Shout it out, Pussy Riot (Twitter)

Fearing the same prosecution as their band mates, the remaining 12 members of Russia's Pussy Riot are running scared. Some of them literally.

Ever since three of the punk performance artists--Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina-- were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for singing a satirical hymn about Vladmir Putin in a Moscow cathedral, the rest of the 15-woman collective have been keeping a low profile as the Moscow police comb the streets in search.

But two of them made a break for it: Rumor has it a couple members escaped Russia in disguise, and are seeking asylum in a safer country. How do we know that? Well, how do we know anything these days? They wrote an update on Twitter.

From the group account's Twitter yesterday (translated from Russian):

“In connection with the search, our two participants have successfully left the country! They are recruiting foreign feminists for new actions!”

The names of the escaped women have not been released, though it shouldn't be hard for the ladies to find support: thousands of women marched in protest before and after the August 17th verdict, and there haven't been this many celebrities lending their name to a cause since Live Aid.

Here's the skinny on your home-searching competition:

Brazilians: The economy in this beach-loving nation has boomed in recent years, thanks largely to the discovery of off-shore oil in 2005. Brazilians are buying up New York properties faster than you lather on a layer of oil and perfect that base tan.

Brazilians have grown wealthier and done their share of buying: Average per-capita purchases in the U.S. (including real estate) jumped 250% between 2003 and 2010.

Russians: What do rich Russians like? Caviar, fine vodka, fur coats and New York real estate. The most fortunate have duffles of cash (no really) and a penchant for spending it on luxury New York apartments. While the Russian economy has weakened recently, don't expect to see the buyers disappear. Securing some seven figure New York real estate is always a good investment when the Ruble is wavering.

Chinese:It's no secret that Chinese buyers have been dominating the high-end real estate purchases in New York over the past few years. Desiring an American home-base for business trips, to visit kids in college or stockpile Louis Vuitton handbags, wealthy Chinese have been buying up a storm.

Chinese buyers are flooding the New York market, picking up Chelsea condos for their children and touring properties like 20 Pine, 15 Central Park West and the Time Warner Center.

There you have it folks! The Observer posits the theory that there is a direct correlation between hosting the Olympics and high-end apartment buying in the city. Expect to see hordes of Englishmen at open houses in the near future.

Grace and Gere.

At a time when the new Russia is more about gangsters than politicians, along comes a benign thriller that is about as thrilling as last week’s borscht. A group of Russian spies sneak across the U.S. border posing as illegal Mexican immigrants. Soon after, a U.S. senator is murdered in an alley in Washington, D.C, played by Detroit. Richard Gere plays Paul Sheperdson, a retired C.I.A. operative who threw in the towel in 1989 after he brought down a coven of Soviet assassins code-named for the Romans who killed Julius Caesar, and especially the bloodiest and most dangerous killer of them all, a monster named Cassius. Now, after more than 20 years, the feds think Cassius has just arrived masquerading as one of the phony wetbacks and suspect him of assassinating the senator. None of this is ever explained, but Sheperdson’s old boss at the C.I.A. (Martin Sheen) implores him join forces with a rookie F.B.I. agent named Ben Geary (Topher Grace) to track down Cassius. Apparently, when the C.I.A. joins forces with the F.B.I., it’s like dumping a piranha in a water tank with a stingray. Sheperdson hates academics, but Geary, despite his youth (he wasn’t even around when Sheperdson watched the Berlin Wall fall), is an expert on Cassius, even writing his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on him. It’s hate at first sight, but Sheperdson, who shot and killed Cassius himself in 1989, is intrigued enough to come out of retirement and prove them all wrong. The search begins and a lot of dull action ensues.

