The Scandal and Shame of the “Red Partisans”

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

In 2004, Vasily Kononov, the former leader of a pro-Soviet commando unit in Nazi-occupied Latvia during World War II, was convicted by Latvia’s highest court for killing nine civilians in the village of Mazie Bati in 1944. On May 17, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights upheld the ruling.

As usual, the Russian authorities were outraged by the decision. Members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement demonstrated outside of the Latvian Embassy in Moscow.

Kononov insists that the victims, including a young pregnant woman, had been collaborating with the Nazis.

CARTOON: No Translation Required

Source:  Ellustrator.

SPECIAL EXTRA — Another Original LR Translation: Russia Butchers its Soldiers, Literally

Russia Butchers its Soldiers, Literally

by Yuri Borodyanksy

Novaya Gazeta

June 7, 2010

Translated from the Russian by La Russophobe Staff

(as always, corrections to the Russian translation are welcome)

In the family video recording of Roman Suslov (pictured, left) saying his goodbyes to his family and friends on the railway platform, the young man’s eyes betray no alarm.  On the faces of his parents, his sisters, his beloved wife clutching their infant son, there is not the slightest hint of what would happen four days later.

The young man was to travel some 5,000 kilometers from his home in Omsk to Khabarovsk, and from there go onward by bus to his posting in a motor rifle unit in the city of Bikin.  He was not particularly eager to join the army, but nor was he seeking to avoid his obligation. 

He was better prepared than many of his peers to endure the hardships and privations of army life, being an experienced boxer and wrestler.  He was also gainfully employed at the lone successful local industrial enterprise, having studied at the local chemical and mechanical college.  He also found time to participate in amateur theater productions.

He had big plans for his future.  “Well, when I get back from the army, he said to me,” relates his mother Tatiana Suslov “we will build a house and all live there happily ever after.”  He had just married his wife Oksana the prior June 25th, and then the draft notice arrived.

June 11, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY JUNE 11 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Legalization of the Neo-Soviet State

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Yanukovich to Putin — Drop Dead!

(3)  Putin & Medvedev Muttering Neo-Soviet Lies

(4)  Letter to Obama:  Don’t Repeal Jackson-Vanick

(5)  One word for Investing in Russia:  Insanity

NOTE:  First Oleg Kozlovsky hooked up with Barack Obama, and now he’s tight with his predecessor as well.  Quite a fellow, our Mr. Kozlovsky.

EDITORIAL: The Legalization of the Neo-Soviet State

EDITORIAL

The Legalization of the Neo-Soviet State

We have grown genuinely weary of reporting, week after week, a somber new low in the history of the neo-Soviet KGB state of Vladimir Putin known as Russia.  Each time we do so, cynics though we may be, we find it hard to imagine how Russia could sink any deeper into the mire of failure and self-destruction. But once again, Russia has surprised us.

And, no, we’re not talking about the revelation that a hoard of Russian soliders stole credit cards off the corpses of dead Polish government officials following the Smolensk air disaster.  That display of Russia patriotism was truly horrific, but this week it didn’t qualify for top billing.

The day we have been predicting for some time here on this blog has now arrived, even more quickly than we imagined:  Vladimir Putin is moving rapidly to legalize and formalize the neo-Soviet state he has been building in Russia for more than a decade.

EDITORIAL: Yanukovich to Putin — Drop Dead!

EDITORIAL

Yanukovich to Putin — Drop Dead!

“I have never recognized Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Kosovo as independent states. This is a violation of international laws and norms. According to international law, any violation of the territorial integrity of any state is forbidden.”

If you think that was the President of Georgia talking, or some other ardent Russophobe, think again. It was Russia’s so-called “friend” in Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich.

Oops!  Just when the Russophile hoards were sure they had won a major victory in Ukraine with Yanukovich’s elevation, he bursts their bubble with a highly sharpened pin.

