35^th anniversary of the end of the war that defined the 1960s and 1970s and which took the lives of so many of their friends and colleagues.  Quite rightly, the reunion had sombre moments;

73 journalists and 135 photographers were killed covering the conflict. But the gathering was marked, too, with a good dose of joyous enthusiasm and banter. I wonder if today’s generation of reporters, who cover Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction, will be gathering 35 years hence in downtown Baghdad or Kabul – by then, hopefully, cities at peace – to mark the end of the wars that dominate these early years of the 21^st century and have characterised war reporting for a brave new generation of journalists.  I suspect not. For Vietnam unlike any other place took over a man’s soul in a way that those other conflicts never can. The proximity of death amid such beauty gave to me, at least, a quality of life unattainable elsewhere.

I have covered many wars since then but decades after the war ended Vietnam’s potent spell still dominates my life.

For five years I lived in Vietnam in my very early 20s and I look back on it now, not so much with nostalgia, but with wonderment that such a place existed. I feel privileged to have known and been a part of it. Journalistically, Vietnam was the best and most important story there was...

When the road from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) reaches My Tho in the Mekong delta it soars across the Tien River on an elegant new 120-ft high bridge. Gazing across the flat terrain from the lofty central span you get a snapshot of Vietnam’s progress from peasant past via wartime destruction to industrial future. The Rach Mieu Bridge bridge opens Ben Tre province to direct road traffic from HCMC some 50 miles northeast up Highway 1. For almost its entire length the highway is lined with new factories, small businesses and housing. To the south, Ben Tre’s famed coconut groves and orchards give way to construction, the line of advance clearly etched in the red earth.

The river port of Ben Tre entered the lexicon of warfare and popular culture in February 1968 when during heavy fighting AP correspondent Peter Arnett quoted an unnamed US officer saying “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it”. Ben Tre was rebuilt and its future is now linked to the bridge, and the changes it has brought were evident barely a year from its opening in late 2008. The sprawl of new shops delineates the city and many others across the delta and along the coastal plain. Rapid construction, often on low-lying farm land, will draw in the rural population, with implications for the country’s important agricultural base: the delta is Vietnam’s rice bowl, producing around 20 million tonnes of padi (unhusked rice) in 2009, or more than half the country’s output, and a major source of export revenue. But for Ben Tre and other similar towns the bridge and other infrastructure may offer shortterm economic stimulus at the expense of long-term sustainability.

Such development a generation or more after unification may produce a mixture of satisfaction and concern among the inner cabal of the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which marked its 80^th anniversary last February and, on April 30, the 35^th anniversary of victory in the war with America. Satisfaction would reflect the progress made since the country emerged from more than 40 years of conflict – between December 1946, when communist-controlled Viet Minh forces attacked the French, and 1989, when the last Vietnamese troops withdrew from neighbouring Cambodia – and the pariah status acquired by besting a superpower – the US. The concern stems from how the party can manage growing expectations while remaining relevant and retaining its authority. While the April 30^th anniversary was celebrated with a military parade through the capital, where thousands lined the streets waving red banners, the government basked more in its economic achievements than its defeat of the United States. Signs of the burgeoning market economy are everywhere – Communist flags vying for attention with corporate ads and logos....

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We turned off the main road from Addis Ababa to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across what seemed empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, this massive structure was far from finished but the plastic-covered steelwork already stretched over 20 hectares, equal to 20 full-size football pitches.

After a quick call to his Dutch boss the farm manager agreed to show us round: tens of millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 500-metre-long rows. Spanish engineers were building the greenhouses, other Europeans were installing the water system and South Africans had dug boreholes with enough water for 100,000 people.  The only Ethiopian input was the army of women bussed in to pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day.  Ethiopia may be one of the hungriest countries in the world, famous for famine and with five million people depending on international food aid, but all the food from Awassa is trucked 200 miles north to Addis Ababa and then flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East. Only food judged unacceptable to the Arabs is sent to the local markets.

The labour is Ethiopian but the money for this giant corporate food enterprise is from Saudi Arabia. The 1,000-ha estate is leased for 99 years to Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, a Saudi billionaire businessman who has an Ethiopian wife and is one of the 50 richest men in the world. His Saudi Star company plans to spend up to $2bn acquiring and developing 500,000 ha of land in Ethiopia. So far, Al Amoudi has bought four large farms and is growing rice, vegetables and flowers for export. He expects eventually to employ more than 10,000 people. Last month he presented his king with the first Saudi wheat grown in Ethiopia.