Keeping that Julius Caesar cast list going, another Russian assassin named Brutus is interviewed in a prison cell and he too is savagely murdered. This time it is Sheperdson who sends Geary home, fearing for the lives of his wife and two kids. Then we see Sheperdson slit the throat of Brutus, using Cassius’s famous trick of using an invisible wire from his wrist watch like an old James Bond toy. Aha! So maybe while we were waiting for the true identity of Cassius to be revealed, it was really secret agent Sheperdson all along. But there’s more. Was he a double agent? Now that the Russians sit beside us at the U.N., who is he spying for? Why do Sheperdson and Geary both lapse into Russian? Who is the real villain? No spoilers here. Illogical surprises are just beginning. Contrived plot twists, preposterous red herrings and music so loud it drowns out the dialogue all contribute to a film that might have seemed feasible in the first draft to director Michael Brandt, who also wrote the silly script with Derek Haas, but it got mangled in translation. You can’t even say that when all else fails, there is always the acting. Hopelessly miscast as an F.B.I. agent on a dangerous mission, Mr. Grace doesn’t look old enough to shave. And rarely has Mr. Gere walked through any movie with so little energy and so much indifference. I’ve seen more fervor on the face of a man parking a car. It will take double time to make up for The Double.

rreed@observer.com

THE DOUBLE

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas

Directed by Michael Brandt

Starring Odette Annable, Stephen Moyer and Richard Gere

1/4

The State History Museum on Red Square in Moscow. (Photo By Ian Walton/Getty Images)

Not since the Cold War, it seems, have strained diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia spilled over into the public arena with such ferocity—only this time the war is over art and two collections of religious books.

The art wars were triggered by the private agenda of Chabad, a Jewish sect seeking religious books and manuscripts possessed by Russia. In 2004, Chabad brought suit as the successors to earlier owners of these pieces and claimed to be their rightful owner. Russia instituted an embargo on art loans to U.S. museums after Brooklyn-based Chabad obtained a default judgment in July 2010 from the District Court in Washington, D.C. Russia had walked out on the proceedings, claiming no U.S. court has jurisdiction over it.

Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned up the heat in this standoff another notch when it confirmed its decision not to send 35 works by fashion designer Paul Poiret to the Moscow Kremlin Museum for an upcoming exhibition there. The Met’s chief spokesperson, Harold Holzer, said the museum was acting in response to Moscow’s recent cancellation of loans to the Met as part of Russia’s now year-long embargo.

Bruce W. Bean, who headed top law firm Clifford Chance’s Moscow office and now teaches at Michigan State University, told The Observer that because it was obtained on default, that judgment, which orders Russia to turn over the collections to Chabad, is “unenforceable” in Russia. 

Chabad has said it wants to enforce the judgment by attaching Russian property as “leverage” to get Russia to surrender the collections.

How would attachment work as “leverage” when a plaintiff is seeking specific property? The Observer asked legal experts. Howard Spiegler of art law powerhouse Herrick Feinstein said he didn’t know. “Enforcement” is when “you haven’t gotten back property but want this instead,” he said.

Louis M. Solomon, head of international litigation at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, questions whether Chabad has the right to attach Russia’s property at all. “If you have a judgment for monetary damages, then you can seize property. If the property is money, you can take it. If the property is not money, you can convert it” to money. Chabad is “not entitled to” attach assets as leverage, he said.

Mikhail Shvydkoy, Russia’s presidential envoy for international cultural cooperation, went on record in March as saying the embargo would last until Chabad’s claim is resolved.

Russia’s embargo has been widely derided—it’s “a phony stunt,” according to Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission for Art Recovery, an organization that specializes in art restitution—though the court hearing the case stated last month that Russia’s fear that Chabad would seize its art to enforce the judgment was not “unfounded.”

Russia has a history of fierce nationalism, especially when it comes to what it considers threats to its patrimony, something discussions of the case and the embargo have ignored. When Mr. Shvydkoy was culture minister, he was threatened with criminal prosecution in Russia for agreeing to return some art to Germany that had been taken during the Second World War. The art stayed in Russia.

This attitude is a reality Chabad sometimes “failed to take into account,” Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, said.

Neither side comes out looking especially good. During a Chabad-organized protest in Russia demanding the books be surrendered, some of its members were reportedly attacked, and the international legal community has long expressed outrage over Russia’s retention of cultural objects taken from others. But neither is Chabad a stranger to extremism—it has pursued its cause, provocatively, through litigation rather than what insiders say could be partial settlement through payment of money, albeit as a de facto bribe. The group’s efforts, Dr. Grimsted has suggested, have played a part in the passage of Russian legislation making it more difficult for others to make claims.

