EDITORIAL
Non-Competitive Russia
China #27
India #51
Brazil #58
Russia #63
Once again, the World Economic Forum has found Russia to be bringing up the rear when surveyed for economic competitiveness and compared to the other nations in the so-called BRIC group. At #63, Russia’s rating remained totally unchanged from last year, no increase in competitiveness whatsoever. Well outside even the top 50 world nations, Russia is languishing in a backwater that gives it absolutely no basis for inclusion in lofty assemblages like the G-8 and the Security Council.
Russia’s growth rate in the first quarter of 2011 was half that of India and China, and it has the highest corruption perception rating of any BRIC nation.
Russia’s ruler Vladimir Putin can think only in terms of improving his country’s position on the list of nations ranked by GDP. But this measurement means nothing to the ordinary citizens of Russia since it does nothing more than take account of Russia’s oil and gas resources, which are not sufficient to make Russia a modern, comfortable, civilized country. Achieving that means competing with other nations in the world marketplace, something Putin totally ignores, and the result is that year after year Russia just can’t do it. You don’t even need this survey to know this: Just look around you and note the total absence of Russian manufactured goods for you to buy.
The World Bank has issued an unusually harsh condemnation of Putin’s policies, referring to “decomposition of export growth over 2000-08 period” that showed “no contribution of the increase of exports of new products to either new or old geographic markets to overall export performance. In Russia, the decline of services exports (from 11.4 percent of gross domestic product in 1999 to 7.6 percent of GDP in 2008) is unique among the BRIC countries .”
Russia’s position on the list is very similar to its place on a list of nations ranked by per capita nominal GDP, but a little bit worse, meaning Russia is not even able to compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis as well as other countries and is totally helpless to do anything more. The likes of Costa Rica and Vietnam are significantly more competitive than Russia and the USA towers above Russia mightily at #4.
Analyzing Russia, the report found that by far the most negative factor in the Russian economy was corruption, crime and theft. Also severely problematical were access to capital, cumbersome tax regulations and inflation. German Gref, the head of Sberbank, stated: “It is becoming increasingly evident that the current growth model, which is centered on high oil prices and leveraged facilities, is no longer effective. New drivers of growth are needed for Russia to achieve sustainable development.”
Can Russians look to proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin for such new ideas? Hardly! Putin is a man whose ideas are mired in the past, who actively defends the fall of the USSR as a catastrophe and who vigorously seeks to bring back icons of the Soviet era. Even as the horrifying WEF indictment on corruption was being released, the Putin regime’s response was to announce it was lessening penalties on white-collar criminals, allowing them to buy their way out of trouble!
Yet Putin is even now planning a return to power as “president for life” no different than many other backwards nations on the planet like Egypt and Libya which have recently seen popular revolutions against such misrule. At the worst possible moment, when Russia needs an entirely new way of thinking, the plan is to make permanent a KGB-dominated regime that has its head mired firmly two or three decades in the past.
Putin has no training and no background which would permit him to think differently. All his life he has learned only one way of viewing the world. Now that Russia needs to change and deal with a competitive international marketplace, Putin is impotent, helpless, clueless and the worst possible thing for Russia.
La Russophobe 
It will be interesting to see how the Russophile trolls, ever blind to truth, will reply to this latest piece of truth about their beloved Putin and the quagmire he has made and is sinking his beloved KGB empire into.
Will the Russian “sheeple” do anything about it? I doubt it as they marched and died in their millions to that GULAG hell in Siberia and did sweet F/A about it.
Whereas the true Russian patriots will be permanently silenced or illegally forced to languish in those unhygienic sub human ice boxes, courtesy of the Lubyanka KGB mafia, specifically created to break or destroy any human spirit that dares to question this past and current evil empire.
You want to know how they will reply? They will start a thread about CIA’s directing Gen. Pinochet or about killing of American Indians in the 19th century or about something going on in Guantanamo. You have to admit, Bohdan, that they have really mastered the art of deflection
I am not sure what the trolls would say, but I will respond that Russia is more competitive in extracting hydrocarbons than in manufacturing. Hence, capital, talent and other resources are first invested in the former, then in services that cannot be imported and last in the latter. That’s how the market economy works. The only point I strongly disagree with in this article is the one related to the GDP per capita. The standard of living is extremely strongly correlated with the GDP per capita, regardless of how it is generated: through extracting and selling oil and gas, through making textiles, through providing banking services or through developing computer software.
Maybe, the market economy works like you described, but do you imply Russia has it? Perhaps, in some embryonic form, but not more. When the government either de facto controls or even directly owns most important sectors of the economy, as is the case in Russia, it will be an exaggeration to call it “market economy.” The same applies to China. It’s a variation of Mussolini’s corporatist system (if the word fascistic is too strong for you).
Well, your observation about the relationship between the standard of living and the GDP is valid. But the structure of the GDP, i.e., how it is generated does matter a great deal. I don’t agree with your notion that it doesn’t matter. If you rely on oil and commodities, you are extremely vulnerable, as those sectors are notoriously volatile. Can you guarantee that the oil prices would never go below $60 or $50? Of course, you can’t, nobody can. And we remember prices below even $20 not so long ago. That’s basically what destroyed the U.S.S.R., not Gorbachev, not Reagan’s appeal to tear down that wall, but low oil prices.
RV, then we must recoignize this Chinese “totalitarian state capitalism” outperforms the “American free market”. Because the US lives on Chinese money, Chinese buying the treasries, right?
Chinese economy is not a topic here, but please define “outperforms.”
Easy enough, RV: China outperforms the West at large in the pretty obvious sense — comprehensible even to the gullible Western petty bourgeoisie — that it’s fast becoming the world’s most important industrial and economic centre, with science and technology not far behind. The decadent, parasitic West is doomed, if not in the eyes of its clueless, mindless, consumerist masses. The West’s affluence and social peace can only be sustained by ceaseless wars of plunder and conquest — indeed the very way that the West came into existence to begin with. So with its economic foundations rotten ripe, the West’s ruling classes — to wit, finance capital — will have to take on their bribed as well as totally unproductive home constituencies (and the latters’ ingrained sense of entitlement to other peoples’ economic output and natural resources). In short: Civil war between parasitic classes. An absolute must-see!
As for Russia, it wavers between Eurocentrism and internationalism. To parrot La Russophobe: Russia finds itself on the verge of overall Western collapse. It’s an open story if it can keep out of the stinking cesspit or not.
Oh, just go to your Trotskite cell meeting and tell them that. I am sure your Commissar will approve. China makes consumer goods of very poor quality that most people I know try to avoid if at all possible. I am not aware of a single item designed and manufactured in China that could be competitive except for being very inexpensive. There are no decent Chinese machinery, cars, computers, planes, anything
Yet, China’s exports to pretty much everywhere are growing every year…Why should the Chinese make cars if the Germans are good at it? The Chinese are competitive at making cheap T-shirts, which they exchange for the US dollars, which they exchange for German cars. The US is competitive at making dollars, which is this country’s main export, and as long as the US can make the best currency in the world (there is no irony in this statement), it will remain America’s main export, just like oil is Russia’s and cheap consumer goods are China’s main exports.
RV, Russia does have a market economy and so does China, but if yo did not know that by now, it would be useless for me to try to convince you otherwise. As far as “how GDP is generated…”, I guess this is your way to say that dependence on commodities exposes an economy to cyclicality. You are right, it does, but the experience shows that this can to a significant extent be mitigated by fiscal policy means. Second, look up the structure of the Russian GDP. Services, not oil extraction account for over 60% of Russia’s GDP, which is similar to the GDP structure of most post-industrial countries, this country included. This also should address your concern of “how GDP is generated”.
RV,
You are 100% right. One only has to look at the great Professor Robert Conquest, author of that superb book ” The Great Terror” which came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, as Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”. One way or another, Conquest has spent nearly 60 years exposing the crimes and follies of communism.
He is best known for his mission to expose the truth about the Soviet regime and his remark about the USSR “that never in the history of mankind has a nation lied so much” speaks volumes in itself.
Putin and his murderous KGB controlled ruSSia, certainly learned a lot under that system, which he now is putting into practice to ensure he is the next president for life of the newest banana republic.