And let’s be perfectly clear:  The President of Ukraine has called the Prime Minister of Russia an international criminal. His words might just as well have been spoken by Mikheil Saakashvili!

If even so-called “Russophile” Yanukovich has such a negative attitude towards Russian aggression against Georgia, then surely  no more final condemnation of Putin’s barbaric policies could be imagined.

Putin and Medvedev, Muttering Pathetic Neo-Soviet Lies

Alexander Golts, writing in the Moscow Times:

A distinctive feature of the Russian power vertical is that leaders do not bother determining what government officials have already said on a particular subject before preparing their own remarks. At a meeting on security agency budgets on May 24, President Dmitry Medvedev set the goal of modernizing at least 30 percent of Russia’s weaponry by 2015. The president was apparently unaware of the previous arms program, announced by then-Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov three years ago. In 2007, Ivanov told State Duma deputies that the program would rearm 45 percent of the military by 2015. It failed miserably.

In addition, officials often do not feel obliged to fulfill the orders of their bosses — even those issued by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a February meeting on the new armament program, Putin ordered that 70 percent of the country’s armed forces be modernized by 2020. But at a recent Duma hearing, acting army chief Lieutenant General Oleg Frolov contradicted Putin. Frolov said the 13 trillion rubles ($418.4 billion) for rearmament to be allocated over the next 10 years was only sufficient for modernizing Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, air defense forces and aviation. He said 36 trillion rubles ($1.2 trillion) would be needed to carry out all of the tasks put before the armed forces.

Thus, the new armaments program is doomed to fail, just like the four previous plans. All of these programs go through the same life cycle:

Letter to Obama: Don’t repeal Jackson Vanick!

Lara Iglitzin, executive director of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, and John Hempelmann, president of the foundation, writing in the Seattle Times:

When Washington state’s U.S. Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson introduced what became the historic Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1975, he was aiming squarely at a repressive Soviet Union that denied its citizens the right to free emigration, one of the fundamental human rights the senator greatly valued.

By denying Most Favored Nation trade status to nonmarket economies that restrict emigration, Jackson-Vanik was intended to motivate Soviet leaders to take action and open their borders. And it worked — well more than 1 million people left the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics thanks to the amendment in the 1970s and 1980s.

While the Soviet Union no longer exists, the amendment remains on the books. And Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin don’t like it. Their message to the U.S. is to prove that the Cold War is over, and repeal what some call a Cold War relic. So why not repeal it?

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the indomitable Russian human-rights leader and activist for the past 40 years, didn’t mince words when discussing the amendment’s current relevance.

“Don’t give Putin something for nothing … free emigration is the one right we have left,” she said at a February conference in Washington, D.C. The conference on “The Legacy and Consequences of Jackson-Vanik” was held jointly by the Kennan Institute and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

One word for Investing in Russia: Insanity

The New York Times Dealbook reports (note that a group of crazed Russian businessmen thought they could buy off this reporter with a free trip to Russia a la Valdai; it blew up massively right in their faces and we could not be better pleased):

From Matt Marshall at VentureBeat:

Russia is the sixth-largest economy in the world, but it’s also a country relatively untouched by foreign investors, especially investors in technology. Could Russia potentially be the home of the next massive tech boom?

The short answer is: No way. At least not anytime soon. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after a week in Moscow, a week in which I took part in the first ever delegation of US venture capital investors to visit Russia.

The organizers invited me as the sole member of the U.S. media. (Disclosure: My trip was organized by AmBar, a group of U.S.-based Russian professionals, and paid for by Rusnano, a government investment fund. In return, I promised to write an honest account of what I found.)