Al Amoudi is a hero in much of Ethiopia for his confidence in the country. But he is accused of being a “land-grabber”, one of thousands buying up land in poor countries globally, with Africa the epicentre. Businesses backed by the governments of food-insecure rich countries are raising tens of billions of dollars to buy or lease land in poorer and hungrier countries to provide food for their growing populations and crops and biofuels to power their transport. Developing countries, moreover, are being advised by the World Bank to hand their land over, even though the UN recognises the dangers.

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It is an ironic twist of fate: suddenly, Germany is discovering the attraction of a more sceptical attitude towards Europe. One could even argue that the Germans are becoming more British while at the same time Britain is slowly but surely morphing into a more “continental” European nation.  Of course this does not mean that the new coalition government in London is less Eurosceptic in its outlook. But David Cameron, using the Lib Dems as a counterbalance, has for the time being managed to soften the hostile instincts of the right wing of his party, preferring a more accommodating approach towards a European Union that faces its biggest crisis yet, while not expecting any trouble from the Lib Dems, the last bastion of integrationists in Britain. Even the greatest fan of further integration, following the logic of “ever closer Union”, must have recognised the futility of such a move. For the foreseeable future, the priority will be trying to prevent the EU, and especially the Eurozone, from falling apart. If there is no appetite for further “deepening” of the EU even in Germany one can safely assume that the traditionally awkward topic of Europe won’t bother this British government.  Another strange coincidence is that both Britain and Germany are governed by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals. The only difference is that the German Liberals, the “Free Democrats”, are clearly more economic liberals, accused by their opponents of being unreconstructed “neoliberals”, the gravest possible sin in the eyes of the left. Nick Clegg’s party leans instinctively more to the left: it is more of a mixed bag, consisting of a greenish bourgeoisie, much mocked as the “beard and sandals brigade”; social democrats who were keenest on forming a “progressive alliance” with Labour, despite the lack of a majority for these parties; and classic Liberals in the tradition of the Whigs, suspicious of too much state influence.

Nobody knows how long this coalition will keep going once the supply of agreed political projects has been used up and the overriding need to cut the deficit subsides. The political fault lines and ideological divisions will, of course, return, but this is for the future.

At the moment one can’t but admire the decisive start of the Cameron/Clegg alliance and the speed with which it is pursuing its maybe too-ambitious reform agenda. For someone used to the long-drawnout negotiations and the endless haggling before a German coalition government can be formed, this came as a pleasant surprise. Just a week was needed to sort out everything, including a job for Vince Cable – no easy task, as everybody knows.  Compare this with more than four weeks of negotiations between Christian Democrats and Free Democrats in Germany. Even after the coalition agreement was signed and sealed the haggling between the two partners never stopped. Recently it became even worse, partly because of the “profile neurosis” of Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP and Germany’s new Foreign Secretary, and a flamboyant character who once took part in Germany’s Big Brother. He is one of these unfortunate political characters you instinctively want to disagree with, even if what he says makes sense, just because of the way he says it – a problem he shares with George Osborne.

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The Greek government accepted a loan from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union that could tide it over repayment of its debt (but would not resolve the underlying problem), and in return it adopted measures that will lead to a deep economic depression and destroy the post-war social contract.

The reaction of the Greek people was expected, but would not have been as immediate and powerful had the 2008 events not happened. Within hours of Grigoris’s killing, huge protests, occupations and demonstrations broke out all over. In an unprecedented move, large numbers of secondary pupils occupied some 800 schools. Daily marches to police stations, parliament and ministries were accompanied by sit-ins, street demos, disruption at theatres, the raising of a banner calling for resistance and the burning of the Christmas tree in Syntagma Square. However, violence against banks and luxury shops was limited and no casualties were reported.  According to opinion polls, half the population supported the protests.

Solidarity demonstrations throughout Europe created fears that they would spread and in France President Sarkozy had to pull back a school reform bill. There were many anxious interpretations. Many, often contradictory, causes were suggested: economic (unemployment and neo-liberal economic measures); political (persistent corruption and failure of education); cultural or ideological. But the most prominent reaction has been incomprehension mixed with incredulity. No political organisation directed the insurrection, no single ideology motivated it, no overwhelming demand was put forward.  The persistent question “what do the kids want?” often led to the conclusion that the events were not political because they could not be integrated into existing analytical frameworks.

What united the protestors was a refusal: “No more”, “enough is enough”. Is this a new type of politics after the slow decay of democracy? The urban space has always been a site of conflict. From the riots of early modernity to the Bastille, the Paris Commune, the reform, suffragette and civil rights movements, to May 1968, the Athens Polytechnic 1973 and the Prague and Bucharest uprisings, the “street” has changed political systems, laws and institutions. In this sense, the December insurrection was a recognisable form of “street” resistance. But this was no ordinary protest. Imagine Westminster and Whitehall under siege everyday for two weeks. A condensation of causes, strategies, and actions turned December into the Greek May 1968....

