Russian Bear Eats Elections Like Candy

The Moscow Times reports on yet another nail in the coffin of Russian “democracy”:

Little more than three months before the parliamentary elections, Channel One has hired a television executive linked to United Russia to oversee its election coverage.

Opposition politicians said the appointment not only dashed their slim hopes of objectivity in pre-election television coverage but also showed tacit support of nationalism in the Kremlin. They promised to complain to the Central Elections Commission.

Andrei Pisarev [pictured -- creepy, isn't he?], formerly head of small Moscow-based Channel Three television, was appointed to the newly created post of deputy director general in charge of elections coverage by Channel One chief Konstantin Ernst in late July, a Channel One spokeswoman said Wednesday. Kommersant first reported the development Wednesday. Repeated attempts to reach Pisarev for comment were unsuccessful. Pisarev told Kommersant that he was not a member of United Russia.

Pisarev, however, has been credited with advising United Russia on several initiatives, including the pro-Kremlin party’s Russian Project. The project, unveiled in February, is ostensibly aimed to promote Russian culture and language in a series of conferences across the country, but it is seen by many as an attempt to steal the nationalist vote. “It is the Kremlin’s approval of nationalist ideology,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, deputy head of the liberal Yabloko party. He condemned Pisarev’s appointment as an example of “the insolence of the authorities” and said Yabloko would ask the Central Elections Commission to investigate the “illegal” recruitment. “After all, television itself determines the election result,” he said.

The Channel One spokeswoman, Larisa Krymova, said the appointment was made for “purely professional” reasons not connected to Pisarev’s political sympathies. “Pisarev is a well-known, professional director who has worked with Channel One on more than one occasion,” Krymova said.

Pisarev played a key role in Channel One’s coverage of the funeral of former President Boris Yeltsin in April, Kommersant said. Pisarev also has covered numerous Russian Orthodox events. Before heading Channel Three, he led the Orthodox Television Information Agency. Channel Three representatives declined immediate comment, asking that questions be sent by fax. United Russia spokesman Konstantin Mikhailov said he was unaware of the appointment. Asked whether Pisarev was indeed a party adviser, he said, “Ask Mr. Pisarev yourself.” United Russia dominates the State Duma, holding 305 of the 446 available seats, and follows any political course designated by President Vladimir Putin. Legislation backed by the Kremlin passes through the house unchallenged. That kind of control is what is at stake in the upcoming elections, said Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. “What a nightmare,” he said of Pisarev’s appointment. “Now the propaganda will begin in earnest.”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Streetwise Professor on the Putin Economy

Streetwise Professor on the prospects of the Putin economy (spoiler alert — they are bleak):

I got a chuckle reading this quote from a Moscow Times article on the growth of the Russian bureaucracy:

From inside the Kremlin’s walls to everyday lives with endless paperwork, bureaucracy rules. Like the nation’s economy, bureaucracy seems to be booming. Determining its exact size is difficult, much like navigating the mire of it. But by all accounts, the number of public servants today likely exceeds Soviet levels. And they are making substantially more money than their average compatriots. Sociologists have detected a growing inclination among young people toward jobs like customs officers or tax inspectors, despite widespread allegations of corruption and inefficiency. [Emphasis mine.]

Er, despite isn’t the right word. Because is more apt. Resources flow to their most highly remunerated use (not necessarily their most efficient one.) In societies where rent seeking is highly rewarded, resources will flow to activities conducive to rent seeking. Just as Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, young Russians are evidently seeking glorious careers in the customs or tax services for exactly the same reason.

This does not bode well for the future of the Russian economy. As Tullock, Anne Kreuger, Vishny & Shleifer, and others have noted, the flow of real resources into rent seeking activities creates a drag on growth. Vishny & Shleifer note that there are sources of increasing returns in rent seeking. Their basic mechanism is that rent seeking depresses the returns to private economic activity, which makes it more attractive to go into rent seeking governmental positions, which results in further depression of the returns to productive work, etc. There are other mechanisms at work too. North, Wallis, & Weingast note that “natural states” built on rent seeking need to suppress private economic activity in order to prevent the rise of political interests that would challenge the rent seekers. Mancur Olson argued that rent seekers come to dominate politics, and introduce rules and regulations that increase their opportunities to extract rents while throttling private economic activity.

Vishny & Shleifer also derived a model in which high rewards to rent seeking activity impede growth by inducing the most talented to go into non-productive activities. In this model, in the productive sector the rate of productivity growth depends on the skill of the most talented individual in that sector (because of spillovers/learning by doing–the less talented learn from the most talented.) High rewards to rent seeking induce the most talented to go into unproductive redistributive activities, thereby reducing growth in the productive sector. (The V-S model presumes free entry into rent seeking activities. Presumably the rent seekers will attempt to protect their turf and erect entry barriers that will mitigate this problem of dynamic inefficiency, but which will create other static deadweight losses as people expend real resources to attempt to get into the cartellized rent seeking sector.)

If the sociologists’ observations are accurate, this is an indication that rent seeking in Russia is not limited to expropriating foreign energy companies, but is instead a more pervasive phenomenon. This would represent a throwback to Tsarist times, and to traditional Russian patramonialism. Sigh.

One other thought comes to mind in this regard. The increasing centralization of power in the Putin years–the re-establishment of the “vertical power”–could actually make things less bad–not good, just less bad. Centralized, “cartellized”, coordinated rent seeking is typically less inefficient than the de-centralized, uncoordinated rent seeking that apparently characterized the Yeltsin years. Vishny-Shleifer analogized the cost of uncoordinated rent seeking to the losses that arise from multiple marginalization that occurs when complementary goods are sold by separate monopolists; integration into a single monopoly can improve efficiency in this case. With corruption, numerous independent bureaucrats each extracting a bribe will collectively charge a bribe that exceeds the monopoly bribe, creates more deadweight loss than the monopoly bribe, and actually results in lower bribery collections. Coordinating the activities of corrupt officials makes everybody better off–though not as well off as they would be if corruption were stamped out. Think of the “anti-corruption” campaigns in Russia as being aimed at making corruption more efficient, not as an attempt to stamp it out altogether. Where’s the fun (and profit) in that?

Similarly, Olson argued that a “stationary bandit” with monopoly control over a territory has an “encompassing interest” in encouraging some economic growth to permit him to extract greater revenues. In contrast, “roving bandits” view the populace as a commons, and have an incentive to steal as much as they can as soon as they can lest somebody else steal first. They have no incentive to encourage any economic growth as unlike the stationary bandit, they can’t get their hands on the fruits of this growth.

This is not to say that I advocate strong power verticals that coordinate theft. It is just to say that as bad as this is, things can be worse. This can also help explain Putin’s popularity. Compared to a normal civil society in which rent seeking and corruption are highly circumscribed, Putin’s Russia appears dreadful. But that’s not a comparison that most Russians can make, never having lived in such a normal civil society. Compared to the era of roving bandits and uncoordinated corruption that preceded Putin, ordered corruption by the vertical power looks pretty good. The tragedy is that many Russian minds identify chaotic corruption with freedom, economic liberty, and democracy, as that is how the transition was described to them. And Putin is not about to disabuse them of that notion. Indeed, he is doing everything to reinforce it, as AEI’s Leon Aron discusses in this article.

One last thing on the Russian economy. I am reviewing some data on recent Russian economic performance, and will soon post an extended entry analyzing that performance, and making some observations on what the future is likely to hold.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

NGOs, Buried Alive

The Moscow Times reports on the Kremlin’s declaration of war on foreign NGO groups operating in Russia.

In a blizzard of bureaucratic absurdity, the new registration law for nongovernmental organizations has created administrative hurdles threatening to put many out of business and deterring others from setting up shop at all. When the bill passed last year, NGO representatives suggested that it was an instance of bureaucracy being deliberately beefed up to fight organizations the government dislikes. Now, they say that up to three-quarters of over 200,000 officially registered noncommercial organizations could face closure. “It’s just tremendous bureaucracy,” said Jens Siegert, head of the Heinrich Foundation’s Moscow office. He said his organization, affiliated with the German Green Party, had to hire one extra staff member solely to cope with the workload.

Part of that workload came from a stipulation in the law that every single organization had to submit new accounting forms to the Federal Registration Service, a sprawling government body with roughly 40,000 employees that reports to the Justice Ministry. The agency’s deputy spokeswoman, Lyubov Mikhailova, said that by May 20, just 48,470 — less than 24 percent of the more than 216,000 registered NGOs in the country — had submitted accounting forms, more than a month after the original deadline in April had passed. Mikhailova did not comment on what the consequences of noncompliance would be for the organizations. In a written response, she merely stated that during the first half of this year, 18,022 domestic and 34 foreign organizations received written warnings for not submitting the forms or violating submission procedures. This amounts to 8 percent of the national and 15 percent of the 226 foreign-run NGOs.

But critics say that just doing everything necessary to comply itself amounts to punishment. In addition, foreign-run organizations must hand in quarterly financial reports and a plan of their activities for the coming year that includes the amount of money allotted for each project by Oct. 31. Authorities must be notified of any new program at least one month in advance and of any essential change of plans within 10 business days of the decision.

