Yesterday Bob blogged about the strangely taboo topic of talking about the economic crisis in Russia’s state-owned media, and the sense of surreal opacity and rumors it has generated. Today there’s a nice piece over on Eurasia Daily Monitor about how the crisis may have an impact on the consensus of Russia’s elite for the Putin-Medvedev tandemocracy of authoritarian capitalism. Pavel K. Baev writes that “The abrupt end of a petro-prosperity that had been taken for granted has revealed and exacerbated divergences and clashes of interests among various groups of loyalists, who suspect that their “social contracts” have been revised without their consent. (…) Who will be rescued from bankruptcy and who is the designated loser is open to bargaining, so the oligarchs have been camping around the Kremlin and wailing about their “social responsibility.”” It’s certainly true that many oligarchs are losing their shirts.