EDITORIAL: The Pathetic Failure of Putinomics

EDITORIAL

The Pathetic Failure of Putinomics

In the annals of “signs of the Russian economic apocalypse,” we can’t think of many more jolting revelations than the report last week that Aeroflot — yes, Aeroflot — was planning to open a “budget carrier” subsidiary.

Do you dare, dear reader, imagine what it might be like to fly on a version of Aeroflot that openly cut corners?  Aeroflot itself is already world famous as one of the cheesiest, most offensive, revolting and dangerous airlines in world history.  What will it be like when Aeroflot starts cutting back on services?  It’s not something we care to contemplate and as for boarding such a plan, even if bound for Vladivostok from Murmansk in winter, we’d rather walk. Or crawl.

A recent economic analysis of Putin’s Russia by the British website WhatInvestment pulls no punches in echoing the dark warnings of economic doom echoed by Aeroflot’s decision.

Just for starters, it calls the overall Russian economy “shockingly imbalanced.”

EDITORIAL: Russia, Perishing

EDITORIAL

Russia, Perishing

At a recent conference on Russia’s lethal population collapse Nikolay Gerasimenko, the first deputy chairman of the Duma Health Committee, said bluntly that “the birthrate will fall whatever we do,” despite the Kremlin’s claims of success in reversing Russia’s declining birthrates in recent months. Garasimenko stated that he “expects high birthrates to continue for two more years, [but] unfortunately since December [2009], there has been a slowing of the birthrate” and as a result Russias brutal “mortality has exceeded berths by 22,000, driving the population down.”

Gerasimenko confirmed that the Russian government does not have any type of viable plan for lowering mortality rates. In addition to reducing alcohol consumption, he said, the authorities need to reduce the use of tobacco and increase access to medical care in order to “reduce the super high rates of morality,” although he too was pessimistic.  He stated that because so many of the mothers are ill themselves “they give birth to ill children,” whose life expectancies are less than normal, creating a vicious circle.

Obama and his Noxious Nuclear Nonsense

Michael Bohm, writing in the Moscow Times:

Josef Stalin once said, “It’s not important how the people vote, but who is counting the votes.” This could also apply to counting the warheads in the New START agreement. Despite all the hyped-up talk about “30 percent reductions” in nuclear weapons in what U.S. President Barack Obama has called “the most comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly two decades,” the real reductions in the nuclear arsenals of both sides are modest at best.

As Peter Baker reported in The New York Times, Russia and the United States have agreed to apply “creative accounting” to pad the reductions on both sides to get to the much-desired 30 percent figure -— at least on paper. For example, one trick was to count the 20 warheads on B-52 bombers as only one. At the end of the day, the real net cuts, according to Hans Kristenson of the Federation of American Scientists, will be only 100 U.S. deployed warheads and 190 Russian ones.

Based on Kristenson’s figures of deployed warheads currently on the U.S. side (2,100) and the Russian side (2,600), the arsenal of deployed warheads will be reduced by only 5 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Thus, creative accounting has produced creative disarmament.

But this was not the only nuclear sleight of hand.

Sokolov on Katyn

Paul Goble reports:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has received enormous and largely uncritical international praise for taking part in the commemoration of the Katyn tragedy and for allowing Andrzej Wajda’s film about the Soviet execution of 22,000 Polish officers there in 1940 to be shown on Russian television.  But a careful reading of his remarks, Boris Sokolov suggests in an essay posted on Grani.ru, shows that Putin not only was unprepared to acknowledge many aspects of that horrific act but openly lied about it to bring pressure on Poland to stop raising the issue either bilaterally or internationally.

In his speech, the Grani.ru commentator notes, Putin spoke about “the joint path to making sense of national memory and historical wounds” as being a means to allowing Russians and Poles to “avoid the dead-end of a lack of understanding and eternal settling of scores, the primitive division of peoples into right and guilty, as some dirty politicians sometimes try to do.”  The Russian prime minister added that “in our country has been given a clear political, legal and moral assessment of the misdeeds of the totalitarian regime, and such assessment is not subject to any revisions.” His Polish counterpart Donald Tusk agreed that “the truth about Katyn must not divide the Russian and Polish peoples.”

Such words sound entirely correct, and compared to earlier statements by Russian officials, they represent a significant step forward. But one cannot fail to be struck, Sokolov says, that “the Russian premier spoke more about his sympathy to the victims and said almost nothing about the responsibility of [their] executioners.”  Moreover, Putin declared that for decades, people had attempted to distort “the truth about the Katyn shootings” and to “lay the blame [for them] on the Russian people.” Such a formulation misstates the case of all those who have examined the Katyn murders: those who do hold responsible for them “not the Russian people but the Russian state.”

Zakayev on the Subway Bombings

Marsha Karp, reporting on Rights in Russia:

I first met Akhmed Zakaev in February 2005 when he was President Maskhadov’s envoy and was taking part in talks, under the auspices of the European Union, with a group from the Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committee of Russia, who came to London to negotiate an end to the bloodshed in Chechnya. A Memorandum outlining a way forward was signed, but less than two weeks later Aslan Maskhadov was killed and the plan came to nothing. After the deadly attacks on the Moscow underground trains on 29th March, and the following explosions in Dagestan, I asked Zakaev, now Head of the Ichkeria government in exile, for an interview.

MK: Who is behind the latest attacks?

Akhmed Zakaev: It is difficult to give a simple answer. We can only analyse these events and compare them with the terrorist attacks that have taken place in Russia over the last ten years since Putin came to power. All the major terrorist attacks, or rather mass murders, that have taken place in Russia have inevitably been followed by reforms of one kind or another, whether political, social or economic.

April 12, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY APRIL 12 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Obamination in Kyrgyzstan

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Chechnya II, the Wrath of Maskhadov

(3)  Chechens must be Free!

(4)  The Moscow Bombings:  Prelude to Georgian Invasion?

(5)  CARTOON:  Medvedev and his Little Friend

EDITORIAL: The Obamination in Kyrgyzstan

EDITORIAL

The Obamination in Kyrgyzstan

With the announcement from rebel leaders in Kyrgyzstan that they were assisted by Russia in their coup d’etat which left blood flowing in rivers through the streets of the capital city, Bishkek, last week, our very worst fears about the abomination known as Barack Obama were realized.

Obama claimed to be “resetting” relations with Russia from the Bush years, and he sure has done so.  Russia has ousted the pro-U.S. regime in Bishkek that had thumbed its nose at Russia and insisted on preserving the U.S. military base just outside the capital city.  It has reached out to the maniacal Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez, promising him nuclear and rocket technology as well as billions in weapons. And it goes on shamelessly providing that same type of technology to Iran.  Obama has even gone so far as to authorize U.S. soldiers to march through Red Square saluting Putin on V-E day.  Rumors are beginning to fly, and we report some in today’s issue, that Russian troops will march into Georgia once again this summer.  The new ruler of Ukraine has just repudiated NATO membership for his country.

Welcome to the Obamination. To put it mildly, we are appalled.

EDITORIAL: Chechnya II, The Wrath of Maskhadov

EDITORIAL

Chechnya II, The Wrath of Maskhadov

No, you can’t get away! From hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!

–Ricardo Montalban as Khan to William Shatner as Kirk in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982)

The Wrath of Maskhadov

Just before he was killed in March 2005 by Russian security forces, Chechnya’s top warlord Aslan Maskhadov stated:  ”Unless the war in Chechnya is stopped quickly, it will spread outwards.  In fact, it has been spreading for some time now. Today fighting can be seen in Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ossetia, Ingushetia, and Karachayevo-Cherkessia.”