I read this book when I was in college, in the early 70’s. It’s still on my bookshelf. I remember it shocked me so much that I almost cried. And I bought every book Conquest wrote ever since. That’s how I learned about the Kolyma, the Pasternak affair and the Ukrainian genocide or whatever term is used currently to describe the extermination of 5 million Ukrainian peasants.
Now, I think the current Russian government is definitely less murderous that that of Stalin, but it is very easy to slip back. It will take just a few bad harvests, or a few terrorist acts, etc. There are no institutional or cultural control mechanisms that would prevent that from happening. Russians still want a strongman, they have one in place, and they are at his mercy now.
RV, I wouldn’t even discuss the “Ukrainian genocide” not recognized by a single state here. I’m just tired of talking to 100%indoctrinated people.
But what I know is we all should rather care about things we can influence. The thing you can influence right now is the US politics. E.g. a policy that made your country kill a dozen and a half of Afghani children in one airstrike in Afghanistan last month
And here’s other specific.cases, this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_caused_by_ISAF_and_US_Forces_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan_%282001%E2%80%93present%29#2011
02/2011 …65 civilians, including 50 women and children, were killed in a Nato operation…
02/2011 …NATO airstrike killed an Afghan family of six…
03/2011 …U.S. helicopter gunners killed nine Afghan boys ages 7–13…
03/2011 …opened fire on civilian houses…
03/2011 …U.S. special forces killed President’s Hamid Karzai cousin…
03/2011 …Two Afghan brothers, aged 13 and 17, were killed by NATO helicopters…
03/2011 …Two civilians, including a child, were killed by a NATO helicopter…
03/2011 …Two men, two women and three children travelling in a car were killed by a NATO air strike…
03/2011 …killing a civilian mullah and an infant aged 23 months… (umm, US never kills priests, LR?)
03/2011 …killing two civilians and injuring four others…
And so on.
And look here:
May 28, 2011 – A NATO helicopter airstrike targets two homes in which 12 children and two women killed. The heliocpter was responding to an attack on a US Marine base.
Do you think the cheaper gas and richer Chevron can justify all this?
You are mistaken about Ukrainian genicde not being recognized by a single state. In fact, Ukrainian genocide is recognized by Canada as a matter of Canadian law, and also recognized by the United States de facto, if not de jure. Perhaps, there some other countries having the same view.
RV,
You have to make allowances for the likes of imbeciles like Dimwitry! when they deny the Ukrainian genocide. He and his ilk have to deny its existence as otherwise what does it make his beloved murderous Russia and her USSR look like.
This genocide has been recognized by several countries such as Australia, U.S.A., and Canada – and many more. Hence the spurious denial claim by Dimwitry, a Putin “stukach – la par excellence” proves he is an outright liar. But then what is to be expected from him, he has to lie to cover the heinous crimes of his beloved Kremlin and their murderous leaders. Putin included!!
On the lack of famine in adjacent regions of Russia and Belarus:
– witness H. Mozhova reported that in the 1920s and 1930s in their Ukrainian village a lot of Russians settled who held leading positions in the settlement administration, party and Soviet bodies. In those years many people secretly travelled to the village of Kantemirovka in Russia because there you could purchase bread, buy a cow or bullock, if anyone had the money, because in Russia there wasn’t such a famine; v. 173, а. с. 132-134
– witness M. Potapova drew attention to the fact that the harvest in 1932 was good but that it was all taken away. She went on foot begging with her father to the village of Urazove in the Belgorod region of Russia. In Russia there was no such famine. There people were not starving at all, they ate white bread and butter. In her native village during Holodomor up to half the people died – specifically Ukrainians; v. 173, а. с. 168-170
Similar testimony was given by witness H. Palahuta and others; v. 173 а. с. 135-137
I know that a few years ago it was reported that our U.S. Congress authorized some kind of a monument or memorial structure to be built in Washington DC to commemorate this. No money from the U.S. Treasury though, the Government of Ukraine is supposed to pay, but it seems the land will be provided for free. To me, it’s a clear recognition of this tragedy.
I just don’t understand Russian stubborn resistance. Why not admit the truth and say they are sorry. I cannot speak for Ukrainians but I think most of them will be satisfied by an apology and will move on. 80 years or so have passed, not a single perpetrator of this atrocity is alive, nobody is going to be prosecuted, and I don’t think Ukraine is demanding any monetary compensation. But just getting an apology seems impossible. It’s the same with Turkey and Armenian genocide. I think it’s the stupid pride and hubris that prevent both Russia and Turkey to do the right thing.
And why should Russia apologize for something that it views as a mutual tragedy, not something inflicted by one nation on the other?
Because the world sees it differently.
Because this tragedy was manufactured by the U.S.S.R. of which Russia was clearly the biggest and principal part and the modern Russia agreed to be a successor state.
Because it is in Russia’s interests to have a more friendly neighbor.
Because it costs nothing but will bring a lot of benefits, such as international good will. It’s just a right thing to do if one wants to bury the past and to move forward.
Enough reasons or do you need more?
Because it’s a right thing to do.
(i) I don’t think the world sees it differently, and it does, Russia needs to educate the world about what it really was;
(ii) Yes, it was manufactured by the USSR. There were representatives of all the USSR nations both among the perpetrators and the victims;
(iii) Yes, Russia needs a friendly neighbor, so both countries have started a dialogue on the subject. Ukraine’s administration generally agrees on the view of the fact as a common tragedy of both peoples;
(iv) No, apologizing for something you did not do never works, and sometimes apologies cost a lot, as apologies are often used by cynical radicals to extort all sorts of compensations.
Any real reasons?
You say it was manufactured by the USSR. There were representatives of all the USSR nations both among the perpetrators and the victims.
If you are saying that Russia and Ukraine are equally responsible for Soviet crimes, that does not pass the laugh test. I read some literature and it is clear that all the decisions were made in Moscow, and the “independence” of all other parts of the U.S.S.R. was a sham.
Nice try again, RV.
As I pointed out in a previous post in another thread recently, one nerver ceases to be fascinated by the sweet naïveté — real or fake — which pertains to the political verbiage of the Western petty bourgeoisie. However, in this case, brazen arrogance and insolence seem to be much more poignant descriptions.
Starting with the preposterous notion of “The world”, it readily translates into the universally despised and reviled sick joke of “The International Community”. Go cry me a river, brother. I, for one, count myself to the overwhelming majority forming no part whatsoever of aforesaid “Community” of Big Business’ lackeys, thieves and gangsters.
Then the standard tripe to the effect that the Evil Russian SFSR (usually reduced to Stalin pure and simple), manufactured this and that monstrosity, here and there, and everywhere. Listen carefully, dear Western parrots: Even if each and every allegation directed at the USSR were accepted as Holy Gospel Truth UNIVERSALLY — to wit, even outside of the Western corporate media conglomerates and their faithful consumers — Western imperialism would offer absolutely nothing in reward except more misery, famine, war, and — surprise, surprise — endless tales of “irrefutable crimes of the USSR to be promptly apologized for”. Sorry, folks: That trick worked back in those wonderful years of 1989 – 1991. Not anymore.
Yes, the decision were made in Moscow, but the Moscow of the time represented — or not represented — to the same extent the Russians, the Ukrainians, as well as other nations and ethnicities of the USSR. The famine in the Volga Region and in Kazakhstan are similar common tragedies of all the ex-USSR nations. On a separate subject, are you prepared to accept that deflection from any given topic here is practiced by pretty much all the posters.
And I never said Russia and Ukraine were “equally responsible” for the Ukrainian and Volga Region famines. I said that these are common tragedies of the peoples. The Stalin regime is responsible for these famines. The Russian, Ukrainian and other nations are to a large extent responsible for letting this regime exist — I am a supporter of the idea that people and peoples deserve the government they have. The same nations denounced the Stalin regime as early as in the mid-1950s and then got rid of the Soviet regime in the 1990s.
The insanely delusional savage uncivilized pagan barbarians in the kremlin is the only government that ORGANIZED 112,000 PAID serial killers, in a few weeks. {AKA GENOCIDE – AKA HOLODOMOR}
In 1932 Ukraine had an average grain harvest of 146.6 million centers (15.5 million centers more than in 1928), and there was no climatic danger of famine. Yet, because of onerous forced grain requisition quotas that the kremlin imposed upon the Ukrainian rural population, the peasants already experienced hunger in the spring of 1932.
