July 23, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY JULY 23 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  In Tuapse, a Rising

(2)  Preobrazhenskiy on Chechnya

(3)  Shevchuk as the Anti-Putin

(4)  Russia is not a Country

(5)  The Full Nemtsov White Paper

NOTE:  A Facebook group devoted to supporting persecuted and prosecuted art curators Yuri Samodurov & Andrei Yerofeev already has over 2,000 members.

NOTE:  Today we release the full version of the latest white paper exposing the fraud and failure of the Putin regime by Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov in HTML.

EDITORIAL: In Russia’s Tuapse, a Rising

EDITORIAL

In Tuapse, a Rising

Maybe, just maybe, when the story of the demise of Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev is written, the story will begin:  “It all started in Tuapse.”

This utterly charming hamlet by the sea (if you’ve not been, you should) rose defiantly to spit in the eye of Putin and Medvedev once again last week.  After the jump, photographs from the scene tell the tale better than any words could do.

More than two thousand brave Russian citizens poured into the streets, heedless of the Kremlin’s threats and its jackbooted thugs called “policeman” and demanded that their government stop killing them, slowing poisoning their environment with toxic chemicals as if their lives did not matter.

One protester declared:  “We address those troublemakers and environmental racketeers and those who sponsor them: Stop causing a nightmare for our terminal!  Think about where your children and grandchildren will work, and whether life be sufficient for all of us”

We can’t help but wonder:  How long before the same happens in Sochi?

Preobrazhenskiy on Chechnya

Frontpagemag.com reports:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, a former KGB agent who became one of the KGB’s harshest critics. He is the author of seven books about the KGB and Japan. His new book is KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent.

FP: Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Putin’s war on Chechnya, which we don’t really hear about much these days. Has Russia succeeded in stifling the Chechens? Fill us in on the latest developments.

Preobrazhenskiy: Thanks Jamie.

Shevchuk as the Anti-Putin

The New York Times reports:

REVERENCE for Russia’s leaders, be they czars, general secretaries or presidents, has never come easily to Yuri Shevchuk. A bespectacled, slightly graying rock star, Mr. Shevchuk has spent much of the last three decades growling into a microphone in an effort, he says, to awaken in his compatriots a passion to break from their long history of bowing to heavy-handed authority.

These days, at 53, Mr. Shevchuk remains a guttural voice of defiance, just as he was when he began dodging Soviet censors by holding secret concerts in apartments throughout Russia in the early 1980s. But now he rails against Vladimir V. Putin’s government in his packed shows and openly scorns other musicians he accuses of selling out.

Last month, he put his preaching into practice, stunning Russians by making an off-the-cuff speech against official abuses during a meeting with Mr. Putin himself.

“I have questions, honestly speaking,” Mr. Shevchuk told the prime minister at the meeting. “They’ve accumulated for some time, and I will use this opportunity.”

Russia is not a Country

Paul Goble reports:

What people call the state in Russia is not “a system of public institutions” as the state is in Western countrie but rather “a mechanism for the enrichment of the powers that be who control the excessively privatized substance called only by mistake is called the Russian Federation,” according to a leading Moscow political scientist.

In an interview posted on Kasparov.ru, Tatyana Vorozheykina, who teaches at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences, argues that the Russian state at the present time is “in fact a private corporation for the servicing of the private interests of a narrow group of people.” And what is more, Vorozheykina says, “everyone knows these people. They come from one city, from one agency, from one dacha cooperative” – an obvious reference to the St. Petersburg mafia of Vladimir Putin. “And the essential quality of this arrangement of power is one involving the translation of orders, ideas and opinions from the top to the bottom.”

The Complete Nemtsov White Paper, Volume III

PUTIN: What 10 Years of Putin Have Brought

An independent expert report by
Vladimir Milov and Boris Nemtsov

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Introduction

In February 2008, we published our report “Putin – The Results” [TN: translated by me as “Putin: The Bottom Line”]. It seemed to us back then that it was about time to review what he had brought about now that his presidential term was coming to an end. We assumed that the policies of his successor would differ in at least some ways from those of the previous incumbent. However, Putin continues to play a key role in Russian politics and the course which he followed for 8 years has barely changed.

A great deal has happened since 2008. Russia has plunged into a deep economic crisis. Instead of growing, the economy is contracting. A budget deficit has replaced a former surplus, millions have lost their jobs. Prices, utilities foremost among these, are rocketing. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has doubled and social and inter-regional inequalities have worsened.

Official propaganda would have it that everything is still fine, the country has weathered the crisis, has conquered terrorism and is beating corruption, that we are proceeding by leaps and bounds along the road of innovation and modernisation, that we are respected around the world, that we are getting wealthier, that there is less poverty, that men and women are bringing forth children, and that “Russia dying out” was a thing of the wild nineties.

The purpose of this report is to tell the truth about what is happening in Russia, to dispel the myths put about by the powers that be, and to relate real information to our fellow-countrymen who for 10 years have not been getting that from the cheerful and frequently false information disseminated by the government-controlled TV and print media.