June 9, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY JUNE 9 CONTENTS

(1) EDITORIAL:  Finally, Sochi Exposed

(2) EDITORIAL:  In Russia, Citizens Biggest Fear is the “Police”

(3) Corruption and Abuse of Power in Putin’s Russia

(4)  Obama, the Bastard, Abandons Human Rights in Russia

(5)  Russia Abandons its Poets

EDITORIAL: Finally, Russia admits the Sochi Horror

EDITORIAL

Finally, Russia admits the Sochi Horror

Now, not even the professional liars who rule the Russian Kremlin can deny it:  the world’s athletes will be risking their lives in 2014 if they are foolish enough to attend the Sochi Olympiad.

Last week, it was reported that Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB, had “warned that terrorists intend to disrupt preparations for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.”

EDITORIAL: In Putin’s Russia, Citizens most of all Fear the “Police”

EDITORIAL

In Putin’s Russia, Citizens most of all Fear the “Police”

Oleg Kozlovsky in Triumfalnaya Ploshchad

Here’s what happened to Oborona opposition faction leader Oleg Kozlovsky last week:

First, he was illegally arrested for doing nothing more than asserting his Constitutional right to peacefully assemble in Triumfalnaya Ploshchad in Moscow.

Then, he was illegally beaten while in police custody as he protested (peacefully) the illegality of his arrest.

Next, he was held illegally for nine hours in police custody (the law allows for only three).

Finally, he was indicted on the signature of a police officer who had nothing whatsoever to do with his arrest and therefore could not have been a party to it, and on a pre-printed form prepared by bureaucrats miles away.

In other words, in the space of just a few hours Oleg had his legal rights trampled upon by the Russian police who are supposed to protect those rights not once, not twice, not three times but four separate times. More than a hundred other activists were treated similarly by the Russian “police” and Oleg saw a reporter get his arm broken by these thugs for trying to cover and report on the their atrocities.

Corruption and Abuse of Power in Putin’s Russia

The New York Times continuing its impressively tough recent line of critical reporting on the Putin KGB state, reports:

Only one spectator showed up for the final hearing in the killing of Magomed Yevloyev. He was a broad-beamed, ruddy-faced man in a carefully pressed black suit, and once in the courtroom he removed his tall fur hat, set it on the bench beside him and waited for a chance to speak.

Sunlight streamed in the window, bouncing off the white walls, but the old man had brought a heaviness with him into the room. When the time came, Yakhya Yevloyev stood and recited a litany of evidence not gathered — witnesses not interviewed, threads left dangling — that might have led to a murder conviction in his son’s death.

The room went silent out of respect for the man’s loss, and for a moment it seemed as if the process could rewind 18 months to the beginning, when his son, an opposition leader in the southern republic of Ingushetia, was hustled into a police car and shot through the head at point-blank range.

Back then, in August 2008, it was a crime so outrageous that it seemed to demand action. Magomed Yevloyev was openly feuding with the region’s leader, Murat M. Zyazikov, when the two men happened to board the same flight from Moscow. Barely half an hour after the police escorted Mr. Yevloyev, 36, off the plane, he was dropped off at a hospital with an execution-style wound.

Death is often murky in the violent borderland of the Russian north Caucasus, but this one seemed different. Protests broke out in Ingushetia, and Western leaders pressed Moscow to punish those responsible. Even the Kremlin appeared to feel the political pressure: within two months, President Dmitri A. Medvedev removed both Mr. Zyazikov and his interior minister.

Obama, the Bastard, Abandons Russian Human Rights

Time magazine reports:

Since his first meeting with Kremlin leaders in Moscow last July, President Barack Obama has established a dialogue with Russia over some critical issues — Iran, Afghanistan, nuclear arms reduction, missile defense — and all of these have yielded progress, even if meager and tentative. But when it came time last week for an unprecedented meeting — involving Russian and American officials, along with human-rights advocates — to discuss the issue of human rights, the dialogue with the Kremlin hit a wall. The Russian side came away pleased that there had been no criticism from the Americans, none of the condescension they remember from the Bush years. The American side, for its part, seemed content to have raised these issues, showing that they have not forgotten them in their eagerness to be friends again. Still, for the rights activists who were at the the table — a presence that was historic — the whole process seemed little more than unproductive political theater.