The grain collections were brutally carried out by 112,000 special kremlin agents sent to Ukraine to extract grain by using terror against both collectivized and independent farmers.
{They also confiscated or destroyed potatoes, beets, cabbage, pickles, and ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that they could find, that was normally edible.}
Consequently mass starvation and disease became rampant, resulting in millions of deaths
{PRONOUNCED PLANED GENOCIDE}.
Lemkin’s {In 1943 he coined the term “genocide”} notion of genocide was much broader than the definition of that crime retained by the UN Convention. In particular, Lemkin’s victims of genocide included groups targeted because of their social and/or political identities. However, the Genocide Convention recognized only four groups of victims:
national, ethnic, religious and racial.
Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select parts and so the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern taken by the German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select and determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation.
http://jicj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/7/1/123
Read more about other GENOCIDES and ethnic cleansing by the insanely delusional savage uncivilized pagan barbarians in the kremlin here:
https://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/editorial-bloody-violent-horrifying-russia/
Just look at the picture. And try to imagine what picture you’re going to see in 20 years, how it’s going to develop.
Change this. Please.
You grossly exaggerate my influence if you think I can change this, but I am flattered. All I can say that the Afghan war, unlike the Iraq one, was justifiable. The United States has a right to defend itself after being attacked. Perhaps now it’s time to end it since there is no improvement anymore. And don’t give me those pictures of dead children and women, unless you can prove that their killings were intentional.
What does it have to do with Chevron and gas? Last I checked Afghanistan does not have oil or gas, or anything to speak of other than opium.
Dear RV,
The extermination and Russification of Ukrainians by the Moskali has been an ongoing genocide – for centuries. The extermination of Ukrainians by – intentionally forced / intentionally fabricated / blantantly murdering / maliciously orcestrated – starvatin is called Holodomor. In the below link, I posted exerpts from Intelligensia of many different nationalitis, and from many different countries – about the Holodomor.
https://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/ryzhkov-on-the-berlin-wall/#com
Sincerely,
LES
Thanks LES. I have a great book by Robert Conquest on this topic, called “The Harvest of Sorrow.”
RV,
I highly recommend a great new book that puts Soviet crimes in the Eastern Europe (mostly Poland and Ukraine) in perspective of the National Socialist crimes (and vice versa). The name’s Bloodlands, I guess it would make quite a really horryfying reading if one didn’t know about most of this already: http://www.andyross.net/bloodlands.htm
Sounds interesting Robert. I’ll check it out
Thanks Robert. A very interesting article, especially so the bit about Stalin’s crimes being ignored while those of the Jews were not by the free world. Why the selected bias, after all innocent human lives were destroyed by both the communist and nazi tyrannies.
The full (and better) version of the same same review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/
The reviewer, Anne Applebaum, is also author of http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,461802,00.html – which is too a great book.
A fragment from the latter review (of Gulag by Applebaum):
The gulag was everywhere in the Soviet Union, not just on remote islands in the White Sea or the permafrost of the Far North. There were camps in the center of Moscow, too. In the early 1950s, for example, some 12,000 men and women — a mix of political prisoners and criminals — worked in Stroilag in the Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia’s new rich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn served part of his time in a prison laboratory, a sharashka, in northern Moscow. It is still there, just around the corner from the studios of Russia’s main TV networks. No plaques record its history, or the work of other zeks (prisoners) here. Few Muscovites know of their contribution, and even fewer seem to care.
Perhaps the sheer scale of the horror makes ordinary Russians uncomfortable. Anne Applebaum, in her meticulously documented and dispassionately written Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Penguin/Allen Lane; 610 pages), estimates that 18 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953. Nobody knows how many died, though she offers, “reluctantly” the almost certainly low official figure of 2.7 million camp deaths. This does not include those who died in the other chapters of Soviet terror — man-made famine in Ukraine, collectivization, the executions during the purge years and civil war. A low estimate for the total death toll is around 10 million.
@Robert: Ten million? Yes, 10 to 15 million sounds right. But not the invention by scumbag Rummel’s of 60 to 90 million.
Robert,
Many thanks for the above links! What eye openers they are as to the murdering tyrannies of Communism and Nazism, brothers in arms when it came to the “art ” of destroying millions of innocent of men, women and children in the name of crazy ideologies that only an imbecile bereft of decency and honesty can support.
Robert,
Many thanks for the above links! What eye openers they are as to the murdering tyrannies of Communism and Nazism, brothers in arms when it came to the “art ” of destroying millions of innocent men, women and children in the name of crazy ideologies that only an imbecile bereft of decency and honesty can support.
http://www.andyross.net/bloodlands.htm – Robert, I realized that this book is for people with low erudition and knowledge in general. So do not advertise it as a super book. Solzhenitsyn’s nobody better never to write. He’s been there!
Words of the author of the book (Anne Applebaum): I especially wrote book for the West . And especially for the generations who no longer even a memory of the Soviet Union. They know that something is, and it is difficult to read Solzhenitsyn, because they do not know now context. It seemed to me that this is important.
new-sky,
Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Gulag. But Bloodlands makes a point most of the Soviet AND Nazi victims did NOT ever see a concentration (labor) camp (where only a few million people died, from hunger, overwork, disease, brutality, executions). They died because of man-made starvation (the “kulaks”, the Soviet POWs, the Hunger Plan victims), were seized or rounded up and shot, or gassed in an extermination camp. And how people in the West (and actually in Russia, too) are just not aware of this (and also of the fact how most of the “Russian” victims of WWII was not really Russian, and how many of them were even victims of “their own” government). And Solzhenitsyn obviously was not shot in a basement of an NKVD building, or in the woods, or starved to death in his village, so no, he was not “there”.
Bloodlands says only a million people died in the Gulag, which is probably an understimate (Applebaum herself estimated over 2 million, great majority under Stalin of course), but by most estimates still at least 3 million people (and possibly many more) died in the Holodomor and most of them in just few months of 1933, so the scale of this absolutely dwarfs the Gulag anyway.
I meant, AT LEAST well over 2 million (which is the Soviet official figure) died in the Gulag camps, according to Applebaum. Still, the point stands that the most victims of Stalin’s system died completely elsewhere – in man-made famines, ethnic (“national”) deportations (during transports and in exile), various purges and massacres. Bloodlands discusses only some of them, in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries and parts of western Russia. Basically, the area where the most of the German crimes were commited during WWII, and these are the other subject of the book (“Europe bewteen Hitler and Stalin”).
RV, The art of deflection doesn’t stop the desintegration of Russia, it simply slows down the inevitable process of another ’empire’ going down; e.g., Russia truly follows the path of the fall of the Mongol empire – where is Mongolia now?? It bring the next logical question; what country in its right mind will risk the billions of dollars in investing the Russia, a country that is heading for the civil var….hence billions of dollars in investments leaving Russia, it is logical consequence of the political instability in Russia.
I certainly would not invest a red penny, no matter how hot Russian mutual funds may be at the moment. I know that their “managers” will eventually steal everything, and the investors will remain with babkes.
I have no advice for you how to invest your money, but it looks like you’ve just become part of the deflection effort started by Ukrainian posters to sabotage the discussion of Russia’s competitiveness. So who’s the troll?
Lack of foreign investment is directly linked to competitiveness, I think
Well, what about your other post? In any case, Russia’s world 13th economy by the FDI volume, so I don’t think you can speak of “lack”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_received_FDI
Boredan the Aussie-Ukro parrots the Pshek admirably: “/…/ they marched and died in their millions to that Gulag hell, bla-bla-bla”. I’m all but speechless from well, whatever.
Besides, there was an editorial recently which was VERY specific regarding the time table for the Russian/Neo-Soviet/Muscovite whatever apocalypse: 1000 days exactly. Why not just simply “do the maths” then?
Love,
/Manfred
russian baboon wrote;
Boredan the Aussie-Ukro parrots the Pshek admirably: “/…/ they marched and died in their millions to that Gulag hell, bla-bla-bla”. I’m all but speechless from well, whatever.
comment;
So it is official now, that russian lives are worth three bla-bla-bla, what a humonguous inferiority complex, you russians think that you have no right to live; by the way I agree with your statement, kleine schwaine, 100%, with one suggestion – that all future victims of the russian gulags SHOULD BE 100% ETHNIC RUSSIANS.
Did you write the above as part of your Ph.D. ?
Богдан — говори так, чтобы все тебя понимали! как это объяснить тебе?
You see Bohdan, it did not take long for them to come out of the woodwork. I thought the deflection will be using Pinochet or Guantanamo or American Indians. I was wrong — Russian non-competitiveness, which is the topic of this article, can be somehow made less important or justifiable if we talk about Chinese economy or about the dead children in Afghanistan.
RV, your petty squabbling inevitably raises the corollary question: Just what are you asking for, really? As I told the Ukro estúpido, LR recently blurted out a typical super-duper-bold assertion to the effect that the Russian/Neo-Soviet/Muscovite apocalypse was EXACTLY 1000 days away.
Is your faith less solid than that of the team? The worse for you.
Actually, what we said is that the Sochi Olympiad would occur in that time and be a disaster for Russia for one or more of many reasons.
Shouldn’t you at least wait until that time passes before you attack us?
Forget it, babe. I’m a great fan of confrontation too, you know.
RV,
These brain dead communists are only as stupid as their soviet controllers, and the propaganda trash they learn parrot fashion, because their brains cannot think or reason like a normal being.
Note how these trolls always deflect the question from the topic being discussed and redirect it against something totally irrelevant, like they themselves are. But they never say anything about the heinous crimes of rape, pillage and murder committed by their beloved fascist RuSSia in furthering and enlarging their beloved GULAG empire.
Sadly honesty is an unknown trait to these trolls as they live the life of inveterate liars.
Well, just look up who introduced the unrelated topic of “Holodomor”, which made the dead children in Afghanistan relevant. China is relevant to the topic: it is prominently mentioned in the article.
Absolute Trash,
Deflecting the talk about “which made the dead children in Afghanistan relevant.” Why don’t you tell us about your beloved Russian oppressive occupiers when they were in Afghanistan and they earned the undying hatred of the outright majority of the people. I mean what nation – with of course the exception of your beloved Russian Soviet communists – would manufacture small anti personnel mines that were green and resembled butterflies and scatter them all around the countryside, so that small or young Afghan children would think they were toys and either pick them up or stand on them. Bingo instantaneous explosion and child maimed for life without an arm or a leg.
Or why don’t you tell us a about the last Soviet Communist Russian puppet leader of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibulah. Whose reputation was that of a secret police appartchik, and who was ran the dreaded Khad (their secret police – you know like the USSR’s Cheka, NKVD, KGB and all the other various names that they used at one or the other time ). So that when the “Krasnaya Armia” ignominiously deserted its so called fraternal brothers in Afghanistan, by 15 February 1989, when the last Soviet troops departed on schedule, and he had to hide at the UN mission until 1996 when the Taliban removed him and publicly hanged him, but not before his penis and testicles were severed with a knife and stuffed into his mouth – NOW that gratitude from the Afghanistan people for his sterling service to his Soviet masters.
Bogdan, are you trying to be so much to be a case in point. All I was trying to demonstrate to RV is that it is the likes of you who hijack all the discussions and deflect them into unrelated subjects. Bogdan’s post, which somehow makes the Afghan war of 30 years ago somehow relevant to the topic of this post makes it clear who is the troll here.
I’ll play a devil advocate (sort of), and say it’s just a standard Soviet aerial-scatter land mine. Such weapon is inhuman in itself (and the mines from the 1980s are harming people in Afghanistan even today), but it was not specifically designed to maim/kill the children – just to maim/kill all the people of tarfgeted areas in general.
The name is PFM-1 and at least hundreds of thousands of them were also sown over Chechnya in the two wars (the abortive “restoration of constitutional order” of 1994-96 and the “counterterrist operation” since 1999) and actually parts of Ingushetia and Dagestan too, in addition to hundreds of thousands of normal mines (which in the early 2000s was the most mined territory in the world), and so thousands of civilians fell victim to land mines “in Russia”, not even in Afghanistan.
Here’s one of their stories, from 2002:
http://reliefweb.int/node/90909
Lechayev Islam was playing with a bunch of his pals in Grozny last summer. One of them picked up a brightly coloured object lying on the ground. It was a mine. Five of his friends were killed and 12-year-old Islam lost both eyes and hands.
It’s unclear just how many mines there are in Chechnya now but a report by the military research organisation Jane’s back in 1998 suggested there were two for every one of the country’s population of 600,000. It said the explosives were concentrated around civilian areas, fields, grazing areas and water sources. These were clearly intended to target civilians.
Worse, children are increasingly falling victim to them as many look like playthings. For example, the green PFM-1, also called the butterfly mine, is designed to flutter through the air and can easily be mistaken for a toy.
According to UNICEF, since 1994 more than half of the 7000 landmine victims who have been fitted with prosthetic limbs have been women and children.
And an example from last week:
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c154/159323.html
Also Najibullah’s regime actually outlived the Soviet one. He fought quite well, and for this he was given most of the Soviet equipment, left behind when they were leaving and also transferred some more (including hundreds of SCUD missiles that many say were actually being operated by clandestine Soviet personnel).
Najibullah thought he would fight the opposition to an extended standstill until they would agree from some kind of a compromise solution (just like Ghaddafi’s apparent strategy today), even won some big battles. His army desintegrated only in 1992, when they finally run out of fuel (literally) and the desertions became truly massive (the final blow was when Dostum’s Uzbek irregular defected wholesale, followed by the surrender of Kabul). When it was down to just him and his brother (also literally), then he made a run for the UN compound.
And some of his SCUDs were there even in 2001, despite 9 more years of the civil war, that somehow didn’t stop. And which looked like that:
No, RV should really appreciate this. When we started the discussion RV was whining about the “art of deflection”. Once there were some logical arguments pointing that things were not actually that bad, there was a discussion of Holodomor. Once there appeared arguments suggesting that the things are not as black and white with this topic as Bogdan was trying to suggest at the beginning, we are discussing the Najibullah regime, which admittedly was the best of what happened to the Afghan people during the last 25 years.
…and I am really seing a pattern behind Robert’s and Bohdan’s stories of “the little Musa or the little Islam” who suffered attrocities from the Russians, but never a story of a little Ivan skinned by the Chechens or a little Mariam stoned by the mujahideens.
Oh come on, go and tell us “a story of a little Ivan skinned by the Chechens”. I enjoy science-fiction.
And I guess that by “little Mariam” you meant Mengistu Haile Mariam, “which admittedly was the best of what happened to the Ethiopian people during the last 25 years” of course. Moscow-backed too, at the roughly same time as Najibullah.
Here’s a story of this Mariam fellow.
Even kind of Holodomor-related too, as there was another Moscow-sponsored genocide through enforced starvation and deportation (in addition to just shooting), but in a more recent history:
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/1999/11/29/ethiop5495.htm
In 1976 Col. Mengistu gave a dramatic send-off to a campaign of terror that he officially dubbed the “Red Terror.” He threw to the ground before a huge crowd in the capital Addis Ababa bottles filled with a red substance representing the blood of enemies of the revolution: the “imperialists,” and the “counter-revolutionaries,” as members of rival leftist groups were labeled by the Dergue. In particular, the campaign targeted students and young people suspected of membership in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP). Thousands of young men and women turned up dead in the streets of the capital and other cities in the following two years. They were systematically eliminated mainly by militia attached to the “Kebeles,” the neighborhood watch committees which served during the Dergue period as the lowest level local government and security surveillance units. The Kebeles required families to reimburse the administration for the price of bullets used to kill victims when they reclaimed their bodies for burial.
Cold war rivalries helped the Dergue to flourish and tighten its hold on power. It became the main client of the Soviet block in Africa, and received massive shipments of arms to help it counter serious challenges from several armed insurgencies by ethnic and regional liberation movements seeking to break away from centuries of centralized hegemony by Ethiopia’s ruling elite. The counter-insurgency campaigns unleashed by the Dergue were characterized by widespread violations of international humanitarian law. Civilians were deliberately targeted and fell victims by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the indiscriminate violence against them.