After 20 years, despite steady U.S. diplomatic support, Chabad’s efforts have yielded little: almost all the books and manuscripts are still in Russia, and its default judgment is of dubious value. 

Reports have generally obscured, as has Chabad, that it is seeking two separate scholarly collections. One is of Jewish books; it’s referred to as the “library” and was nationalized shortly after the Russian Revolution because it was created in and remained in what was then the post-Revolution U.S.S.R. 

The other collection, referred to as the “archive,” is a private one belonging to a rabbi who had to leave it behind in Warsaw when he fled the Nazis in 1939. The archive was first seized by the Nazis and then, after Soviet soldiers conquered the Nazi-controlled territory, seized again as spoils of war by the U.S.S.R in 1945.

These two collections are often referred to as one unit, but the difference between property, like the library, that was nationalized after the Russian Revolution and what Russia now refers to as “cultural property displaced to the U.S.S.R. as a result of the Second World War,” like the archive, is significant. 

What was in Russia at the time of the Revolution is generally considered inviolate and has left Russia only on limited loan or, during a terrible period of mass starvation there in the early ’30s, via surreptitious sales to get money for food.

Russia also views its vast plunder of cultural treasures during World War II, taken in territory where millions of Soviets died fighting the Nazis, as rightfully its own. Providing even symbolic restitution, member of Duma (the Russian Parliament) and former culture minister Nikolai Gubenko said in 1997, is “to spit on the grave” of the many millions who died during the war, The New York Times reported. A culture minister who advocated restitution was burned in effigy. 

Russia is entitled to these objects, Mr. Gubenko, then-deputy chair of the Duma’s Committee on Culture, told the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets in 1998. He emphasized Soviet losses and suffering in fighting the Nazis: “Twenty-seven million killed, of them two million Jewish compatriots, 1,710 fully or partially destroyed cities … nearly 200 million destroyed and stolen books, more than 600,000 lost cultural works … ” 

And he added, “This is the amount of the U.S.S.R.’s losses in World War II. At the Nuremberg process, the Soviet Union offered 30 volumes of documentary evidence of the destruction and looting of its cultural property. What other country could provide such evidence?”

Russia formally nationalized the “displaced” property, including the archive, when it passed a new law in 1998—but the law contains an exception for Holocaust victims like émigré Jewish communities. It permits “restitution” provided the claim goes through diplomatic channels and Russia is compensated in exchange.

Before Russia walked away from the case in 2009, its argument that its own law could provide Chabad some relief outraged the U.S. Court of Appeals: “Obviously, Russia’s mere willingness to sell the plaintiff’s property back to it could not remedy the alleged wrongs,” the court wrote.

According to a report in Die Presse, 10,770 documents were returned to Austria in 2009 for “compensation” of 400,000 euros. That’s about $40 per document.

Mr. Goldstein, the restitution expert, thinks money could be raised, but on “principle,” he said, you “don’t pay to get stolen property back.” Further, Mr. Goldstein said claims are granted only on “[Vladimir] Putin’s whim.” Dr. Grimsted, however, who supports Chabad’s claim to the archive, said those few archives that have been surrendered have gone through the 1998 law, which may be Chabad’s best hope.  

In any event, Chabad deliberately rejected advice to take this route, said someone who was privy to strategy discussions, because it did not want to separate the archives from the library, which it views as more valuable, but to which it has no World War II restitution claim.

It’s “against Russian law” to surrender the library, nationalized after the Russian Revolution, Dr. Grimsted pointed out, because the books “were always in Russia” or what was the U.S.S.R. 

The claim for the library would ordinarily not be recognized by U.S. courts, either. When the U.S. formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 it also gave Soviet laws retroactive effect. The Court of Appeals said that the U.S. court had jurisdiction over the library claim on other grounds, however questionable that might be.

Chabad, said Dr. Grimsted, has “not taken into account” Russia’s special concerns about the library. Chabad’s first attempts in the early 1990s immediately aroused its fears, she said, that surrendering the books to Chabad would set a precedent that “would open it up to demands from every religious body” whose property was nationalized after the Revolution, including, within its own borders, the Russian Orthodox church. 

After Chabad obtained its default judgment in July 2010, “there was an outburst of indignation,” said Dr. Grimsted. The Duma had been considering a law nationalizing religious texts, and in November it passed.