The law also requires all foreign NGOs to re-register their offices by Oct. 18. Dozens of NGOs, including some that had submitted their documents prior to the deadline, were not in the registry by Oct. 18 and had to suspend their activities in Russia for days or weeks until the registry reviewed their paperwork and officially re-registered them. The recipients see the additional requirements as proof of what they believe is the regulation’s real purpose — to rule out the possibility that foreign organizations could provoke public unrest in the way the Kremlin believes happened in Georgia and Ukraine. “I call this law an Orange measure,” Siegert said in a telephone interview, referring to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power. “NGOs are forced to occupy themselves with internal matters instead of their real work,” he said. He also suggested that the relatively low numbers of warnings issued was a sign that the authorities themselves were also overwhelmed by the workload.

The new regulations prevented small organizations in particular from focusing on their real activities, said Inara Gulpe-Laganovska, NGO liaison officer for Human Rights Watch in Russia. She also said the law contained disproportionate punishment for violations. “Only two types exist — suspension or liquidation,” she said in e-mailed comments. Aside from the burdens, critics say the law allows the authorities to engage in excessive interference. “The worst thing is that the reporting makes NGOs vulnerable by giving registration officials an unprecedented level of discretion in deciding which projects comply with Russia’s national interest,” Gulpe-Laganovska said.

Human rights campaigners also point to the fact that authorities have arbitrarily targeted some organizations with seemingly ludicrous demands. The St. Petersburg-based NGO Citizens’ Watch, for instance, has been asked to disclose the entirety of its written correspondence with anyone or any organization outside the office over a three-year period — including e-mails. “The registration service came to us in July and showed us a screening warrant,” the organization’s chairman, Boris Pustintsev, said in a telephone interview. “They then suddenly demanded that we produce all outgoing correspondence from July 2004 to July 2007.” Pustintsev said he initially refused because he believed the request exceeded the agency’s competence. After a board meeting, however, the NGO did grudgingly agree to comply “because otherwise the authorities could freeze our bank accounts,” he said. But Pustintsev added that Citizens’ Watch also decided to “raise hell” with the Federal Registration Service. “We will sue them, we will appeal to [service head Sergei] Vasilyev, and we might take the matter to the Constitutional Court,” Pustintsev said.

Other organizations have already been officially closed under dubious circumstances. The International Youth Human Rights Movement — a group that says it has 1,000 active members in Russia and abroad — learned in early August that it had been shut down by a court in Nizhny Novgorod. “The ruling was made June 13, but we only heard about it by chance almost two months later,” the movement’s coordinator, Dmitry Makarov, said in a telephone interview. The rationale behind the decision seems to stem from a basic bureaucratic mix-up. “The court based its decision on our failure to submit accounting forms to the local branch of the registration service,” Makarov said. Instead, he said, the documents had been filed to the Federal Registration Service in Moscow, as requested, because the organization had reorganized into an international group in 2004. Bereft of its legal status, the movement is now filing a legal complaint against the ruling.

Others are also trying to fight back. Agora, an interregional association of Russian human rights groups, said in a memorandum that it found 33 cases of unlawful actions from the service against NGOs from April 2006 to May 2007. Agora provided legal assistance to those concerned in 20 of them. The cases demonstrated the service’s “unfriendly bias against NGOs,” excessive demands on their operations and, in some cases, an unwillingness to maintain constructive relations, the memorandum said. Another consequence is that setting up an NGO has become a daunting task. A study prepared under the presidential human rights council found that the cost of legal procedures was 33 percent higher than setting up a business and requires more time. “It takes a minimum of six to eight weeks to register an NGO, while registering a commercial company takes from seven to 10 days,” said Anton Zolotov of the Institute of Civil Analysis, who co-authored the survey, preliminary versions of which were released earlier this year. Siegert said he knew of at least two cases where individuals had opted to open up a business instead of an NGO, just to avoid the hassle.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

August 24, 2007 — Contents

FRIDAY AUGUST 24 CONTENTS

(1) Kasparov Warns Australia on Selling Uranium to Russia

(2) More Proof of How Erudite and Informed Russians Are

(3) Annals of Russian Humliation

(4) The Observer Blasts “Neo-Soviet” Russia

(5) On Putin and the New Cold War

NOTES FROM ALL OVER: We can’t say it comes as much of a surprise to us, but it turns out that, on top of everything else, Maria Shamapova is bad in bed, too. Maybe right about now she’s thinking she should’ve stayed in Siberia and made tractors. And you know what? We’re kinda thinking that too. Whoops! This just in: That’s just another one of Mark Ames‘ lies. Apparently, when he needs to fill space, he just thinks up some lies. But you already knew that, didn’t you, clever little LR reader that you are. What you may not have known is that he was also lying when he said all those nasty things about America. Really, he makes George Bush look like Benedict Arnold.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Kasparov Warns Australia not to Sell Nuke Material to Russia

Australia’s Bulletin magazine (analagous to the American Newsweek) reports on Russia’s insidious efforts to get nuclear fuel from Australia (we have commentary running on Publius Pundit about this topic and have written about it here before):

Australia will share blame if yellow cake sold to Russia ends in the wrong hands, ex-chess champion says.

One of Russia’s most prominent Opposition political figures, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, has warned the Howard Government that Russia cannot be trusted to use Australian uranium solely to power its domestic energy industry. In an exclusive interview with The Bulletin on the eve of APEC, Kasparov says Australia will have to accept moral responsibility if Russia on-sells the uranium to a rogue state or uses it for other non-civil purposes. “Should Australian uranium end up in the wrong hands … Australia will not be able to act innocent or to claim ignorance,” he told The Bulletin. During the APEC forum meeting in Sydney next month it is understood the deal between the two countries to export about 2000 tonnes of Australian yellow cake annually (providing about one third of Russia’s imported uranium stock) will be signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and John Howard. Russian investigative journalist Grigory Pasko, who was jailed in Siberia after revealing the Russian Naval Fleet had dumped nuclear waste in the Pacific, will also be in Sydney next week arguing that Australia must impose tougher safeguards on any uranium sales to Russia. The demand for uranium worldwide, particularly in energy-poor countries like India and China, has seen the share price for uranium companies more than double in the last two years. Australia now has more than 200 companies whose main business is uranium exploration. Australian Uranium Association chief executive Michael Angwin says spending on exploration is set to pass $100 million this year, up from $77 million last year. “There has been a ten-fold increase in the last four years,” Angwin says. The reason for the hype is simple. The ALP dropped its no-new mines policy earlier this year and close on its heels, the Federal Government flagged a possible expansion of the nuclear power industry in Australia.”There is a high level of confidence in the fact that Australia has a much more liberal framework for industry to operate in,” Angwin says

Download a copy of the full Bulletin interview here (courtesy of Robert Amsterdam).

As the Epoch Times reports, lawyer and blogger Robert Amsterdam is also sounding the warning call. Way to go, Robert! Pasko, Amsterdam and Kasparov is a formidable trio, to be sure!

“All Australians should be concerned about advanced talks to sell uranium to Russia,” wrote British Lawyer Robert R Amsterdam in an article published in the Herald Sun on August 20.

Defence counsel for jailed Russian millionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mr Amsterdam cautioned the Australian Government over an expected uranium deal next month between Canberra and the Kremlin. “When negotiating the Russia-Australia Nuclear Safeguards Agreement, the Howard Government must consider the Kremlin’s track record,” he wrote. “Australia should be very careful not to rush into a deal without rigorous rules and safeguards relating to the use and enrichment of uranium and the development of nuclear technologies.”

As evidence of the regime’s attitude towards the nuclear issue he pointed out that the Kremlin imprisoned a journalist for reporting on Russia’s illegal dumping of nuclear waste in the Pacific Ocean. Mr Amsterdam also noted that; “When the United States and Europe wished to defend themselves against the possibility of rogue missiles from Asia, President Putin threatened to point Russian nuclear missiles at London, Paris and Berlin.”

“Moscow sells nuclear technology to Iran and has agreed to build a nuclear research centre in Burma,” he noted. Foreign policy in Russia, he stated, is governed with a firm hand. He gave examples of gas and oil pipelines to neighbouring countries being shut off and trade embargoes. In his article Mr Amsterdam also described the current regime run by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. “By 2003, a powerful group of former intelligence and military strongmen had succeeded in taking control of Putin’s Kremlin power base,” he stated. “Democratic pluralists and market economists were pushed out or marginalised. Political opposition was crushed. “Most major news media were bought out. The country’s energy resources were brought under Kremlin control,” he wrote. “Neighbours are bullied and long-time business partners are extorted. Opponents are jailed, such as former Yukos oil company boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or killed. “A belief has taken root that Russia is entitled to assert itself aggressively and above the law if need be,” he stated. “No one is above the extortion tactics of the Kremlin and its selective application and misapplication of laws.”

It is also expected when Vladimir Putin arrives for the APEC meetings next month, along with a nuclear deal he will also sign an economic accord which The Age reports will allow for increased Russian investment in Australia, particularly in the mining and minerals sector.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More Proof of How Erudite and Well-informed Russians Really Are

Writing in the Moscow Times, using the example of Darfur, columnist Georgy Bovt neatly summarizes the extent of Russia’s barbaric ignorance and callous disregard for the rest of the world, totally incompatible with G-8 membership.

Russian newspapers almost never write about events in the Darfur province of Sudan, where bloody fighting between government forces and Muslim rebels has dragged on for years. The country was mentioned briefly in the country’s print and television news in mid-August, but only in connection with an initiative by a number of U.S. congressmen to boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing because of China’s “incorrect” policies in Sudan. Their primary complaint is that Chinese firms, motivated exclusively by profit, have abandoned all moral principles in their attempts to gain a foothold in the Sudanese market.

