CARTOON

Source: Ellustrator.

March 15, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY MARCH 15 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Putin’s “Inhumane” Russia

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Berezovsky 1, Putin 0

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Putin and his Charlatans

(4)  Medvedev’s Dismal mid-term Report Card

(5)  Russians lap up Georgian Cuisine

(6)  Annals of Machine Translation

EDITORIAL: Putin’s Russia is Brutal, Cruel and Inhumane

Yuri Shevchuk lays down the law to Vladimir Putin

EDITORIAL

Putin’s Russia is Brutal, Cruel and Inhumane

The system that has been built in our country is brutal, cruel, and inhumane. People are suffering, not only in prisons and camps, but in orphanages and hospitals as well. So many bastards are feeding themselves on power. With epaulettes on their shoulders and with flashing lights in their heads, they are robbing us, running us over on the road, and shooting us in stores. And nobody is being held accountable.

You may think those words were uttered by some demonic foreign “Russophobe” who just doesn’t know how great things are on the ground in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but if you think that you are very, very much mistaken.

Russian rocker Yuri Shevchuk of the seminal band DDT uttered those words during a concert last weekend in Moscow. A video of the remarks has gone viral in Russia (already collecting nearly over 175,000 views and over 500 comments). In a subsequent interview, Shevchuk warned ominously: “I know there are thousands of wonderful musicians who sing songs about civil themes, who do not agree with what is happening in this country. There are a lot of wonderful young people who are playing in cellars. And all this is gaining some critical mass.”

Radio Free Europe provides the evidence that Shevchuk is right:

EDITORIAL: Berezovsky 1, Putin 0

EDITORIAL

Berezovsky 1, Putin 0

He laughs last laughs Berezovsky

When state-operated RTR TV accused Russian “oligarch” Boris Berezovsky of being involved in the assassination of KGB defector Alexander Litvinkenko, Berezovsky cried foul.

Claiming RTR went to press without a shred of evidence linking him to the killing, as part of a political smokescreen designed to deflect blame from the real killers who were Kremlin operatives, Berezovsky filed a libel lawsuit in Britain.  It was Berezovsky against Putin, mano-a-mano, before an impartial arbitrator.

Last week, Berezvosky emerged the smiling victor.  He was awarded £150,000 (a quarter of a million dollars) in damages after the High Court of Britain concluded that Putin’s minions at RTR had been lying.

Ouch.

The verdict is a direct condemnation of the Kremlin, similar to what Mikkhail Khodorkovsky is seeking in the European Court for Human Rights. The British court ruled that the Kremlin was directly complicit in RTR’s libeling of Berezovksy since RTT “had been assisted both before and during the trial by a team from the Russian prosecutor’s office.”

EDITORIAL: Putin and his neo-Soviet Charlatans

EDITORIAL

Putin and his neo-Soviet Charlatans

An extraordinary recent article in the Wall Street Journal tells the tale of one Victor Petrik, a neo-Soviet charlatan with close ties to the Putin regime.  The story is eerily similar to that of another close Kremlin confident, Professor Igor Panarin, who predicted that the USA would collapse before this  year is out.

Last month, the Moscow Times reported that Petrik, who operates a website at GoldFormula.ru, had served prison time in the 1980s for fraud and extortion and had gone too far even for the Kremlin by attempting to market one of his products under the name of Putin’s Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu.  But Petrik had been allowed to use the logo of Putin’s United Russia party after winning a clean water competition they had sponsored.  The MT pointed out that Petrik had “no formal training in any applied science.”

The WSJ reports:  ”Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of Russia’s parliament and No. 2 in the party, have publicly endorsed his products. The two men are listed as the authors of a patent granted in 2009 for a filter that Mr. Petrik says can turn radioactive waste into water that’s safe to drink.”  The WSJ quotes Eduard Kruglyakov of the Russian Academy of Sciences:  ”He’s a master of bluff.  He hasn’t discovered anything.”  Another Petrik critic admits that Putin’s Russia is “especially vulnerable” to pseudoscience.

Medvedev’s dismal Midterm Report Card

Vladimir Ryzhkov, writing in the Moscow Times:

President Dmitry Medvedev was elected president two years ago on March 2, 2008, with 70 percent of the vote, and this is a good time to analyze his midterm results. In a word, they are dismal. Medvedev did the right thing in not even mentioning his anniversary. Just like when he chose not to attend the closing Olympic ceremonies in Vancouver after Russia’s miserable results, there are certain things that are certainly better left ignored.