“After the decision,” said Dr. Grimsted, Russia “wouldn’t have passed something that would give the books away.”

The current art embargo isn’t the first time the Chabad case has ratcheted up tensions between the two nations. In May 1992, the U.S. was scheduled to return to Russia the portion of the Soviet “Smolensk Archive” it had gained possession of during World War II. But the return of those materials didn’t happen in 1992, because Chabad had won U.S. government support, and in March of that year the Senate, led by then-Senator Al Gore, passed a resolution blocking the return of the Smolensk Archive unless Russia surrendered the Chabad library. 

Dr. Grimsted has suggested that Chabad’s efforts and the withholding of the Smolensk Archive “may well have inspired” the Duma debates that led to the passage of the 1998 law nationalizing spoils of war. At any rate, the Smolensk Archives were part of the Duma’s vigorous discussion.

The Senate resolution and Mr. Gore’s continuing efforts “held the Smolensk Archive hostage to the recovery of the Chabad Library from Moscow for 10 years,” Dr. Grimsted wrote recently. It wasn’t returned to Russia until 2002.

As for the current art embargo, Cadwalader’s Mr. Solomon points out the U.S. can enter the litigation at any time to protect its interests. He predicted that the U.S. will play a role there as “neutral arbiter.” Mr. Holzer, the Met spokesperson, said he understands that the State Department is trying to resolve things diplomatically. 

editorial@observer.com

Map of Russia (via Time for Kids)

Russian Dolls is a new reality series on Lifetime about the habits and lifestyles of women of Russian extraction in Brighton Beach. Alessandra Stanley is an acid-tongued New York Times critic who wants to show you that she was paying attention in sophomore-year European history (or, maybe, during her stint as Moscow correspondent), by totting out her references. They're defined below!:

• "borscht-and-bling" (a Ukrainian beet soup and gaudy jewelry or a Stanley-coined subgenre of reality television into which this show falls)
• The Kremlin (the governing body of the former U.S.S.R., which Ms. Stanley suggests might make a good Real Housewives series)
• matryoshkas (Russian dolls containing smaller versions of themselves inside, or, somehow, metaphorically, the way plastic surgery has made reality-TV stars look? Unclear/apocryphal.)
• "Pushkin-reciting violinists and math prodigies of Brighton Beach" (a group of Russian-Americans of whom Ms. Stanley approves, unlike the cast members, whom she speculates are from a uniquely reality-TV ready ethnicity: "There seem to be plenty of Russian-Americans who fit the niche; the producers didn’t have any difficulty recruiting a gaggle of vain, vulgar spendthrifts willing to hiss, preen and cry on cue for the camera.")
• Gary Shteyngart (Russian-American author whose plots might have predicted the themes of Russian Dolls.)
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian author and victim of gulag torture whose wounds pale in comparison to watching Russian Dolls)
• "Slavic soullessness" (what differentiates the Russian Dolls cast from The Real Housewives of New Jersey.)
• Volga (River in central Russia whose name conveniently shares four letters with "vulgar")

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

In a decision issued Tuesday, the federal District Court in Washington, D.C. acknowledged that Russia’s fear that its art might be seized by Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Jewish Orthodox sect, is legitimate. The embargo, thus, is not without rationale.

Chabad is seeking to seize Russian property to satisfy a default judgment it obtained last year.

Russia has stated that if it sends art to the U.S. it fears it will be seized by Chabad to force it to comply with the judgment.  As a result, over the last year, Russia has cancelled loans to such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and recalled other loans.

For the most part, legal experts and the press have denigrated Russia's fears.  Yet, in its just-issued opinion the federal court said otherwise.  The court’s statements were in its decision denying Chabad’s motion for sanctions as premature and granting its motion to begin enforcement proceedings on the judgment obtained when Russia refused to acknowledge U.S. jurisdiction.

The Court stated it “is unwilling to conclude that Russia’s concerns about the safety of its own cultural objects is entirely unfounded, given prior – albeit unsuccessful – attempts to attach such objects in at least one other case.”

In a stunning suggestion of diplomacy where the judicial branch of government tries to do what the State Department has not – cool things off – the Court said it hopes its decision “will help facilitate a return to business as usual in the sharing of artifacts and history between nations that is crucial to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding.”

