EDITORIAL: LR in Russian

EDITORIAL

LR in Russian

The major Russian website InoForum has translated a second of our recent editorials, this time the one entitled “How We See It” in which we explained our confrontational approach to reform in Russia.  Previously, InoForum translated our editorial exposing of the extent of Vladimir Putin’s alienation of the people of the United States, entitled “Putin=Russophobia.”  Interestingly, they’ve also translated several of our reader comments posted to that editorial, a nice touch.  As a result of this, you may notice an increased number of Russian-language comments appearing on this blog from InoForum readers who transit here from their link to the source page (the material in Russian is also the subject of voluminous commenting on the InoForum website as well).  “How We See It” now has well over 100 comments.  

This same website, by the way, we praised for having translated Oleg Kozlovsky’s op-ed in the Washington Post when it appeared several months ago, attentive readers will recall.

We are delighted that someone is returning our favor in translating a huge volume of material from the Russian blogosphere into English.  As well, though we already had a large number of Russian readers, significantly larger than any other English-language Russia blog, but since our main purpose is to influence the conduct of the people of Russia we are always delighted to have more.

These two editorials, of course, go hand in hand.  In the first, we documented American alienation from Russia owing to Putin’s outrageous conduct.  In the second, we explained the importance of making Russians aware of this reality, since most are blissfully ignorant of it because of Putin’s chokehold on the national media.

It’s a hopeful sign that there are still possibilities, though vestigial, to get the truth out in Putin’s Russia via the Internet.  But it’s a slender reed. We could wake up tomorrow and find that InoForum has been shut down, its operators arrested, one more candle snuffed out.  And if that happened, it’s not very likely that the Western nations would raise much of a fuss.

Still, the slender reeds — with names like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak and Babel — that clung to life during the Soviet period surely contributed to the ultimate peaceful collapse of the USSR, and some hope is better than none.  Today, we can still hear their echoes in the words of great Russian patriots like Valeria Novodvorskaya, whose work from the heroic Grani.ru website we translated last week, and of Yulia Latynina in her regular column in the Moscow Times.

These voices must speak out as loudly and often as they are able, before they are silenced by the neo-Soviet iron curtain slowly descending across the continent. They are Russia’s last, best hope.