January 21, 2011 — Contents

FRIDAY JANUARY 21 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Parfyonov vs. Putin, the Smackdown

(2)  EDITORIAL:  China vs. Russia, the Smackdown

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Russia is #10!

(4)  Desert Siberia

(5)  Russians Scrooge Christmas

(6) CARTOON:  Frosty the Putinman

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment on the mighty Pajamas Media megablog details the craven reaction of the Obama administration to the arrest and persecution of Boris Nemtsov. Shame on you, Mr. Obama.

NOTE:  An extensive interview with opposition activist Oleg Kozlovsky has been posted on YouTube.

EDITORIAL: Parfyonov vs. Putin, the Smackdown

EDITORIAL

Parfyonov vs. Putin, the Smackdown

Leonid Parfyonov

One of the most remarkable events in Russian history occurred in November 2010, but you can be forgiven if you missed it.  State-sponsored Russian television did not think it worthy of mentioning.

The event was an acceptance speech by Leonid Parfyonov to a black-tie audience at a ceremony where was presented with the first Listyev Prize from state-sponsored Channel One television, in honour of Vladislav Listyev, a Russian journalist who was murdered in 1995 in Moscow.  Thankfully, it survives on YouTube, with subtitles. Parfyonov blogs in Russian on LiveJournal.

Little did the Kremlin realize what it was in for when it authorized Parfyonov to receive this award!

EDITORIAL: Russia vs. China, the Smackdown

EDITORIAL

Russia vs. China, the Smackdown

China is a Communist country.  Russia is supposedly capitalist.  Suppose a major business publication were to undertake a study of the two countries to decide which one presents a more horrific environment for foreigners to do business in:  Which country do you think would come out on top – that is, on the bottom?

Did you guess Russia?  You’re right!  The study’s authors explain:  “We applied a concept called the Capital Receptivity Index (CRI) that measures an EE using 23 specific factors — distributed among the four elements listed above. Countries are scored on each factor from 1 (world’s worst) to 5 (world’s best), which makes the maximum possible score 115. Tallied as a percentage, the CRI of the U.S. is 82% (94/115), Russia’s is 38% (44/115) and China’s is 46% (53/115).”

Here is the data breakdown (with each country’s score out of the total possible score):

EDITORIAL: Russia is #10!

EDITORIAL

Russia is #10!

In yet another stunning proof of Russia’s absolute failure as a civilized, modern country under Vladimir Putin, global risk manager  Maplecroft has just published the results of a worldwide study of 196 countries and found that a truly shocking 186 of them were less risky to do business in than Russia.  You read that right: Russia is the 10th most dangerous place to do business on this planet.

Russia is keeping company with virulent hell-holes like Somalia, Pakistan, Congo and Iraq.  Maplecroft classifies Russia as an “extreme risk country” and states:

Russia’s Siberia becomes a Desert

The Dallas-Forth Worth Tribune reports:

Picture a town inaccessible by road, buried under ice and snow for eight months of the year, unable to support a movie theater and without enough cars to warrant a traffic light or even a stop sign.

Chersky is the definition of isolation — or, in Stalinist terms, exile. This forbidding area of northeastern Siberia, where winter temperatures commonly sink to about -50 Celsius, (about -60 F) was once part of the Gulag, the network of prisons for the Kremlin’s enemies.

The town has shed more than half its population of 12,000 in the hard times that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of those remaining say they also would leave if they could.

Russians to Christmas: Drop Dead!

The indispensable Paul Goble reports:

Fewer than two percent of Russian citizens attended Orthodox Christmas church celebrations this year, a number that calls into question not only the claims of the Moscow Patriarchate that Russian population is overwhelmingly Orthodox but also the special relationship it has with the state and the state’s spending to promote Orthodoxy.

As Svetlana Solodovnik noted in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, perhaps no other public organization has benefited as much from the tandem as the Russian Orthodox Church which has positioned itself as the moral arbiter of the majority and extracted both the return of property and enormous state subsidies.

CARTOON: Frosty the Putinman

Source:  Ellustator.

If only the real one would melt as easily!