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So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a chopper.

If art has something to say to us about the planet we are destroying it can rarely have been better expressed than by Before I Sleep, a show created for last month’s Brighton Festival. It takes a moment and a character from Chekhov and transforms them into an experience that shakes up our notions of everything from high art to the everyday banality of shopping to the ecoapocalypse.  And with brilliant appropriation of place, it is staged in the shell of a run-down former Co-op department store on one of Brighton’s grimmest roads.

Remember Firs, the old butler left behind at the end of The Cherry Orchard? He is abandoned because of the economic development of the land and the sweeping away of the old order, represented in the threat to cut down the orchard. The presiding spirit of the piece, he greets us and reappears in various scenes as we move through the darkened, neglected building. The journey takes us from snowy Russian wastes in miniature to a full-size department store where every assistant speaks a different language and on to a drowned future.

Oh, yes, the imperative behind the destruction of the orchard leads inexorably to the Millennium Retail store, your international focus of the capitalist dream. And if we have eyes to see through the multi-media settings and ears to hear what’s being said behind the multi-lingual blandishments, we might understand the transformation from forest to flood that threatens the planet.

But to begin at the beginning.

It is three-dimensional magic, boxes within boxes, houses within houses, levels within levels, while we the spectators become actors in a promenade performance whose strangeness confuses, alarms, exhilarates, entertains and, hopefully, enlightens.

 We enter in groups of four on the ground floor. A guide knocks on a door and an old man with a candle peers round, muttering in Russian, and leads us in. It is pitch dark apart from his little flame. We stumble after him, bemused, as he seems to get shorter and feebler before the candle gutters and goes out. Assuming he has descended some steps we brace ourselves for a fall. Space and time begin to fracture. But another light glows and it’s clear that he has crawled into a low bed where he lies under blankets, muttering. Suddenly, there is light everywhere. We are in a glass-walled room where three Russian women in modern dress are shouting at us, and gesturing angrily through the glass. They lead us out and direct us through a door into a huge room, whose entire floor is covered by a miniature winter scene from the play. There is the house, with the orchard behind it....

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What is it to endorse and vote Labour? Principally, it is to vote for the party of cosying up to the banks and super-rich in order to bestow on them fabulous wealth at crippling public expense, and create the widest gap between the richest and the poorest since the early 1960s. It is to vote for the party which took Britain vaingloriously into an illegal war on the basis of a pack of lies. It is to vote for obsessive authoritarianism and survelliance of a bludgeoned, stressed out one-nation-under-CCTV. It is to vote for the overpaid civil servant, for education cuts and tuition fees, bumper bonuses and bank bailouts. It was under a Labour government which promised to eradicate child poverty that London won the Olympic games: but in the Olympic city, 19 per cent of children now live below the poverty line.  Under such circumstances, one would expect the Conservatives to be romping home with the same incomprehensible public euphoria that propelled Tony Blair to power 13 years ago. But, after their initial spurt in the polls, not even Labour’s wreckage seems to be able to muster much enthusiasm for the Bullingdon Tories. The true-blue base will of course turn out as usual. Many will transfer from Labour in pursuit of novelty value or out of lack of imagination – and a few even more desperate liberals will be voting Eton, after visions of David Cameron reigning in the City, calling off the bailiffs, dismantling surveillance cameras, curbing energy prices – and just generally getting the trains they privatised into becoming the worst and most expensive in Europe to run on time. What a rude shock awaits them: for what is a vote for the Conservatives? The launch issue of Frontline last year carried an article called ‘Looted Britain’, about the smash-and-grab of this country’s ‘Family Silver’ as Harold MacMillan called it, by an oligarchy of free-market zealots both Labour and Conservative.  Perhaps there are enough people who remember that to vote Conservative is to vote for the destruction of the country’s proud manfufacturing base (of a kind kept by the Germans and French), the sleazy sell-off of those utility companies and railways in the first place and the prospect of losing the little that is left of infrastructure in Britain.

Some might be tempted to flee to the Liberal Democrats, who can afford to appear as angelic as they do because they have never had to govern and never will, since the two so-called ‘main parties’ have stitched up the electoral system to ensure just that. They might well, however, hold the balance of power.  This third party is best judged not by what it promises it could never do in government, but what it does in local government, when it gets the chance to give us a glimpse of its real self. On Merseyside, the Lib Dems have supervised the wholesale demolition of a city, to build a vast, white elephant shopping mall. On Tyneside, they have similarly packaged a downtown showroom while failing utterly to rennovate the ragged edges.  In Southwark, the party is so adept at managing public housing that a crowded block of flats lethally caught fire through negligence, while anyone trying to live on water along the Thames is extorted and threatened into homelessness. The Lib Dems have a European vision, but no record at local level to qualify them nationally and little national credibility since Paddy Ashdown’s leadership.

