November 3, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 3 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia Crashes another Party

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia, Nation of Thieves

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Putin’s Demographic Fraud

(4)  EDITORIAL:  America and her Russian “Guests”

(5)  In Russia, a Childish Government for a Childish People

(6)  Shame and Humiliation for Russia at the Kremlin Cup

(7) LETTER:  Russians Ouraged by Biased Independent Reporting

NOTE:  Wikileaks is preparing to blow the lid off Putin’s Russia. Must be for real, the KGB is already issuing crude, criminalistic threats.

NOTE:  Blogger Oleg Kozlovsky says that this is a photo of Federal Transit Safety Service head Gennady Kurzenkov’s car. You may notice that it happens to be driving on the wrong side of the road.

NOTE:  Who gave Vladimir Putin a shiner?

NOTE:  We’ve heard about “don’t feed the bears,” but this is ridiculous.  Only in Russia!

EDITORIAL: Russia Crashes another Party

EDITORIAL

Russia Crashes another Party

In another editorial in today’s issue, we highlight the fact that Russia has just been revealed by Transparency International to be the very most corrupt nation in the G-20 organization.

Now it turns out that both Brazil and India, fellow members of the so-called “BRIC” group that includes Russia as well as the G-20, are already disgusted with the organization and are spurning it. This was, of course, supposed to be Russia’s great coming-out party, a new group of independent countries looking to Russia for leadership and acting as a bulwark against a unipolar world dominated by the United States.  It is turning out to be another classic Russian boondoggle, an illusion rather than a reality.

Once again, in other words, we see Russia being revealed as a totally isolated country, unsuitable and unqualified for membership in any civilized group of countries and unable to establish a leadership role in any organization.  Russia imagines itself a leader, but in fact it is not even a follower.

EDITORIAL: Russia, Nation of Thieves

EDITORIAL

Russia, Nation of Thieves

Russia’s so-called president spent the last year, according to his own propaganda, furiously working to reduce Russia’s virulent corruption.  So naturally, the most recent corruption survey by Transparency International shows that Russia has gotten even worse.

Russia dropped from #146 to #154 in the world in terms of corruption.  Only a tiny handful of countries on the entire planet are more corrupt than Russia, and not a single one of the G-20 nations is as corrupt as Russia.  TI stated:  “There are no significant changes. Regarding corruption, everything remains just as bad as it was.”

Even the Russians themselves are appalled.

EDITORIAL: Putin’s Demographic Fraud

EDITORIAL

Putin’s Demographic Fraud

A recent report on Russian demographics in the Moscow Times contained two stunning facts.

First, the average annual income of a Russian citizen is $7,500.  For a full-time worker with two weeks of vacation per year, that translates into an hourly wage of $3.75 per hour.  And remember, that’s the average wage, meaning something like half the population earns less.  It’s a wage that would be flatly illegal in every American state and every country in Europe. It represents desperate poverty in any civilized country.  In Russia, it’s normal. And remember: Russians pay the same prices for things like cars, refrigerators, televisions and computers that people in the West pay, because none of those things are made in Russia.

Second, the Putin regime thinks it’s doing a great job because the birthrate is rising.

EDITORIAL: America and her Russian “Guests”

EDITORIAL

America and her Russian “Guests“

Once again, a small army of toxic, venal Russian invaders has been discovered within America’s shores. First it was a nest of spies led by the Mata Hari wannabe Anna Chapman, and now it is cyber criminals.

In Russia, a Childish government for a Childish People

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

Any government that is accountable to the people dedicates a substantial amount of time analyzing and reporting on its actions and mistakes. Visitors to the U.S. government and Senate web sites will find hundreds, even thousands, of such reports. An unaccountable government behaves exactly the opposite. Rather than analyzing its mistakes, it makes empty promises, and instead of holding past actions up to scrutiny, it draws attention with predictions about the future.

Nowhere is this unaccountability of the Russian authorities more evident than in this past summer’s wildfires. Three months after much of European Russia was engulfed in toxic smoke, villages burned and people lost their lives, we have no more information about what happened than what was offered at the very outset.

Shame and Humiliation for Russian Tennis in Moscow

Russian women’s tennis reached a new low last week at the Kremlin Cup in Moscow.

Russia currently has six players ranked in the world’s top 20, a shocking comedown from its position in prior years (America currently has more top-five players than Russia does).  Two-thirds of these Russian players, four of the six, spurned the Kremlin Cup entirely. They were not even interested in stepping on the court for their own country’s most prestigious tournament.  The roll of shame:  Vera Zvonareva, Yelena Dementieva,  Nadia Petrova and Maria Sharapova.

