EDITORIAL: Putin, Now and Forever

EDITORIAL

Putin, Now and Forever

Speaking to the corrupt and repugnant “Valdai Discussion Club” which consists of a group of so-called “Russia Experts” who travel to Russia at the Kremlin’s expense, dine on caviar at the Kremlin’s expense (while the people of Russia starve and die), and then hopefully spread the Kremlin’s propagandistic lies throughout the world, Russian “prime minister” Vladimir Putin declared when asked whether he would run against “president” Dima Medvedev in 2012:  “There will be no competition. We will reach an agreement because we are of the same blood and of the same political outlook.  In 2012, we will think together and will take into account the realities of the time, our personal plans, the political landscape and the United Russia party and we will take the decision.”

EDITORIAL: Russia the Laughingstock of Nations

EDITORIAL

Russia the Laughingstock of Nations

Already ranked #118 last year out of 183 world nations for placing regulatory obstructions in the path of small business, Russia’s World Bank ranking in that area fell two places this year.  Russia, a member of the G-8, is in other words in the bottom third of all world countries in this area. Nicaragua — yes, Nicaragua — is more business friendly than Russia.  So, for that matter, is Uganda.

In Russia’s 27-nation region, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Russia ranks an appalling #24.  Only Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are more hostile to small business in terms of legal framework.  Georgia, attacked by Russia with tanks and routinely vilified by Russian nationalists as a crazed dictatorship, is #1 in the group. That’s right, #1.

Laughing at Dima Medvedev

Radio Free Europe reports on what it calls Dima Medvedev’s “laughable” call for reform:

So the president of Russia continues his effort to conquer the Internet space. Dmitry Medvedev’s article “Russia, Forward!” which appeared on gazeta.ru on September 10, is charming. Its charm is unqualified and unconditional — I’d even say that it is absolute. At least it would be hard for me to imagine anything more charming.

My first reaction when I read the piece was a desire to copy it and rework it a bit. For example, maybe put it on a pink background and decorate it with flowers here and there. To mark out particular paragraphs with lipstick kisses and others with smiley faces.

Russia Knifes the IKEA Baby

The New York Times reports:

Weeks before the opening of its flagship store outside Moscow in 2000, Ikea was approached by employees of a local utility company. If the Swedish retailer wanted to have electricity for its grand opening, it had to pay a bribe.

Instead, Ikea rented diesel generators large enough to power a shopping mall. The generators roared to life in a loud rebuke to the corrupt executives who thought they had the retailer cornered, and soon the utility turned on the power.

Under Putin, the Russian Language Disappears

Only a tiny handful of foreign nations say "da" to Russian

The New York Times reports:

IN a corner of Bukvatoriya, a bookstore here in the capital of the Crimean Peninsula, are some stacks of literature that may be as provocative to the Kremlin as any battalion of NATO soldiers or wily oligarch. The books are classics — by Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare — that have been translated into Ukrainian, in editions aimed at teenagers. A Harry Potter who casts spells in Ukrainian also inhabits the shelves.

Two decades ago, there would have been little if any demand for such works, given that most people in this region are ethnic Russians. But the Ukrainian government is increasingly requiring that the Ukrainian language be used in all facets of society, especially schools, as it seeks to ensure that the next generation is oriented toward Kiev, not Moscow.

Children can even read Pushkin, Russia’s most revered author, in translation. (This tends to bother Russians in the way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Spanish can touch off cross-cultural crankiness in the United States.)

September 13, 2009 — Contents

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russian Schools get another “F”

(2)  Putin is to Blame

(3)  Once Again, Russia lags behind the World

(4)  Latynina Probes the Russian Subconscious

(5)  Putin’s Neo-Stalinist State

NOTE:  Radio Free Europe interviews Scott Anderson here.

EDITORIAL: Russian Schools get an “F”

EDITORIAL

Russian Schools get an “F”

One of the least well-reported and most under-appreciated facts about Russia is the dismal quality of its education system.  Even in Soviet times, huge swaths of analysis and  critical thought were bludgeoned into dust, so that Russians had no real understanding of foreign culture or history, or indeed even their own.  Only in a tiny band of scientific education did the Soviet system hold its own, and under the continued rule of the KGB even that has utterly collapsed.  Indeed, how can people like Vladimir Putin, educated by the miserably failed Soviet system, hope to reform that system? They can’t. It’s impossible. In fact, even those with good intentions often go astray.  Today, Russians are among the most barbarically ignorant and backwards of any people in the industrialized world.

Writing in Vedemosti and republished in the Moscow Times, Vladislav Inozemtsev, director of the Centre for Post-Industrial Research and the publisher and editor-in-chief of Svobodnaya Mysl magazine, exposes the horrific failure of neo-Soviet education.

Putin is to Blame

In another brilliant condemnation of the Putin dictatorship, Streetwise Professor reports:

The Moscow Times reports that the Russian Federal Audit Chamber had inspected the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam two years ago, and reported that 85 percent of its equipment needed to be replaced.  The Chamber’s boss, Sergei Stepashin, said that “the government and the Prosecutor General’s Office were informed about the results of the check at the time.”

This gives the lie to Putin’s post-disaster statement stressing the need to inspect Russian infrastructure to identify problems.  In the particular case that spurred the Putin’s demand, an inspection had been carried out.  The inspection had identified problems.  The government had been informed.  But nothing was done.  So . . . you can inspect all you want, but if you ignore the results of the inspection, what you get is a disaster.

Once Again, Russia Lags Behind the World

Russia, a follower among followers

The Moscow Times reports:

Despite regulatory reforms, Russia got poor marks in terms of competitiveness and the ease of doing business, with corruption considered the biggest problem, according to two global reports released Tuesday.

Russia ranks 120th in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report, which evaluates laws and regulations that affect business activity in 183 countries. Russia improved on three of the survey’s 10 indicators by easing the process of registering property, lowering the corporate income tax rate from 24 percent to 20 percent, and defining bankruptcy rules more clearly. But it still slid overall because of tough competition in a year that saw countries introduce a record 20 ­percent more business-friendly reforms than in any other year since the report was first published in 2004, said one of the authors, Svetlana Bagaudinova.

“The splash of reform activity indicates a concerted effort to support business during the crisis,” Bagaudinova told The Moscow Times.

Latynina Probes the Russian Subconscious

The fearless and heroic Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

In an authoritarian society, public opinion surveys are meaningless. The problem isn’t so much that survey data are falsified. It’s that the results themselves do not provide an accurate reflection of reality — just as a thermometer placed outside the kitchen window cannot give you the temperature indoors.

As soon as word of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant accident became known to residents who lived downriver from the dam, most relocated immediately to higher ground. If you were to ask those people in a poll if they have faith in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, they would surely answer positively. They are convinced that Putin brought stability to Russia, restored the power vertical and saved our citizens in South Ossetia from Georgian genocide.

It is not that respondents lie when surveys ask for their opinions. But consciously they believe one thing, and subconsciously quite another. Consciously, they love Putin, but subconsciously they know that if the dam had burst and the Yenisei River had swept them all away, Putin, if asked by the media what had happened to the victims, would not hesitate to quip, “They sank” — just as he did in 2000 when U.S. television journalist Larry King asked Putin what happened to the Kursk submarine.

Putin’s Neo-Stalinist State

Paul Goble reports:

Vladimir Putin is not pursuing the kind of authoritarian modernization described by Fareed Zakaria as characteristic of illiberal states but rather an updated and specifically Russian version of Stalinist modernization based on the search for enemies and the instillation of fear, according to a leading Russian commentator. But this distinction has been obscured, Irina Pavlova argues, because Putin’s approach, thanks to the possibilities offered by modern information technologies, does not require many of the features of classical Stalinism such as the GULAG and a new iron curtain even though the essence of Putin’s approach is the same.

September 11, 2009 — Contents

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia, Crushed by Putinomics

(2)  Putin, Dancing with Neo-Nazis

(3)  Putin Wipes out Opposition in Moscow Elections

(4)  Photo Essay:  It Seems Putin is no Music Lover

(5)  The U.S. Open isn’t over yet, except for the Russians

NOTE:  Kim Zigfeld takes on Conde Nast and GQ in her most recent installment of her Russia column over at Pajamas Media (now 37 columns strong).  Needless to say, they don’t stand a chance.  It’s the third time Kim has had the lead item at the superblog.

NOTE: The bleak news coming out of Russia can be depressing sometimes, and looking for good news from Russia as consolation is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  So let’s look at Mt. Bosavi in Papaua New Guinea where in the crater of an extinct volcano has been discovered an entire new world of never-before-seen creatures that have evolved in isolation for 200,000 years. The photos are breathtaking, and remind us that anything is possible. Even democracy in Russia, however unlikely it may seem.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Economic Morass

EDITORIAL

Russia’s Economic Morass

The Moscow Times has made an impressive major reworking of its website design, and part of it allows the mighty little paper to publish larger photographs and images, such as the brilliant editorial cartoon show above which captures the fundamental dishonesty of the Russophile hoards who rabidly seek to defend the Putin regime from its obvious and endless economic failures that have brought the nation to its knees.  Their ridiculouse lies hide the truth only from the lemming-like people of Russia themselves, while the rest of the world gapes in horror and pity.

The cartoon accompanied an editorial from the Vedemosti newspaper that is published with assistance from the Moscow Times and which is one of Russia’s last remaining bastions of real information — though like all the others it is ready a perilous few.

Putin, Dancing with Neo-Nazis

Just say "NO!" to Nazis

Writing on the Open Democracy network Russian journalist Vladimir Tupikin says that the Putin regime is dancing to the tune of the country’s neo-Nazi movement:

On Tuesday 4 August 2009 the St. Petersburg City Court examined the appeal in the case of Alexei Bychin, a young anti-fascist arrested in the summer of last year. According to witnesses, the trial lasted around three minutes and upheld Bychin’s sentence: five years in a maximum security prison. From three to five, as people say in jest. But this time the story isn’t funny at all.

At the beginning of the white nights season in the middle of June 2008, a group of young punk rockers were walking around in the centre of Petersburg. Among them was Alexei Bychin, who had the ironic punk nickname Tolsty (Fatty), because he is thin and small (50 kg, 165 cm). There were girls in the group too.

Pusillanimous Putin Purges Opposition Candidates even in Local Elections

The Moscow Times reports:

An independent election-monitoring group criticized election officials Monday for refusing to register all but one opposition candidate for next month’s Moscow City Duma elections, saying none of them would have won seats even if they had run.

“If elections were held according to European standards, these candidates could have become deputies,” Golos election monitor Andrei Buzin said at a news conference.

Photo Essay: It Seems Vladimir Putin is no Music Lover

It seems Russian “prime minister” Vladimir Putin is no music lover. Above is opposition leader Roman Dobrokhotov strumming on his guitar at an August 31st rally in Moscow. Care to guess what happened next?

U.S. Open Recap: Another New Low in Russian Humiliation

The mighty Oudin, slayer of Russians

If you learned that a 17-year-old American ranked well outside the world’s top 65 players went deep, deep into the draw at the year’s final grand slam event, the U.S. Open in New York, it probably wouldn’t surprise you a bit, would it, to learn that each and every one of her matches prior to the quarter finals came against Russian  opponents, whom she cut down as if they were feeble shoots of wheat beneath her sharpened deadly scythe, regardless of their ranking?

SPECIAL EXTRA — EDITORIAL: Cowards and Traitors at Condé Nast

EDITORIAL

Cowards and Traitors at Condé Nast

The face of betrayal

Martin Luther King always said he’d much rather battle the white sheets of the KKK than those so-called “moderates” in his own ranks whose cowardice so often betrayed him. We feel his pain especially sharply this week.

The September issue of GQ magazine bears a huge photo of the face of deceased pop star Michael Jackson on its cover and weighs in at a massive 320 pages, if you count the final one which has a sample of LaCoste cologne for men. It’s the “Big Fall Style Issue” and begins with dozens of pages of fashion advertising interspersed with the issue’s table of contents, making it virtually impossible to survey the list of articles in any efficient way.

The cover makes no reference whatsoever to the eight-page investigative article you will find beginning on page 246, written by seasoned war correspondent Scott Anderson and entitled “None Dare Call it Conspiracy.”  You also won’t find the article anywhere on the magazine’s website, and National Public Radio reported that the Russian version of GQ won’t even carry the piece in its hard copy, much less online (Bloggasm has more details).   The article accuses the Putin regime of planting the bombs which leveled two Moscow apartment blocks in 1999, and then using those massacres as justification to attack Chechnya days later.  These are the same explosive allegations that got Alexander Litvinenko poisoned with radiation by the KGB.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the GAWKER website, however, you can read the brilliant, courageous and absolutely essential article in both Russian and English from the comfort of your browser. UPDATE:  The story is now online in HTML format thanks to the efforts of the blogosphere.  It’s one of the most important pieces of reporting on Russia in the last decade. 

September 7, 2009 — Contents

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 7 CONTENTS

(1)  Russia Secretly sending Weapons to Iran

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Putinomics Poisons Russia

(3)  EDITORIAL:  The Putin Dictatorship Poisons Russia

(4)  Abkhazia spits in Putin’s Eye

Russia Secretly sending arms to Iran

The Times of London reports on the latest barbaric outrage from Putin’s Russia:

A cargo ship that vanished in the Channel was carrying arms to Iran and was being tracked by Mossad, the Israeli security service, according to sources in both Russia and Israel.

EDITORIAL: Putinomics is Poison for Russia

EDITORIAL

Putinomics is Poison for Russia

The latest stunning bad news on the Russian economy is that the nation’s budget deficit increased a whopping 37% in August, Russia’s month of doom.  In the first seven months of the year the budget deficit was 4.3% of GDP, but in August it increased a gut-wrenching 1.6 points to reach 5.9% of GDP.  The budget deficit could get close to double digits by year’s end. 

EDITORIAL: The Putin Dictatorship Poisons Russia

EDITORIAL

The Putin Dictatorship

Anyone who had the slightest doubt about whether Russia is a dictatorship or not lost them last week, when the Putin regime removed Ilya Yashin’s name from the list of candidates running for the Moscow City Council, removed it along with all three of the other Solidarity Party candidates.

Abkhazia Spits in Russia’s Eye

Paul Goble reports:

Moscow’s expectations of gratitude from Abkhazia because of Russia’s decision to extend diplomatic recognition to that breakaway republic are proving to be unjustified, according to an influential Russian analyst, and he predicts that Abkhazia will continue to “drift away” from Moscow as Sukhumi pursues its own interests.

In an article published on the Nezavisimaya Gazeta website, Aleksandr Karavayev, who is the deputy head of the Moscow State University center for the study of the former Soviet space, offers the most pessimistic assessment yet from a Russian analyst about where Abkhazia is heading. If most analysts have assumed that Abkhazia will pursue a variant of the pro-Russian policy that South Ossetia’s Eduard Kokoity backs, either because they assume that both breakaway republics will act only on the basis of gratitude or because they think that the only issue is whether these regimes will survive, Karavayev draws a very different conclusion.

September 6, 2009 — Contents

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:   Annals of Russian Insanity I

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Annals of Russian Insanity II

(3)  What was on that Ship, Mr. Putin?

(4)  Another Russophile Disgusted by Russia

(5)  A Sunday (S&M) Mystery

NOTE:  In a shameful display of cowardice, the Conde Nast publishing group is censoring an article from the American version of GQ magazine from running in the Russian version and refusing to place the article on GQ’s website.  GAWKER is running pages of the article, in the current issue, alongside a working Russian translation.  The article delves further into the allegations that the Putin regime, not Chechen terrorists, blew up Moscow apartment buildings in the 1990s.

EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Insanity I

EDITORIAL

Annals of Russian Insanity I

We can’t help but remark again upon the amazing irony involved in the recent disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant.  When bombs exploded a decade ago in two Moscow apartment buildings, the Chechen rebels denied involvement.  The Kremlin refused to accept their denial, and insisted they were guilty.  As a result, the launched a massive invasion of Chechnya.

Yet in the case of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant, where the Chechen rebels claimed credit for the explosion that crippled the plant, the Kremlin insisted they had nothing to do with it and ignored them.  How can this possibly be explained?