The meeting’s location, which was chosen by the Kremlin, was about as poignant a symbol of Russia’s past rights abuses as one could find outside the Gulags. Standing about 100 miles east of Moscow, Vladimir Central Prison housed some of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political prisoners, including the activist Vladimir Bukovsky, several of Stalin’s relatives, and the American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Also hovering over last week’s talks was a much more recent prison scandal. Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who once represented an American investment fund in Russia, had died six months before, on Nov. 16, after being refused medical treatment for months at Moscow’s Butyrka prison. He had been awaiting trial on tax fraud charges for nearly a year.(See the dangers of doing business in Russia.)

Russia Abandons its Poets

In a story that could not be more timely in the wake of Vladimir Putin not recognizing Yuri Shevchuk, the New York Times reports:

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, Russian poetry has begun to resemble American poetry in ways that are both fascinating and sad. What’s fascinating is how talented, and how different from one another, Russia’s young poets are. What’s sad is how little they are read, and how little they matter. Whatever reach contemporary poetry had in Russian society has vanished like wood smoke.

The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin “thaw era” in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when that reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous. They squabbled. Mr. Yevtushenko seemed to be alluding to poets too, when he asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

June 7, 2010 — Contents

MONDAY JUNE 7, 2010

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Another Shocking new Low for Putin’s Russia

(2)  Putin is Exterminating Russia’s Mayors

(3)  The Kremlin’s Failure in Kaliningrad

(4)  Shameless Barbarism in the Russian Duma

(5)  CARTOON:  My Name is Vova

(6)  French Open Recap

EDITORIAL: Russia sinks to a Pathetic new Low

EDITORIAL

Russia sinks to a Pathetic new Low

Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet KGB state sank to a shocking new low last week when it turned to public advertisements on the Internet to locate an attorney to defend it from a burgeoning onslaught of lawsuits in the European Court for Human Rights, suits which Russia routinely loses at great financial and public relations cost.

Is Putin’s Russia really so absolutely incompetent, clueless, and friendless, that the only way it can find competent lawyers is by advertising for them as if it were any other helpless company adrift on the legal seas?  Are there really no lawyers employed by the Kremlin itself who could be called upon to do battle in the courtrooms of Strasbourg?

It is that clueless, and there are no such persons.  Russian “law schools” exist in name only, since the very definition of “law” is unheard of in Putin’s Russia.  Russians simply have no idea whatsoever how to behave in a real Western courtroom where judges cannot be bribed and government edicts have no force. 

Putin is Exterminating Russia’s Mayors

Nikolai Petrov, writing in the Moscow Times:

In its ongoing attempt to transform the political landscape, the government has been stepping up efforts to replace directly elected mayors with nominees from among State Duma deputies — who themselves are put in office not by voters in the districts they represent but as appointees from party lists.

This process has spread to a number of major cities. The direct election of mayors has been canceled in Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk, Ulyanovsk and Penza. The vote has also been canceled in cities that never even held direct elections, such as Ufa and Saratov as well as in Kazan, where direct elections had been expected to start. Under discussion now is the cancellation of the elections in Yekaterinburg, Perm and Volgograd, among others. According to various estimates, the direct election of mayors has been canceled in a third to half of all municipalities already.

Governors, who are appointed, and United Russia functionaries share a common interest in this change. Incumbent mayors have even given their support in return for assurances that they can remain in office.

The Kremlin’s Failure in Kaliningrad

Vladimir Ryzhkov, writing in the Moscow Times:

Developments in Kaliningrad clearly demonstrate that the “power vertical” built over the past decade — a system for permitting unchecked bureaucratic abuses — is not only failing to effectively manage the regions but is, to the contrary, itself the cause of serious social and political conflicts that are making the system increasingly unstable. What’s more, the boundless appetite of monolithic state capitalism — the economic foundation of that “vertical” — has already exceeded the limits of what even the most long-suffering Russians can tolerate.