Only the lowest two of the top six deigned to appear in the own country’s tournament:  Maria Kirilenko and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

Pavlyuchenkova lost her opening round match to an unseeded non-Russian. Kirlenko reached the finals, where she lost in easy straight sets to a non-Russian who was not even the tournament’s top seed.  From beginning to end, Russian players produced nothing but disgrace and humiliation for their country, confirming that it remains a sports backwater even among Russians and that Russians simply can’t compete against foreign rivals.

“Dominant” Russians? We think not.

LETTER: Russians Outraged by Skewed Independent Reporting

Dear La Russophobe,

You may be aware of the crude propaganda article which appeared in The Independent last month, praising Valentina Matviyenko, the unelected and corrupt governor of St. Petersburg, as ‘Russia’s Thatcher’. That was, of course, a direct consequence of the Independent being sold to a veteran KGB spy Alexander Lebedev. Lebedev also owns the Evening Standard and has today launched another daily newspaper in the UK, called ‘i’.

We have complained about the Matviyenko article to the Press Complaints Commission and they have confirmed yesterday they are investigating it. The complaint is signed by St. Petersburg regional leaders of all major opposition parties and groups (‘Solidarity’, ‘Yabloko’, ‘United Civil Front’, People’s Democratic Party), leaders of St. Petersburg’s independent NGOs (including the city’s association of small businessmen and the trade union of small business employees, as Matviyenko is notorious for her stifling of small businesses), and other eminent Russians in St. Petersburg as well as several Russian exiles in the UK such as Vladimir Bukovsky and myself.

Although we do not discuss the question of undue influence from Lebedev in the text of the complaint, we are quite prepared to make such allegations on the record, tell about the common business interests Lebedev has with Matviyenko, and suggest that’s probably what was behind the article.

One of the issues in the complaint is the controversy about the Gazprom sky-scraper project, designed by the British firm RMJM, which is opposed by many in St. Petersburg. It was recently reported in Russian press that Charles Phu, the project’s chief architect, said at a public meeting that RMJM was getting regular ‘memoranda’ from Putin, encouraging them to go ahead with the project and promising support from the government. It is also reported that Anton Glikin, the Chairman of the Russian division of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) has written to the INTBAU’s patron, the Prince of Wales, about Putin’s improper lobbying of the RMJM.

Best wishes,

Pavel Stroilov

Following the jump is the Complaint filed against The Independent.

October 27, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 27 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia is a Bandit Nation

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Moscow’s Crypto-Fascist Scumbag

(3)  Khodorkovsky’s Challenge to Putin

(4)  Beware of Smiling Russian Bears

(5)  The Final Push against Novaya Gazeta

EDITORIAL: Russia is a Bandit Nation

 

Paddycake, paddycake, psychopathic man, bake me some nukes as fast as you can!!

 EDITORIAL

Russia is a Bandit Nation

We can’t help but wonder how Russians would have reacted to an American president being photographed with, say, Shamil Basayev in the same way Russia’s Dima Medevedev recently was with lunatic Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  And what if, during the meeting, the American president had declared his intention to supply Basayev with nuclear technology?

The New York Times reported:  “Russia first offered Venezuela nuclear power in 2008, during an intense spell of anti-Western sentiment in Moscow after the war with Georgia. The agreement on Friday fleshed out that offer.”

Chavez certainly hates America just as much as Basayev hated Russia, and would like to do America just as much harm, or more.  And America certainly could have justified such a move as Medvedev does, pointing to the need to counterbalance increasing Russian imperialist ambition.

EDITORIAL: Moscow’s New Crypto-Fascist Scumbag

EDITORIAL

Moscow’s New Crypto-Fascist Scumbag

Sergei Sobyanin

Deutsche-Welle, one of the best sources of reporting on Russia, has published a brilliant exposure piece on Sergei Sobyanin, the handpicked, unelected new mayor of the city of Moscow.

Here is what Sobyanin said after he was “elected” governor of Tyumen provience in 2000:  “There is opposition, look! Only 24 out of 25 deputies have voted for me.” Such a remark could easily have been made by a stooge of the Soviet empire, and indeed quite often was.  Now, Sobyanin has been placed in charge of one of the world’s largest cities by exectutive fiat of the Kremlin, and he will be its slave.  Democratic politics at the local level has been absolutely and finally extinguished, and it has been carried out by the so-called “liberal” reformer Dima Medvedev.

