Michaela Tolpin | Cold War: Round two?

It's been a few years in the making, but LUKoil is now officially omnipresent. Or so it seemed two weeks ago as I was anxiously driving around New Jersey, looking for a gas station to fill up my minivan.

Stubbornly ignoring my angry orange light, which had been glowering at me for the past 15 miles, I zoomed past the clean-looking red-and-white station. Some things were just more important.

Like my own atom-sized attempt to bring down Russia.

For those who do not drive on the East Coast, LUKoil is the result of a 1991 merger of three separate oil companies, largely thriving off of Russian oil stores. Russia owes this company and the seemingly infinite international demand for oil its recent economic growth and prosperity.

Now, Penn students are, on the whole, internationally aware. What with our foreign-student population (the highest in the Ivy League!) and the natural curiosity that comes with not living under a rock, we pride ourselves on being more up on international affairs than our fearless leader himself.

Unfortunately, global focus on Russia is becoming more and more something to be shelved into the vast file cabinet of 20th-century politics.

But contrary to this belief, Russia is back on top, and President Putin would be damned if he does not make it known.

In 1962, during the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. and the USSR came warhead-to-warhead in what was a fingernail's twitch away from apocalyptic. Nostalgic for those glory days, Russia is reestablishing itself as a power to be reckoned with.

Or, to be more specific, Russian agents are frolicking about Britain with radioactive isotopes.

After all, why should Russia be respectful of international soil? Putin's no Yeltsin-like Western puppet.

It is this very distance that Putin has put between himself and the West that makes his popularity so seemingly infallible within Russia.

"In Gorbachev's time Russia was liked by the West and what did we get for it? We have surrendered everything: eastern Europe, Ukraine, Georgia. NATO has moved to our borders," said Russian Private Agents' spokesman Igor Goloshchapov, as quoted in the August 23rd issue of The Economist.

According to Penn alumnus Andrew Fink, who spent a semester in St. Petersburg last fall, Putin's leadership offers Russian youth "a renewed sense of national pride."

"The first memory of these kids was the collapse of the USSR. . [They] have a sense of nostalgia [for it], and here we have a man, Putin, who is leading the nation back to its proper glory, its proper place," Fink said.

Although Putin may have done Russia a service by stabilizing the country (and some may even argue that the Russian population feels more comfortable in the hands of a czar-like ruler) his government's refusal to cooperate in an investigation of nuclear terrorism is taking it too far.

And it is nuclear terrorism.

What else would you call the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko?

Although I'm just as gung-ho as the next Penn student on civil liberties and freedom of speech, Russia was never that kind of country; roughly a dozen journalists have been killed in recent years for attempting to challenge this general rule. It's a choice between ideology and breathing.

It's a legitimate question whether journalists in Russia feel free to report objectively, or are being pressured by their employers to tow the party line.

I am not advocating righting the Russian government's many human-rights violations; the time of the Truman Doctrine has come and gone, and it should stay that way. Short of genocide, whatever happens within the Motherland's borders is its own business.

But Russia's blatant refusal to help investigate the poisoning of Litvinenko, its purposeful shutting off of gas to the Ukraine, and its recent much-debated bombing of Georgia must not to be tolerated.

In the only way I can, I decided to hit Mother Russia where it hurts: its oil-centric economy. Granted, what I'm doing is nothing big - an infinitesimally small stab into a burly Mafia-like pyramid of power - but at least it's something.

This bully ain't getting his hands on my lunch money.

Michaela Tolpin is a College sophomore from North Caldwell, NJ. Her e-mail address is tolpin@dailypennsylvanian.com. Tuesdays with Michaela appears on Tuesdays.

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