The typical editor or producer of a Russian newspaper or television station would probably say that readers and viewers aren’t interested in Darfur. I don’t find such statements very convincing. I think virtually any subject taken from any part of the world can be interesting, depending on how it is presented and the quality of the reporting.

For example, I recently listened with great interest to an account of the situation in Darfur from a Russian politician who had traveled there as a tourist. In addition to showing me some extremely interesting photos, he confirmed that the whole system of humanitarian aid distribution in Darfur was nothing but a highly profitable business run by companies with tribal connections to the nobility. Isn’t this a good theme for an investigative reporter? Sure it is, but you won’t read about it in any reputable Russian publication or see any television coverage on the subject. You won’t learn anything at all in the press about the enormous tragedy in Darfur that has already claimed over 200,000 lives and turned a huge region of Africa into a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Russian journalistic community is too lazy to come up with new stories, much less to present the outside world to their readers and encourage them to expand their outlook. A large part of the journalistic community has long relied on the authorities for instructions and recommendations on what to report. To be sure, there are a small number of journalists who love to busy themselves with criticizing the authorities from time to time. But in either case, the focus of media coverage is on domestic themes. When the outside world is presented in the Russian media, it appears very small and squalid.

In contrast, most reputable Western newspapers report on the situation in Darfur fairly frequently. Leading U.S. newspapers, for example, run stories on it almost every other day. And the Darfur conflict also has a place in U.S. foreign policy, with Washington effectively leading international efforts to end the fighting there.

In general, U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration has given increasingly greater attention to Africa over the years. Washington has increased its financial aid to African nations by 67 percent and allocated an additional $15 billion for the fight against AIDS there. Most political analysts explain this increased emphasis on international humanitarian issues, which include human trafficking and sexual enslavement, as arising from a sharp increase in the Christian evangelical movement’s political influence in Washington.

Darfur received some coverage in the Russian media not long ago, but only in connection with the latest Group of Eight meeting in Germany. No other initiatives regarding Darfur were made either before or after that meeting. In this respect, Russian diplomacy closely resembles the Russian press: They both have very little interest in the topic. Diplomats are extremely passive regarding almost all international humanitarian problems.

But if the country’s politicians are increasingly vocal with their cries that “Russia is back” on the international stage, then they should show much more interest in international humanitarian issues. After all, a country’s greatness and standing are measured not only be the number of times it says “no” to its partners.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Russian Humiliation: Neo-Soviet Russia Drops Another Sochi-Related Clanger

The Moscow Times reports on how barbaric, chicken-with-the-head-off Russia humiliated itself before the world at a recent air show it attempted to host. Reading this, do you dare to imagine dear reader what will happen when Russia attempts the Olympics, on a far grander scale?

At the opening of the MAKS 2007 air show, half a dozen bewildered delegates from Italian industrial group Finnmeccanica sheepishly boarded a barely marked shuttle bus as the temperature was rising and their patience running thin. As the driver pulled away, he veered as if to head in the opposite direction from the main event. “Please,” yelled one of the exasperated Italians, “if he’s taking us back to the entrance again, someone just shoot him.”

On Wednesday, the second day of the air show, that irritation was palpable from many foreign participants and visitors. While organizers have boasted that MAKS deserves a place in the big league of international air shows, words like “amateur” and “bizarre” were more common in assessments coming from foreigners. The most common complaints ranged from poor transport links and inadequate infrastructure to ponderous security checks, bad food and revolting public toilets.

A number of prominent officials, including Sergei Chemezov, the head of state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, have credited MAKS with climbing into the ranks of major international air shows like France’s Le Bourget and Britain’s Farnborough. This year’s event is the biggest ever, and with almost 800 companies from nearly 40 countries, foreign participation is up by almost 50 percent. The size and scope of the event have been a constant selling point for Russian officials, who have pushed it as a symbol of a resurgent aviation industry. Alexei Fyodorov, head of the newly formed, state-run United Aircraft Corporation, said last week that the country would sell $250 billion worth of military and civilian aircraft over the next 18 years.

But some representatives of foreign firms warn that the list of inconveniences faced by participants could scuttle Russian attempts to sell both itself and its aircraft to Western investors. “It is amateur,” said Nathalie Merand, a spokeswoman for Brazilian plane manufacturer Embraer, just as the backlighting at the company’s stand failed. “An air show is about business, and this is more like a public holiday. It is very expensive to be here and it is not worth it,” Merand said, listing problems from a flooded stand to a lack of overall coordination.

Another Embraer representative, who asked not to be identified, said the company was weighing whether it was interested in returning to the next MAKS event in two years. Complaining about the poor food and arbitrary document checks by police, he said he “did not know whether to throw up or urinate” in the free portable toilets. “All this is a very bizarre contrast to the claims that it is on the same level as Farnborough or Le Bourget,” said an official with another foreign firm. “They always claim that this is the best MAKS, but it might actually be the worst.”

Anna Abarshalina, head of communications for MAKS 2007, said she was aware of the complaints, but that senior event officials were unavailable for comment Wednesday afternoon. The biggest gripe was getting to the site, with some participants saying it had taken up to seven hours to travel the approximately 40 kilometers from Moscow to the Zhukovsky airfield. “They should at least have a separate entrance for the people running the exhibits,” EADS spokesman Gregor Von Kursell said. “They shouldn’t make them queue up with children and grandmothers and the toilet cleaners.”

Temperatures approaching the mid-30s didn’t help the moods of exhibitors and industry representatives as they were forced to wait in line. But with the air show an obvious target for a possible terrorist attack, most said some delays were understandable. Francois Roudier, vice president of the Le Bourget air show, described traffic and lines for security checks at the French event as a “nightmare” for organizers there as well. He said MAKS was relatively young at 15; the Le Bourget show is in its 98th year. “Crowd control can always be better,” Roudier said by telephone from Paris. “There will be solutions in years to come.”

Amanda Stainer, Farnborough International’s director of exhibitions and events, said traffic snarls were a problem that organizers of the British show had been forced to address in the past. “We got a working group together and agreed on a plan with the authorities,” Stainer said in a telephone interview. “It was a really coordinated effort.” Measures that helped improve the traffic situation at Farnborough included limiting thoroughfares on the way to the site to one-way traffic and establishing separate lanes for buses.

Some participants were more positive about the event once inside. Rolls-Royce representative Dave Gould said that even though it took taken him five hours to get from his hotel to his stand, the event went well. “Once you’re in here, then it’s OK,” Gould said. He said MAKS was more on a level with smaller air shows, like one in Beijing, but the rapid expansion in the Russian market meant that it was unlikely foreign businesses would be put off. For some of the participants, MAKS even offered an atmosphere that could not be found elsewhere. “I like this event,” Jean Herve, a representative for French company Le Guellec, said jovially as he waited for workmen to sweep water away from his stand after a pipe burst overnight at the Seimens’ exhibit, flooding the pavilion. “It is more festive here,” Herve said. “Le Bourget is more about business.” And with shashlik stands, myriad fast food, souvenir stalls and even a giant hot air balloon in the shape of a can of Baltika beer, the event had the air of a carnival or championship sports event.

As for the problems with logistics, the writing may have already been on the wall last week — or, perhaps more accurately, inauspiciously falling off. Boris Alyoshin, head of the Federal Industry Agency, which organized the event, offered a preview for journalists Aug. 16. Just as he was extolling the event’s virtues, the power cut out, silencing the microphones and plunging the hall into darkness. As journalists stood around in the gloom, two posters for the show came loose from the wall and crashed noisily to the ground.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

The Observer Blasts the Neo-Soviet Kremlin

An editorial in the Sunday Observer, referred by an anonymous commenter (who suggests clicking through the link and reading the pathological frenzy of Russophile commenters, including obviously a number of Nashi freaks, lashing out at what is in fact a rather moderate view of the situation):

The diplomatic atmosphere between Britain and Russia has been getting sharply chillier since Moscow refused to extradite the man Scotland Yard accuses of the murder of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko. There were tit-for-tat embassy expulsions. Now the BBC World Service has had its licence to broadcast in Moscow revoked.

But this is a sideshow in a broader story of Russia’s growing suspicion of the West and a tendency towards neo-Soviet grandstanding. President Vladimir Putin last week said that, in response to ‘strategic threats by other military powers’, Russian long-range bombers would resume their Cold War routine of flights around the world. Russian jets have also started testing Nato defences, ‘buzzing’ targets near US and UK bases.

Russia is particularly peeved about US plans to deploy an anti-missile defence shield, supported by facilities in former Eastern Bloc countries. Moscow does not believe Washington’s claim that the shield is meant to ward off future Iranian or North Korean attacks.

Russian insecurity is easy to understand. The collapse of the Soviet Union cost Russia its global trading system, its European military alliance and a huge swath of its territory, including many ethnic Russians now resident in neighbouring states. Any country that went through such a trauma might react by retreating into aggrieved ultra-nationalism. That is what Germany did, for example, after the First World War.

The comparison can be overstated. The Soviet Union did not suffer a military defeat in 1991 and the West did not impose punitive reparations. But it is striking how much Mr Putin’s international sabre-rattling is matched by authoritarian tendencies at home. Political dissent has been crushed and state media promote a cult of the President.