Khodorkovsky’s Challenge to Putin

Once again defying Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky appears boldly in the Western press calling for insurrection against the Kremlin, this time in The Los Angeles Times:

I am a member of the last generation of Soviet people — those who were born and came of age in the USSR. In 1990, the final year of the Soviet Union’s existence, I was 27 years old. The next generation — of which the first of my sons, born in 1985, is part — only knows about “those times” from our stories.

Growing up, an ordinary young man from the outskirts of Moscow from a family of engineers who worked at a Soviet factory, I believed the things that were said on television, written in the newspapers and taught in school. I wanted, like my parents, to work at a factory and serve my country. I wanted to go further than my father, to become a factory director. Like a third of my peers, I studied at a technical institute, and like 90% of them, I was a member of the Young Communist League.

Beware of Smiling Russian Bears!

Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish defense minister and chairman of the Council of Euro-Atlantic Association, writing in the Moscow Times:

Remember the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, aimed at enshrining “commonly shared values” between Russia and the European Community? Signed in 1994, during the hopeful early days of Russia’s first-ever democracy, the agreement was bolstered in 1999 by the creation of the European Union’s Common Security Defense Policy.

Both sides often refer to this desire to forge closer relations as a “strategic partnership.” But as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel meet President Dmitry Medvedev in Deauville, France, on Tuesday, it would be wise to recognize that the Kremlin seems to be changing the terms of this nascent relationship.

The Final Push against Novaya Gazeta

Other Russia reports:

Editors at Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s most well-renowned opposition newspapers, fear that the publication may be shut down in the coming year.

Following months of legal battles, a Russian court declared in September that a decision by Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media supervision agency) to issue an official warning against the newspaper for “propagandizing nationalistic views” was valid. Since a publication can be shut down after two such warnings, Novaya Gazeta editors say that the court’s decision spells the beginning of the possible end of the newspaper.

October 22, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY OCTOBER 22 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Corruption and Insurrection in Putin’s Russia

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia is an Uncivilized Monstrosity

(3)  EDITORIAL: Schwarzenegger and Chapman Party On in Moscow

(4)  Exposing Putin’s Plans to Violently Liquidate Opposition

(5)  The Wolf Pack runs Wild in Putin’s Russia!

(6)  The Russians show the NHL who they Are

NOTE:  Once again, the rebels in Chechnya have launched a bold direct assault on the government, this time attacking the parliament while both in session and being visited by a high-ranking Russian official.  Pacified Chechnya? We think not.

NOTE: Vladimir Putin’s marriage is on the rocks. What a surprise.

EDITORIAL: Racism, Corruption and Insurrection in Putin’s Russia

EDITORIAL

Racism and Insurrection in the Russian Army

In our last issue we carried two items illustrating the dire consequences of unchecked power being given to Russia’s cadre of spies and its police officers.  Today, we turn our attention to the Russian military.

Last week we were appalled and terrified by the spectacle that unfolded in the Siberian city of Perm.  The indispensable and brilliant Paul Goble, translating from the Russian press, reports how Russian army units there are in open rebellion against their officers because large numbers of the young recruits are Muslim and they face daily oppression from their racist Slavic “brothers.” What the Kremlin does not seem to have noticed while ignoring this scathing, barbaric racism is that its victims are being armed and trained to kill.

The upshot of the rebellion was the Russian officers were forced to turn to Muslim clerics and beg for their assistance in quelling the insurrection.

EDITORIAL: Russia is an Uncivilized Monstrosity

EDITORIAL

Russia is an Uncivilized Monstrosity

An exhibit opened last week in Berlin, Germany, whose purpose is to confront the people of Germany directly with the active support — indeed, adoration — given by their ancestors to the maniacal regime of Adolf Hitler.  The New York Times reports:

As artifacts go, they are mere trinkets — an old purse, playing cards, a lantern. Even the display that caused the crowds to stop and stare is a simple embroidered tapestry, stitched by village women.  The household items had Nazi logos and colors. The tapestry, a tribute to the union of church, state and party, was woven by a church congregation at the behest of their priest.

The same exact thing, of course, was true of Russians during the time of Stalin, and Stalin ended up murdering far more people than Hitler ever dreamed of doing.  But instead of facing up to their hideous past as Germans are doing, Russians prefer to rewrite their past with absurd lies and misdirections, and now Russians are weaving new tapestries of exaltation to Stalin and his ilk. Indeed, they’ve even elected a proud KGB spy from the Brezhnev era as their “president.”

EDITORIAL: Schwarzenegger and Chapman Party On in Moscow

EDITORIAL

Schwarzenegger and Chapman Party on in Moscow

Party on Arnold! Party on Anna! Excellent!