Though Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has made claims to the contrary, the war was not stopped quickly, and it did spread — just as Maskhadov said it would.  Just as the killing of Said Buryatsky did not stop, but rather increased, terrorist activity in and around Moscow, the killing of Maskhadov did not quell, but rather expanded, secessionist activity in the Caucasus region.  Just as Obi Wan Kenobi only became more powerful when struck down by Darth Vader, Maskhadov has risen from the ashes to spit at Russia over and over again.  Surely, he is laughing with glee at the failed polices of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times reports:

Chechens must be Free

Writing on Market Oracle Eric Margolis, author and contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, writes that Chechnya must be free:

There is an old saying about the fierce Chechen tribes who inhabit southern Russia’s Caucasus mountains: “Chechen cannot ever be defeated. They can only be killed.”

Chechen are Russia’s nemesis. Even the notoriously brutal Russian mafia fears the ferocious Chechen, and for good reason.

Last year, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proudly proclaimed that resistance to Russian rule in the North Caucasus had been eliminated. The region was pacified.

Confounding Putin’s claim, Chechen suicide bombers hit Moscow’s subway last week, killing 39 and injuring over 70. Chechen suicide bombers in Dagestan killed twelve, mostly policemen. There were further attacks in neighboring Dagestan. The North Caucasus was again at a boil.

The attacks seriously rattled Russians and left the Kremlin deeply embarrassed and enraged.

The Moscow Bombings: A Prelude to Russia’s Invasion of Georgia?

Frontpagemag reports (hat tip:  reader “Robert”):

The Chechen Islamist Doku Umarov has claimed responsibility for the March 29 subway bombings in Moscow that killed at least 40 people. Putin and the Russian government have vowed to hunt down those responsible for the attacks. The target of the beating of the war drums isn’t only Chechen Islamists, though. For months, Russian officials have been blaming Georgia for terrorist violence on their soil, setting the stage to remove the Saakashvili government and control Georgia.

In 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia under the pretext of protecting the Russian minority in the country from the aggressive Georgian military. The Russian forces took control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia using this excuse, and the two republics have since declared “independence” while remaining under Russian control. Since then, Russia has continually expressed opposition to the government of Mikheil Saakashvili and his removal is a clear goal.

CARTOON: Medvedev and his Little Friend

Source:  Ellustrator.

April 9, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY APRIL 9 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Putin the Vampire

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Danila Bochkarev, neo-Soviet Bagman

(3)  Russia’s Cowardly Majority

(4)  Putin’s Russia:  This Stupid Country

(5)  Ghengis Khan, Part II

NOTE:  All hell appears to have broken loose in Kyrgyzstan.  Marina Litvinovich has photos on her blog (hat tip:  Russian Scoop).  Is Moscow to blame?  Stay tuned.

EDITORIAL: Putin the Vampire

EDITORIAL

Putin the Vampire

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has sunk his fangs deep into the neck of his nation, and is drinking heartily of its blood.  The nation grows paler by the hour, and we grow more appalled.

In our last issue, we reported on how Putin is moving to place every photocopier in the nation under registration so he can choke off one of the last outlets of independent printing, the “samizdat” publishers who stood against the USSR.  Simultaneously, Putin is preparing to prosecute the defiant Nezavismaya Gazeta for daring to publish an op-ed piece by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which predicted that the Putin regime would end in bloody violence.  And as insurrectionist activity becomes more and more defiant in the Caucasus, Putin is pushing to make it illegal to report the public statements of the rebel leaders.

There is simply no way to describe these measures except “neo-Soviet.”  At breakneck speed, Putin is returning Russia to the same type of governance that led to the collapse of the USSR in less than a century.

EDITORIAL: Danila Bochkarev, Neo-Soviet Bagman

EDITORIAL

Danila Bochkarev, Neo-Soviet Bag Man

Danila Bochkarev, neo-Soviet bagman

It’s been some time since we’ve had occasion to write about a scum-sucking Russophile reptile attempting to insinuate his views into mainstream political culture, and that’s a good thing.

As the Putin regime becomes more and more openly and horrifyingly neo-Soviet in character, even the craziest of these cockroaches becomes more and more wary of opening his mouth in public for fear of the humiliation the next day may bring.

But someone named Danila Bochkarev, representing something called the EastWest Institute, remains shameless.