Last week’s scrambling of aged bombers to patrol the skies is a desperate bid for international attention and domestic applause. Such posturing is a sign of weakness. Russia has an underdeveloped economy, dependent on rising oil prices. Mr Putin wants recognition and respect from the West more than conflict. He is open to negotiation. But we must be wary of this neo-Soviet state. Britain can reassure Russia that it wants co-operation and partnership. But history warns of the danger of appeasing aggressive nationalism.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On Putin and the New Cold War

Moscow Times columnist Alexander Golts sees Vladimir Putin’s decision to begin bomber flights against the West as his formal declaration of a new cold war:

Militarism is not only when the military makes all the key government decisions. It is also when civilian politicians use military solutions as the universal tool to solve all of their problems.

This can lead to some interesting results. One example was when President Vladimir Putin announced last week the start of a new Cold War. While standing on an artillery range during what was called anti-terrorist military training maneuvers by members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Putin declared that Russian strategic bombers would resume regular, long-range patrols — or “tours of duty” as Putin said in televised remarks Friday — for the first time since 1992.

I can imagine how professional military leaders winced when they heard this statement. After all, resuming regular patrols means that planes are flying with nuclear weapons on board, ready to be fired at the order of the commander in chief. The last time Moscow’s strategic bombers flew regular sorties was during one of the more heated stages in U.S.-Soviet relations — from January 1985 to April 1987.

But I really don’t think that the 14 strategic bombers, which carried cruise missiles with nuclear warheads, completed their sorties Friday over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans with any intention of launching an attack. If that had been the case, the U.S. reaction would have been much harsher than the caustic comments we heard from U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: “If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that’s their decision.”

Last week’s announcement regarding regular, long-range bomber missions is just the latest in a series of threatening stances by the Kremlin that take us back to the era of the 1980s. Remember Putin’s statement in February 2004 during military exercises, where he claimed that Russia had developed a “miracle missile” that could overcome any anti-missile defense system. And of course there was the explosive Munich speech, in which, among other things, Putin revealed his belief that the heightened U.S.-Soviet confrontation of the 1980s was one of the most stable periods in international relations. This was a time when Moscow and Washington focused on mutual containment by significantly strengthening their military capabilities.

Putin has become quite nervous of late about a fictitious danger that he seems to have concocted himself: the West’s intention to interfere in Russia’s transfer of power in 2008, when Putin’s second term comes to an end. The president is trying to protect his country from outside enemy influences by playing the Cold War card. This tactic enables him to rally the people and convince them that any criticism of his Kremlin is an insidious ploy by foreign powers to prevent Russia from “getting up off its knees” to become a global superpower again.

This whole anti-West campaign is a farce, of course, but the question is whether this farce will grow in intensity and become a very real and dangerous drama. This could happen if Washington begins taking at face value the Kremlin’s repeated declarations of its growing military potential. Although the Kremlin’s bold statements against the West may have been designed for primarily domestic political goals, it could, nevertheless, lead us back to a serious confrontation.

The Peace Mission 2007 maneuvers, a joint military exercise of SCO member countries held last week in the Chelyabinsk region, show once again that conventional military forces are ill-equipped to fight an effective battle against terrorism. The exercise involved about 6,000 troops from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and about 1,000 pieces of military hardware, from fighter jets and bombers to heavy artillery. In these simulated training maneuvers, a group of mock terrorists seized a population center in SCO member nation “A.” An armed gang of fighters from country “N” then broke through to them. Under these conditions, the SCO states consulted and decided upon a coordinated anti-terrorist operation. The combined military forces of the six SCO member nations then killed the terrorists and set the hostages free.

On one hand, these maneuvers demonstrated a new level of military cooperation between Russia, China and the Central Asian member nations of the SCO. It would seem that, on the surface, much was achieved: A mechanism for joint action and decision making has been established; China has proven its ability to project its armies and military hardware — including air power — into Russia; and military leaders were able to coordinate complex military operations among six different nations.

What is most important, however, is that the Peace Mission 2007 training exercises — despite all of its claims — have no application whatsoever in the fight against terrorism. It is obvious that the army is the wrong tool for battling terrorists. The bombing of the Moscow-St. Petersburg train shows that a conventional army cannot prevent a terrorist act. Law enforcement agencies must be the ones to combat terrorists, using their agents to infiltrate the ranks of terrorist organizations. Fighter jets and bombers, like the ones paraded with so much fanfare in Peace Mission 2007, are of very little use in this struggle.

In addition to terrorists, the joint exercises of Peace Mission 2007 identified another target — separatists and insurgents. It is no coincidence that some analysts saw a connection between the Peace Mission 2007 maneuvers and events in Andijan, Uzbekistan, in May 2005, when the regime of President Islam Karimov used bullets from government troops to disperse a protest in the town’s main square, resulting in scores of civilian deaths. Karimov called the protest a terrorist uprising, and Moscow supported that version of events.

As the SCO members attempt to develop conventional military solutions to solve terrorist threats, the question is who will they label as terrorists in each concrete situation. It is clearly in Russia and China’s best interests to ensure stability in Central Asia. But, according to Moscow and Beijing’s interpretation, stability means one thing — keeping the current ruling regimes in power. What’s more, these leaders do not understand that the most serious threat to stability in the region is the crushing poverty among their citizens. At the same time, Moscow and Beijing have made it quite clear that they are not willing to work with the West to resolve the problems in the region.

The joint training exercises last week clearly demonstrated Moscow and Beijing’s readiness to use military measures to keep the weak and corrupt Central Asian regimes in power. And the Kremlin has once again shown that military force is an unsuitable tool to achieve political goals. Putin’s announcement on Friday that regular, long-range patrols of strategic bombers will be re-established is just the latest example of this fundamentally flawed policy.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

August 23, 2007 — Contents

THURSDAY AUGUST 23 CONTENTS

(1) Arap Speaks

(2) Annals of the Neo-Soviet Crackdown on NGOs

(3) Annals of the Neo-Soviet Crackdown on Bloggers

(4) Crazed Russia Again Menaces Britain with Nukes

(5) Oops, They did it Again

NOTE: Here’s the most recent snapshot of our international readership, courtesy of Site Meter. As an LR reader, you are part of a large and very international community of people who are concerned about the security risks posed by neo-Soviet Russia not only to the outside world but to the Russian people themselves. We’re proud to note how many countries patronize our blog, and especially proud of the fact that the third-largest group of readers comes from Russia. That shows there is still hope!

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Arap Speaks

The Independent Reports:

Larisa Arap has just emerged from a 46-day imprisonment in two Russian psychiatric hospitals. Pills were forced down her throat and she received injection after injection. She doesn’t know what medications they were, or whether they will cause permanent damage.

“I don’t feel very well, but I have a fighting spirit,” Mrs Arap said yesterday, adding that sometimes she was so drugged she could barely walk or speak

She was forcibly interned, not for health reasons, but over her association with the opposition group led by former chess star Garry Kasparov, the United Civil Front. Her arrest stemmed from the publication of an article entitled “Madhouse,” exposing the ghoulish practices of a Russian psychiatric hospital in the Murmansk edition of his organisation’s newspaper, Dissenters’ March.

She was interned in the very hospital she had written about. “We’re ready to take this to court, although the medics have made it clear that we’ll lose,” she said.

Russian activists say her ordeal confirms what they’ve argued for years: punitive psychiatry did not end with the Soviet Union. Now, critics suggest, if someone has a grudge – a husband, a business partner, even a psychiatrist – it isn’t difficult to get them confined to a padded room.

In recent years, Mrs Arap had been looking after the child of her daughter, Taisiya, in her home town of Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Problems first arose in 2003, when she uncovered corruption in her local housing association, as she reported in “Madhouse.” She was then attacked in her building, mystery callers threatened to murder her, and finally she was warned by the FSB, the KGB’s successor, to keep quiet. She didn’t.

Taken to a mental ward, Mrs Arap noted that many of its occupants seemed perfectly sane. “I was surprised that among them were lots of normal people,” she wrote in “Madhouse”. “But how they [staff] communicated with them: They shouted, they beat them up, they put them on drips, after which people became like zombies, they raped them, carried them off in the night and returned them in the morning, tormented.”

One woman was threatened with the removal of organs, Mrs Arap said. Children were told that if they didn’t give massages to medics they’d receive electro-shock therapy.

Mrs Arap was freed, but on 5 July, she was restrained at a clinic after stopping for documentation needed to obtain a drivers’ license. Her doctor asked if she had written “Madhouse,” and when she confirmed, police escorted her to a Murmansk mental hospital. Taisiya said that when she was first arrested, Mrs Arap was beaten, and went on a 5-day hunger strike in protest, consuming nothing but water and smoking cigarettes. It was only on 18 July that a court sanctioned her hospitalisation; until then, she had been detained illegally. Mrs Arap was moved to a hospital near Apatity, 180 miles from Murmansk, “without her agreement or the agreement of her relatives,” Taisiya said.

It was “a closed hospital from which people rarely return. … No positive feelings arise in this hospital. It’s a psychological hospital for the difficult, the dangerous, the abandoned.” Mrs Arap was eventually released when a commission, initiated by Russia’s human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, said there was no reason for her to be hospitalised. She is due in court today to protest her treatment, and the United Civil Front plans to prosecute everyone involved, although a representative admitted the group has little chance of winning. “We were never told anything concrete about why she was locked up,” Taisiya said. “The most frightening thing of all is that the law gives a lot of power to psychiatrists and doctors to do what they want.”

UPDATE: Some malignant little Russophile troll, illiterate and hence unable to read our comment publication rules, has claimed that the world’s newspapers have not noticed Arap and that this proves the world doesn’t care about her. Just to help him look even more ridiculous, we offer the following additional links from major English language publications around the world. Undoubtedly, there are many in other languages as well.

America – Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, New York Times

Great Britain – The BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph

Australia – The Age

France – The International Herald Tribune

Russia – The Barents Observer

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of the Neo-Soviet Crackdown on NGOs

The Independent reports:

At least 600 Russian NGOs, defending everything from consumers’ to Communists’ rights, have been deregistered for failing to comply with cumbersome new rules, a Russian media monitoring group said. The NGOs are, in effect, crippled, unable to open bank accounts or new offices. The Voronezh-based Interregional Group of Human Rights Defenders added that in some cases, the deregistering appeared to be politically motivated.

Critics of the NGO registration law, which came into effect in April 2006 and requires NGOs to file lengthy annual reports, have lambasted it as an excuse to clamp down on Russia’s nascent civil society. Opponents of the government can be deregistered over technicalities, they say. The government, however, argues that many NGOs are fronts for criminals or terrorists and need to be vetted. “There’s an opinion among the country’s leadership that the revolutions that happened in Ukraine and Georgia were begun by NGOs,” said the report’s author, Olga Gnezdilova, referring to pro-democracy uprisings in the former Soviet nations.

In October, 77 NGOs, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were temporarily forced to suspend activities after missing a registration deadline. Ella Pamfilova, a top adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, later admitted that the new law was suffocating NGOs. This year, only 216,000 of around 500,000 Russian NGOs were able to meet the registration deadline, the Kommersant business daily reported on Monday. The remainder can be taken to court and stripped of their registration. The new report, which collates media reports from eight regions, says that NGOs are being declared inactive by courts though some claim they filed all the necessary documents.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of the Neo-Soviet Crackdown on Bloggers

Republishing from BBC Monitoring, Red Orbit offers the following translation of a Russian TV broadcast about the neo-Soviet blog crackdown:

Text of “24″ news report by Russian Ren TV on 22 August

[Presenter] No gossiping on Zhivoy Zhurnal [Live Journal]. Russian justice has extended its reach to the world wide web. Several people have come under close police scrutiny for their statements on the Internet. In Perm, the Internet user Dmitriy Shirinkin [as received] could end up in the dock for a prose essay full of hatred of everything from the authorities to the TV show Dom- 2 [Russian version of Big Brother].

Meanwhile, a blogger from Syktyvkar, Savva Terentyev, has been careless in his description of the men in epaulets. Nina Davlidzyanova [as received] has more.

[Correspondent] The musician Savva Terentyev had planned to spend his summer on tour, but he has been forced to spend his holiday in his home city Syktyvkar, under orders not to leave the city. It could all have been different if on one fateful evening, a policeman had not decided to take a look at information freely circulating on the net, as it says in the case.

[Savva Terentyev] He sometimes read the blog of Boris Suranov [in whose blog Terentyev posted his comments] at state expense, although there’s no ban on that. Found it, read it, took offence.

[Correspondent] Savva described the police officers with scathing expressions, accusing them of corruption.

[Anton Nosik, captioned as manager of an Internet blog] The people who launched the criminal case are trying in this way to portray police-turned-crooks as a social group that enjoys protection from Russian legislation. It seems to me that it ought be us who are protected by the law, not crooks.

[Correspondent] Most Internet users justify Terentyev, and say the constitution gives everyone the right to their own opinion, which can be expressed in both blogs and letters to the editor. The prosecutor’s office in the Republic of Komi believes differently. There, they say the musician could face up to four years in prison under the [Russian Criminal Code] article on inciting hatred or enmity as well as abasing human dignity.

[Eduard Guskov, captioned as head of the investigations directorate of the Republic of Komi prosecutor's office] First, we are sure that Terentyev’s actions constitute a crime. We believe that whichever lawyer comes, it won’t prevent a lawful verdict in this case.

[Correspondent] The first court hearing of the Terentyev case is set for September. There are some who believe that is a good sign. At last, legal rights are reaching the Internet.

[Sergey Lukyanenko, captioned as writer] Freedom should not be confused with permissiveness. Blogs, in essence, are mass media on the Internet. Correspondingly, they are subject to the same laws as printed publications.

[Correspondent] In August this year alone, two sentences were passed for inciting hatred on the Internet – in Novosibirsk and Krasnodar. One culprit got away with a R130,000 fine [slightly over 5,000 dollars at the current exchange rate]. The other was given a 1.5-year suspended sentence. But it is still too early to speak of a trend, say analysts – at least while such cases are still a rarity in Moscow.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Crazed Russia Once Again Menaces UK with Nuclear Attack

The BBC reports that Russia has once again menaced it with nuclear attack in the manner of a crude thug, a rogue nation like Iran:

Two new RAF Typhoon jets shadowed a Russian bomber heading for Britain, the Ministry of Defence has said. The jets were scrambled on Friday 17 August to identify the Russian aircraft, which turned back before it reached UK skies. The MoD said: “RAF Typhoons from Numbers 3(F) and XI Squadrons launched to shadow a Russian Bear-H aircraft over the North Atlantic Ocean.” The BBC’s Gordon Corera said the incident was not a security threat. He said a similar incident occurred in July, but that this represented a new, more provocative Russian foreign policy. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has recently resumed the Soviet-era practice of sending bomber aircraft on long-range flights.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Oops! They did it AGAIN! Russia Keeps Right on Violating Georgian Airspace

The BBC reports:

Georgia has accused Russia of violating Georgian airspace for the second time in a month. The foreign ministry in Tbilisi said a Russian fighter jet flew 5km (3 miles) into Georgian territory on Tuesday. Moscow immediately denied the claim, saying Russian planes did not fly near the Georgian border on that day. Earlier this month, Georgia said a Russian plane had dropped a missile on Georgian territory, an accusation strongly denied by Russia. On Wednesday, Georgia’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the Russian jet had crossed into the north-west of Georgia. It said the incursion had been tracked by the Georgian air defence system. Relations between the two former Soviet republics have been strained since a spy row last year.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

August 22, 2007 — Contents

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 22 CONTENTS

(1) In Putin’s Prosperous Moscow . . . No Hot Water

(2) Free At Last!

(3) Thinking of Traveling to Putin’s Russia? Think Again!

(4) Sweden Bashes Russia, Withdraws WTO Support

(5) He’s a Yale Man, That Explains a Lot

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

In Prosperous Putin’s Moscow, No Hot Water

He’s boiling water on his STOVE so he can take a bath. In Russia’s wealthiest metropolis!
Is that barbaric or what? Russia as Africa. Zaire with permafrost!
This country is in the G-8! What a cosmic joke.

The New York Times reports that in the prosperous Moscow of Vladimir Putin, you can’t even get hot water to take a bath. Now is that pathetic, or what? Meanwhile, Russia’s military budget expands exponentially and the population continues to dwindle by up to 1 million per year. No wonder Putin is so popular with Russians! What wise, thoughtful people they are!

The dour Moscow of cold war film strips is long gone, and this increasingly prosperous city fancies itself striding chest out into the future. But every summer, the people here get a taste of old-style deprivation, as if they were flung back to a time when they had to queue up at dawn to buy a few coils of mealy sausage.

In neighborhoods rich and poor, for as long as a month, most buildings have no running hot water, not a drop. [LR: This is Moscow we're talking about. Can you imagine what "life" is like in provincial areas?]

For all its new wealth and aspirations, spurred by a boom in oil and other natural resources, Moscow remains saddled with an often decrepit infrastructure. Around now, an apt symbol of its condition is the city’s hot water system, perhaps one of the more exasperating vestiges of Soviet centralized planning. Buildings in Moscow usually receive hot water from a series of plants throughout the city, not from basement boilers, as in the United States. By summer, the plants and the network of pipelines that transport hot water need maintenance. Off goes the hot water. And in homes across the city, out come the pots and sponges and grumbling.

The summer suspension of hot water is such a part of life that it has found its way into poems and songs, Russians being accomplished at turning privation into art. (There is also no shortage of jokes bemoaning the olfactory assault from the unwashed masses in the subways when the temperature sometimes reaches the 80s.) In fact, how people cope with the suspension seems to reflect the evolution of Russian attitudes. Younger Muscovites, who are less familiar with the hardships of the past and are as comfortable with Nokia and Pizza Hut as their peers in suburban New Jersey, seem far less forgiving.

The older generation certainly complains, but seems more willing to shrug it off. After all, what are a few weeks without hot water, given everything else that has been weathered over the decades? This view may be especially prevalent in Moscow, the largest city in Europe, whose population has surged with an influx of people from hardscrabble regions. “We are all basically country folk,” said Lidiya Artyomova, 52, a maid. “We are used to this sort of thing, so there’s nothing to be done.” Ms. Artyomova was working the other day at an apartment building without hot water on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Soon after she spoke, up drove a resident, Roman Berezin, 25, a student with a dog in the back seat and a harsher view. “It’s very unpleasant,” Mr. Berezin said. “I like to take a shower twice a day, and without hot water, you end up going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, carrying the water from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

Of course, as under Communism, ways are devised to skirt the common misery. Some buildings, including hotels, install boilers, and some people put small water heaters in bathrooms — both are legal. But many cannot afford to do so, or live in dwellings whose plumbing and electricity cannot handle the equipment.

Moscow is not alone in its summertime water woes. St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have similar systems. But it galls some Muscovites that a city of such power and money cannot provide a basic necessity year-round. “We often think about why the city cannot fix all the pipes,” said Aleksandr Savin, 38, another resident of the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, who runs a package delivery company. “How come they have to do this every year? And then there are the accidents, so they have to turn off the cold water sometimes, too.”

