EDITORIAL
The Caucasus are Burning
Sure, the friends of democracy are getting liquidated in Josef Stalin’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia left and right, and the homicidal Kadyrov regime is openly threatening more reprisals. Indeed, they make no effort to hide their crimes because they know they have the Kremlin’s blessing. But if you think the only people getting killed in the Caucasus these days are Putin’s enemies, think again.
EDITORIAL
Watch “The Italian” and “A Woman in Berlin”
Someone who wants to take a good hard clear look at Vladimir Putin’s Russia cannot do better than to screen Andrei Kravchuk’s devastating 2005 drama “The Italian” (winner of the 2005 Berlin Film Festival), currently airing on the Sundance movie channel. Filmed at a real orphanage outside St. Petersburg and cast with real orphans, including a brillant and heart-wrenching performance by Kolya Spiridonov as the title character, the film shows Russia as it really is, in all its brutal coldness and deprivation.
It shows the barbaric conditions in which ordinary Russians live, full of contempt and corruption, and the far more brutal torture they inflict on those not lucky enough to be “ordinary” such as orphans. Every single frame in the movie is a slice of Russia life, just exactly as it is lived today under Vladimir Putin. Truly, a picture is worth a thousand words.
It also sends the message that Russians, like the little hero of the film, who are willing to risk everything to stand up to the power of their government, its criminality and its corruption, can win. Just as the USSR fell, so to the malignant KGB regime of Vladimir Putin can collapse if Russians who love their country are willing to demand democracy.
Posted in arts/letters, editorial, russia
Tagged a woman in berlin, kaytn, russia, the italian
Streetwise Professor reports:
I’ve written before on how Russia strikes me as a very Romantic country. Not in the look-into-my-eyes-darling sense of the word, but in the more philosophical sense of the word (note the capitalization). That thought struck with particular force as I began to read Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. Many of the Romantic strains that Viereck identifies in German history and character types are also pronounced in Russia. Indeed, take virtually any one of the quotes to follow, and you can replace “German” with “Russian” and still strike very close to the bone.
MONDAY AUGUST 17 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Economic Collapse in Putin’s Russia
(2) EDITORIAL: Further Misadventures of Matveeva the Rat
NOTE: For those interested in history or philosophy where Russia is concerned, Streetwise Professor offers a truly brilliant (and scary!) take on the Hitler-Putin nexus. Required reading! We link today and reprint on Wednesday.
NOTE: Blogger “cyxymu” has written an open letter to Russian “president” Dima Medvedev asking for an investigation into the cyber terrorism launched from Russia against his blogs. He indicates that previous attempts by him to comment on Medvedev’s blog have been censored. The post already has nearly 100 comments.
NOTE: “Who sings better than me?” he asked. “Nobody does, besides God.”
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Economic Collapse in Putin’s Russia
The lastest jaw-dropping bad news out of Russia came last week with the announcement that the beleaguered nation’s economy shrank a stunning 10.9% in the second quarter of this year, a significant increase from the 9.8% contraction that occurred in the first quarter, meaning that the pace of Russia’s devastating recession accelerated rather than slowing at the whopping rate of over 10% per quarter). It was the worst quarterly performance of the Russian economy since the fall of the USSR. The data was much worse than economists had predicted, and the ruble and stock markets plunged accordingly. With only half the year over, economists are predicting a double-digit budget deficit, 10% of GDP or more, by the end of the year, with worse to follow in 2010, including the total exhaustion of the budgetary emergency fund.
EDITORIAL
The Further Misadventures of Anna Matveeva
Anna Matveeva, Russophile Rat
We’ve written twice before about the scurrying Russophile insect Anna Matveeva, and now it’s time for installment #3.
We love Radio Free Europe, but nobody is perfect. RFE’s Roman Kupchinsky, for instance, lauded Vladimir Putin’s doctoral dissertation just a few weeks before it was exposed as shameless fraud. Yet Kupchinsky looks like Walter Cronkite next to Farangis Najibullah, who recently quoted Matveeva as if she were a military expert and without telling RFE’s readers a single thing about her virulent background in pro-Kremlin propaganda (she blogs for the Kremlin’s “Russia Today” propaganda network).
Najibullah can’t claim ignorance: Just Google Matveeva. The third hit is one of our editorials.
Paul Goble reports:
A group of Sakhalin residents, after a visit to Tokyo, are not only studying Japanese but also collecting signatures on a petition asking that Moscow hand over their island to Japan so that they can live and raise their children in a rich, modern country that is not fighting a war with anyone else.