When famine in 1984 hit areas in northern Ethiopia partially held by rebels of the Tigray and Eritrean People’s Liberation Fronts (TPLF and EPLF respectively), Mengistu’s government for a while blacked out information about the famine. It later used the disaster as a pretext to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of villagers from northern Ethiopia to areas in the south. The Dergue argued that its “villagization” campaign, as it came to be known, was meant to relocate people from food deficient areas to the fertile plains of the south. In reality, the move was meant to empty rebel-held areas form potential supporters. Again, victims of government action during the forced relocation were in the hundreds of thousands. A 1991 Human Rights Watch report, “Evil Days: 30 years of war and famine in Ethiopia,” gives a detailed account of this dark period in Ethiopia’s recent history during which it is estimated that at least half a million civilians were killed as a result of the Dergue actions.
Racist bastard.
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/18/news/mn-23005/3
Mr. “Racist bastard”, please quote the part about “a story of a little Ivan skinned by the Chechens”, because I don’t see anything about any “little Ivan” (nor “huge Ivan”, or any Ivan at all) in the link that you provided. Nor anything about anyone being “skinned by the Chechens”, I think.
Which doesn’t mean someof Chechnya’s kidnapping victims (tens of thousands of them, including thousands of whom were found dead and thousands who continue to be missing) were not being torture through skinning (and scalping) by the Russian barbarians who abducted them.
For example, this mass grave (actually: corpse dumping site, they were being simply strewn around through an abandoned dacha village to jusr rot and be picked by animals) where the corpses of dozens of recently “disappeared” people, including women, who were discovered just outside the main Russian base in Chechnya:
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,RUS,,3bd0239b7,0.html
And here’s an ECHR ruling in the case of one of the murdered women who were discovered there (she was a retired teacher was was a wife of former judge who was actually a local pro-Russian official). To put some human face on the victims – the face that was smashed, literally, as her skull crushed with multiple blows of a blunt object (probably with a rifle butt, maybe a hammer – and guess what, it was not even classified as torture by the court, and she was too decomposed to find some “actual” torture traces on her):
http://sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/hof.nsf/d0cd2c2c444d8d94c12567c2002de990/8214690f0466d42ac125721e003465f9?OpenDocument
Robert, I don’t doubt atrocities were committed by both sides. I, however, did not find one single link in your messages exposing the Chechen atrocities. Having heard a few stories of Russian refugees from Chechnya, however, there is no doubt in my mind that barbarity was universal. Yet, in the true propaganda fashion you provide plenty of half-truths in your posts. Well, whatever, let those slave trader families celebrate the ECHR awards.
“Russia needs an entirely new way of thinking”.It means that like -mindedness of today`s Russians is out of date and must be changed by the new like-mindednes? And Putin prevent this change? Russians passionately whish to become “comfortable,civilized” empire,Russophobe supposes.She don`t see any contradiction between the imperial like-mindedness and tend to the individual comfort.
In reality Russians cry and remind the times when they frightend the whole world.
Pingback: Obama and Russia’s descent into tyranny | Command the Raven
Pingback: Jesus Lives! » Blog Archive » Obama and Russia’s descent into tyranny
You “don’t doubt”, okay. But I do doubt your blood libel fantasy “story of a little Ivan skinned by the Chechens”.
Oh, and according to you all Chechen kindapping-torture-murder victims were “slave traders”. So when a female kindergarten teacher (without work, because the kindergarten was bombed out) and wife of a former Soviet judge (for 20 years) goes to a market to sell strawberriers, gets rounded-up by a masked gang of “law enforcers” (during “peacetime”), promptly brutally murdered along along the other seized women (her skull crushed-in with repeated blows), and dumped along with scores of other mutilated corpses to rot for 10 months – but hey, she was obviously a “slave trader”. Attempting to sell the enslaved, helpless Russian stawberry named “Ivan”. A little stawberry. She just had it coming from the heroic defenders of Russian citizens (well she was a Russian citizen too, but should had leave these poor strawberries alone).
But hey, not all of this “slave trader family” got exterminated yet! just look at this judge fellow, pretending to mourn his wife, speaking in Moscow: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1326687/Judge-mourns-wife-abducted-by-death-squad.html But if her wife obviously got just what she deserved (and her cousins too), I guess he should better not try to trade any more of these fruit and vegetable slaves that he’s growing from this ancient-Russian land, himself. A strawberry slave market is a dangerous place. And after all, he should “celebrate”. Right? AT? No, really. If you want to see a “Racist bastard”, go and check the mirror.
Oh, and why are these “Russian refugees from Chechnya” not returning? Isn’t the War-That-Never-Was over for over a decade now? Or, even ended repeatedly, for the first time in February 2000, and the latest occasion being in 2009 – well, ended anyway, no matter never declared and always denied, what matters it’s all just past now (some say something called “criminal underground”, but it must be lies). And aren’t the ruined cities and villages mostly rebuilt now? Isn’t the Russian law-and-order kept by the various Heroes of Russia like General Kadyrov, who is also the president? Please tell me, what’s the reason? I really wonder.
Because, you know, when all the Chechens were either killed or deported from there during just 2 days of 1944, the survivors returned from Kazakhstan ASAP – as soon as Stalin died, even before they were officially allowed in 1957, even as all of their cemetries and cultural relicts were destroyed and their old homes were taken over by colonialists. So I can’t understand: why are the Russians not in hurry, now? Is it not their land, after all, or something? Go on and try to explain, maybe I’m missing out something.
Again, Robert, as we previously discussed, it is not “their land”. No nation has an inherent, God-given right for any land. Russians are not returning to Chechnya because they are hated by the local population, just like the Chechens are generally hated by Russians. And also because unemployment in Chechnya is currently exceeding 50%. This will take time to overcome.
The story of the skinned Ivan is a real story I’ve heard from a family of my friends who had to flee Grozny, so is the story about Chechens playing football with an old Russian lady’s head reported in the LA Times, as well as stories of corpses of Russian citizens of Grozny dumped into garbage containers, which you can read in memoirs of the eye witnesses if you can read in Russian and care to look beyond the sites of Chechen sympathisers. And a slave market in Grozny was a real fact of life. Notably, however, much fewer cases of Chechens playing football with old Russian ladies’ heads are documented, translated in to English and made available for Robert to find on the web than cases of slave traders’ families getting ECHR awards. But I guess Robert is satisfied with half-truths and propaganda.
Civilians, hated? Why? By whom?
I’ll give you a fine example. Remember this church in Grozny? The only one that was allowed to be there by the Soviets? The one which was destroyed in 1995 by the inading Russian “federal” vandals? Well, it’s completely rebuilt for several years now (used to be a bombed-out shell, not different than, for example, the Grozny Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.bitsofnews.com/images/graphics/grozny_museum.jpeg but since 2006 looks like http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11455058 this). Now, do you think it was since then bombed, or firebombed? Do you think that as much as one shot was fired at it by anyone? The answer is: no, there were no incidents. As opposed to the attacks on the well-guarded government buildings and security forces’ posts and vehicles. There is a lot of hate alright, but it’s directed elsewhere.
So, RT writes: “Just three years ago the church lay in ruins. The roof was destroyed by bombs. People who came to pray had to stand in the pouring rain.”, with a picture: http://rt.com/news/prime-time/churches-and-mosques-stand-side-by-side-in-grozny/ But, who did drop these bombs? Let’s not talk about “pouring rain” now, let’s talk about pouring bombs. And shells, and rockets, of all kinds, all around. And who then then walked around looting and further burning and demolishing buildings, including these the ones where the Russians lived? Hey, who KILLED THEM, by thousands, uncounted (but some say: over 30,000), and then buried them in mass graves at the Christian cemetary and in the Kirov Park (now Kadyrov Park), and in trenches at the outskirts of the city, or just left them under the ruins, rotting and smelling for the months to come – and then did it again? That’s some serious questions for you, that you may be not ready to confront.
Where’s this “story about Chechens playing football with an old Russian lady’s head reported in the LA Times”? And the “story of little Ivan” who was skinned by the Chechens, and turned into matzah?
The “slave” (hostage) market was not in Grozny (it’s a myth), but in Urus-Martan (the town controlled by the Akhmadov brothers and Arbi Barayev and his allies, who were in absolutely open rebellion against the authorities in Grozny). Who are the “slave traders’ families getting ECHR awards” – give me the names of these families, come on. No, really, do it. I’m waiting?