Moscow officials acknowledge the system’s failings but note that they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on replacing pipes, some of which did not function all that well even when they were installed during Stalin’s rule. Irina Negazina, an official at the city agency that oversees the system, said she hoped that pipe replacements would be complete in as little as five years. At that point, the suspensions, which roll across Moscow as crews move from site to site, should be briefer, she said. They might last only a few days, she said, because only plants should require major repairs.

Still, the feeling of frustration when the faucets run dry is widespread, as was captured by a prominent poet, Tatyana Shcherbina:

They’ve turned off all the hot water,
My liquid of love, my stream of words.
I should complain to the people,
But a scarf’s been thrown over my mouth.
Like this, without moisture of life, I’ll dry out,
Along with the unwashed dishes,
I’ll gather moss, a stone unturned,
Or perhaps be forgotten, lost in the grass.

For now, with a respite a long way off, Russians, as always, find ways of getting by. “We pretend we are angry and complain about it mockingly, and sometimes we go to visit those friends who have hot water in their apartments,” said Dmitri Kuper, 39, a clothing designer with a fondness for tattoos and piercings who lives in the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street. “I simply call my friends and tell them, ‘I am coming to see you, and I will have my towel with me!’ ”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

In Prosperous Putin’s Moscow, No Hot Water

He’s boiling water on his STOVE so he can take a bath. In Russia’s wealthiest metropolis!
Is that barbaric or what? Russia as Africa. Zaire with permafrost!
This country is in the G-8! What a cosmic joke.

The New York Times reports that in the prosperous Moscow of Vladimir Putin, you can’t even get hot water to take a bath. Now is that pathetic, or what? Meanwhile, Russia’s military budget expands exponentially and the population continues to dwindle by up to 1 million per year. No wonder Putin is so popular with Russians! What wise, thoughtful people they are!

The dour Moscow of cold war film strips is long gone, and this increasingly prosperous city fancies itself striding chest out into the future. But every summer, the people here get a taste of old-style deprivation, as if they were flung back to a time when they had to queue up at dawn to buy a few coils of mealy sausage.

In neighborhoods rich and poor, for as long as a month, most buildings have no running hot water, not a drop. [LR: This is Moscow we're talking about. Can you imagine what "life" is like in provincial areas?]

For all its new wealth and aspirations, spurred by a boom in oil and other natural resources, Moscow remains saddled with an often decrepit infrastructure. Around now, an apt symbol of its condition is the city’s hot water system, perhaps one of the more exasperating vestiges of Soviet centralized planning. Buildings in Moscow usually receive hot water from a series of plants throughout the city, not from basement boilers, as in the United States. By summer, the plants and the network of pipelines that transport hot water need maintenance. Off goes the hot water. And in homes across the city, out come the pots and sponges and grumbling.

The summer suspension of hot water is such a part of life that it has found its way into poems and songs, Russians being accomplished at turning privation into art. (There is also no shortage of jokes bemoaning the olfactory assault from the unwashed masses in the subways when the temperature sometimes reaches the 80s.) In fact, how people cope with the suspension seems to reflect the evolution of Russian attitudes. Younger Muscovites, who are less familiar with the hardships of the past and are as comfortable with Nokia and Pizza Hut as their peers in suburban New Jersey, seem far less forgiving.

The older generation certainly complains, but seems more willing to shrug it off. After all, what are a few weeks without hot water, given everything else that has been weathered over the decades? This view may be especially prevalent in Moscow, the largest city in Europe, whose population has surged with an influx of people from hardscrabble regions. “We are all basically country folk,” said Lidiya Artyomova, 52, a maid. “We are used to this sort of thing, so there’s nothing to be done.” Ms. Artyomova was working the other day at an apartment building without hot water on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Soon after she spoke, up drove a resident, Roman Berezin, 25, a student with a dog in the back seat and a harsher view. “It’s very unpleasant,” Mr. Berezin said. “I like to take a shower twice a day, and without hot water, you end up going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, carrying the water from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

Of course, as under Communism, ways are devised to skirt the common misery. Some buildings, including hotels, install boilers, and some people put small water heaters in bathrooms — both are legal. But many cannot afford to do so, or live in dwellings whose plumbing and electricity cannot handle the equipment.

Moscow is not alone in its summertime water woes. St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have similar systems. But it galls some Muscovites that a city of such power and money cannot provide a basic necessity year-round. “We often think about why the city cannot fix all the pipes,” said Aleksandr Savin, 38, another resident of the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, who runs a package delivery company. “How come they have to do this every year? And then there are the accidents, so they have to turn off the cold water sometimes, too.”

Moscow officials acknowledge the system’s failings but note that they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on replacing pipes, some of which did not function all that well even when they were installed during Stalin’s rule. Irina Negazina, an official at the city agency that oversees the system, said she hoped that pipe replacements would be complete in as little as five years. At that point, the suspensions, which roll across Moscow as crews move from site to site, should be briefer, she said. They might last only a few days, she said, because only plants should require major repairs.

Still, the feeling of frustration when the faucets run dry is widespread, as was captured by a prominent poet, Tatyana Shcherbina:

They’ve turned off all the hot water,
My liquid of love, my stream of words.
I should complain to the people,
But a scarf’s been thrown over my mouth.
Like this, without moisture of life, I’ll dry out,
Along with the unwashed dishes,
I’ll gather moss, a stone unturned,
Or perhaps be forgotten, lost in the grass.

For now, with a respite a long way off, Russians, as always, find ways of getting by. “We pretend we are angry and complain about it mockingly, and sometimes we go to visit those friends who have hot water in their apartments,” said Dmitri Kuper, 39, a clothing designer with a fondness for tattoos and piercings who lives in the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street. “I simply call my friends and tell them, ‘I am coming to see you, and I will have my towel with me!’ ”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

In Prosperous Putin’s Moscow, No Hot Water

He’s boiling water on his STOVE so he can take a bath. In Russia’s wealthiest metropolis!
Is that barbaric or what? Russia as Africa. Zaire with permafrost!
This country is in the G-8! What a cosmic joke.

The New York Times reports that in the prosperous Moscow of Vladimir Putin, you can’t even get hot water to take a bath. Now is that pathetic, or what? Meanwhile, Russia’s military budget expands exponentially and the population continues to dwindle by up to 1 million per year. No wonder Putin is so popular with Russians! What wise, thoughtful people they are!

The dour Moscow of cold war film strips is long gone, and this increasingly prosperous city fancies itself striding chest out into the future. But every summer, the people here get a taste of old-style deprivation, as if they were flung back to a time when they had to queue up at dawn to buy a few coils of mealy sausage.

In neighborhoods rich and poor, for as long as a month, most buildings have no running hot water, not a drop. [LR: This is Moscow we're talking about. Can you imagine what "life" is like in provincial areas?]

For all its new wealth and aspirations, spurred by a boom in oil and other natural resources, Moscow remains saddled with an often decrepit infrastructure. Around now, an apt symbol of its condition is the city’s hot water system, perhaps one of the more exasperating vestiges of Soviet centralized planning. Buildings in Moscow usually receive hot water from a series of plants throughout the city, not from basement boilers, as in the United States. By summer, the plants and the network of pipelines that transport hot water need maintenance. Off goes the hot water. And in homes across the city, out come the pots and sponges and grumbling.

The summer suspension of hot water is such a part of life that it has found its way into poems and songs, Russians being accomplished at turning privation into art. (There is also no shortage of jokes bemoaning the olfactory assault from the unwashed masses in the subways when the temperature sometimes reaches the 80s.) In fact, how people cope with the suspension seems to reflect the evolution of Russian attitudes. Younger Muscovites, who are less familiar with the hardships of the past and are as comfortable with Nokia and Pizza Hut as their peers in suburban New Jersey, seem far less forgiving.

The older generation certainly complains, but seems more willing to shrug it off. After all, what are a few weeks without hot water, given everything else that has been weathered over the decades? This view may be especially prevalent in Moscow, the largest city in Europe, whose population has surged with an influx of people from hardscrabble regions. “We are all basically country folk,” said Lidiya Artyomova, 52, a maid. “We are used to this sort of thing, so there’s nothing to be done.” Ms. Artyomova was working the other day at an apartment building without hot water on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Soon after she spoke, up drove a resident, Roman Berezin, 25, a student with a dog in the back seat and a harsher view. “It’s very unpleasant,” Mr. Berezin said. “I like to take a shower twice a day, and without hot water, you end up going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, carrying the water from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

Of course, as under Communism, ways are devised to skirt the common misery. Some buildings, including hotels, install boilers, and some people put small water heaters in bathrooms — both are legal. But many cannot afford to do so, or live in dwellings whose plumbing and electricity cannot handle the equipment.

Moscow is not alone in its summertime water woes. St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have similar systems. But it galls some Muscovites that a city of such power and money cannot provide a basic necessity year-round. “We often think about why the city cannot fix all the pipes,” said Aleksandr Savin, 38, another resident of the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, who runs a package delivery company. “How come they have to do this every year? And then there are the accidents, so they have to turn off the cold water sometimes, too.”

Moscow officials acknowledge the system’s failings but note that they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on replacing pipes, some of which did not function all that well even when they were installed during Stalin’s rule. Irina Negazina, an official at the city agency that oversees the system, said she hoped that pipe replacements would be complete in as little as five years. At that point, the suspensions, which roll across Moscow as crews move from site to site, should be briefer, she said. They might last only a few days, she said, because only plants should require major repairs.