But what is definitely worth remembering is his infamous “Four I’s” speech that he delivered at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum in February 2008, just weeks before he was elected president. He called for the immediate development of Russia’s “Four I’s” — institutions, infrastructure, innovation and investment. It is important to remember this speech only because it underscores the huge gap between his absolutely meaningless, empty slogans and the sorrowful state of affairs in Russia.

Russians Lap up Georgian Cuisine (yup, that’s how much their own sucks)

The Independent reports (click the “cuisine” category in our sidebar to read more about Russian food and drink, if so it can be called):

At the newly opened Café Khachapuri, just off Pushkin Square right in the heart of Moscow, young Muscovites tuck into plates of coriander-infused chakhokhbili chicken stew, spicy lobio beans and the eponymous khachapuri – gooey cheesy bread.

None of these exotic Georgian dishes tastes like the bland indigenous Russian food, and nor do their consonant-heavy names roll off the Slavic tongue easily. But everyone knows exactly what they’re ordering. Georgian food, perhaps the tastiest and most exciting of cuisines in all the former Soviet countries, has long been popular in Russia, and as new restaurants spring up across the capital, its popularity is going from strength to strength.

Annals of Machine Translation

A comparison (click to enlarge or follow link) of various computerized machine translations available on the web, courtesy of the New York Times.

March 12, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY MARCH 12 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Secession in Kalinigrad and Vladivostok?

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia’s Lame excuse for an Internet

(3)  In Russia, Old evils in New Guises

(4)  Putin and Sochi: They just don’t Work

(5)  CARTOON

NOTE: In another amazing “get,” the CATO Institute will have a panel discussion between Andrei Illarionov and Yulia Latynina in Washington DC on March 17th.  Be there or be square.  It will also be available via the web.

NOTE:  Be sure to take our “Sochi 2014″ reader poll in today’s issue!

NOTE:  Reader “Andrew” points readers to an interesting report on Vladimir Putin’s corrupt background in St. Petersburg over on Radio Free Europe, which does some of the best reporting on Putin’s Russia in the business.

NOTE:  Blogger Julia Ioffe wishes Russians a happy Women’s Day.  Not.

EDITORIAL: Secession in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok?

EDITORIAL

Secession in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok?

The indispensable Paul Goble reports that the residents of Kaliningrad, Russia are thinking thoughts of secession these days.

Kaliningrad presents a really fascinating paradox.  Compared to most regions of Russia, the residents of Kalingrad are rich. But compared to their neighbors Poland and Lithuania (the Kaliningrad region is not contiguous to Russia), they are dirt poor, as are the vast majority of all Russians.  And Kaliningraders don’t compare themselves to their remote and slovenly Russian brothers, but to their neighbors, so they’re hopping mad that the Kremlin has bungled their governance so badly and they are taking to the streets to make their displeasure very plain indeed.

According to Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of the Panorama Information and Research Center:  “It is perfectly obvious why: the governor is bad and the Kremlin runs our affairs badly as well.  The Kaliningraders want to live just like the Poles do.”

And, because of their proximity to the West and their isolation from Russia, it turns out that Kaliningraders are willing to stand up to the Putin regime in brazen acts of defiance that have rocked the Kremlin to its core.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Lame excuse for an “Internet”

EDITORIAL

Russia’s Lame excuse for an Internet

A recent article on the Lenta.ru website (Russian language link) confirms that two-thirds of Russian households have no access to the Internet (only 0.1% of Russians use Twitter).  That’s not news, of course, we’ve often reported on Russia’s puny level of Internet penetration, and it’s no surprise:  In a country where the average wage is $3/hour, but where Internet access costs the same as it does in the West, paying for Internet access is a luxury few can afford.  And as we’ve said before (click the “Internet” category in our sidebar to read our extensive reporting on this subject), the one-third figure is a gross overstatment of Russia’s true level of Internet access, because it includes as “users” those who may go online as rarely as once a month and then only for a few minutes.

But the Lenta article did report a surprising fact:  It stated that half of all respondents who could access the Internet were doing so by means of their cell phones.  