And as you’re so-obviously interested in this particular subject of kidnappings in Chechnya, go and read this: http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/chechnya_3980.jsp – it tells the “boths sides of the story” that you were looking for, and the author got shot in the head twice because of her reporting, in Moscow (but she was once kidnapped too). And actually she even wrote in this very article: “we Russian citizens of the early 21st century … have realised that a bullet in the head is the simplest, most natural way of resolving any conflict”.
was not in Grozny (it’s a myth) — and surely you know that from your reading and Internet research. Robert, you have no idea…
Actually, I have an idea. And also I knew I asked you some highly uncomfortable questions that you would just ignore.
But, you might point me ot the “celebrating families of dead slave traders” you were talking about (let’s even pretend for a while it’s okay for “law enforcers” to murder anyone). Here’s a list of most of the judgements so far, and you will tell me these names: http://www.srji.org/en/legal/cases Come on.
Robert, I am not sure what “uncomfortable questions” I am not answering. No, I won’t make a full-fledged research as to which specific families who got the ECHR awards are slave traders’ families. Given that atrocities, including slave trade, were very widely perpertrated by the Chechens, there are reasons to think that quite a lot.
One has only to regret that atrocities similar to those recorded by the ECHR but perpetrated against the Russians have never been properly documented.
As for “… its okay for “law enforcers” to murder anyone”. Come on, no one doubts that the capacity of the Russian troops as “law enforcers” of their country at the time was very seriously compromised. In their infinite wisdom, the Chechen leadership of the time mounted military opposition against their country at a time when the country was experiencing crisis. This crisis deeply affected all Russia’s institutions, including the army. The army was lacking discipline, command and control, as well as many other vital functions an army should have. But this was the only army Russia had and could use against the criminal, murderous, genocidal Chechen regime at the time. And this army was used as effectively as it could be.
In the grand scheme of things, the Chechens got nothing they did not deserve for chosing the leadership that decided it was a good idea to confont Russia militarily at the time when the Russian army was collapsing. The Russians got nothing they did not deserve for not being better prepared.
“have never been properly documented”
What? Why not? If they occurred, isn’t this an outrageous failure by the Putin regime that requires it be terminated immediately?
You are right about the failure. Whether it should be terminated or not, I guess, this is for the nation to decide. So far, for reasons I repeated many times, the regime has been popular with the people.
Really? It’s just too bad.
Now, a fun fact for you, Mr. AT: Do you know that in absence of justice (called: “effective investigation and remedy” – in fact, “exhaustion of domestic remedies” is necessary for a case to be admitted to begin with!) by the Russian state, families of allaged Russian victims of genocide (or what not) by “the Chechens” ever since May 1998 (the date of ratfication by Russia) can take it to the ECHR too. And the ECHR, being not discriminate, just like Russian bombing, can “document it” and award the families of these “slave traders” too!
And just so many Russian do something like this: “With 6,950 new applications in 2008 and a total of 27,250 pending applications by 31 December 2008, Russia remains the country against which the largest number of applications is lodged.”
So could you point me (us) to some of such cases, being “properly documented” for everyone to see? Like, you know, some “little ines” (not even named Ivan or Mariam) being allegedly “skinned”, or this “old lady” being allegedly beheaded, or just the worst story that you could find, go on and amaze me with your fabled “google skill” and what not
Because there was not much to document.
Remember how Russia promoted the lie of “genocide in South Ossetia” for a while (supposedly more than 1,000 of civilians killed in the first hours only and what not), and quietly abandoned it later (except of Kokoity gang who are still pushing it), but many Russians keep on believing it, anyway? Or how they abortively accused NATO of “genocide in Yugoslavia” in 1999?
This meme is like that. The Russian nationalists just can’t face the fact the Russian forces killed more ethnic Russian civilians than “the Chechens” did, and so they need it , badly. Many of them even actually believe it, and Mister AT might be actually believing it too.
And the “genocide” thing was actually officially pushed once, in 2001, at the heigh of Budanov scandal. Here’s how it happened:
The leading Russian state television channel ORT, whose broadcasts reach virtually every hamlet in the country, ratcheted up the rhetoric in its March 22 news broadcast: “From the beginning of March,” it announced, “they [the rebels] have made short work of fourteen elderly women and four men. All of them were ethnic Russians.” ORT then proceeded to remind its listeners of certain events which had occurred several years previously in the village of Chervlennaya in Chechnya. On that occasion a Chechen had killed ten local residents, all of them Russians. “For the first time in the history of Russia,” ORT underlined, “the accused was charged not just with murder but with genocide…. This is the first trial in history on a charge of genocide against the Russian populace. Neither in pre-revolutionary Russia nor in Soviet times was there such a thing (ORT Novosti, March 22).
As this ORT news program showed, the Putin regime–which effectively controls what is broadcast on ORT–has decided, for its own reasons, to play the “race card” against the Chechens, advancing the hot-button charge of genocide. Why the regime has adopted this approach will be discussed later.
(…)
Asked for his reaction to these charges, the separatist president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, “flatly accused Russian troops of being behind the attacks [on civilians] and demanded a full inquiry into the case” (Agence France Presse, March 20). The former speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, also an ethnic Chechen, stated more elliptically: “Behind the murders in Grozny there can stand the most variegated interested parties” (Segodnya, March 21).
To return to the question posed earlier, why would the Russian leadership be interested in further inflaming Russian-Chechen relations by charging young Chechens with genocide? One presumed reason is the flagging support for the war revealed in recent public opinion polls. By raising the incendiary issue of the genocide of Russians, the Putin leadership, one assumes, is seeking once again to rally public support behind the war. The charge of genocide also likely represents an attempt to deflect public criticism of the regime and of the Russian military for recently revealed mass atrocities committed against Chechen civilians, for example, the dumping ground for bodies located adjacent to Khankala military base where more than fifty unburied corpses were discovered. NTV and the prodemocracy Russian media have been highlighting these atrocities. Another related aim of the regime has probably been to dampen criticism of Russia in the West.
Finally, the raising of the red-hot issue of “genocide” may be related to the immensely significant trial of Colonel Yury Budanov–postponed once again last week until April 10–taking place in Rostov-on-Don. Budanov, charged with strangling to death a young Chechen woman, has recently emerged as a national hero for much of the Russian public. Of 113 persons who responded to an invitation by Komsomol’skaya pravda to telephone in with their views on the trial, 89 or 79 percent–demanded that Budanov be acquitted. A telephone poll conducted by Moskovsky Komsomolets yielded “approximately the same result.” (Moskovsky Komsomolets, March 20). Of course, these were in no sense “scientific” polls, but they did provide a rough sense of the public mood.
One of Colonel Budanov’s official “social defenders” at the trial, Sergei Klyatka, recently fulminated during an interview with the newspaper Segodnya: “How can there be peaceful dwellers in Chechnya?! Let even one Chechen clan state that there is no blood on its hands!… The Chechens have gotten precisely what they deserve. And they have no one to blame but themselves.” And Klyatka continued: “I will say this directly: Our soldiers were sent to Chechnya to kill enemies. That is the basic task of the army. Because it is impossible to introduce order into a bandit lair by any other means. Budanov honestly and professionally carried out his duty” (Segodnya, March 17).
The trial of Budanov has been perceived as hurting President Putin and his administration and as helping the man some political observers in Russia and the West believe is the Russian president’s most serious political rival, retired General Vladimir Shamanov, the elected governor of Ulyanovsk Oblast, who appeared at Budanov’s trial and assailed it as a craven kowtowing to the West. In a sharp attack published on the pages of the far-right weekly Zavtra, entitled “Colonel Putin and Colonel Budanov,” Captain Vladislav Shurygin recently wrote: “People are not only expressing their solidarity and support for Budanov but are openly saying that the presidential administration has betrayed Budanov” (Zavtra, March 7).
The charge of genocide raised against Chechens could thus in part be aimed at neutralizing the combustible effect of the Budanov trial–which is, presumably, now seen by the regime as a political blunder–through demonstrating to the Russian public that the regime, too, has now had it with the quarrelsome Chechens.