Ryzhov on Russia’s Cowardly, Craven, Silent Majority

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, who hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio, writing in the Moscow Times:

Russia saw more protests in the first three months of 2010 than it has seen over the past few years. A wave of demonstrations swept from one end of the country to the other. From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, demonstrators for the first time made both economic and political demands, shouting “Down with the tariff increase!” and “Putin must go!”

The gap between the people and the government is widening further and further. The Kremlin not backing down at all from its power vertical model. If anything, it will only be strengthened. Nonetheless, a growing demand for change can still be heard from the liberal members of society.

Putin’s Russia: This Stupid Country

Mark N. Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, writing in the Moscow Times:

I have recently returned from a two-week visit to Moscow where I gave lectures to university students studying international relations at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. While their views are not representative of all Russians —the students themselves readily acknowledged this — they were nonetheless extremely interesting and a very hopeful sign.

While critical of U.S. foreign policy, the young Russians I spoke to very much want Russia to have good relations with the United States and the West. They see this as being in Russia’s national interest and in their own personal interest as well.

This is because they highly value their ability to travel to the West, something that neither their parents nor grandparents could do in the Soviet Union. Indeed, most of the students I met had traveled abroad. They all fear that deteriorating Russian relations with the West could someday result in their becoming unable to travel there. Many expressed a fear that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s belligerence was going to lead to this.

I was especially surprised at how often I heard students use the expression “this stupid country” to describe Russia. I took this, however, not as an indication of disrespect for their motherland but of disappointment in it not being the modern democratic country that they want it to be.

Ghengis Khan in Russia, Part II

Paul Goble reports:

The “mass exodus” of the ethnic Russian population from the North Caucasus, a flow that began in the late Soviet period, expanded after the demise of the USSR, and shows no sign of diminishing in the future “threatens the very existence of the Russian Federation,” according to a Russian specialist at the Southern Federal University in Rostov.

Edvard Popov, who teaches there, says that conditions in the North Caucasus, including poverty, unemployment, xenophobia and violence help to explain two migration flows: the outflow of ethnic Russians which reverses the earlier “Russian colonization” of the region and the outflow of non-Russians which can be called “the internal colonization of Russia” by them. The second has created many problems in Russia’s cities, he acknowledges, but “the mass departure of the Russian population [from the republics of the North Caucasus] threatens the very existence of the Russian Federation” because “the Russian people is the state-forming people” of the country”.

April 7, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY APRIL 7 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Breathtaking Failure of Vladimir Putin

(2)  Piontkovsky on the Rise and Fall of Vladimir Putin

(3)  Putin says “NYET!” to Samizdat

(4)  Russia is doomed in the Caucasus

(5)  Gazprom and Putin, on their Knees

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment of her Russia column over on the powerful American Thinker blog exposes the total failure of the Obama administration’s Russia policy as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin hatch a nuclear and rocket deal. The piece has been translated into Russian by INOsmi.

EDITORIAL: The Breathtaking Failure of Vladimir Putin

Putin is forlornly calling out: "Mahatmaaa . . ." Source: Ellustrator.

EDITORIAL

The Breathtaking Failure of Vladimir Putin

Our issue today contains two brilliant, highly insightful essays from the mainstream press documenting in breathtaking detail how the recent Moscow subway bombings have exposed the total failure of the Putin regime in Russia. No fair-minded person who reads this commentary can come to any conclusion other than that a Russia led by Putin, utterly unqualified to run a major economy in  a supposedly democratic country, is doomed.  And we back this up even further with a third essay exposing the downfall of Russia’s most potent economic engine, Gazprom.

Much as we admire this analysis, however, we think that the two most telling facts about the bombings were left out of the picture, so we’d like to add them back in.

Piontkovsky on the Rise and Fall of Vladimir Putin

The always-brilliant and courageous Andrei Piontkovsky, Russian political scientist and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, writing on the Taipei Times:

The history of authoritarian rule in Russia displays a certain depressing regularity. Such regimes rarely perish from external shocks or opposition pressure. As a rule, they die unexpectedly from some internal disease — from irresistible existential disgust at themselves, from their own exhaustion.