In Russia, the old Evils appear in New Guises

Russian author Yelena Chizhova

The New York Times reports:

NOT long ago, Yelena S. Chizhova was engaged in what has become a standard winter pastime for Russia’s middle class: taking the sun at a giant resort hotel in Egypt. She and a girlfriend, who also grew up in St. Petersburg, joined the river of people flowing into the warehouse-size dining hall, its tables heaped with steaming meat and pastries.

And then something passed over them like a shadow. The women felt so uneasy that they had to step away for a moment, and Ms. Chizhova asked her friend what she was thinking about. But she did not need to ask. What the two women had in common was relatives who starved in the 872-day siege of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, when army engineers set off explosives in the fields and shoveled corpses into the craters.

For a moment, Ms. Chizhova had the strange feeling that she was seeing the piles of food through the eyes of her dying relatives. Born in 1958, she learned the official version of the siege from Soviet textbooks, which cast it as a patriotic triumph. The truly terrible facts sifted down to her when she eavesdropped on her mother and great-grandmother, who lost most of their family in the siege, as they talked quietly over cups of tea.

Putin’s Russia, Putin’s Sochi: They just Don’t Work

In a brutally frank essay Alexei Bayer, writing in the Moscow Times, exposes the fundamental fraud that is the Sochi games, and the possible silver lining of holding the Olympics in Russia:  That Russia may be finally, totally, exposed before the slack-jawed world:

The Olympic flame in Vancouver has barely gone out and four years remain until the opening day of the next Winter Olympics in Sochi. But the first, most important race is already under way. From now until the closing ceremony on Feb. 23, 2014, the world will be on the edge of its seat, wondering whether Russia can pull it off.

The stakes for the Kremlin are huge. The Sochi Olympics are already different from most previous Winter Games, which were largely organized by local or regional authorities with only limited input from federal governments. Sochi, on the other hand, has always been a federal undertaking, driven by Vladimir Putin and controlled directly from Moscow. It is a national priority meant to showcase Russia’s accomplishments. In this respect, it is part of a long line of “propaganda Olympics,” which began in 1936 in Berlin and continued in Moscow in 1980, Seoul in 1988 and, most recently, Beijing two years ago.

CARTOON

 

Source:  Ellustrator

March 10, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY MARCH 10 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia’s Barbaric, shameless Racism

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Putinomics Crushes the Russian Economy

(3)  Nemtsov mocks Putin’s Olympic Fantasies

(4)  Some Russians “get it” on Stalin

(5)  Exposing the Fraud that is Dima Medvedev

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Barbaric, Shameless Racism

EDITORIAL

Russia’s Barbaric, Shameless Racism

The Russian language is bizarre and crude, a perfect reflection of the people who speak it, people who turn their backs on a torrent of annual race murders or, even worse, participate in them.

Take the image at left, for instance. It’s a snapshot of a billboard that hangs in many Moscow subway stations, the kind you’re forced to look at as you take interminable rides up and down endless escalators, which are so long because of the subway’s dual purpose as transit and bomb shelter.

The text reads:  ”Your country needs your records.  Every minute in Russia three new people are born.”

It’s totally shameless, barbaric racism.  The billboard is saying:  ”Lots of babies are being born in Russia, and way too many with dark skin. What are you going to do about it, white woman?”

Russia is not only losing population fast, but the Slavic population within Russia is doing the worst job of all, leading to projections that Russia will soon become an Islamic country.  The Kremlin, to put it mildly, is panicking.

The same people who publish and read such blasphemy, of course, who deny the citizenship rights of dark-skinned “Russians,” who believe that only white-skinned Slavic people can properly even be called “Russian,” these same people refuse to let places like Chechnya be independent.  Instead, using blood violence, they insist that such dark-skinned people remain under Russia’s thumb, enslaved.

But is the word “record” really the best that the Russian language can come up with to convey this idea?  It’s not even a “Russian” word, of course, even someone who doesn’t know a word of Russian could recognize it, if they could get past the Russian script.  Seemingly, Russians lack the initiative to invent their own words for things like “hamburger,” even when the word has a sound like “h” that doesn’t exist in Russian.  So Russians just call it a “gahmboorgehr.”  Even many Russians would have to do a double-take to figure out just what “record” is supposed to mean in this context.  Unfortunately, upon figuring it out precious few would disagree with the idea.

