Get Ready for KGB & Lie Detectors in Russian Airports

As the Washington Times reports, Russia is planning to authorize KGB-style interrogation of tourists boarding airplanes using a highly questionable aural lie detection computers.

According to the London Telegraph, the Times states:

Millions of passengers traveling through Russia soon will have to take a lie detector test as part of new airport security measures that could eventually be applied throughout the country. The technology, to be introduced at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport as early as July, is intended to identify terrorists and drugs smugglers. But many passengers will be chilled by the set of four questions they will have to answer into a machine, including, “Have you ever lied to the authorities?” The machine asks four questions: The first is for full identity; the second, unnerving in its Soviet-style abruptness, demands: “Have you ever lied to the authorities?” It then asks whether either weapons or narcotics are being carried. To cut delays, passengers will take the tests after taking off their shoes and putting baggage through the X-ray machines. He doesn’t get his shoes back until he satisfactorily answers the questions. Each test will take up to a minute. “If a person fails to pass the test, he is accompanied by a special guard to a cubicle where he is asked questions in a more intense atmosphere,” says Vladimir Kornilov, IT director for the airport.

In other words, welcome back to the USSR!

This technology was recently the subject of a major expose by American network television as being essentially fraudulent, a perfect excuse for the KGB to randomly interrogate and intimidate foreigners such as NGO and human-rights personnel.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Russia vs. China and Manifest Destiny

200 years from now, the border between Russian and China will be the Ural mountains (if Russia is lucky). According to an article in the American Thinker in June 2005:

“The temptation to seize the Russian Far East and Siberia may be too much for China to resist, since the region would offer the country an opportunity to achieve increased energy autonomy and replace its own depleted natural resources. Many coal mines in China are nearly exhausted, with further exploration an expensive and time consuming alternative. China also imports more oil than it produces—a significant barrier for a country of its size with designs for regional dominance and global influence.

The article continues:

“China could decide to take conventional military action, embarking on its own “Chinese Blitzkrieg” to secure the Russian Far East and Siberia. Such a large-scale invasion would almost certainly elicit a nuclear response from Moscow. This is something both countries would want to avoid, since any large-scale nuclear exchange would all but destroy the area’s natural resources, not to mention other obvious drawbacks. Although weakened by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia’s conventional forces remain formidable, capable of confronting any Chinese aggression.

One must question whether Russia’s conventional forces are in fact “formidable” where China is concerned. China could easily thrust 2 million or more soldiers into Russia’s Far East, and Russia has nothing like the capacity field that many troops, much less project them quickly from bases in the West toward China. After all, Russia still can’t even subdue tiny Chechnya, which doesn’t even have a regular army. Moreover, one must question whether Russia could possibly fire nukes at China, since Chinese retaliation could affect Europe, without NATO approval that it would never receive, and whether Russia could risk a Chinese response that could erase Moscow and St. Petersburg.

What’s more, as the article notes, the issue of population is key:

“Vladimir Yakovlev, Russia’s regional Asian development director, recently commented that Russia’s total population had fallen to 145 million – a decline of 1.7 million people over the past two years. If the Russian population continues to decline at the current rate, some experts estimate it could drop to 100 million by 2050. Despite draconian population control measures, the Chinese population continues to increase, placing rising pressure on Beijing to find open space. Even a very slow increase from a baseline well over a billion souls provides a lot of new people.

Thus, China can take the Far East without firing a shot:

China could adopt a policy of ‘gradual assimilation’ and ‘soft influence.’ Under this scenario, Beijing would sponsor increased migration, hoping that the Russian-Chinese population would eventually be capable of exerting influence over regional politics and thinking. Beijing could then use this opportunity to question many of the boarder treaties now in place, demanding concessions from Moscow.”

Russia would be even more helpless against this option, since the only way it could be resisted would be in concert with NATO, which Russia has already alienated by supporting Iran and Hamas and fighting the incorporation of the former Soviet slave states into Europe. In fact, population would be crucial in a nuclear exchange as well. If Russia lost 20 million people in Moscow and Piter as the result of a Chinese assault, that would be 20% of Russia’s population. If China lost 50 million to Russian ICBM’s, more than twice as many, that would still only be a tiny 5% of China’s teeming population.

The conclusion is obvious: Russia will lose Siberia the same way it lost its Tsar and its Politburo. Implosion.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Yet Another Race Murder in Russia!

15 Men Attack Gypsy Camp, Killing 2

The Associated Press

ROSTOV-ON-DON — A group of 15 young men attacked a Roma camp in the Volgograd region, beating inhabitants with metal bars and killing a man and a woman, the Interior Ministry said Friday.

Two other Gypsies from the camp in the town of Volzhsky — an 80-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl — were gravely wounded in the Thursday night attack and hospitalized, a ministry’ spokesman said.

Three men, aged 18 to 20, have been detained and face charges of racially motivated murder, Shchekotin said. Police are searching for the other attackers.

In St. Petersburg, where a Senegalese student was fatally shot earlier this month, a 31-year-old Afghan man was beaten at a market on Friday and hospitalized with broken bones and bruises. On Saturday night, two Mongolian students were beaten by 10 unidentified assailants in the St. Petersburg metro.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

1,500 Brave Russian Patriots Rally Against Putin’s Media Attacks

The Moscow Times reports:

On the fifth anniversary of Gazprom’s takeover of NTV television, some 1,500 protesters and several prominent former NTV journalists rallied Sunday on Pushkin Square to demand greater media freedom and a television free of Kremlin control.

The protesters — many of them pensioners who pledged to listen only to independent Ekho Moskvy radio — gathered at 1 p.m., waving Russian flags, wearing “I’m free” pins, and holding posters reading, “Kremlin, get away from TV,” or “Take the remote control away from Putin.”

Many also wore T-shirts and pins calling for the release of jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky and chanted “Censorship today, dictatorship tomorrow.” Behind a Channel One cameraman, protesters held a poster reading, “Channel One, stop lying.”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !