EDITORIAL
Russia and its Bandits
Our hearts skipped a beat last week last week when we read reports indicating that Russian “president” Dima Medvedev had declared his intention to “eliminate the bandits” who were plaguing his country.
At last, we thought! Finally Russia’s so-called leader has seen the light and is going to arrest proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin and his gang of thugs who have been robbing the nation blind for years. And that’s to say nothing of the murders.
EDITORIAL
Dima “Slimeball” Trenin
Dmitri "Just call me Slimeball" Trenin
It’s that time again, dear reader, to catch up with the neo-Soviet misadventures of our little friend Dima “Just call me Slimeball” Trenin.
When last we met Mr. Trenin, of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, darling of Kremlin-owned propaganda outlets Russia Today and Russia Profile, he was being spit upon by the heroic Andrei Piotkovsky as Trenin hosted a cocktail party to tout his propaganda tract “Getting Russia Right” whilst Piontkovsky faced criminal charges for criticizing the Kremlin in Moscow. We blasted Trenin’s blind nationalism in the very earliest days of this blog’s history, but nothing prepared us for what we found in the Moscow Times from this reptilian’s pen last week.
Somewhere, Andrew Carnegie is rolling over in his grave and screaming.
Leila Pliyeva holding photos of her son Alikshan Pliyev
The Washington Post reports:
Aliskhan Pliyev was talking on his cell phone with his girlfriend one autumn afternoon when two dozen masked men in uniforms stormed into his family’s house, grabbed him and began to hustle him away.
The 30-year-old construction worker’s three sisters screamed, demanding to know where the intruders were taking him. “None of your business!” a man in a black mask shouted, before Pliyev was driven off in a convoy of cars and vans escorted by an armored personnel carrier. He hasn’t been seen since.
Officials here in the Russian region of Ingushetia say they don’t know anything about Pliyev’s abduction, one of scores in recent months that have caused fresh outrage and grief in a region already scarred by over 15 years of fighting.
But the young man’s kidnapping in the outskirts of Ingushetia’s largest city bears the hallmarks of what rights activists call Russia’s “policy of state terror,” a shadow war against violent Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus, a strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia.
A central tactic in the war, activists say, is forced disappearances – the brazen snatching of young people from their homes or off the street, often by gangs of masked men who move freely, even in areas heavily patrolled by Russian military and police. The pace of forced disappearances has doubled in the past year, following a spike in militant attacks on police and authorities, including suicide bombings, ambushes and assassinations.
What follows are two articles from the Western press documenting, each in its own way, the rise of the neo-Soviet Gulag prison system, where anyone the Kremlin doesn’t care for can be tortured into oblivion.
First, Russia reporter Amy Knight, writing in the New York Review of Books online:
The horrors of Soviet prisons and labor camps were described vividly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, and later, by the Soviet dissident and former political prisoner Anatoly Marchenko, in his 1969 memoir, My Testimony. To judge from a disturbing new report about the tragic death of 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in late November, Russia’s current penal system is almost as bad as it used to be.
As was the case under Stalin and his successors, the treatment of prisoners reflects the deeper problems of a politicized law enforcement system that routinely disregards human rights. Now, the Magnitsky case seems to have persuaded Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to begin to address these problems—though his powerful Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
An editorial from the Washington Post highlights how utterly alone and friendless Vladimir Putin’s Russia has become in former Soviet space:
IF IT’S JANUARY, it seems, Russia must be involved in a politically motivated dispute over energy supplies with one of its neighbors. This time it’s Belarus, the former Soviet republic that used to be called Europe’s last dictatorship, until Russia itself headed back in that direction. Strongman Alexander Lukashenko still rules in Minsk, but in the past couple of years he’s taken several steps toward shaking off the tutelage he once accepted from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. At the urging of Western governments, Belarus released a few political prisoners and in turn was allowed to join the European Union’s Eastern Partnership program. Mr. Lukashenko has also embarrassed Mr. Putin by refusing to recognize the two puppet states that Moscow is backing in Georgia.
No wonder, then, that as this winter gets cold Mr. Putin has singled out Belarus for punishment. On Jan. 1Russia cut off part of its supplies of oil to the country, once again raising alarms in Western Europe, which receives large quantities of Russian oil through a pipeline that transits Belarus. The supplies resumed after a couple of days, but Mr. Putin continues to insist that Belarus accept a new supply deal that could cost it as much as $5 billion, or about 10 percent of its gross domestic product.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 13 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Russia’s Empty Schools
(2) Rotten Russia
(3) Putin Betrays Russia’s Future
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Russia’s Empty Schools
Speaking on Echo of Moscow radio last week, Russian Education and Science Minister Andrey Fursenko said that “three or four years from now, there will be half as many students [in the country’s higher educational institutions] as there are now.” Over the next two years, the pool of annually available potential university students will be just 700,000 compared to 1.3 million three years ago.
The consequences of this fact are obvious: Unqualified students will be admitted to study where their efforts will be wasted, and qualified instructors will lose their jobs. Even worse, the diversity and creativity present in the Russian classroom will plummet.
Fursenko reveals a truly shocking and horrifying statistic, namely that less than one third of enrolled students, even in the most elite institutions, are “really” engaged in study, and that as few as 15% — yes, fifteen percent — are doing so in the second-rate institutions.
The American Spectator reports:
There is a chilling sequence in Tsar, Pavel Lungin’s dark and brilliant new film about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan, played by the mercurial rock musician Pyotr Mamonov, steps out of his private chapel wild-eyed after a long session of wheedling and bargaining with his God. The Tsar walks, lost in thought, through a series of rooms. As he shuffles along grovelling boyars ceremonially dress him. One group gently places a cloth-of-gold gown over his shoulders. Another group presents an embroidered collar, then cuffs, a crown and staff. Finally the Tsar emerges into the winter sunlight, golden and terrible. The crowd of people who have been waiting for him since dawn prostrate themselves in the slush and the sh*t of the palace yard. Silence falls. The message is clear: for the grovelling boyars and the grovelling peasants alike, the Tsar is God’s messenger on earth, the sole fount of worldly power and protection.
Paul Goble reports:
All the problems Russia had in the late 1990s remain unresolved because Vladimir Putin failed to use income from the rise in oil prices to address them, preferring instead to enrich himself and his friends and to pretend that the existence of such wealth, even though kept abroad, was by itself sufficient to pull Russia back from the brink.
But now, a decade after “the miracle” of the rise in oil and gas prices propelled Putin to the stop, Moscow commentator Maksim Kalashnikov says, “the Putin zigzag” in the ongoing decline of Russia is coming to an end, and Russia faces a terrible reckoning, one highlighted by but not limited to technological disasters.
Posted in corruption, economics, neo-soviet failure, russia
Tagged maksim kalashnikov, paul goble, russia
Investment U reports (hat tip: Robert Amsterdam):
These days, you don’t have to look far to read about success stories within the “BRIC” nations. However, while Brazil, India and China enjoy solid growth, the remaining member – Russia – has fallen to the bottom of the pack.
And with good reason.
The Hopman Cup is the Superbowl, the World Cup if you will, of mixed doubles tennis. Last year, Russia’s brother-sister tandem of Marat and Dinara Safina went down to sensational, humiliating defeat in the finals against a much lowlier team from Slovakia. It made a hat trick of championships for Slovakia in the event, which has been contested since 1988. The United States has won the tournament four of the past seven years. Russia has prevailed only once in its entire history.
The shame and disgrace for Russia at the Hopman continued last week as its Elena Dementieva (world rank #5) and Igor Andreev (world rank #35) went down to spectacular defeat at the hands of Kazakhstan’s Yaroslava Shvevdova (world rank #51) and Andrei Golubev (world rank #133). The Kazakh team was the weakest in the group of eight nations contesting the title in round-robin play, and therefore seeded last in the draw. But the Russians could not handle them.
This meant that Russia fell to third place in its group and could only qualify for the finals by beating first-place Great Britain in its final tie and then seeing Kazakhstan lose. Neither happened, and Russia was sent packing.
Once again, Russia proved its “dominance” in the sport of tennis.
FRIDAY JANUARY 8 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: The Perils of Pikalyovo
(2) EDITORIAL: A Tsunami of Sports Humiliation for Russia
(3) EDITORIAL: Look, up in the Sky – It’s Super Russia!
(4) Annals of Russian “Education”
NOTE: A few issues back we hammered Russia over a restaurant review in the New York Times that crucified one of its establishments, while right next door it praised the cuisine of Trinidad. As if to add insult to injury, the Gray Lady followed with a love letter, complete with lush photographs, to a famous and time-honored Ukrainian restaurant. Ouch.
EDITORIAL
The Perils of Pikalyovo
Last summer, when the town of Pikalyovo revolted against the Kremlin’s gross mismanagement of the Russian economy, which had left residents unpaid, starving and hopeless, Vladimir Putin was left with two choices: implement radical reform, or making protest activity like blocking roads, which the Pikalyovo protester used to devastating effect, a serious crime.
Care to guess which option Putin chose last week?
EDITORIAL
A Tsunami of Humiliation for Putin’s Russia
The shame and humiliation for Russia came so fast and furious on the sports front last week, across the whole spectrum of its most famous areas of expertise, that it’s genuinely hard to know where to begin.
Posted in editorial, neo-soviet failure, russia, sports
EDITORIAL
Look, up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Super Russia!
Of all the ridiculous, asinine “ideas” to emerge from the fetid wasteland that is neo-Soviet Russia (floating nuclear power stations, building islands in the Black Sea, colonizing Mars, walking on the Moon, etc.) surely the most side-splittingly ludicrous of them all is the Kremlin’s “plan” to “save the Earth” from a killer asteroid by blasting it with a Russian-made missile.
Shaun Walker, writing in the Independent:
Critics are accusing President Vladimir Putin’s government of a Soviet-style rewriting of Russian history with a series of new “patriotic” textbooks to be unveiled in the new school year.
New laws passed this summer have given the government sweeping powers over which textbooks will be used in schools. Teachers and other critics have voiced concerns that this will allow the government to force the use of a single, approved book in each subject – essentially a return to Soviet practice.
Mr Putin has complained that the negative view of the Soviet past in current history textbooks is down to the fact that the authors received foreign grants to write them.
Now, the Kremlin claims it wants to change that situation and a recommissioning of Russia’s history textbooks is under way. A handbook for teachers, on the basis of which a future textbook for students could be written, is called The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006. Only one of the authors is a professional historian. The book calls Joseph Stalin a “contradictory” figure, and states that while some people consider him evil, others recognise him as a “hero” for his role in the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) and his territorial expansion.
Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate at the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on the Foreign Policy website:
At a recent meeting with Russian liberals in Moscow, a well-known European intellectual started trying to convince them that, as he put it, “Russia is not a dictatorship these days. [President Dmitry] Medvedev is trying to liberalize the system, and with time Russia will become a democracy. You shouldn’t try to hurry things.” Not surprisingly, this advice provoked consternation among an audience that had expected at least some encouragement from Continental liberals.
At a conference last month in Berlin, I witnessed another example of this divide. When I started to raise the question of democratic standards in Western-Russian relations, I was interrupted by another Western attendee. “You irritate us,” he said. “International relations are not about values; they are about power!” If he is right, Russian liberals will have to reconsider their expectations about the Western opinion-leaders they have long counted on for moral support and understanding.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 6 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Russia on the Brink
(2) National Projects? What national projects?
(3) Kirill prepares for Holy Russian Empire
(5) In Putin’s Russia, no Shops
(6) Russia sucks!
NOTE: A few weeks ago we published an interview with the firebrand Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky. Now, Felshtinsky’s Live Journal blog has been shut down by the provider because, according to Global Voices, Felshtinsky dared to publish a link to a Russian translation of his book “The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin.” Yet one more nail in the coffin of the Russian Internet, driven by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin while the craven population of the country turns a blind eye. Apparently, if we were on ZheZhe, the lines we’ve just written would get this blog turned off. Yikes.
Posted in contents
EDITORIAL
Russia on the Brink
“The Russian economy is in recovery and will post significant growth next year.”
That’s the Kremlin’s story and it’s sticking to it, whatever the facts may show.
Those facts are frightening, for folks interested in such trifles as facts. Russia’s PMI index, a key gauge of manufacturing potency, fell even further below the threshold score of 50 below which recession is indicated. The index is at its lowest point since July of last year. To glimpse a genuine economic recovery in an economy with solid economic foundations, take a gander at the USA, where the manufacturing index has risen for five consecutive months and now stands at its highest level since April 2006.
New export orders from Russia dropped for the fifteenth straight month and Deputy Industry Minister Andrei Dementiev projected a 7 percent decline in the country’s steel industry in 2009. Belying any notion of recovery, the Russian central bank went on furiously cutting interest rates in the hope of generating manufacturing activity, and Russia’s own Finance Minister referred his country as the “weak link.”
Robert Coalson reports, on the Power Vertical:
Remember the much-ballyhooed Russian “national projects”? Evidently, you aren’t supposed to.
Let me remind you then that the national projects were four long-term domestic-policy priorities laid out by then-President Vladimir Putin in 2005. They were supposed to bring dramatic improvements to the areas of housing, medical care, education, and agriculture. And they were under the oversight of then-First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. (The projects are now under Putin’s direct supervision.)
Now, according to a front-page report in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” it turns out that the Kremlin’s priorities have changed. The four projects have become, in the words of one analyst quoted in the piece, “non-priority priority projects.”
Paul Goble reports:
In the waning days of 2009, Patriarch Kirill made three statements designed among other things to position the Russian Orthodox Church for even greater role in Russian politics at home and abroad in the year to come, a role that some may welcome but that others will see as a challenge to secular values and human rights in both Russia and Europe.
First, in what must be music to the ears of many in the Russian government, Kirill repeated his longstanding view that Russia represents a unique civilization and should therefore can and should ignore the evaluations offered by outside experts and institutions like the European Court of Human Rights. Second, and as part of his campaign to build bridges with the Papacy and conservative Christians more generally, the outspoken Russian patriarch lashed out at Europeans for surrendering their cultural and political values to what he described in Gumilyev-style language as “passionate” Muslims. And third, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church further integrated that institution with the state not by signing an expanded cooperation accord with the Academy of Government Service, and demanding that the powers that be support religions relative to their size.
Yet another young Russian opposition leader has crossed the Atlantic to reach out to American leaders. First it was Oleg Kozlovsky, now Roman Dobrokhotov. Global Voices reports:
Roman Doborohotov (27) is a leader of Russian youth democratic movement “Mi” (We). He attracted media attention after he had interrupted the Russian President Dmirty Medvedev’s speech[RUS] by shouting that there were wide violations of the constitution in the country. Dobrohotov keeps his blog on Livejournal and studies political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In November 2009, Dobrohotov visited the Kenan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in the U.S. where he spoke about “Mi” movement. He also talked to GVO about the Internet, democracy and online activism in Russia.
Roman, thank you for talking to GVO. Let’s start with a general question. What is the role of the Internet in Russian society?
The Internet is the only source of information [in Russia - G.V.] that is not censored. As alternatives, we have only newspaper “Kommersant” and radio “Echo Moskvy“ with, to some extent, TV channel “REN TV.” But “Kommersant” and “Echo Moskvy” also use the Web a lot as a source of information. Very often, their news sources are blogs. Most of journalists also have their online dairies.
Paul Goble reports that in Putin’s Russia, it’s just like the good old neo-Soviet days:
Bryansk Governor Nikolay Denin’s directive this week that officials there deliver vodka, champagne and other goods to isolated villages for the New Year’s celebration highlights the increasing isolation of many Russian villages from the amenities available in Russian cities and the growing desperation of the rural residents in that country. Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported that “only just ahead of the New Year did [regional officials] suddenly remember that in [their] Bryansk oblast [which is located in central Russia not far from Moscow], some 1386 population points somehow are living without any stores”.
Indeed, the paper’s Aleksandr Fedosov said, “to reach some of them now is more difficult than it was for the Germans who during the war launched attacks against [the famed] Bryansk partisans.” There are no passable roads, he continued, and in many heavily-forested places even a helicopter has no safe place to land. Normally, Fedosov continued, officials ignore these people and their problems, but this year, they have had to pay attention because “on the eve of the [New Year’s] holiday, many [of the villagers remain without moonshine [samogon] and even without home-brewed beer [braga]” that have long been an integral part of the holiday.
Posted in economics, neo-soviet failure, russia, russian people
Tagged paul goble, russia
Russia sucks, and nobody knows that better than people who have seen the horrid place up close and personal. Especially the Russians themselves. And that’s the name of that tune. An exchange from Facebook:
MONDAY JANUARY 4 CONTENTS
(1) EDITORIAL: Putin shows Snegurochka who’s Boss
(2) EDITORIAL: Russia butchers its Women
(4) Mr. Putin and his Sense of “Humor”
(5) Cartoon
NOTE: Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment of her Russia column on the mighty Pajamas Media blog is up and running. It takes the cowardly Obama administration task for what she calls “obamappeasment” in failing to stand up to the imperialistic advances of the Putin regime, thereby encouraging even more aggression just as Chamberlain did to Hitler in World War II. Required reading.
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