EDITORIAL: Putinomics Crushes Russia’s Economy

EDITORIAL

Putinomics Crushes Russia’s Economy

“The Russian economy is in recovery!”  That’s the Kremlin’s story and it’s sticking to it, whatever the facts may show.

And what the facts in fact show is continuing disaster.

The VTB Capital purchasing manager’s index, for instance, shows that employment has fallen every month since October 2009, reaching 9.2% in January, the highest level since March 2009.  The PMI index fell to 51.0, it’s lowest level since last July, and just one point above the level that indicates a double-dip recession. VTB says that the services sector “slowed to nearly a standstill in February, as the number of new orders declined dramatically from the prior month.”

That’s only the tip of the bad-news iceberg where Putinomics is concerned.

Nemtsov Mocks Putin’s Olympic Fantasies

Joshua Keating interviews Boris Nemtsov at TheStar.com:

Foreign Policy: So why do you believe it is a mistake to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics in your hometown, Sochi?

Boris Nemtsov: In all of Russian history, I can think of only one example as crazy as this. After he visited Iowa, (Soviet Premier Nikita) Khrushchev, told farmers around Murmansk, above the Arctic Circle, to grow corn in the frozen tundra. (Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin is now repeating Khrushchev’s experience. He has found one of the only places in Russia where there is no snow in the winter. He has decided to build these ice rinks in the warmest part of the warmest region. Sochi is subtropical. There is no tradition of skating or hockey there. In Sochi, we prefer football, and volleyball, and swimming. Other parts of Russia need ice palaces – we don’t.

Some Russians “get it” on Stalin

The Putin regime has become so unhinged in recent days that, as Robert Amsterdam points out, even a cog in the RIA Novosti machine, writing on of all places Kremlin-funded Russia Profile, is deeply worried about the regime’s pro-Stalin stance:

If the human rights activists were more laid back, they would be able to rebuff any of their opponents’ claims not with demonstrations, but with a dull lecture for the semi-literate about the difference between a poster, a history textbook and academic research.

So, dear conservatives. There are some differences in genre. Scientific labor presupposes a kind of indifference on behalf of the scientist toward the final outcome of his study. Accepting the Solzhenitsyn Award, the great linguist Andrey Zaliznyak acknowledged the praise that he was given and stated the following: I did not try to confirm the authenticity of “The Lay of Igor’s Warfare” [an epic poem of old Russian literature], I just studied the issue. It just so happened that the authenticity was confirmed in the end. But if the poem turned out to be phony, it would have been a scientific finding all the same.

Exposing the Fraud that is Dima Medvedev

Newsweek blows the lid off the “Medvedev is a liberal” myth, for all the world to see:

It says a lot about the kind of place Russia has become that just two minutes of mild mockery of the Kremlin could cause a political shock wave. But sure enough: when the state-controlled Channel One showed a short cartoon in January depicting Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President.

Dmitry Medvedev dancing together in Red Square, singing a comic duet about the big news stories of 2009, liberals rejoiced. After years of political repression, tight media control, and officially ordained Putin-worship, they saw the lighthearted cartoon as a sign that Medvedev is finally changing Russia. The cartoon followed on the heels of a number of speeches the young president has given on the ills of Russia’s rotten bureaucracy and its broken economy. He’s promised, for instance, to slash bureaucracy and reform the corrupt judiciary, to simplify regulation, and to put government services online. He’s vowed to break Russia’s economic dependence on natural resources and build a knowledge economy. He also recently ordered the firing of 10,000 cops and 16 top police officials, and warned police to stop “terrorizing” private businesses. Nasty nationalist youth movements have been shut down, and human-rights activists once squeezed by Putin have been received as honored guests at the Kremlin. Taken together, these moves have made it seem as though spring is in the air. “I believe President Medvedev sincerely intends to liberalize the system,” says Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti–Corruption Committee, an NGO.