Czarist rule withstood many harsh tests during its long history: peasant revolts, conspiracies and the alienation of the educated class.

In January 1917, from his Swiss exile, Lenin noted with bitterness and hopelessness that: “We, the old, will hardly live till the decisive battles of that forthcoming revolution. But … the young maybe will be lucky not only to fight, but finally win in the approaching proletarian revolution.”

By the following March, however, Czar Nicolas II was forced to abdicate.

Did somebody say “Samizdat”? Putin says: “Nyet!”

The indispensable Paul Goble reports:

In what one wishes were only an April Fools’ joke, the Russian interior ministry is reportedly preparing legislation that would require the registration of all copiers, a step sources there say is needed to combat counterfeiting but one that opposition groups fear is designed to limit their ability to communicate with the population.

Rossiskaya Gazeta has reported that the MVD plans to seek approval for a plan to require the licensing and registration of all copying machines imported from abroad, to enter that information in a data base, and thus be in a position to combat a rising tide of counterfeiting, most often of 1,000 ruble notes. Last year alone, sources at the interior ministry said, the Bank of Russia seized and took out of circulation 155,200 counterfeit bills. Fighting such counterfeiting is increasingly expensive, the sources said, and the MVD has decided that it is “logical to establish tight control over the use” of copiers of various kinds.

Russia is Doomed in the Caucasus

Looks like New York Post columnist Ralph Peters has been boning up on Russia right here at La Russophobe. His latest column tells the world that Russia is doomed in the Caucasus, and Vladimir Putin’s leadership is an utter disaster. Most crucially, he delivers an unambiguous warning about the dangers posed to the next Winter Olympics:

It’s been an embarrassing week for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, prime minister and de facto czar.

On Monday, Islamist suicide bombers struck just a rifle shot from the Kremlin. The worst of the two subway bombings rubbed ex-KGB man Putin’s nose in it by slaughtering dozens in the Lyubanka station — named for the notorious security-service headquarters upstairs. And the day after the two blasts killed 39 (with twice that many hospitalized), Islamist terrorists renewed their bombing campaign in Russia’s Muslim republic of Daghestan, next to battered (Muslim) Chechnya.

Gazprom and Putin, on their Knees

Streetwise Professor reports:

A recent FT had a fascinating article on Gazprom.   Many of the company’s challenges are well known: declining production, reduced demand in Europe, increased world supplies, pressure on its traditional pricing mechanism.  What makes the FT article particularly interesting is its extended discussion of the internal domestic challenges to the company’s dominance.  Challenges led by your fave and mine, Igor Sechin.  (If, as the one State Department intelligence guy told me, Lavrov is fascinating in the same way a tarantula is fascinating, in what way is Sechin fascinating?  One shudders at the thought.)

April 5, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY APRIL 5 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia reaps the Grapes of Wrath

(2)  EDITORIAL:  The Naked Fraud of the Russian Stock Market

(3)  Latynina in Brooklyn

(4)  Exposing the Potemkin fraud that is the Putin Economy

(5)  Russia after the Subway Bombings

EDITORIAL: Russia reaps the Grapes of Wrath

EDITORIAL

Russia reaps the Grapes of Wrath

The tragic suicide bombings in Russia confirm the risk that all countries face in world today. Yet only two months ago, Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov of Russia, shook hands and welcomed Khaled Meshaal, the leader of the Hamas movement, to Russia. Hamas itself has carried out countless suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians over the past 15 years. How would those Russian leaders feel if other countries held meetings and shook hands with terrorists like those who bombed its civilians?

George Reiss, Paradise Valley Arizona
Letter to the Editor of the International Herald Tribune

How indeed, Mr. Reiss, how indeed.

How would Russians react if Hillary Clinton were to travel to Dagestan and shake hands with Chechen warlord Doku Umarov, who has claimed responsibility for the recent subway bombings?  Would they say:  ”Well, that’s America’s business, they have the right to shake hands with whomever they please?”

We think not.