A vote for a minor party may be a tempting option for various communities: environmentalists (The Greens), fascists (BNP), nostalgics (Scargill) or ridiculous little-Englanders (UKIP).  But even more than for the Lib Dems, the system is rigged so as to rob anyone so inclined of even the voice one might enjoy in another country.

The MPs’ expenses scandal, and its minimal impact on the political class, helps to demonstrate what kind of political parties now claim newspapers’ endorsements and public votes.  The political class demonstrated that it acts as a body, in its own interests and its own interests only. To behold the parties strut their mediocrity – in Parliament, on ‘Question time’ and in the embryonic hustings – is an insult to the people in a time of recession and crisis. They demonstrate no more than that the differences between them are ersatz and non-existent, and that none are capable of meeting the challenge of rebuilding this battered, looted country.

Frontline considers that for a publication to endorse any political party at this election is to demean itself, and that for citizens to flatter any party with a vote is to demean themselves.  There may come a time – but it is unlikely – when “None Of The Above” is an option on the ballot paper, as it is in some countries – and were that option to exist now, it would probably be the number one choice. There may even come a time when the parties reform themselves and cease to dumb down the discourse and with them the country. But until they do, there is nothing honourably to do but vote for a devolutionary or separatist party in Scotland or Wales, a party comitted to peace in Northen Ireland, an independent in England, or – rather than stay at home – spoil the ballot, with humour or otherwise.

We had just made it to the river, ducking under branches and scrambling around stumps, when the young grizzly bear appeared upstream. I stood mesmerised as, clearly oblivious, he moved slowly towards us. Then with a bound he started running in our direction before stopping to pounce on a red salmon.

Heart beating fast, pepper-spray in hand, I weighed the next step.Was he alone? Was his mother around? If I unloaded the spray into his face would she charge to his defence? As I waited, the mantras drilled into me by my trainers ran through my head:

“Never surprise a grizzly bear at close quarters.”

“Identify yourself as human and never, ever run.” By now the grizzly was barely 100 feet away. I raised my arms and clapped sharply. He came to a sudden and surprised halt. He circled this way and that, sniffed the air, deciding what to do next. Then slowly, very slowly, he moved off into the alders.  As bear encounters go, this was a pleasing one.  Coming face to face with a wild grizzly fishing for salmon in the Canadian wilderness, unarmed, on foot, and on its terms is an experience to be savoured.  Out on the coast of British Columbia some bear-viewing operations let you watch from purpose-built platforms many feet above the ground. But those animals have become used to people by years of viewing them as predictable, somehow distant, residents of another world.Watching from a platform, I think, you are more of a voyeur than a participant.  I prefer the less consistent but more varied viewing that comes with operating around totally wild bears.  Some are indifferent to humans, some not, but each has its own personality, history and behaviour.  The meeting with the young grizzly was the culmination of months of learning about these icons of the wilderness; there’s more to bears than cute bums, long claws and porridge. There is the scat – slightly smaller than a horse’s but significantly larger than a human’s. Sometimes it is red and heavy with berries, at others green and apple-scented.When the bears begin to gorge on the salmon the scat takes on a shiny, grey colour and a pungent fishy smell.  Then there are the tracks. On a grizzly print the claws are further from the toe-marks than on a black bear and the ball of the foot less curved. There are less obvious signs too: scratches and bite marks on trees that the bears like to rub and urinate on, leaving their scent for the next animal that comes along.  There are bear paths through the bush and tiny snips of hair caught on twigs (black bear hair tends to be uniform in colour, grizzly hair usually varies throughout its length).

We came to the bush to get away from it all.  Four years ago, I quit journalism and led Kristin, then my girlfriend, now my wife, away from Russia, from the wars of the Middle East and Afghanistan, away from hostility to a new life. After a miserable urban winter we chanced upon the dream we were seeking in a remote valley in British Columbia on a 32-acre plot of wilderness.