Russia achieved an impressive new low last week in national humiliation.  We can hardly keep the tears of laughter out of our eyes long enough to publish today’s issue.

First, The Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived in Moscow and declared: “President Medvedev is a great visionary. He had this vision to create a Silicon Valley in Skolkovo. I love places where there is an extraordinary potential. It’s almost like looking at a gold or diamond mine and saying, ‘All you got to do is go in there and get it.'”

Simultaneously the New York Times was writing of the Governator’s home state of California:  “California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).”  But by Russian standards, of course, California is a majestic success and the Governator is a leading economic genius!

Then, as if to show Russia has never sunk as low as it can get, it was announced that the ludicrously failed Russian spy Anna Chapman had been appointed an advisor to a leading Russian financial institution.

Exposing Putin’s Plans to Violently Liquidate Opposition

Paul Goble reports:

The way in which Moscow is arming and training units assigned to the Organization of the Collective Security Treaty suggests that these forces will be used against domestic opposition groups in the member states – not excluding the Russian Federation, according to some analysts — rather than exclusively against foreign aggressors.

Col.Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of the unified staff of the ODKB (its Russian acronym), said that “the international forces subordinate to him soon will begin to receive as armaments water cannon, traumatic pistols, tear gas and noise grenades – all “so-called non-lethal” weapons.

Up until now, such weapons have generally been used by the police or special services rather than by national armies or international alliances. Obviously, “tank columns are not dispersed by water cannon.” Indeed, most of the units in the ODKB are “motorized rifle battalions, the chief task of which is repulsing a foreign threat.”

The Wolf Pack runs Wild in Putin’s Russia!

This Youtube Video is amazing for two entirely different reasons.

First, it shows a Russian policeman actually stopping a vehicle on the highway for a violation — in this case, only one working headlight.  The norm in Putin’s Russia, of course, would be for a cop to stop a driver for no reason other than to collect a fat, juicy bribe for continued passage.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that this officer didn’t intend to ignore the violation in exchange for such a bribe, just one one of many reasons that Russia’s roads are among the world’s most dangerous.

But even more shocking is what happens next.

The Russians show the NHL who they Are

ESPN reports:

Pretty much everything went according to plan with the Carolina Hurricanes‘ recent historic trip to St. Petersburg, Russia. And if it weren’t for actually having to play an exhibition game there, the trip might have been the perfect precursor to the NHL’s staging a regular-season game in Moscow.

But the Hurricanes did end up playing an Oct. 4 exhibition game against St. Petersburg, and the game turned into an ugly affair with Carolina coach Paul Maurice pulling his No. 1 goaltender, Cam Ward, and top forward, Eric Staal, out of the contest for fear they would be injured.

October 20, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 20 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Lying Bastards at Voice of Russia

(2)  Russian Spies, out of Control

(3)  A Russian Revolution against Russian Police?

(4)  In Russia, the Fraud goes On

(5)  CARTOONS

EDITORIAL: The Lying Bastards at Voice of Russia

EDITORIAL

The Lying Bastards at Voice of Russia

Even by the appalling standards of neo-Soviet pseudo-journalism, the lapdog cretins at the Voice of Russia radio propaganda network operated by the Putin Kremlin deserve some special kind of prize.

The willingness of these mendacious bastards to lie openly, shamelessly and repeatedly, regardless of how obvious it may be that they are doing so, bespeaks mental illness. They are so utterly removed from any vague sense of reality or ethics that it is possible to believe they have not yet heard about the failure and collapse of the USSR.

Here is the report on last week’s regional “elections” by Voice of Russia, for instance:

Russian spies, Out of Control

Reuters reports:

Russia’s security services have changed a lot since late Soviet days.

They are much worse.

That’s the view of Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two young Russian journalists who have just published a book on the FSB, the main present-day successor to the powerful Soviet KGB.

“The KGB was a very powerful organization but at the same time it was under the strict control of the Communist Party,” Soldatov told Reuters in an interview in London on Wednesday, when he and Borogan were promoting their book at a seminar.

“… With the FSB, we have no party control and we have no parliamentary control … we have got uncontrollable secret services.”

A Russian Revolution against the Russian Police?

Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

A video titled “Primorye Partisan” has been making the rounds on the Internet. It was made by a gang of self-proclaimed guerrillas in the Primorye region that led an armed attack against policemen. They are suspected of killing two policemen and wounding six others between February and June.

One of their slogans is “Grab a weapon and save your soul” — something that is close to what guerrilla fighters in the Caucasus have said and done. Imagine that these guerrillas surfaced in the United States and started shooting at cops. I think the public would call them the new Manson family.