Still, the feeling of frustration when the faucets run dry is widespread, as was captured by a prominent poet, Tatyana Shcherbina:

They’ve turned off all the hot water,
My liquid of love, my stream of words.
I should complain to the people,
But a scarf’s been thrown over my mouth.
Like this, without moisture of life, I’ll dry out,
Along with the unwashed dishes,
I’ll gather moss, a stone unturned,
Or perhaps be forgotten, lost in the grass.

For now, with a respite a long way off, Russians, as always, find ways of getting by. “We pretend we are angry and complain about it mockingly, and sometimes we go to visit those friends who have hot water in their apartments,” said Dmitri Kuper, 39, a clothing designer with a fondness for tattoos and piercings who lives in the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street. “I simply call my friends and tell them, ‘I am coming to see you, and I will have my towel with me!’ ”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

In Prosperous Putin’s Moscow, No Hot Water

He’s boiling water on his STOVE so he can take a bath. In Russia’s wealthiest metropolis!
Is that barbaric or what? Russia as Africa. Zaire with permafrost!
This country is in the G-8! What a cosmic joke.

The New York Times reports that in the prosperous Moscow of Vladimir Putin, you can’t even get hot water to take a bath. Now is that pathetic, or what? Meanwhile, Russia’s military budget expands exponentially and the population continues to dwindle by up to 1 million per year. No wonder Putin is so popular with Russians! What wise, thoughtful people they are!

The dour Moscow of cold war film strips is long gone, and this increasingly prosperous city fancies itself striding chest out into the future. But every summer, the people here get a taste of old-style deprivation, as if they were flung back to a time when they had to queue up at dawn to buy a few coils of mealy sausage.

In neighborhoods rich and poor, for as long as a month, most buildings have no running hot water, not a drop. [LR: This is Moscow we're talking about. Can you imagine what "life" is like in provincial areas?]

For all its new wealth and aspirations, spurred by a boom in oil and other natural resources, Moscow remains saddled with an often decrepit infrastructure. Around now, an apt symbol of its condition is the city’s hot water system, perhaps one of the more exasperating vestiges of Soviet centralized planning. Buildings in Moscow usually receive hot water from a series of plants throughout the city, not from basement boilers, as in the United States. By summer, the plants and the network of pipelines that transport hot water need maintenance. Off goes the hot water. And in homes across the city, out come the pots and sponges and grumbling.

The summer suspension of hot water is such a part of life that it has found its way into poems and songs, Russians being accomplished at turning privation into art. (There is also no shortage of jokes bemoaning the olfactory assault from the unwashed masses in the subways when the temperature sometimes reaches the 80s.) In fact, how people cope with the suspension seems to reflect the evolution of Russian attitudes. Younger Muscovites, who are less familiar with the hardships of the past and are as comfortable with Nokia and Pizza Hut as their peers in suburban New Jersey, seem far less forgiving.

The older generation certainly complains, but seems more willing to shrug it off. After all, what are a few weeks without hot water, given everything else that has been weathered over the decades? This view may be especially prevalent in Moscow, the largest city in Europe, whose population has surged with an influx of people from hardscrabble regions. “We are all basically country folk,” said Lidiya Artyomova, 52, a maid. “We are used to this sort of thing, so there’s nothing to be done.” Ms. Artyomova was working the other day at an apartment building without hot water on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Soon after she spoke, up drove a resident, Roman Berezin, 25, a student with a dog in the back seat and a harsher view. “It’s very unpleasant,” Mr. Berezin said. “I like to take a shower twice a day, and without hot water, you end up going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, carrying the water from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

Of course, as under Communism, ways are devised to skirt the common misery. Some buildings, including hotels, install boilers, and some people put small water heaters in bathrooms — both are legal. But many cannot afford to do so, or live in dwellings whose plumbing and electricity cannot handle the equipment.

Moscow is not alone in its summertime water woes. St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have similar systems. But it galls some Muscovites that a city of such power and money cannot provide a basic necessity year-round. “We often think about why the city cannot fix all the pipes,” said Aleksandr Savin, 38, another resident of the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, who runs a package delivery company. “How come they have to do this every year? And then there are the accidents, so they have to turn off the cold water sometimes, too.”

Moscow officials acknowledge the system’s failings but note that they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on replacing pipes, some of which did not function all that well even when they were installed during Stalin’s rule. Irina Negazina, an official at the city agency that oversees the system, said she hoped that pipe replacements would be complete in as little as five years. At that point, the suspensions, which roll across Moscow as crews move from site to site, should be briefer, she said. They might last only a few days, she said, because only plants should require major repairs.

Still, the feeling of frustration when the faucets run dry is widespread, as was captured by a prominent poet, Tatyana Shcherbina:

They’ve turned off all the hot water,
My liquid of love, my stream of words.
I should complain to the people,
But a scarf’s been thrown over my mouth.
Like this, without moisture of life, I’ll dry out,
Along with the unwashed dishes,
I’ll gather moss, a stone unturned,
Or perhaps be forgotten, lost in the grass.

For now, with a respite a long way off, Russians, as always, find ways of getting by. “We pretend we are angry and complain about it mockingly, and sometimes we go to visit those friends who have hot water in their apartments,” said Dmitri Kuper, 39, a clothing designer with a fondness for tattoos and piercings who lives in the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street. “I simply call my friends and tell them, ‘I am coming to see you, and I will have my towel with me!’ ”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

In Prosperous Putin’s Moscow, No Hot Water

He’s boiling water on his STOVE so he can take a bath. In Russia’s wealthiest metropolis!
Is that barbaric or what? Russia as Africa. Zaire with permafrost!
This country is in the G-8! What a cosmic joke.

The New York Times reports that in the prosperous Moscow of Vladimir Putin, you can’t even get hot water to take a bath. Now is that pathetic, or what? Meanwhile, Russia’s military budget expands exponentially and the population continues to dwindle by up to 1 million per year. No wonder Putin is so popular with Russians! What wise, thoughtful people they are!

The dour Moscow of cold war film strips is long gone, and this increasingly prosperous city fancies itself striding chest out into the future. But every summer, the people here get a taste of old-style deprivation, as if they were flung back to a time when they had to queue up at dawn to buy a few coils of mealy sausage.

In neighborhoods rich and poor, for as long as a month, most buildings have no running hot water, not a drop. [LR: This is Moscow we're talking about. Can you imagine what "life" is like in provincial areas?]

For all its new wealth and aspirations, spurred by a boom in oil and other natural resources, Moscow remains saddled with an often decrepit infrastructure. Around now, an apt symbol of its condition is the city’s hot water system, perhaps one of the more exasperating vestiges of Soviet centralized planning. Buildings in Moscow usually receive hot water from a series of plants throughout the city, not from basement boilers, as in the United States. By summer, the plants and the network of pipelines that transport hot water need maintenance. Off goes the hot water. And in homes across the city, out come the pots and sponges and grumbling.

The summer suspension of hot water is such a part of life that it has found its way into poems and songs, Russians being accomplished at turning privation into art. (There is also no shortage of jokes bemoaning the olfactory assault from the unwashed masses in the subways when the temperature sometimes reaches the 80s.) In fact, how people cope with the suspension seems to reflect the evolution of Russian attitudes. Younger Muscovites, who are less familiar with the hardships of the past and are as comfortable with Nokia and Pizza Hut as their peers in suburban New Jersey, seem far less forgiving.

The older generation certainly complains, but seems more willing to shrug it off. After all, what are a few weeks without hot water, given everything else that has been weathered over the decades? This view may be especially prevalent in Moscow, the largest city in Europe, whose population has surged with an influx of people from hardscrabble regions. “We are all basically country folk,” said Lidiya Artyomova, 52, a maid. “We are used to this sort of thing, so there’s nothing to be done.” Ms. Artyomova was working the other day at an apartment building without hot water on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Soon after she spoke, up drove a resident, Roman Berezin, 25, a student with a dog in the back seat and a harsher view. “It’s very unpleasant,” Mr. Berezin said. “I like to take a shower twice a day, and without hot water, you end up going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, carrying the water from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

Of course, as under Communism, ways are devised to skirt the common misery. Some buildings, including hotels, install boilers, and some people put small water heaters in bathrooms — both are legal. But many cannot afford to do so, or live in dwellings whose plumbing and electricity cannot handle the equipment.

Moscow is not alone in its summertime water woes. St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have similar systems. But it galls some Muscovites that a city of such power and money cannot provide a basic necessity year-round. “We often think about why the city cannot fix all the pipes,” said Aleksandr Savin, 38, another resident of the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street, who runs a package delivery company. “How come they have to do this every year? And then there are the accidents, so they have to turn off the cold water sometimes, too.”

Moscow officials acknowledge the system’s failings but note that they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on replacing pipes, some of which did not function all that well even when they were installed during Stalin’s rule. Irina Negazina, an official at the city agency that oversees the system, said she hoped that pipe replacements would be complete in as little as five years. At that point, the suspensions, which roll across Moscow as crews move from site to site, should be briefer, she said. They might last only a few days, she said, because only plants should require major repairs.

Still, the feeling of frustration when the faucets run dry is widespread, as was captured by a prominent poet, Tatyana Shcherbina:

They’ve turned off all the hot water,
My liquid of love, my stream of words.
I should complain to the people,
But a scarf’s been thrown over my mouth.
Like this, without moisture of life, I’ll dry out,
Along with the unwashed dishes,
I’ll gather moss, a stone unturned,
Or perhaps be forgotten, lost in the grass.