March 8, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY MARCH 8 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:   A Serious Misstep from Tymoshenko

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Khodorkovsky, Russia’s Oddest Duck

(3)  Exposing Russia’s Potemkin Modernization

(4)  The West must face Russia on Ukraine, Georgia

(5) Khodorkovsky comes out Swinging

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment of her Russia column on the powerful American Thinker blog blasts the failed foreign policy of Barack Obama, which has driven the French into cozying up to Russia and supplying dangerous warships to the KGB dictatorship.  Just as the French once surrendered to Hitler, they now roll over for the KGB.

EDITORIAL: A Serious Misstep from Tymoshenko

Tymoshenko exits, stage stupid

EDITORIAL

A Serious Misstep from Tymoshenko

It’s a pity that Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko could not see her way clear to take our advice. We believe that both she and her country will come to regret it.

When Tymoshenko lost her bid to succeed Victor Yushchenko as president, going down to defeat against Victor Yanukovich in a runoff, we urged her to accept the results rather than contest them.  Tymoshenko’s firey, impulsive disposition had already cost her the presidency, because she was too confrontational with Yushchenko and he ended up refusing to support her in the runoff after going down to defeat himself. Without his supporters, Tymoshenko could not prevail.

We urged Tymoshenko to be more constructive in dealing with Yanukovich, so she could preserve her position as prime minister, but once again she refused to do so. Her coalition collapsed, and she was forced out.

We understand why Tymoshenko acts the way she does.

EDITORIAL: Khodorkovsky, Russia’s Oddest Duck

EDITORIAL

Khodorkovsky, Russia’s Oddest Duck

Jailed oil “oligarch” Mikhail Khodorkovsky is surely Russia’s oddest duck, and in a land of strange fowl that is really saying something.

Khodorkovsky released a vicious broadside aimed at the Kremlin last week.  Writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (we republish an English translation below in today’s issue), Khodorkovsky stated that “the steamroller that has replaced justice is the gravedigger of the modern Russian state” and accused the Putin regime of operating a mafia-like judicial system whose “destruction will occur in the traditional way for Russia – from below and with bloodshed.”

Ouch.

Exposing Russia’s Potemkin Modernization

Vladislav Inozemtsev, a professor of economics, director of the Moscow-based Center for Post-Industrial Studies and editor-in-chief of Svobodnaya Mysl, writing in the Moscow Times:

The entire discussion of how to modernize Russia has developed in a rather strange manner. In most countries that have undergone modernization, the process involved accelerating industrial development, increasing the level of integration into the global economy, exploiting competitive advantages and enacting political reforms as a prerequisite to economic growth.

Everything is just the opposite in Russia today. Rather than strengthening the country’s highly uncompetitive industrial sector, the authorities have focused on creating an innovative “smart economy” from the top down. Moreover, instead of developing sectors with products that enjoy broad market demand, Russia’s leaders are fixated on reorganizing the space and nuclear industries, two fields that in all other countries depend on government support for their existence. And even when it could significantly reduce expenses for domestic firms by regulating the price of the raw materials and energy that Russia has in great abundance — thereby giving the country a competitive edge analogous to China’s cheap labor — the government instead raises those prices to world levels.

This is how the authorities turn Russian modernization plans into another illusion. Plans to develop nanotechnology under the aegis of Anatoly Chubais and Rusnano or to build an “Innovation City” according to Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov’s vision are both classic examples of siphoning away huge sums from the federal budget with little or no results to show for it.

The West must Face Russia on Georgia, Ukraine

Ronald D. Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels and author of The Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia and the Future of the West, writing in the Moscow Times:

What is the most important source of disagreement today between Russia and the West? It is not the issues most often in the news — Iran or Afghanistan. It is Europe’s contested neighborhood: the future of those countries between the eastern border of NATO and the European Union and the western border of Russia. While the West and Russia still talk the talk of cooperative security in Europe, geopolitical competition for influence has been renewed in these regions.

Russia today openly lays claim to a sphere of interest in its borderlands — in direct contradiction to commitments made under the Helsinki process. It has embraced policies and a military doctrine that places NATO as the top external military danger and justifies the right to intervene in neighboring countries. While packaged in smooth diplomatic language, President Dmitry Medvedev’s new proposal for pan-European security has the less-than-hidden goal of stopping and rolling back Western influence.

Rather than moving into the 21st century, Russia seems determined to revert to 19th-century strategic thinking. With the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama focused on Afghanistan and Iran, the Kremlin hopes that a West in need of its cooperation will acquiesce to its demands.