But it also issued a warning: “While the Court is eager to provide whatever assurances to Moscow are necessary to encourage full future exchanges of art and artifacts between the United States and Russia, . . . the Court is not imbued with the authority to pre-judge any potential attachment that might occur.”

[Sotheby's]

"If anything happened to me," he said, pausing, as if to contemplate the inscrutable darkness of the country he had left behind seven years ago, "it would break my father."

On a Friday in late December, at Ground Support Cafe in Soho, Mr. Khodorkovsky took a sip of his coffee and looked around the crowded room. "We're hoping for an appeal," he told The Observer, trying to crack an upbeat smile. He wore jeans and a heavy coat with a fur collar and had just come from his apartment in Chelsea, where he lives with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. "We're hoping it will bring some better news."

Over the course of a two-hour interview, mixing Russian with English, Mr. Khodorkovsky discussed Vladimir Putin, the FSB and Siberian penal colonies, causing people at nearby tables to look up. "Putin is constantly trying to tie my dad to murder charges," he said.

One of Russia's most successful businessman-and possibly the least ruthless of a ruthless post-Soviet scrum-Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the chairman of the oil company Yukos. With a fortune of some $15 billion, he was the richest man in Russia and the 16th-wealthiest person in the world, until he challenged President Putin for political power around 2000 and Mr. Putin decided to take it all away.

In October 2003, commando troops in black masks arrested Mr. Khodorkovsky on a Siberian tarmac. The young Mr. Khodorkovsky was in his freshman year of college at Babson, in Wellesley, Mass. From there, he watched his father stand trial on tax charges in 2005, resulting in an eight-year sentence in a faraway Siberian prison. Father and son initiated a convoluted correspondence, their letters ferried through attorneys, scanned by prison officials, personal details and emotions necessarily kept to minimum.

Last month, a second trial, this time for embezzlement, resulted in another conviction. Barring appeals or parole, Mikhail Khodorkovsky will remain in prison until 2017. "The judge is just a slave," said Pavel, reflecting broad international sentiment that the ruling was an act of political retribution. His voice clicked up in volume. "The decision was made by Putin."

With his father as Kremlin enemy No. 1, the younger Mr. Khordokovsky has been marooned in Manhattan.

Mr. Khodorkovsky last saw his dad when he visited him at college. It was a month before he was arrested. After starting to recall this memory to The Observer, Mr. Khodorkovsky trailed off and went silent, his eyes scanning the room. It seemed so long ago.

The only child of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's first marriage (he has a half-sister and two half-brothers), Mr. Khodorkovsky bears a strong resemblance to his dad-that calculated, hard-faced expression he became known for as he sat in a steel cage at the front of the Moscow courtroom. And he also possesses the familial resolve-revealed in his father's crisp, focused polemics from Siberian prison, where he has been confined for the past six years. "Honestly, I'm pretty angry," Mr Khodorkovsky told The Observer. "But I don't want to lose hope."

When asked about his family's riches, Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose manicured fingernails sometimes flashed in the overhead lights, said that he did not lead a pampered life, despite reports that his father shuffled considerable assets out of Russia-billions, maybe-before his arrest. "When I was in college, Dad helped out," he said.

"Once I got a job, I started supporting myself. I don't have a luxury lifestyle. I don't drive a Ferrari. I don't take cabs to work every day. I take the subway." He does drive a 2006 BMW X5. But he also holds down a day job, as a project manager at New Media Internet, a tech support company owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, an exiled Russian media tycoon.

On the eve of his father's sentencing, Pavel sent him a note. He did not bother with anything sentimental. Instead, he asked for advice regarding the way to arrange the corporate structure of his own new company, Enertiv, an energy monitoring firm. His father's reply from the Moscow dock: Limit your personal liability.

These communiqués have been as close as the younger Mr. Khodorkovsky is prepared to venture to his homeland, fearful that he might land in prison. "A bag of coke could end up in my luggage," he said. "There is very little recourse in Russia."