This remarkable action surfaced today when radical Moscow commentator Valeriya Novodvorskaya reported in her Grani.ru column that one of the organizers, who she indicated had to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, had approached her to ask to whom he should forward their appeal.
Now we’ve seen everything.
SUNDAY AUGUST 16 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Russian Drivers are Maniacs
(2) EDITORIAL: Alexei Pankin, Neo-Soviet Liar
(3) Another Original LR Translation: Russian Anti-Americanism
(4) The end of Freedom of Expression in Russia
(5) Another Original LR Translation: Russia’s Lethal Bunnies
(6) The Sunday Photos: Another Russian Inferno
NOTE: Russia has some interesting geological formations in its far north, reminiscent of a natural Stonehenge or Easter Island. Soviet Russia links to various photo albums of the remote, almost unreachable attractions.
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Russian Drivers are Undisciplined and Criminally Careless
Russian drivers are undisciplined and criminally careless. As a result, they are inflicting barbaric homicidal damage on their country which can be found no place else in the civilized world. There is no domestic movement to make the roads safer, no capacity of local government to address the issue, so the national leader has no choice but to police the nation’s roads himself.
Now just hold your horses! Before you go accusing us of “racism” against Russians, those aren’t our words. They are the words of an entirely different Russophobe, by the name of Dima Medvedev, who just happens to be the so-called “president” of Russia himself.
EDITORIAL
Alexei Pankin, Shameless Neo-Soviet Liar
In a recent op-ed in the Moscow Times, Russian “journalist” Alexei Pankin claims that before the war against Georgia in 2008 he was pro-West, but then when the West dared to take Georgia’s side over Russia he realized how wrong he had been.
This news came as rather a big surprise to us here at La Russophobe, since we carefully documented Pankin’s slobbering anti-Western hatred as early as November 2006, when we called him a neo-Soviet bagman, and again in August 2007, when we called him a scum-sucking greaseball.
Translator’s Note: I am fascinated and horrified by the amount of mindless anti-Americanism one comes across these days. Obviously, it comes as no surprise when one experiences this in neo-Nazi Russia, where national chauvinism is official policy but it is more annoying to come up against this in Europe, where they should know better. It was therefore with particular pleasure that I read this intelligent article on the subject by a a Russian American.
Don’t Look for Fools in America
Vladimir Gandelsman
7 August 2009
Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel
Gandelsman
My colleague Lev Rubinshtein recently published an article [in Grani] on the subject of “mother country” and found that we were thinking along the same lines as I was in fact considering this opening for my piece: A certain German chancellor, when asked if he loved his “heimat”, replied that actually he loved his wife… Don’t get smart with words, in other words. However, if it is in someone’s nature to get smart with words or concepts, and if he’s feeling bored and can’t think of anything else to do with his (not so great) brains, he will almost always wind himself up into a state of hatred for the alien or love of the homeland.
I recall how a group of Russian writers once paid a visit to Israel. One of them snorted that Israel is a historical mistake, another made some senselessly rude remark about émigrés. To cut a long story short, they went there, behaved like louts, and left. Even if we allow that our writers were maybe taken somewhere unsuitable (which can happen on any trip to any country), they probably deserved to be taken to that very place and find themselves talking to the people there. Conversely, there was no need for the locals to get upset, they should have known what sort of people they were dealing with.
Posted in editorial, essel, russia, translations
Tagged dave essel, russia, Vladimir Gandelsman
Two-thirds of all Russian radio stations which previously broadcast programs from Radio Free Europe have been shut down by Vladimir Putin. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Walker of Freedom House sounds the clarion call of alarm at the final consolidation of neo-Soviet dictatatorship, making the point we’ve made here on this blog many times before: If Dmitri Medvedev has real authority, that would be worse for Russia than if he doesn’t, because it would mean Putinism can continue without Putin at the helm.
Ten years ago on Sunday, Russia’s Duma confirmed Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The vote took place only one week after then-President Boris Yeltsin had nominated the little-known former KGB operative for the post. Yeltsin’s surprise resignation only four months later left Mr. Putin as acting president and paved the way for his election as head of state in March 2000. This swift and far-from-transparent ascent to the pinnacle of Russian power was a sign of things to come.
Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has used the instruments of the state to forge what is known in Russian as a “vertical of power,” a governance model in which authority is tightly consolidated at the top. Putinism captured the Russian zeitgeist as people were hungry for stability, or at least the appearance of stability. The system’s core features include the political control of the country’s dominant energy sector, the quest to restore Russia’s global power status, and a heavy-handed reassertion of Russian influence in former Soviet states.