For now, with a respite a long way off, Russians, as always, find ways of getting by. “We pretend we are angry and complain about it mockingly, and sometimes we go to visit those friends who have hot water in their apartments,” said Dmitri Kuper, 39, a clothing designer with a fondness for tattoos and piercings who lives in the building on Sadovaya-Karetnaya Street. “I simply call my friends and tell them, ‘I am coming to see you, and I will have my towel with me!’ ”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Free At Last!

Bloomberg reports that Larisa Arap (pictured) has finally received her freedom; in the hot glow of world outrage, it took more than one month. Can you imagine how long it would have taken if nobody had noticed? Remember how Jack Nicholsen got “free” of solitary confinement in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”?

A Russian journalist won release after 46 days of forcible confinement in a psychiatric hospital, a case human rights groups likened to the Soviet-era practice of locking up dissidents in clinics.

Larisa Arap, 48, who had written an article on maltreatment of children at a mental clinic in the northern city of Apatity, was hospitalized against her will on July 5. Doctors at the clinic released her today after intervention by Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin, his spokeswoman Natalya Mirza said by telephone. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists had written to Putin asking him to secure Arap’s release. “The horrifying method of forcible psychiatric detention as punishment for dissent was a trademark of the Soviet past and has no place in a new, democratic Russia,” it said in the letter.

President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel who was elected in 2000, has tightened control of political life in Russia, squeezing opposition parties out of parliament and eliminating most independent media. Arap, who belongs to an opposition movement led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, was taken away in an ambulance after visiting a doctor for a routine health check needed to extend her driving-license, said Marina Litvinovich, a spokeswoman for Kasparov. Hospitalized in the northern port city of Murmansk, she was injected with drugs that weakened her, caused her tongue to swell, blurred her vision and affected her balance, CPJ said, citing her family.

On July 26, the authorities transferred Arap to the clinic in Apatity, 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Murmansk, the place she had described in her article, the media freedom watchdog said. Lukin’s spokeswoman Mirza said that an independent psychiatric commission appointed by the human rights official to investigate Arap’s case had recommended her release.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Thinking of Traveling to Russia to See the Sights? Three words of advice: Don’t do it

The International Herald Tribune reports on neo-Soviet Russia’s warm, welcoming attitude towards foreign tourists. Just wait until they get a crack at those Olympics visitors!:

A Chilean graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has been detained in Russia for more than two months after customs officials found several Soviet medals and currency she bought from a street vendor. Roxana Contreras, 29, faces up to seven years in prison, her supporters say. She “acquired USSR state honors illegally” and attempted to export them, according to Russian court documents. Supporters in the United States say the physics student was visiting friends in the southern city of Voronezh and probably did not realize she was doing anything wrong when she bought the six military medals, currency and coins for $66 (€49) and tried to bring them on the plane home with her. “They were being sold by a street vendor, so she had no idea they were not supposed to be taken out of the country,” said Sonya Bahar, the director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rep. Todd Akin, who represents Missouri in Congress, has written to Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov inquiring about the case. Russia’s right to protect its national heritage is “undeniable,” he wrote. But, “there are many at the University who vouch for the integrity of Ms. Contreras and who are convinced that this incident is the result of an unfortunate error. It is my understanding that in similar cases contraband is rightfully confiscated, but that individuals are usually detained only for grave offenses.” In a follow up letter, Akin wrote that the ambassador’s office told him by telephone that Contreras had been released. However, her supporters said Russian authorities are still detaining her while she waits for a court date. Phone calls to the Russian embassy went unanswered Monday. An e-mail was also sent to the Chilean consulate in Moscow seeking comment. Attempts were also made to reach Contreras.

Bahar has asked university officials, academics and politicians to vouch for Contreras’ character. She fears the outside support may have an unintended consequences. “Whatever we seem to be doing to try and help seems to be making it worse,” she said. Contreras has hired a lawyer and rented an apartment. Russian officials are reluctant to keep renewing Contreras’ visa, but a judge there refused to write a letter explaining the situation to help, her supporters said. They are concerned she will be in further violation of the law if her visa expires. Contreras, who previously studied in Russia, is trying to improve her language skills and bought a guitar to pass time. “Some days she’s all right,” Bahar said. “Other days she’s just devastated.” Contreras’ boyfriend, Fred Scherrer, 41, of St. Louis, said, “She has been put on, we would call it, city arrest.” He said officials want to be able to reach her at all times. He thinks the items may have been intended as a gift for him, but said neither he nor his girlfriend collected medals or currency. “We don’t understand it from an American point of view. Why would they detain a traveler for two months?”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Thinking of Traveling to Russia to See the Sights? Three words of advice: Don’t do it

The International Herald Tribune reports on neo-Soviet Russia’s warm, welcoming attitude towards foreign tourists. Just wait until they get a crack at those Olympics visitors!:

A Chilean graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has been detained in Russia for more than two months after customs officials found several Soviet medals and currency she bought from a street vendor. Roxana Contreras, 29, faces up to seven years in prison, her supporters say. She “acquired USSR state honors illegally” and attempted to export them, according to Russian court documents. Supporters in the United States say the physics student was visiting friends in the southern city of Voronezh and probably did not realize she was doing anything wrong when she bought the six military medals, currency and coins for $66 (€49) and tried to bring them on the plane home with her. “They were being sold by a street vendor, so she had no idea they were not supposed to be taken out of the country,” said Sonya Bahar, the director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rep. Todd Akin, who represents Missouri in Congress, has written to Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov inquiring about the case. Russia’s right to protect its national heritage is “undeniable,” he wrote. But, “there are many at the University who vouch for the integrity of Ms. Contreras and who are convinced that this incident is the result of an unfortunate error. It is my understanding that in similar cases contraband is rightfully confiscated, but that individuals are usually detained only for grave offenses.” In a follow up letter, Akin wrote that the ambassador’s office told him by telephone that Contreras had been released. However, her supporters said Russian authorities are still detaining her while she waits for a court date. Phone calls to the Russian embassy went unanswered Monday. An e-mail was also sent to the Chilean consulate in Moscow seeking comment. Attempts were also made to reach Contreras.

Bahar has asked university officials, academics and politicians to vouch for Contreras’ character. She fears the outside support may have an unintended consequences. “Whatever we seem to be doing to try and help seems to be making it worse,” she said. Contreras has hired a lawyer and rented an apartment. Russian officials are reluctant to keep renewing Contreras’ visa, but a judge there refused to write a letter explaining the situation to help, her supporters said. They are concerned she will be in further violation of the law if her visa expires. Contreras, who previously studied in Russia, is trying to improve her language skills and bought a guitar to pass time. “Some days she’s all right,” Bahar said. “Other days she’s just devastated.” Contreras’ boyfriend, Fred Scherrer, 41, of St. Louis, said, “She has been put on, we would call it, city arrest.” He said officials want to be able to reach her at all times. He thinks the items may have been intended as a gift for him, but said neither he nor his girlfriend collected medals or currency. “We don’t understand it from an American point of view. Why would they detain a traveler for two months?”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Thinking of Traveling to Russia to See the Sights? Three words of advice: Don’t do it

The International Herald Tribune reports on neo-Soviet Russia’s warm, welcoming attitude towards foreign tourists. Just wait until they get a crack at those Olympics visitors!:

A Chilean graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has been detained in Russia for more than two months after customs officials found several Soviet medals and currency she bought from a street vendor. Roxana Contreras, 29, faces up to seven years in prison, her supporters say. She “acquired USSR state honors illegally” and attempted to export them, according to Russian court documents. Supporters in the United States say the physics student was visiting friends in the southern city of Voronezh and probably did not realize she was doing anything wrong when she bought the six military medals, currency and coins for $66 (€49) and tried to bring them on the plane home with her. “They were being sold by a street vendor, so she had no idea they were not supposed to be taken out of the country,” said Sonya Bahar, the director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rep. Todd Akin, who represents Missouri in Congress, has written to Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov inquiring about the case. Russia’s right to protect its national heritage is “undeniable,” he wrote. But, “there are many at the University who vouch for the integrity of Ms. Contreras and who are convinced that this incident is the result of an unfortunate error. It is my understanding that in similar cases contraband is rightfully confiscated, but that individuals are usually detained only for grave offenses.” In a follow up letter, Akin wrote that the ambassador’s office told him by telephone that Contreras had been released. However, her supporters said Russian authorities are still detaining her while she waits for a court date. Phone calls to the Russian embassy went unanswered Monday. An e-mail was also sent to the Chilean consulate in Moscow seeking comment. Attempts were also made to reach Contreras.

Bahar has asked university officials, academics and politicians to vouch for Contreras’ character. She fears the outside support may have an unintended consequences. “Whatever we seem to be doing to try and help seems to be making it worse,” she said. Contreras has hired a lawyer and rented an apartment. Russian officials are reluctant to keep renewing Contreras’ visa, but a judge there refused to write a letter explaining the situation to help, her supporters said. They are concerned she will be in further violation of the law if her visa expires. Contreras, who previously studied in Russia, is trying to improve her language skills and bought a guitar to pass time. “Some days she’s all right,” Bahar said. “Other days she’s just devastated.” Contreras’ boyfriend, Fred Scherrer, 41, of St. Louis, said, “She has been put on, we would call it, city arrest.” He said officials want to be able to reach her at all times. He thinks the items may have been intended as a gift for him, but said neither he nor his girlfriend collected medals or currency. “We don’t understand it from an American point of view. Why would they detain a traveler for two months?”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !