Medvedev: Off the Reservation or Off his Rocker?

The always insightful Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Los Angeles Times:

The security of the United States continues to be tied to decisions in Moscow, as evidenced by President Obama’s touting of the pending strategic arms-control agreement with Russia in his State of the Union address. And those decisions, in turn, will hinge on Russian domestic politics. The central question is whether President Dmitry Medvedev’s increasingly radical rhetoric will begin to translate into policies that would spell a decisive break with those of his predecessor and current prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

Could 2010 become Medvedev’s equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1987 — the year when, also after only two years in the Kremlin and against very strong opposition by hard-liners, Gorbachev began lifting totalitarian controls over politics by declaring glasnost and democratization?

Like Gorbachev in 1987, Medvedev faces tough odds. His speeches are still contaminated by the bluster and outright propaganda lies of Putinism. Moreover, unlike Gorbachev — who had the awesome power of the office of the Communist Party’s general secretary — Medvedev’s authority still appears to be on loan from Putin. It’s as if Gorbachev had ruled with Leonid Brezhnev watching over him.

And yet, just as unmistakably, in the last few months, Russia’s president has not only dissociated himself from key tenets of Putinism but challenged and repudiated them, in effect chipping away at the legitimacy of the political and economic order he inherited. Medvedev’s critique was especially pointed and concentrated in his September article, “Rossiya, vperyod!” (“Russia, forward!”), posted on the opposition Web daily Gazeta.ru — and more or less reprised, alongside propaganda cliches, in a November address to the Russian parliament.

February 12, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 12 CONTENTS

(1)  TRANSLATION:  Making Journalism a Crime

(2)  Uncool Russia

(3)  Stalin and Facebook

(4)  Kadyrov and his Mommy

(5)  Russians on Russia

(6)  Of Russians and their Love of Whale Penis

(7)  CARTOON

NOTE:  An interesting translation of information about the recent wave of anti-Putin protests from the Russian blogosphere and exchange of comments afterwards over at Global Voices.

NOTE:  Ah, Russian cuisine. Yum, yummy, yum!

Another Original LR Translation: In Putin’s Russia, Journalism is now a Crime

We were so appalled by the following item from the Russian press that we have taken the time to translate it and held our editorials from this issue, allowing this revolting material to speak for itself. No further words from our editorial board are necessary.  This is truly an epic new low in the sordid history of the Russian nation.

500 Ruble’s Worth of Shame

Vremya Novostei

January 21, 2010

by Ekaterina Butorina

Translated from the Russian by LR Staff

RIA Novosti's photojournalist Andrei Stenin

The Municipal Court of the Tver district of Moscow yesterday set a precedent fraught with serious potential for Russian authorities to impose a new wave of crackdowns on civil liberties. According to the decision, journalists who attend  unauthorized opposition political rallies in order to report on what transpires can be treated as if they were participants in the demonstration itself, and therefore as criminals subject to prosecution just like the “perpetrators.”

The first to be accused of such “wrongdoing” RIA Novosti’s photojournalist Andrei Stenin. On January 20th, a magistrate found him guilty under Art. 20.2 of the Municipal Administrative Code of participating in an unsanctioned demonstration, held in mid-December last year in front of the presidential administration building, and fined him 500 rubles.  The Director of RIA Novosti called the incident “a dangerous precedent” and expressed his intention not only to appeal yesterday’s “global solution” but also to bring to the incident to the attention of business leaders and journalistic colleagues.

The head of Department Internal Affairs’ Moscow Division, Vladimir Kolokoltchev, stated that “law abiding citizens have nothing to fear when participating in rallies as police officers act against them in strict accordance with the law.”  Tell that to Stenin, who was acting in accordance with the Constitution and the Law on Mass Media and who as a result was arrested and convicted as a direct result of police action.

Uncool Russia

Alexei Bayer, writing in the Moscow Times:

Four years ago during the XX Winter Olympics, the Russia House was by far the hottest party venue in Turin. It even had an open-air ice skating rink on the roof, where skaters were treated to free shots of vodka and an unending parade of scantily clad young women. There were plenty of brutish middle-aged men, too, but they somehow seemed less scary — and therefore more fascinating — since then-

President Vladimir Putin had curbed the excesses of Russia’s wild capitalism.

Stalin and Facebook

The Estonian blogger at Blue, Black & White Alert tells of his meeting with Josef Stalin:

I recently received a Facebook friend request from Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili Stalin.

Yes, I’m aware: alter egos are proliferating on FB; it’s become a miniature version of the Internet with trolls and even viruses running amok. Everybody can have a second joke profile, it seems.

Still, who knows? Maybe it WAS Stalin. People come back. The rumour in this case was that the Iosif Stalin page was created by a bunch of Italian students. And, you may know what happened in one of Umberto Eco’s novels — a bunch of academic types fed a hodge-podge of classic conspiracy theories into a computer…and they became true.

So my first reaction was to become frightened. Besides killing 40 million in a detached, banal manner, this guy probably started the whole tradition of polonium ingestion and brutality that persists to this day in Russia. He’s the kind of guy who’s not smart enough to invent a gas chamber but will get envious when he hears someone else has done it and takes it out on everyone around him — before maybe stealing the gas chamber for his own use.

Kadyrov and his Mommy

It appears that the Chechen lunatic Ramzan Kadyrov grows more dangerously insane by the hour. The New York Times reports:

Chechnya’s powerful president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, backed down from a conflict with human rights defenders and journalists on Tuesday, withdrawing several libel suits at the request, aides said, of his mother.

It was a rare concession from Mr. Kadyrov, who has exercised nearly unchecked authority over the volatile southern Russian region. The lawsuits were prompted by accusations that the Chechen leader has employed kidnapping, torture and murder in his Kremlin-supported effort to grind down a lingering Islamic separatist movement in the region.

“His mother insistently asked him to do this,” said Alvi A. Karimov, Mr. Kadyrov’s spokesman, adding that prominent Chechen cultural figures and clergy had also advised him to drop the suits.

Russians on Russia

Julia Ioffe reports from Moscow:

I’ve just spent the last couple of days holed up inside Moscow’s World Trade Center for the Troika Dialog Russia 2010 Forum, an economic conference where I was surprised to hear some refreshing honesty from the Russian political elite who made appearances there.

Anatoly Chubais, who heads up the state nanotech corporation and was an influential reformer in the 1990s, said, “We have to admit that we have fallen very far behind.” And by “far” he means about 30 to 40 years. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov was equally harsh. “We need to change our behavior, drive safely and not, as is customary in Russia, haphazardly,” he said. He admitted, too, that the Russian bureaucracy — “an unfriendly administrative system” — is a stultifying force that even the elite has to do battle with, and that social protection is not a public good here. “Even if you have money, you have no sense that the security services will protect your rights,” he said.

Who needs rich Corinthian leather when you can have whale penis?

U.S. News and World report reveals the details of a very interesting new Russian addition to the world automobile market:

The press release is titled, “Armored Car Without Penis. Let’s Save the Whales.”

We promise we did not make this story up.  That’s about all we can promise you.

A Russian SUV builder has abandoned its plans to line the interior of its new luxury SUV with whale penis leather.  Thanks to Pamela Anderson. And Greenpeace.

The Dartz Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition, Jalopnik reports, was designed to be “The world’s most expensive ultra-luxury SUV.”  Planned for a 2010 debut, the $1.5 million vehicle was to feature “White gold diamond and ruby encrusted badges,” Kevlar body panels and “Gold-plated bulletproof windows.”

No, we don’t know how you’re supposed to see out of a gold-plated window; perhaps the Kevlar body panels are there because you’ll hit stuff.  It does come with three bottles of Vodka, after all.

Most importantly, the car was to feature a “Whale Penis Leather interior.”

Enticing, isn’t it? Even Stephen Colbert wanted one.

But it was not to be.

CARTOON

The upper sign on the tree reads “Yanukovich” while the lower reads “Tymoshenko.” The skier wears the colors of Ukraine.

Source:  Ellustrator.

February 10, 2010

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 10 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Election in Ukraine

(2)  EDITORIAL:  The Missiles of February

(3)  Yanukovich the Gangster

(4)  Goodbye Karelia!

(5)  Vladimir Putin and his Crimes

EDITORIAL: The Election in Ukraine

EDITORIAL

The Election in Ukraine

Before voters ever went to the polls in Ukraine last weekend, they had already won.

They had already shown themselves to be far more civilized and advanced than their Russian neighbors, for instance, because they had carried out a real election, ousting the current regime and replacing it with a radically different opposition candidate. They repudiated the sitting president long before the votes were counted, and we can only wonder:  What sort of barbaric crimes would Vladimir Putin have to commit before Russian voters would do the same. Would he have to actually eat babies on TV? Would even that suffice.  Russia, behaving like a nation in the dark ages,  has never once ousted a regime in an election in its entire thousand-year history — not once, not ever.

Similarly, Ukraine is building a real economy, not relying on the accident of natural energy resources, and it is not attacking any of its neighbors in any way, but rather building solid relationships with Western nations that will last for centuries..

What’s more, as we reported in our last issue, Ukrainians have already made it clear that no matter who won, Ukraine would turn its back on Russia and look towards the West for its future prosperity and security.

So there was lots of good news, and Ukrainians have much to be proud of.  With that said, Ukrainian voters sadly made the wrong choice on Sunday when they handed power to the charlatan Victor Yanukovich.

EDITORIAL: The Missiles of February

EDITORIAL

The Missiles of February

Last week yet another nation in Eastern Europe made an emphatic statement of how it feels about Russia:  Romania agreed to host an American ballistic missile defense system starting in 2015.

Russia’s representative to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, a crazed nationalist whose nomination itself speaks volumes about whether Russia wants normal relations with the West, sputtered and fumed and demanded “exhaustive explanations” from the USA.

But what Rogozin didn’t do was ask why Romanians hate Russians so much that they would wish to take an action that would so infuriate the Kremlin.  Nor did he ask why the Obama administration, whose craven cowardice in regard to Russia is well known, suddenly started getting tough.

Yanukovich the Gangster, Tymoshenko the Savior

Nina Khrushcheva, writing in the Moscow Times:

A pox on both your houses” may be an appropriate individual response to frustration with the political candidates on offer in an election. But it is a dangerous sentiment for governments to hold. Choice is the essence of governance and to abstain from it — for whatever reason — is to shirk responsibility.

But that seems to be the stance of the entire West regarding Sunday’s second round of Ukraine’s presidential election. Because the Orange Revolution in 2004 turned out to be a seemingly unending series of disappointments, most Western leaders are acting as if it makes no difference whether Prime MinisterYulia Tymoshenko or her rival, Viktor Yanukovych, wins.

They are wrong — not only about what the election will mean for Ukrainians, who have stoically endured so much, but also about what it will mean for security and stability across Eurasia. If the Orange Revolution demonstrated one thing, it is that Ukraine’s politics are not those of a pendulum, swinging predictably between opposing forces that agree on the fundamental rules of democracy. Indeed, it is patently clear from his own words that Yanukovych does not accept the legitimacy of the Orange Revolution, which means that he does not accept the bedrock principle of democracy that you cannot cheat your way to power.

Yanukovych’s anti-democratic position should come as no surprise. His criminal record is often noted, but the particular crimes that sent him to prison are rarely spelled out. Let me do it.

Goodbye, Karelia! Warm wishes!

Paul Goble reports:

The FSB has opened a criminal case against Karelians who have distributed leaflets calling for their land to be re-attached to Finland, a campaign Russian security services say reflects shortcomings in anti-extremist efforts but one others in that northern region argue is the result of the failure of officials to keep the heat on in local buildings. At the end of last week, German Shtadler, the head of the Karelian procuracy, announced that the FSB had brought the case after some unknown group distributed leaflets in the Sortavalsk district calling on people there to push for a referendum on transferring their district from Russia to Finland.

No one has yet been arrested – although the local media suggested that the Finnish organization Pro Karelia which seeks the return of territory seized by Stalin after the Winter War — but once someone is, Shtadler said, he or she will be charged under Article 280 of the Russian criminal code which sets punishments for those who call for carrying out extremist actions. According to the prosecutor, Karelia “in recent times” has become a favorable breeding ground for “extremist manifestations,” with some of them rooted in ethnic clashes with Gastarbeiters from the North Caucasus as in Kondopoga and Kuitezha and others the reflection of the efforts to union leaders to press for higher wages and better working conditions.

Vladimir Putin and his Crimes

Paul Goble reports:

The nature of the current Russian political system was shown by the response of the central government to the demonstrations in Kaliningrad, a Moscow commentator says. The powers that be at the center responded not when regional officials acted within the law but when they failed to violate it to suppress an anti-government demonstration.

In an article in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, Vladimir Nadein, who explicitly says that he does not like Putin, that the prime minister has done “enormous harm” to Russia, and that he should be removed tried for his crimes, argues that Moscow’s reaction to the events in Kaliningrad is itself an indictment of Putin’s system. “When people in Kaliningrad came out with signs reading ‘Down with Putin!’” he writes, “this was entirely legal. When the police there, unlike in Moscow, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, and Rostov, did not tear the placards out of the hands of the peaceful demonstrators and did not beat them with truncheons, this also corresponded to the letter and the spirit of the law.”

February 8, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY FEBRUARY 8 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Putin, Surrounded

(2)  EDITORIAL:  The Slaughter at Rechnik

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Russia and Mickey D

(4)  Ukraine turns West

(5)  Kasparov on Russia and Europe

EDITORIAL: Vladimir Putin, Surrounded

EDITORIAL

Vladimir Putin, Surrounded

Last week, we must say, was an exceedingly delightful one if you are a Russophobe.  Vladimir Putin got his from every direction, left, right and center.

On the left, he was besieged by a group of incensed OMON officers — you read that right, OMON — who turned out to have written to Russian “president” Dima Medvedev begging him to take action to curb corruption run amok within their ranks.

EDITORIAL: The Slaughter at Rechnik

EDITORIAL

The Slaughter at Rechnik

We previously reported on the Russian Kremlin’s barbaric actions, flouting a promise made in court, to eject dozens of homeowoners onto frozen Moscow streets in order to raze their allegedly illegal riverfront homes.  Now, 12 elderly residents of the homes have perished according to Other Russia “since city-ordered demolitions of their houses began in late January.”

EDITORIAL: Russia and Mickey D

EDITORIAL

Russia and Mickey D

There are 235 McDonald’s restaurants in Russia.  Before this year is out, that number will increase by a whopping 20% as the company spends $150 million on the Russian business.

Russian McDonald’s outlets are twice as busy on average in Russia as one of the chain’s locations in the United States, seeing an average 850,000 customers compared to just 400,000 in the USA.

Over 125,000 Russian workers owe their income to McDonalds.  That number, of course, is increasing just as rapidly as the number of restaurant locations.  Whole industries previously unknown in Russia have been created to supply the burger chain with the 300 different ingredients it needs to produce its daily menu of American cuisine.

Ukraine looks West as Russia fails Again

Bloomberg reports:

When Yuri Davydov needed investors to expand his Ukrainian food company, he looked west to the European Union, not east to Russia, even though his VAT Creativ Industrial Group is in the Russian-speaking part of the country.

“We have good connections with Russia, but we prefer to trade with non-Russian companies,” Davydov said after a Jan. 19 presentation to potential investors in Vienna. “If the European Union removes barriers, we can find a niche.”

His attitude may explain why both contenders in the Feb. 7 runoff presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Timoshenko, have vowed to sign a trade accord with the EU. They favor it even though Yanukovych had Russian backing for his first run in 2004 and Timoshenko accused President Viktor Yushchenko of being too confrontational toward Russia.

The EU is looking more attractive to executives from Ukraine’s eastern industrial centers of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, as well as in Kiev and Lviv farther west. The need to diversify from Russia, Ukraine’s largest single trading partner, has business leaders pushing politicians for easier access to the 27-nation EU. Its market of 449 million people is more than triple the population of Russia.