Later it turned out that the man who sold us the land and the wooden buildings on it was a kingpin in the local marijuana business. But by then it didn’t matter.We were hooked and threw ourselves headlong into life in the bush. There followed three years of crisis management, chaos and a host of minor disasters. I survived a small avalanche, a run-in with a log-splitting machine and a bloody accident with a kindling axe. One day my psychopathic horse first threw me and then stood on my prone helpless body.  Later I drove a car off a mountain road and, with Kristin, had a run-in with black ice that left us upside down on the side of the Alaska Highway in a pick-up truck that had been crushed like a can of Coke.  When we finally stopped to catch our breath we had a small wilderness bear-viewing operation – intimate, lots of fun, almost, though not quite, profitable and located in what is surely one of the most beautiful valleys in Canada.  There was, however, one fly in this otherwise idyllic ointment. Each spring beer-swilling, potbellied men, each carrying a gun as big as himself, would descend on our valley. For days they scoured the trails on their quad bikes seeking out the animals that made the valley so special – the grizzlies. And when they found one, they shot it. Incredibly, it was all perfectly legal.

It seems to me that even in a Third World country that is struggling for survival, shooting one of the main attractions and tourist earners would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg: paltry short-term profit for substantial long-term loss. But in a First World country with a squeaky-clean image that prides itself on its considered and civilised moderation, this bloody backcountry ritual seemed to have no place.

At first it all made me feel just a little uneasy. And then it began to niggle and gnaw. My adopted province had aspirations of being a beacon of social order and prosperity, so self-satisfied that it was sometimes smug: The Best Place on Earth is the provincial slogan. And when I began to enquire, it seemed nobody had a good explanation for the hunt.  Many residents didn’t even know it was happening.

So I turned to the government for an explanation.  One of the things about being a journalist that I most miss is the power to terrify inept and overpaid bureaucrats. As a reporter I took great pleasure in turning over stones and exposing small-time corruption and mean-mindedness. Now, several years after I hung up my typewriter, I was sitting in a windowless room in a small, provincial town in Canada listening to a man with an enviable government salary, whose ostensible job was to protect wildlife. Instead he was defending the grizzly hunters. “Our clients . . .” the small man with the fuzzy red hair intoned to us pompously.  “Do you mean the grizzly hunters?” asked Fred Easton, my friend and lawyer, whom I had invited to the meeting.

“Well they are our primary clients,” the ministry of environment official said defensively.  In the 1960s as a young Greenpeace activist Fred had set out with a camera on a Zodiac inflatable to record Soviet whalers in the Pacific. His footage fueled a new conservation movement that became the global Save the Whale campaign. Now, nearly 40 years later, that indomitable spirit was resurfacing. I felt the steel of Fred’s resolve as his words became harsher and crisper. Under Fred’s relentless cross-examination the whole sorry story of the government’s dirty little secret began to emerge.

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Ukraine’s presidential election five years ago, which led to the Orange Revolution, seemed to signal that the country had finally torn itself out of Russia’s orbit and would cleave to the West, join NATO and occupy an integral role in the European Union’s vision of the continent’s development. That would have been a momentous and logical conclusion to the fall of the Berlin Wall and could have altered the geopolitical map of Europe permanently.As former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski maintains, without Ukraine Russia is no longer an empire. The election of Viktor Yanukovych as president has boosted Moscow’s resurgent imperial ambitions, rekindled by Vladimir Putin. Russia is gleeful because it was terrified the Orange Revolution would cross the border to where elections are utterly predictable and the new Czar, Putin, is waiting to come back to his throne in perpetuity.

Voters in the presidential elections, played out in two rounds in January and a February run-off, gave a small majority to Yanukovych, the pro-Russian candidate, against his rival, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had pledged to bring Ukraine closer to the EU and NATO.

Ukraine’s election commission declared him winner saying that Yanukovych had received 48.95% and Tymoshenko 45.47%. She challenged the result but her hopes of mustering large-scale demonstrations to force a repeat of the run-off election faded. A further blow came mid-February when she dropped her legal challenge after the court refused to consider her claims of electoral fraud. Yanukovych has now been inaugurated as president.

Most foreign and domestic observers said that the election was generally fair, although both candidates had bought votes. President Obama was among the first western leaders to congratulate Yanukovych, who lost in 2004 after his team was found to have organised massive electoral fraud. EU leaders, the NATO Secretary-General and the presidents of Georgia and Belarus also offered congratulations. The Kremlin was, of course, overjoyed and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev welcomed the result. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church – at bitter odds with Ukraine’s own Orthodox Catholic churches – showered Yanukovych with blessings.

Preliminary results showed that Yanukovych won by roughly 900,000 votes. But Tymoshenko alleged more than a million had been falsified in his favour, particularly in his core constituencies in the east and south. She also claimed alterations to electoral regulations hastily pushed through parliament by Yanukovych’s supporters between the two rounds paved the way for large scale vote-rigging.  “Yanukovych is not our president. He will never become the legitimate elected president of Ukraine under any circumstances,” she said and indicated she would organise the sort of mass demonstrations that occurred in 2004. But it is difficult to see an Orange Revolution revival.Then, international observers and organisations nearly all branded the elections as monstrously flawed. Not only had there been vote-rigging but Yanukovych’s supporters in the outgoing government of autocratic President Leonid Kuchma used intimidation to try to neutralise the campaign of the pro-western candidate,Viktor Yushchenko, who pledged to bring democracy and human rights to Ukraine and to fight rampant official corruption.  One of the most visible consequences of the dirty tricks campaign was damage to his face, whose skin was ravaged when he was poisoned.

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Newspaper headlines are always shouting that the Russian bear is eternally waking up, growling, or on the prowl. When Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, announced that the defence budget was to rise this year by 26%, the bear was said to be on the rampage. These bear stories, usually with pictures of massed tanks and missiles, always make me cross. I want to ask, who is going to drive these tanks? If Russia is going to be a world power, who will man the factories, design the weapons and march into battle?  The truth is that there just won’t be enough people to do it all. Russia’s population is declining, and figures in this year’s UN Human Development Report, the work of Russian academic experts, make this startlingly clear. Every year the country has some 800,000 fewer children: in 1997, for example, it had 36 million children and teenagers at school. When the 2010 school year starts in September, there will be only 15 million, meaning that classrooms all over the country, except for Moscow and a few other oil-boom cities, are emptying. “For the foreseeable future,” the report concludes, “there is no way of halting decline of Russia’s population at large or of its economically active groups.” The effects will be dire. Putin’s plans to make Russia the world’s fifth economic power by 2020 will stumble due to the lack of energetic young people.  The numbers of these lost children are huge. But I am fascinated by them because I have spent the past three years investigating the life of one child, a boy called Vanya, whose story encapsulates many of the problems his country faces.

Vanya was born in 1990, in the dying months of the USSR. The following year, just as the old communist state collapsed, his parents abandoned him and his elder sister, leaving the neighbours to rescue them. Social services separated Vanya from his sister and placed him in a baby house, a state orphanage for infants up to five years old. As he was born prematurely, he failed to meet his development milestones and was confined to a room for the so-called “incurables”. Assessed by the Russian medical experts as an “ineducable imbecile”, he was sent just before his sixth birthday to an adult mental asylum where he was confined to a cot 24 hours a day and starved of food and human contact. He was not expected to survive.

The story has a happy ending. Thanks to his engaging character and refusal to give up, he recruited a range of people to his aid – both Russians and expatriates – and eventually escaped a likely slow death in a mental asylum. He is now in America, where he is known as John.

I got to know Vanya when I was working as Moscow correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, and wrote about him as an example of the abuse and neglect of children in state care. At that time, the only part of Russia untouched by revolution seemed to be the world where Vanya was confined.  In 2007 I decided to find out what had happened to him, and the result is The Boy from Baby House 10. This is a worm’s eye view of a closed world, one rarely seen by foreigners; it is an attempt to recreate the real texture of life at that time.  When I returned to Moscow to research Vanya’s early life, I had expected to find the children’s gulag being torn down. President Putin, in 2006, called Russia’s declining population “the most acute problem facing our country today”. He called on local authorities to take action to reduce the number of children in such institutions.

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 Until Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration more than a year ago, no Chicagoan had ever seized the White House.That no one from the Windy City had achieved the presidency before 2009 seems perverse, given Chicago’s significance in national electoral politics. One measure of this importance is that the Republicans and Democrats have held more presidential nominating conventions in Chicago than in any other city – 25, compared to 10 for its nearest rival, Baltimore. Chicago’s clout and money were always welcome in national elections, even if its politicians were not sufficiently potable to sit uptable from the White House salt. Jack Kennedy said that he would not have won in 1960 without Chicago Mayor Richard Joseph Daley, a fellow Irish Catholic and old friend of Kennedy’s father. (When Illinois Republicans demanded a recount in 1960 of the famously unreliable Cook County vote, Daley agreed to check all the ballots at the rate of one precinct a day. “At that pace,” Mike Royko wrote in his magisterial biography, Boss: Richard J Daley of Chicago, “they would complete the recheck in twenty years.” A special prosecutor, who turned out to be a “faithful organisation Democrat”, eventually dropped all charges against the suspect polling officers.) Bill Clinton was so indebted to the second Mayor Daley, Richard Michael, that he made his younger brother William secretary of commerce.  