Instead, Mr. Khodorkovsky has contributed to his father's defense from afar, organizing rallies in Times Square, meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, forging support from anyone who may put a bug in the Kremlin's ear. Some supporters believe, however faintly, that the current Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin protégé, would like to release Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a sign of his supposed dedication to modernization and an improved business climate.

Mr. Khodorkovsky also administered the Institute of Modern Russia, a human rights organization underwritten by the Eurasia Fund, and his father's Open Society, which promotes democratic development in Russia. "My dad's fight is for something above and beyond his own freedom," he said. "I still have friends in Russia. They tell me he's not alone. There are many similar cases. They just don't get the media attention."

After picking up a phone call from his wife, Mr. Khodorkovsky hurried home for a photo shoot, the media attention increasing on him as his father was being shuttled back to prison. At a busy corner, Mr. Khodorkovsky pleaded with an off-duty cab driver to take him, smiling broadly, then climbed into the yellow minivan. The streets were piled high with snow, and the traffic moved slowly uptown.

"I've grown very fond of New York," he said, looking through the window at the winter scene as the taxi streamed up the West Side Highway. "You can still find peace. I don't think I'll be moving anytime soon."

A photographer was waiting for Mr. Khodorkovsky when his wife, Olesya, a petite woman with dark hair, opened the apartment door on an upper-floor high-rise. Mr. Khodorkovsky and his wife, who is from the Russian city of Penza, south of Moscow, met through friends in New York. Photos of their 1-year-old daughter were tacked to the wall near the open kitchen. A Christmas tree was positioned in the small living room, near a white dining table. Baby toys sat on the gray modern couch, a hobby horse in the corner. Though the Khodorkovskys own the apartment, it is modest, large enough for the small family, but nothing more. With flexible positioning, one may see the Empire State Building through the bedroom window.

Propped on the couch were several placards that Mr. Khodorkovsky had constructed for his rallies. There was one each supporting his father and his father's co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, a former Yukos official. A third placard read, "Putin, let my dad out," in both Russian and English, the words bracketing a photo of Pavel with his father.

Olesya watched the photographer run Mr. Khodorkovsky through his paces. Soon her eyes wandered, though, toward the placards on the couch, a photo of her father-in-law behind bars, a photo of her husband. "I'm afraid to go to Russia," she whispered.

The photo session complete, Mr. Khodorkovsky sat down on his couch. Talk turned to what he will do when his father is released, whenever that may be. "I always thought I'd fly to Moscow and wait outside the prison," he said. "I want to be outside when he comes out." He gestured toward a bottle of Scotch across the apartment, a bottle of Macallan 18, a present from his father to celebrate the birth of his daughter, delivered through Mr. Khodorkovsky's grandparents. "I haven't opened it up yet," Mr. Khodorkovsky said. "I wa
nt to sip it together. We have a lot of catching up to do."

editorial@observer.com

 "Assange said that Russians will soon find out a lot about their country and he wasn't bluffing," Novaya Gazeta said. "Our collaboration will expose corruption at the top tiers of political power. No one is protected from the truth."

The newspaper has been given full access to the Wikileaks database and will begin publishing documents next month.

Novaya Gazeta is a weekly newspaper run by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev, known as an independent and critical alternative to the state-run papers. It was home to Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who wrote about civil rights abuse in Chechnya and corruption in Putin's Kremlin and was assassinated on Putin's birthday in 2006.

Documents about Politovskaya's murder, as well as information linking Russian officials to organized crime, are reportedly in the imminent release.

@kstoeffel | kstoeffel@observer.com

Hot stuff! Putin's probably sicced his old KGB buddies on the those with loose lips, seeking to quash the rumors. But the release of a certain magazine may make it hard to lower Alina's profile -- the beauty is set to stare out from newsstands across the world as the cover girl for January's Russian Vogue.

The Telegraph reports that Putin sternly denied any improper relationship between him and Alina, who also works within Putin's party, after a newspaper ran a story saying he had left his wife and two daughters and taken up with the gymnast.

The issue will almost certainly place newly appointed Russian Vogue editor Viktoria Davydova in hot water, and will come out in January.

If the rumors, which first surfaced in 2008, are true, let's just hope that Putin doesn't croon his love interest to sleep. Yes, Vlad, we know you like Fats Domino tunes, but we can't say we're a fan of the singing voice.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234