The paralysis of state systems and the limitless greed shown by officials for monopolistic businesses are manifested most severely on the periphery of the country — in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok. There, the population and the business community pay a much higher price than the national average for maintaining parasitic bureaucracy and monopolies. This is a result of their geographic remoteness and, in the case of Kaliningrad, the fact that it is a distant exclave surrounded by foreign countries that are EU member states.

Shameless Barbarism in the Russian Duma

The Moscow Times reports:

United Russia has prevented lawmakers from debating police violence at a Moscow opposition rally this week, a Communist State Duma deputy said Thursday.

City police detained more than 150 people at an unsanctioned rally Monday on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad, and about two dozen people claimed that they were beaten or attacked as law enforcement officials tried to break up the event.

Sergei Obukhov, a Duma deputy with the Communist Party, tried to discuss the rally at the chamber’s session on Wednesday, he told The Moscow Times.

But his microphone was switched off by Duma Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov, a United Russia deputy, because the issue was not on the formal agenda, Obukhov said.

CARTOON

 

Playing on the story were reported in our lead editorial in our last issue, Ellustrator has the Russian “prime minister” being asked at the pearly gates “Sorry, what’s your name” and the PM replying:  “Vova Putin, tyrant.”

French Open Recap

Confronted by Nadia Petrova, who can dare say Russian women are not the most beautiful in the world? And how about their fashion sense?!

Well, it wasn’t pretty. No, it surely was not.

Last year’s French Open finalist Dinara Safina of Russia was ousted in her very first match at this year’s tournament, ousted by a player who became the second-oldest in the tournament’s modern history to win as much as a single match.

Ouch.

Then there was the woman who defeated Safina to take the title last year, Svetlana Kuznetsova.  She was ousted in her third match of the French Open by a player not seeded in the top 25.

Ouch, ouch.

So, just for starters, neither of the two Russians who contested last year’s final, widely seen as one of the most pathetic and unwatchable in the history of grand slam finals, managed to get as far as the fourth round this year.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. But there was more, oh, so very much more carnage to report.

June 3, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY JUNE 3 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL: Russia and the Ape who Governs Her

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Saakashvili, Supremely Triumphant

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Volodya “Girly Boy” Putin

(4)  Cracks in Putin’s Corrupt Foundation revealed in Sochi

(5)  Russia Brainwashes another Generation

EDITORIAL: Russia and the Ape who Governs Her

EDITORIAL

Russia and the Ape who Governs Her

Russia's ape in chief

Try to imagine a press conference where U.S. President George Bush is asked about his policies at Guantanamo Bay by Bruce Springsteen, and responds to “the Boss” by musing:  ”Who are you?”

What do you think the world might then say about Mr. Bush?

Well, precisely that happened last week when Yuri Shevchuk, the Russian equivalent of Springsteen and leader of the legendary rock band DDT, stood up and confronted Putin with the following question:  ”I received a call the day before yesterday from your assistant, I guess — don’t remember his name — who asked me not to pose sharp questions.  Do you have a plan for the serious, sincere and honest liberalization and democratization of our country so state organizations do not strangle us and so we stop being afraid of the police on the streets?”

Putin responded:  ”What’s your name, sorry?”  Shevchuk gave his name, and added “a musician.”

EDITORIAL: Saakashvili, Supremely Triumphant

EDITORIAL 

Saakashvili, Supremely Triumphant 

Cheers, Mr. President!

In elections across the nation of Georgia last month, President Mikheil Saakashvili swept to blinding, awe-inspiring victory.   

Voters from one corner of the nation to the other spoke with one voice and repudiated Russian aggression and imperialist efforts to bring Georgia back with in Russian domination in a massive landslide. 

“No,” the people of Georgia boldly declared:  ”We will be free!”