The most striking quality of Putinism, though, is its hostility to free expression. This decade-long assault on a fundamental human right is not a reprise of the uniform, all-encompassing ideological control that was the hallmark of the Soviet period. To give Russia the veneer of a liberal society and simultaneously create a useful societal steam valve, authorities have come up with a new, selective censorship model. In this system, the state tries to censor information of true political consequence while allowing a certain amount of independence at the margins.
Translator’s Note: The following is just too funny and just too sad. What better example could one wish for of a country and people who have not just completely lost their way but actually appear to have lost any sense of honour and pride. One has to have completely lost one’s moral compass to act as described below. It is beyond imagining that the British or US (or indeed almost any other) army could sink to this. The danger, of course, is that although the event in question was totally harmless, an army so devoid of morals or pride will as a matter of course sink to anything, including atrocities.
Orchestra Leadership Will be Punished For Parade in Bunny Costumes
Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel
Fontanka.ru reports that the tribunal of the Leningrad Military District has completed its investigation of the military band which performed in bunny costumes, the symbol of Playboy magazine, at a private evening parry.
The district’s military prosecutors have completed their report which has been to the CiC of Leningrad Military District Andrei Tretyak. The document demands the prosecution of Sergei Yezhov, the officer commanding the 5th Military Orchestra of the Leningrad Military District as well as of his second in command and head of music Sergei Vovka.
Yet another towering inferno in Russia, as photographed by a Live Journal blogger. Russia has the highest rate of fatality by fire of any industrialized nation in the world, ten times higher than in the United States. Note that this is a brand new building, not a Soviet-era tinderbox, where the risk is far greater and the Russians drop like flies.
FRIDAY AUGUST 14 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Russia is a Nation of Murdering Bastards
(2) Another Original LR Translation: Stalin vs. Novaya Gazeta
(3) Obama on Russia: Igornant or Simply Cowardly?
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Russia is a Nation of Murdering Bastards
“We don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”
– Pennsylvania resident Katy Abram to turncoat Senator Arlen Spector at a public forum on Tuesday
Zarema Sadulayeva in 2006. Murdered by the Kremlin last Tuesday. RIP
Blood is flowing in rivers in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As a New York Times op-ed writer we publish below states: “Russia is getting away with murder.”
Stalin, through his malignant spawn, as we reiterate in an original translation today, is suing Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper which published Anna Politkovskaya, who was yet another entry in a seemingly endless string of obviously political murders that dates back to Vladimir Putin’s first days in the Moscow Kremlin, with the slaying of Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova.
Stalin is alive and well in Putin’s Russia, in more ways than one. Stalin had Beria, and Putin has Kadyrov, his homicidal henchman in Chechnya, who is striking down the Kremlin’s critics with total impunity, so fast it is hard to keep up. And he openly boast of his deeds and his hatred for the women who dare to challenge him. He recently stated that Natalia Estemirova, Politkovskaya’s successor and struck down just like her, was “misleading people and writing lies.” Before that, he publicly declared she had “no honor or conscience.” He admits that he has “blood up to his elbows,” and the blood marks rose a little higher earlier this week when he brutally abducted and murdered children’s rights activist Zarema Sadulayeva and her newly married husband, stuffing their corpses into the truck of their own car. His police, copying Stalin jot for jot, had rounded them up.
And why shouldn’t they?
Yuck!!! Joseph Stalin's grand-son Eugeny Dzhugashvili kisses the death-mask of his grand-father. The picture was taken in the native house of Joseph Stalin.
Pots and kettles
Alexander Skobov
6 August 2009
Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel
The news that Stalin’s grandson is suing Novaya Gazeta for defamation of his grandfather is not something that can or should be just laughed off as a joke. The thick mud of moral deafness and the sadomasochistic inclinations that infect both the state élite and the population as a whole have created an absurdly Kafkaesque situation in which it is quite possible that the court will find for the plaintiff. The episode, furthermore, fits in fine with a whole chain of steps that government and public bodies have been taking recently to achieve a creeping rehabilitation of the Stalinism though the application of administrative and legal levers to deny dissenters of a voice.
First and foremost, we should recall the notorious Shoigu Law. If one strips it of the verbal dross about prevention of justifications of Nazism and of belittlement of the role of the USSR in the victory over it, it is evident that the main purpose of the law is to make it possible to prosecute anyone for any condemnation of anything about how the Stalin régime ran the war or for saying anything remotely justificatory about the the actions of the régime’s enemies.