Chicago’s politicians were kingmakers, not kings.  Their legendary delivery of delegates at the Democratic Convention and electoral college votes to the Democrats’ nominee required contenders to feign ignorance of the ways the votes were obtained and counted. Although the last time police had to seize large quantities of arms from polling places was in 1924, the number of dead who went on casting votes meant an election in Chicago was called Resurrection Day. Yet electioneering was governed by explicit regulations, as Fortune magazine noted in August 1936: “Rule one of this art: never pay a bum his dollar for a full day’s voting in advance. He may drink it up before he has voted the requisite number of times, in which case he will spend the day sleeping it off.” Quaint electoral traditions, abolished by reformers in most other American cities by mid-20^th century, made Chicago politicians a hard sell for national office. Obama changed that, his achievement of becoming the first president of African descent less startling than being the first from Chicago.  At his inauguration on January 20 2009, he vowed to “remake America”. His supporters are entitled to ask whether he remade Chicago during his 21 years there, three as a community organiser and 18 as a lawyer and politician. Or did Chicago make him? He saw the city for the first time aged 10, when his grandmother determined the precocious Hawaiian islander should visit the mainland. His memoir, Dreams From My Father, mentions only three images from this three-day stay: the indoor swimming pool at his motel, the elevated train he stood under while shouting as loud as he could and “two shrunken heads” in the Field Museum that struck him as “some sort of cosmic joke”. That was 1970, Richard J Daley’s 16^th year as mayor.  Fourteen years later, Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York. He wanted to change the world by organizing communities. His rationale was as idealistic as it was simple, or simplistic: “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organise black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”

 Chicago was the capital of urban activism in America, probably because there was much to be active against. Organisers like Jane Addams and Saul Alinksy aimed at the realistic target of winning concessions from a corrupt power structure, rather than the more problematic goal of eliminating it.

 “Community organising against the political establishment is a fundamental tradition in Chicago,” the left-liberal political consultant and columnist Don Rose told me. With “Another Old White Guy for OBAMA” badge pinned to his jacket, the 78-yearold savant recalled Saul Alinsky’s methods. Rose knew Alinsky, author of the 1946 bestselling Reveille for Radicals. Although the father of Chicago community organising died in 1972 at 63, Rose spoke of him in the present tense, “When Alinsky threatens to take three trainloads of black people to Marshall Field’s department store, he’s not trying to shut down Marshall Field’s, but to get it to hire blacks for various jobs. Or to bring legislation. Or to build a new police station, a new fire station. A kind of petitioning with the threat of force.” Soon after his 1983 graduation from Columbia, Obama applied to work for civil rights and community groups in Chicago. In the absence of any response, he became a researcher for corporate consultancies in New York.Two years later, a community organiser from Chicago approached him and asked what he knew about the place. Obama answered, “Most segregated city in America”. That apparent fact did not deter him from accepting a post in the tough South Side neighbourhoods where blacks had been ignored, abused and exploited for generations. “A week later,” Obama wrote, “I loaded up my car and drove to Chicago.”

The Cook County Democratic Party gave Obama, when he arrived from New York in summer 1985, more instruction on achieving and using power than Saul Alinsky’s manuals. Chicago has been a one-party city since 1931, when the Democrats captured city hall. Their monopoly outlived that of Italy’s Christian Democrats, who ruled in collusion with the Mafia and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in ways the average Chicago ward boss would find familiar, by 34 years. Despite beating the Soviet Communist Party’s 74-year record four years ago, Cook County Democrats have yet to embrace glasnost. It all began with Anton Cermak, an immigrant from Bohemia who, like Obama, had a “funny name”.  “Tony” Cermak graduated from precinct captain to chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee in 1928 and took the mayor’s office from the Republican incumbent,William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, three years later. Thompson, who counted Al Capone among his many friends, had made the mistake of campaigning against Cermak’s foreignness. One slogan went, “I won’t take a back seat to that Bohunk, Chaimock, Chermack or whatever his name is Tony,Tony, where’s your pushcart at?  Can you picture a World’s Fair mayor With a name like that?”....

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As Studs Terkel marched towards the reception desk of the Chicago Tavern Club, the girl behind the counter was already getting his tie out from under it.  Well, not his tie exactly; the one the club kept for him, since they were obligatory in those days, and Studs did not own one. “What’s the point of a goddamn tie?” he rasped, as, for the umpteenth time, she helped him do it up.This was some years ago, and we were meeting for lunch to talk about Chicago. Studs Terkel, who died at the age of 96 just four days before Barack Obama was elected, was the champion of vernacular democracy, a kind of documentary Steinbeck. And the generous genius of “Toikel” – as he was addressed – is that, unlike most people, he listened. That is how he gave voice to the real-life characters in his books, those he called “ordinary people who have done extraordinary things”.  