Kasparov on Russia and Europe

The Other Russia translates an interview from Yezhedevny Zhurnal with Garry Kasparov:

The idea of European integration set out by opposition leader Garry Kasparov in a recent interview with Yezhednevny Zhurnal was met by an overwhelmingly positive reaction from its readers. Seeing the idea as a genuine and strategic alternative to current Russian foreign policy, many were left wondering if such integration could realistically be achieved.

Therefore, Yezhednevny Zhurnal sat down with Kasparov for another interview, in order to extend the discussion of why European integration is necessary for Russia and how current political posturing on economic and political reforms will inevitably come to naught.

Garry Kimovich, in your opinion, do the nationalist and leftist wings of the National Assembly support the idea of European integration?

The strategic vector of Russia’s future development is, of course, a question for national discussion. At a time when a new global consensus is developing, Russia’s own interests force it to determine who its strategic partners are. It is possible that, as before, part of the left will look towards China. They think that the ruling Chinese Communist Party will implement the correct scenario for the country’s development.

However, in my opinion, if Russia focuses so recklessly on the East, it will inevitably cause our country to lose geopolitical subjectivity. Nothing will come of Russia’s own role, most likely becoming a purely raw-exports role for its active eastern neighbor. China is a very strong player, constantly driving economic expansion. By steadily expanding the limits of its influence, it has already established hegemony over practically the entire Asian expanse.

It is possible that there are some nationalists who, believing in Russia’s divine destiny, will say: “But we don’t need anyone – we’ll handle it ourselves.” I think that all of these utopian theories will come to be rejected as a result of discussion. I do not doubt that in the end, both the nationalists and the leftists will choose the vector of European integration.

February 5, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Russian Scourge named Putin

(2)  Exposing Putin as the Beast

(3)  Putin’s Olympian Fraud

(4)  Stalin Terrorizes and Destroys

(5)  Putin, the Man and his Lies

NOTE:  A special issue today, devoted to the unspeakable horror that is Vladimir Putin.

EDITORIAL: The Russian Scourge Named Putin

EDITORIAL

The Russian Scourge Named Putin

We republish a trio of news stories today each commenting on a different facet of the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and its effects on the people of Russia.  They are stories of deception, violence, corruption and, ultimately, the destruction of the nation just as it was destroyed by the institutions of the Tsar and Politburo.

Each one is more horrifying and appalling than the last.

Exposing Putin as the Beast

Michael Bohm, opinion page editor of the Moscow Times, writing for the paper:

A year after former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on fraud charges, Baikal Finance Group — a mysterious company with a share capital of only 10,000 rubles ($330) — acquired Yukos’ largest subsidiary, Yuganskneftegaz, for $9.3 billion in an “auction” consisting of only one bidder. After Yuganskneftegaz was sold four days later to state-controlled Rosneft, Andrei Illarionov, economic adviser to then-President Vladimir Putin, called the state expropriation of Yukos “the Biggest Scam of the Year” in his annual year-end list of Russia’s worst events. When Illarionov announced his 2009 list in late December, he should have added another award and given it to Putin: “the Best PR Project of the Decade.”

The Yukos scam was “legal nihilism” par excellence, but most Russians have a completely different version of the event. The Kremlin’s 180-degree PR spin on the Yukos nationalization should be a case study for any nation aspiring to create a Ministry of Truth. As Putin explained in his December call-in show, the Yukos affair was not government expropriation at all, but a way to give money that Yukos “stole from the people” back to the people by helping them buy new homes and repair old ones. Putin, it turns out, is also Russia’s Robin Hood. War is peace. Ignorance is strength.

Putin’s Olympian Fraud

Australia’s The Age reports:

The president of the Russian Olympic Committee has emerged as a figure in one of the biggest frauds in Australian corporate history – the $100 million failure of fuel technology company Firepower.

Leonid Tyagachev, a close friend and regular skiing companion of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, was part of a failed attempt to raise money for Firepower in London financial circles in 2008.

A 30-page document marked ”commercial in confidence” obtained by The Age shows Mr Tyagachev was one of three people who made a presentation to the London-based branch of the Japanese bank Nomura. The others were a former senior federal government employee Gregory Klumov and Firepower founder Tim Johnston.

The document claimed Firepower had the support of the Australian Government.