Following the publishing of President Dmitry Medvedev’s extended liberal thought piece, which at least one commentator said may as well have been penned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Kremlin convened a conference yesterday in Yaroslavl entitled “The Modern State and Global Security.”

According to the Reuters report, attendees from the state-approved opposition (Zhirinovsky can come, but Nemtsov can forget about it) spent the time discussing the social compassion of Joseph Stalin, berating American democracy, while a visiting Chinese scholar denounced the evils of separatism (hard to know if this was a shot at Russia’s conduct in Georgia).  Even with the Prime Minister of Spain in attendence, the sideshows attracted the most attention.  The salient message to take home with the leftover caviar – sovereign democracy is still the mindset in Moscow, while the “new security architecture” remains the goal.