It is strange in retrospect that a city known principally for duplicitous power play and big-mouthed banter should have had as its icon – until Barack Obama was elected president – one of the straightest-talking Americans of all time, who was also the country’s greatest-ever listener. But then, as Studs wrote: “Janus, the two-faced god has both blessed and cursed the city-state Chicago . . . Our double vision, double standard, double value and double-cross have been patent ever since the earliest of our city fathers took the Pottawattomies (Indians) for all they had. Poetically, these dispossessed natives had dubbed this piece of turf Chicagou. Some say it is Indian lingo for City of the Wild Onion but some say it really means City of the Big Smell.”

Nelson Algren’s description of Chicago back in 1956 had played to the same theme: “Not so much a city as a vast way-station where three-and-a-half million bipeds swarm with a single cry: ‘One side or a leg off, I’m gettin’ mine’ . It’s every man for himself . . . Chicago forever keeps two faces, one for winners, one for losers one for hustlers, one for squares, one for early risers, one for evening hiders.” Chicago always was, and is, the capital of work, the leveller of men, city where the dust from the “subway” system – elevated above the streets on pillars of rusting but sturdy iron – showers down as the “El-trains” rattle and lurch overhead. Chicago is also the capital of real America. If you regard this country as made up of the South, two coasts and the vast real-life rest, then Chicago is the capital of the rest. “Chicago,” says Terkel, “is the country. Chicago is a metaphor for everything.” Now, Chicago is the seat of the presidency. Barack Obama runs the White House with one major modus operandum in common with George W Bush, whose principle was that if Texas has to be part of the union, then he might as well try and make the union Texas. Obama’s dictum is that since he and Abraham Lincoln, the president who led the union in the civil war, both came from Chicago, then the union might as well be Chicago. And one cannot help wondering: what would Studs think?...

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In the days and weeks after haiti’s earthquake sent its televisual shockwaves across the world, there seemed genuine hope that this natural disaster might finally bring salvation to the poorest people in the western hemisphere in a way that so many previous horrors had not. surely now there would be a chance to rebuild port-au-prince, to extinguish forever the slums of Cité soleil and rid the Caribbean nation of the most venal elements of oppression and violence that have marked so much of its history? as one Un official put it: “I sense that while most of us are focused on logistics at the moment and the day-to-day operation of getting food to the people on the ground, there are a lot of people who have a vision for a different haiti. a strategic change of direction.  whether that is possible or not is anyone’s guess.” haiti has seen many false dawns, one of them the much-vaunted return to power in 1994 of president Jean-bertrand aristide, the liberation theologian-turned politician reinstated under the aegis of president bill Clinton’s peace initiative for haiti.  Landing in a Us military helicopter on the then- pristine lawn of the presidential palace, aristide seemed the very embodiment of change.the streets around the capital were specially cleaned and even his Fanmi Lavalas party, literally Family waterfall movement in reference to the biblical flood, held overtones of a country that would be washed clean of its past.

It was a symbolism not lost on the diminutive aristide as, flanked by Us secret service agents, he addressed the nation under a baking Caribbean sun from behind bullet-proof glass. “honour, respect,” the president announced as he cast a dove of peace into the air. “no to violence, no to vengeance, yes to reconciliation . . . never, never again must one drop of blood flow.” next to him sat warren Christopher, the Us secretary of state, while the rev Jesse Jackson, the american civil rights activist, and Joseph kennedy, the congressman and scion of america’s most prominent political family sat on a raised dais.  haitians ran through the streets of port-au-prince chanting the slogan of Lavalas: “one we are weak, two we are strong, together we are Lavalas.” The sense of hope was tangible, but like so much in haiti, short-lived. the desire for retribution lay just beneath the surface. one group carried a rooster, the symbol of Lavalas, sitting astride a guinea fowl, the icon of duvalierism, a movement long associated with the worst abuses of power.  people moved towards the guinea fowl and plucked its feathers one by one, shouting: “Justice for all.” and within days the vengeance killings had started again and the streets were running with blood. this time the murders were committed in the name of a priest-turned president rather than the man who had ousted him three years earlier, the duvalierist Lt general raoul Cedras. the effect on the population, however, was the same. Fear continued to rule.  the earthquake, though, seemed different. this was no man-made horror and, despite the devastation, there was a sense that here was an opportunity for haiti, a country whose people remain so resolutely and exemplarily positive in the face of endless tragedy, to emerge from the ruins as a modern nation. the scope of the destruction was vast, both in human terms and in damage to the infrastructure, its iconic epicentre the crushed cupola of the presidential palace. according to the bbC, the scale matched that of the asian tsunami in 2004, the death toll in Indonesia’s aceh province comparable to that in port-au-prince, now known to be more than 230,000.

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