December 24, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY DECEMBER 24 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Resurgent McCain blasts Russia

(2)  EDITORIAL:  A Vacation in the Country for Moscow Seniors?

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Walmart to Russia — Drop Dead!

(4)  Documenting Vote Fraud in Neo-Soviet Russia

(5)  Kashin Speaks

(6)  Shenderovich on Putin-King

(7)  Annals of the Neo-Soviet Crackdown on Art

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment on the powerful American Thinker blog exposes the neo-Soviet Kremlin’s attack on the next Khodorkovsky, attorney Alexei Navalny.

NOTE:  Nearly half our content today, items 5-7, was written by Russians.  All required reading!

NOTE:  The staff of La Russophobe wishes all our readers and contributors a very merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

EDITORIAL: Resurgent McCain blasts Neo-Soviet Russia

EDITORIAL

Resurgent McCain blasts Neo-Soviet Russia

Can we have a word, Mr. Putin?

Last week Senator and presidential candidate John McCain gave us Russophobes an amazing early Christmas present, delivering a blistering attack on neo-Soviet Russia at one of the world’s most prestigious institutes of foreign policy, Johns Hopkins University.  The speech was immediately touted by conservative pundits as a declaration of war by the newly empowered Republican Party upon the craven appeasement policies of the Obama adminstration.

McCain pulled no punches.  He called for massive new shipments of arms to Georgia, condeming Russia for continuing “to occupy 20 percent of Georgia’s sovereign territory” and “building military bases there” and “permitting the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in South Ossetia, and denying access to humanitarian missions – all in violation of Russia’s obligations under the ceasefire agreement negotiated by President Sarkozy.”  He openly mocked the Kremlin, stating:  “The World Bank considers Georgia the 12th best place in the world to do business; Russia is 123rd.  Russia’s decline is a human tragedy, but it is also a geopolitical reality.  Put simply, Russia is becoming less and less capable of being a global, great power partner with the United States.”

And that was just for starters.

EDITORIAL: The Kremlin turns its Eye towards the Aged

EDITORIAL

The Kremlin turns its Eye towards the Aged

“This is a big country – there’s the Far East, and Siberia.”

—Yevgeny Savchenko, Putin-appointed governor of Belgorod Oblast, when asked to where Russia’s elderly could be relocated.

Well, that did not take long.

In power for only a brief period, the Kremlin’s hand-picked Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin has already jumped on the bandwagon being driven by Belgorod governor Savchenko and is proposing the resettlement of all of Moscow’s elderly citizens in order to bring down real estate prices for the city’s younger set.

Savchenko is blunt:  “Make it so that there would be five million people living here [in Moscow], and all the issues would be resolved without capital investment.”

But we think he is not bold enough.

EDITORIAL: Walmart to Russia — Drop Dead!

EDITORIAL

Walmart to Russia — Drop Dead!

We congratulate the executives at Walmart Inc. on their wisdom in deciding to reject the Russian market.  We encourage the very small number of other Western companies who are considering investment in Russia, or who are already there, to do likewise.  Western firms that do business in Russia are supporting the rise of a neo-Soviet state and therefore they are both undermining democracy in Russia, destroying the future of Russia’s children, and helping to create a dire new threat to the security of the West.  History will judge them harshly, and conscientious Western citizens should boycott any firm they know to be doing business in Russia in order to send a clear message that such support is intolerable.

That’s to say nothing, of course, of the appalling risks of doing business in the KGB state run by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin.

Documenting Vote Fraud in Neo-Soviet Russia

The New York Times reports (click the link to watch related video):

On the eve of regional elections, an opposition candidate named Olga V. Safronova arrived at a school for a campaign finale. She planned a rousing speech with a refrain that Russia had been seized by a dictatorial ruling party.

But operatives from that very party showed up to stop her.

What displeased them was this: Ms. Safronova’s political party was supposed to be a fake opposition, created by the Kremlin to give the illusion that Russia was a thriving democracy. Now, though, this puppet party was rebelling here in Siberia — battling for votes, defying the governing party and even assailing Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin himself.

Kashin Speaks

About Gagarin and About Myself
By Oleg Kashin
November 29, 2010
Kommersant/Vlast
Translated from the Russian by The Other Russia

An unfamiliar man in a white coat took an instinctive step to the side, and my hand, stretching towards his chest pocket, grasping only air, falls back again to the mattress.

“What does he want?” asks the man, feeling his pocket.

“The pen, probably,” posed a woman’s voice; and that woman, who I didn’t see, was right: the pen, of course, I needed the pen. The blue gel pen from the chest pocket of the white coat of that man.

Shenderovich on Putin-King

A Few Words About Methods
By Viktor Shenderovich
December 7, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal
Translated from the Russian by The Other Russia

I intentionally waited a few days – would anybody speak out?

Nope. All is quiet…

Impudence is bliss.

“The methods of our security services differ in a good way from the methods used by United States security services,” Putin told Larry King. “Thank God… the officers of our intelligence services and other security services are not noted as having been involved in the organization of secret prisons, kidnappings, or the use of torture.”

They were noticed, naturally, and more than once.

The difference between Russia and the US is that the people who used torture in Guantanamo are in prison, having been convicted by American courts, and the Russian citizens, kidnapped and tortured by FSB officers, won’t get justice from anywhere closer than Strasbourg.

The second difference is that the American journalists who investigated Guantanamo won the Pulitzer Prize and are all alive, and Politkovskaya and Estemirova, who investigated the filtration camp in Chernokozovo, have been murdered, and their murderers have not been found, and Putin still managed to publicly spit on Politkovskaya’s grave.

So that’s it about the methods. And not those of the security service, but of Putin and his propaganda. They are simple, like a stick: lie through the teeth, nobody will notice!

Annals of the Neo-Soviet Art Crackdown

Yana Plucer-Sarno of the Voina art collective

A scathing item on ArtInfo by Yana Plucer-Sarno, editor of the Voina art collective, condemns the outrageous neo-Soviet crackdown on art:

Voina is a well-known group of Russian artists that engages in radical street protest actions. These artists have protested against the total elimination of freedom of speech, against the violation of human rights, and against the utter liquidation of democracy that have taken place in Russia in recent years.

In their manifesto, the group proclaims that its main goal is to create a new contemporary art language for the sake of pure art — and not for money. Within Russia, they want to create a real left-wing art movement in the best traditions of the Russian Futurism of the 1920s. They aim to trigger a revival of political protest art around the world. Voina struggles against the climate of socio-political obscurantism and right-wing reaction that has overtaken Russia.