Next we have the establishment of the commission to counter the falsification of history and protect the perceived interests of the Kremlin. Its aim is of course not actually to verify any sort of facts or truth (for example, the genuineness or not of the Politburo resolution ordering the murder of imprisoned Polish officers) but solely to inveigh against evaluations of historical events that the ruling cliques consider inimical.
Following on this, we have the hysterical reaction to the resolution of the parliamentary assembly of the OSCE by our parliament which is stubbornly determined not to know that the Stalin régime brought the same evils to people as Hitler’s and that in 1939 it allied itself with Hitler’s to start the world war.
Celestine Bohlen of Bloomberg News, writing in the New York Times:
Russia is still getting away with murder.
On Tuesday, two more bodies of human rights workers were found in the southern republic of Chechnya, this time in the trunk of a car.
This comes less than a month after the shocking death of Natalya Estemirova, a 50-year-old human-rights campaigner whose body was dumped by the side of a road. She had been shot several times — at least once in the head, which is the signature for the killers who have been methodically eliminating critics and rivals of Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya.
Once again, Mr. Kadyrov, who is just 32, has mocked both his accusers and the victims. “Why should Kadyrov kill a woman who was useful to no one?” he scoffed when asked by Radio Free Europe about allegations that he was responsible for Ms. Estemirova’s death. “She was devoid of honor, merit and conscience.”
In the rearguard of the former USSR
Mikhail Sergeyev
August 6, 2009
Translated from the Russian by The Other Russia
Russia has shown some of the worst results in economic decline, inflation rate, and income decline among the CIS countries
The statistical data of the country’s socioeconomic development for the first half of the year looks gloomy. The domestic economy is experiencing shocks much worse than those of developing countries, i.e. members of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and neighboring CIS countries.
Jonas Bernstein, writing for Voice of America:
President Dmitri Medvedev has made fighting a corruption a top priority and has vowed to remove the bribe-taking officials and bureaucratic barriers that make life so difficult for Russia’s small and medium-sized businesses. But independent observers point to the entrenched, systemic nature of Russian corruption and are skeptical Mr. Medvedev’s anti-corruption drive will succeed where others have failed.
President Medvedev assembled top officials, Wednesday, to discuss the red tape and corruption plaguing Russia’s small and medium-sized business sector.
The latest victims of Vladimir Putin's KGB state
A young couple newly married couple barely into their twenties, Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband Alik Djabrailov (pictured, left), both just 33 years old, were abducted by law enforcement authorities in Chechnya on Monday and found shot and stuffed into the trunk of a car on Tuesday. When human rights leaders complained to the authorities, they were told there had been no kidnapping, and later that the two had gone off voluntarily with law enforcement for questioning.
She was the leader of a small human rights NGO called “Save the Generations” which worked closely with UNICEF to protect Chechen children from land mines and other horrors. This placed them, like all other human rights workers in Chechnya, in direct confrontation with a government that does not want to acknowledge any human rights abuses of any kind, and views those who reveal them as traitors to be executed. The horrifying double murder comes immediately after the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, publicly declared that the last victim of such assassination, Natalia Estemirova, had no conscience or honor. Kadyrov has been decorated for heroism by the Russian government.
No thinking person now can question the role of the Russian government in these killings. It is time for President Barack Obama to end his craven silence and sanction Russia for these outrages.
NOTE: Reader “Robert” has lots of excellent follow-up links in the comments section of this post. Don’t miss them.
Posted in russia
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 12 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Here Comes NASHI
(2) EDITORIAL: The Beast of Chechnya
(3) Putin Shows Exxon how its Done
(4) Der Spiegel Exposes and Condemns Russian Barbarism
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Here Comes NASHI
Translating from Grani.ru, FinRosForum reports:
Meeting at its annual summer camp in Seliger, the Kremlin-led youth group, Nashi, decided to establish bands of militia consisting of disadvantaged youngsters armed with stun guns. Under the plan, hundreds of thousands of Putin’s young stormtroopers would patrol Russia’s streets and have the right to check people’s IDs. The initiative to establish the Russian Militia Association (Vserossiiskaya Assotsiatsiya Druzhin, VAD) comes from Vasily Yakemenko, director of the Federal Agency on Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh) and former leader of the Nashists. The organisation would be financed from the state budget and receive administrative support from Rosmolodezh.
Attentive readers will remember our report a two weeks ago on human rights activist Albert Pchelintsev, who was attacked by a gang of youth and shot in the mouth with . . . a stun gun. Gazeta.ru has more details on the proposed new use of NASHI stormtroopers.
The horrors of this scenario are so ghastly and obvious the hardly need to be stated:
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