Also in 2001 (what a year it was) Putin made some drunken rant to the American press:
On June 18, President Vladimir Putin invited a number of correspondents representing leading American media to the Kremlin for a discussion of the significance of what had occurred when he had met three days previously with President Bush in Slovenia. One of the questions put to him, by correspondent S. Glasser of The Washington Post, concerned the present conflict in Chechnya and also Russia’s relations with Georgia (The complete text of the discussion was posted by NTV.ru on June 20.)
After praising President Bush as “an absolutely normal man who perceives things in realistic fashion,” Putin revealed that he had in effect been required to give the American president a history lesson concerning the origins of the current Russo-Chechen conflict. “I am prepared,” he confided, “to tell you, even in certain details, what concretely I said about this question [of Chechnya].” “In 1995,” Putin commenced his recitation to the reporters, “Russia jurisdictionally did not recognize but de facto agreed to the independence of Chechnya, and Russia left there completely.” Putin made a serious factual blunder here–the first war, of course, ended only in 1996, while the key agreements between Russia and Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov were signed during 1997.
In withdrawing from Chechnya, Putin noted, Russia had “dismantled all of its organs of power and administration, withdrew the army, the police, the procuracy, and the courts. Absolutely everything was dismantled.” This retreat, Putin commented with evident bitterness, “looked like a national humiliation,” but Russia did it “in order to achieve a reconciliation.” Putin then presented the journalists with his take on what occurred in Chechnya during 1996-1999, in the hiatus between the two conflicts. The results of Russia’s departure from Chechnya were, in his opinion, horrific. “We were de facto confronted with the destruction of the Russian-language population in Chechnya, but Russia did not react to that. [Russia] was in approximately the same condition as America was after the Vietnam War.”
Putin left vague what he meant by “the destruction of the Russian-language population in Chechnya.” If he meant a genocide, then he was misleading his listeners, because there was no genocide of Russians and Russian-speakers (whatever that term means-most Chechens, after all, are able to speak Russian) during the period 1996-1999. True, many ethnic Russians, some representatives of certain minority peoples of Chechnya, and some Chechens chose to migrate from Chechnya during this period. But this out-migration can hardly be termed a “destruction.”
And if someone’s interested who were the “young Chechens” who were allegedly behind this supposed “genocide” (the first in Russian history, you know – no less), and more details:
On the same day, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported, “The bodies of four women and three men were discovered with gunshot wounds to the head in the Leninsky District of the city, as well as the body of one man who had a knife wound to the neck. Two other men [found]… were killed at least two months ago.” Thus, two of the bodies discovered were two months old. The same newspaper report cited the words of Prosecutor Chernov: “Those killed on the street are basically Russian women–they died of bullet shots to the head–while the victims of reprisals in the apartments, among whom there were also Chechens, were knifed to death.” Again, there is a reference to Chechen as well as Russian victims.
Who committed these indeed heinous murders? On March 21, Prosecutor Chernov reported that police investigating the killings “had hunted down and killed two Chechen rebels.” Two Chechen teenagers, Isa Tobogaev, age 19, and Khasanbek Akhorshaev, age 18, were said to have holed up in a cellar and resisted Russian attacks for six hours before being killed. “It has been established,” Chernov said, “that the youths had links to bandit groups… and were connected with the killing of ethnic Russians in Grozny” (Reuters, March 21). No evidence to support this view was provided.
For some perspective, even if it was true there was such a “genocidal” killing spree by two young Chechens (for whatever reason):
In the non-ruined, not exactly war-torn, actually peaceful, Russian capital Moscow, a gang of a few young (teenage to early 20s) skinheads led by one Artur Ryno (an Orthodox theology student) knifed or beat to death at least 20 non-Slavs, and attempted at least 12 other murders between August 2006 and October 2007 (Ryno himself said they have killed 37 people). But this was not any “genocide”, of course, and for their crimes the Russian courth gave them only 10 to 20 years in prison – or just half to only 1 year per each of their proven victim who died.
For a comparison, the events mentioned events in Chervlennaya. Well, a Chechen fellow named Ramzes (no, seriously) Goychayev (Gaychayev, Gaichaev, etc) was charged with leading a small gang responsible for the death of “dozens” and then convicted for killing 10 local villagers (including one 10 year old, which made him a “Chechen baby killer” according to the Russian propaganda outlets) in several home invasions during his killing spree over the period of 1997-1999 (born in 1978, arrested in 2000, convicted in 2001). So he probably got 5 or maybe 10 years, right? Not exactly: Mr. Ramzes has been actually charged with “genocide” and got death penalty (automatically commuted to life in prison). What else? Oh, this: he was just a local hoodlum criminal – a robber/rapist and a killer, and he was arrested for his crimes in 1999 and awaiting trial before the second war, when he was freed by some armed men in the chaos of Russian invasion, and the Russians only re-arrested him one year later.
And this was the true story of the supposed “genocide of Russians in Chechnya” beyond the fairy tales of AT and his types. A leading persona behind spreading this meme of this crazy old guy: http://conrad2001.narod.ru/ (nice WWII cosplay) and his website, if you want to read “the supressed truth” THEY don’t want you to know.
These atrocities are not “recorded by the ECHR”. It’s judgements of an international court, not any “recording”.
And the so-called “law enforcers” were not only an army, or the paramilitary Internal Troops (a quasi-army). How about: OMON? Is it not a “law enforcing body”? Not to mention the FSB. But anyway,
@Given that atrocities, including slave trade, were very widely perpertrated by the Chechens, there are reasons to think that quite a lot.
Okay.
How about something like this: “The Russian victims of terrorist bombings are obviously slave traders, and their families are celebrating the awards given to them by the Russian government’. Well, not all of them, of course. But given that atrocities, including slave trade, were very widely perpertrated by the Russians, there are reasons to think that quite a lot.”
How do you like it? You’ll probably do, after all you wrote how “both sides are euqally guilty” in your recent post, so it’s something like this, right?
Except I don’t believe this neither. Not even about the victims of the Lyubyanka Station bombing. (If it was at the Lyubyanka complex itself, where the Chekists, and not Chechens, had actually tortured and murdered thousands of ethnic Russians, it’s another matter.)
But let’s continue:
“In their infinite wisdom, the Russian leadership of the time mounted military opposition against their country at a time when the country was experiencing crisis (including the raids by the tank columns of the “Chechen opposition” on Grozny). This crisis deeply affected all Chechnya’s institutions, including the army. The army were lacking discipline, command and control, as well as many other vital functions an army should have. But this was the only army Chechnya had and could use against the criminal, murderous, genocidal Russian regime at the time. And this army was used as effectively as it could be.”
Which is actually true.
And the tanks of the “Chechen opposition” were manned by the Russians, crudely dressed as Chechens (this meant mostly just wearing unmarked uniforms and being unshaven). These guys (and remember that according to international law they could have been simply shot as spies, but they weren’t shot):
Or rather, you won’t.
Oh, and it IS their land. Why? Because they ALWAYS owned it (through all the history, with a short break between 1944 and the 1950s), and because their attachment to it is extremely strong.
For example, when they die in exile, like in Europe, the custom is that even dead bodies are then transported all the way to Chechnya for burial (despite the cost of this).
For Russian colonists, on the other hand, it was just a place of residence and nothing more. When their houses were destroyed there was no reason for them to brave all the dangers, including MANY land mines (and unexploded ordnance, a very big percentage failed to explode at the moment of impact) per each km2, just to build a new home there in a zone of extreme poverty.
(Now not so much, but there were times the people used to freeze and starve to the point of death, and add very little-to-no medical care, the war-related indirect mortality rate was very high especially among the elderly and the newborn.)
Robert, no this is not their land, this is the land where they, by virtue of circumstance and their own effort have been living for a long time. An ethnicity’s “sense of attachment” is only an incentive for the ethnicity to hold on to the land. In no event this makes a land someone’s eternal property. I am sure the Summerians were also attached to their Sumer and claimed they had lived there for millenia. No nation has any God-given rights.
There are no Sumerians today. Becasue they did not care about their land and their sense of ethnic identity and language well enough, so they vanished (over 2,000 years ago). No Akkadians, no Babylonians, too.
There are people who claim to be Assyrians, though. It’s now a small mostly-Christian group in Iraq (traditionally being victimised along with the Kurds, or even by the Kurds) and Syria and elsewhere, and with Assyria of their own being long no more.
AND there are of course the Jews, another Semitic civiliazation, who do care to survive s a nation (despite the various efforts of their various enemies), and there is even again the state of Israel today.
Now, how many Russian colonists cared anough to return to their destroyed homes in the middle of a huge mine field? Lke the most of hundreds of thousands of the ethnic Chechen refugees to Ingushetia who returned already in 2000-2002, when it was still a hot war zone (with thousands of people to death, injury or disappearance there every month)?
Not many? Why? Go and tell me.
There will be no Chechens, Russians and Americans one day. Chechens returned to Ingushetia because they had no better options, obviously. Russians, Ukrainians and other ethnicities did. And they will return to Chechnya once it becomes a livable and civilized place again.
That will never happen if Russians choose to live there.
Based on your support for corruption, mass murder, and genocide (as long as they are carried out by Russia/Serbia, or pro Russian forces), Russians and civilization are mutually exclusive.
You and civilization are mutually exclusive.
Dead wrong, AT. Imbecility and depravity are paramount to appreciating Western civilization properly. Our marvellous little team proves the point admirably!
Define “livable”? Is it populated by the undead and the people don’t really live there?
I think you meant: “returned from Ingushetia”?
Well, some had “no better options” – because they were evicted by Zyazikov (a general in the FSB) after Putin made him president of Ingushetia.
But many, from norther Chechnya, were returning already in January 2000, even before the fall of Grozny. So much the paranoid Russians even stopped the men of “military age” (between 10 and 60) from returning.
And that was after trying to stop the refugees from escaping. And this included shooting and bombing them on route or at the borders, killing and wounding thousands of people, even in the so-called “safe corridors” (in one incident they killed hundreds people with intense shelling of a refugee column and just bulldozered them along with the wreckage to the huge mass graves at a cement factory).
After February 2000, more than tens of thousands of people returned to Grozny, even as their houses were destroyed, to live in the ruined houses and blocks that were not completely demolished (among all the mines and unexplodes munitions, and bombings and shootings by night, and zachistkas by day, and occasional further shelling):
Livable = a place with good employment opportunities (hopefully, an unemploymentr rate below the national level, not 75%), a place where barbaric habits of the indigenous population (such as vendetta and clan-based corruption) are effectively controlled, and hopefully a place free of ethnic tensions.
Really? And who’s going to do it?
Hopefully the very people who live there.
Although, having restored the infrastructure, the federal govenment should, in my mind, do its best to develop education there. High-quality, secular instruction, the promotion of fluency in Russian and English can do wonders in terms of helping overhaul the social fabric of the place, help the Chechens integrate in the modern society, make them mobile, competitive, enterpreneurial and successful.
And the unemployment now fell considerably, due to reconstruction (which was mostly very shabby, though, speeded-up for Potemkin look and Ramzan’s vanity, and if a serious earthquake happens will be a catastrophe, but that’s another story). It’s now officially “40-45%”: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101202/161599925.html and hey, you love the official Russian statistics don’t you?
Under 40%, even.
40-45% unemployment is pretty bad. What’s your point?
And on the construction quality, it looks like Robert, you are an expert in everything, construction included. I have never been in Grozny and don’t intend to travel there, but the changes are quite impressive:
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5204/lexandre.cf/0_3b613_8d0eb40_XL
As for what will happen if a serious eathquake happens, my guess, you know this as accurately as whether Kadyrov is on FSB’s payroll or not, who blew up those buildings in Moscow and if there was a slave market in Grozny.
Also, locals’ accounts (I know, I know, they “prove nothing” to Robert the Omniscent)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/world/europe/30grozny.html?pagewanted=all
But I do doubt your blood libel fantasy — this is as much a fantasy as the statement that the slave market in Grozny was a “myth”.
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/18/news/mn-23005/3
And this was supposed to “prove” what exactly? Your silly blood libel fantasy about “little Ivan” being “skinned by the Chechens” for their Mountain Jew religious rites, presumably?
But go on and tell me the exact location of the alleged “slave market in Grozny” (“a real fact of life” and not a myth at all), along with some respectable source of this information (like HRW, AI, Memorial, or UN, for example). Of course after you identify for me, by names, the “families of slave traders” that are “celebrating”.
And you can just tell me the surname of “little Ivan” too, if you identified this alleged victim of skinning by his first name already (and this “little Mariam” too, if you didn’t mean Mengistu Haile Mariam after all).
The article contains an eyewitness account of a person who saw a man sawn into pieces while alive, a reported scene of the Chechens playing footbal with an old lady’s head and such. I could ask my friends who had to flee the region what was the first and the last name of their nephew who was actually skinned in Grozny. I could provide links to sites that provide other witnesses’ accounts of torture and murder perpetrated by the Chechens. I could even go as far as to accommodate my own identity here to prove to Andrew that I visited Georgia a couple of months ago. But to what ends? Your post proves exactly what I said: no “respectable” organization, like HRW, AI, Memorial, or UN, for example, has undertaken the task of documenting atrocities perpetrated by the Chechens on the grand scale. There are thousands of eyewitness accounts, there are hundreds of articles in the press, mainly in the Russian press, mind you. You occasionally meet Russian escapees from Chechnya with scarred and mutilated faces, but this proves nothing to the Internet warrior Robert, who litters this place with half-truths and propaganda.
Where’s this “reported scene of the Chechens playing footbal with an old lady’s head and such”? Quote it to me, with a name of “old lady”.
You know, something like this:
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/russia_chechnya2/index.htm
One of the victims was the over 100-year-old Nabitst Kornukayeva, shot dead along with her son Arbi by the kontraktniki who came to loot their house. Another villager, Aindi Altimirov, a fireman, was taken away to the Russian field camp and beheaded there.
Btw, the article that you linked me quotes “former Maj. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a crusading journalist from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper”. Well, Izmailov was forced to quit the army by General Shamanov, who no less but ordered him to be killed. The same Shamanov also led the massacre from the HRW report, as well as many other massacres (it was in connection to one of them, already in the first war, that he openly ordered the hit on Major Izmailov who has made it public). Now Shamanov is one of the top generals of the Russian military, and Putin’s favourite, and a “Hero of Russia” of course, and the common Russians love him too, despite being horribly incompetent and brutal at once (and a failed civilian governor in the meantime).
And here’s what Izmailov had to say about Shamanov, who was, ironically, the head of “Russia’s Interagency Commission for Prisoners of War, Internees, and Missing in Action” at the time, during the scandal after Bush met Shamanov in the White House:
Novaya gazeta military affairs correspondent Vyacheslav Izmailov, a retired major who had fought in the first Chechen war and was personally threatened by Shamanov, wrote in the bi-weekly’s April 2 edition that after Shamanov was named chairman of Russia’s Interagency Commission for Prisoners of War, Internees, and Missing in Action in 2005, he failed “to help Russian mothers in the search for their sons who had disappeared in the war in Chechnya.” Izmailov added: “On that account, I heard Shamanov’s statements…[that] the corresponding Chechen commission supposedly should deal with the missing. But it [the Chechen commission] is headed by the former head of the Ichkerian security service, Ibragim Khultygov, who, like his former ‘office,’ was involved in kidnapping soldiers and civilians.” Izmailov concluded by saying he hoped Bush had agreed to meet with Shamanov by mistake. “First of all because General Shamanov, I think, should answer in court for multiple counts of war crimes,” Izmailov wrote. “Secondly, because, in contrast to the Americans, nobody is searching for our prisoners and abductees.”
And here’s from “your” article, the very 3rd page that you linked to me directly:
With 950 unaccounted for in the Interior Ministry figures, it’s not clear how many died in Russia’s ferocious bombing campaign. “Hostages say the most terrible thing they experienced was the Russian bombing,” says Izmailov, who believes the number of hostages is much higher than official figures suggest. The least “lucrative” hostages are soldiers, says Mikhail Suntsov of the ministry’s organized-crime department. Roman Tereshchenko, a 22-year-old soldier, was sold into slavery in Chechnya by another soldier, Vasily Pinigin, for a few hundred dollars in June 1998. Pinigin was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to eight years in prison. It was the only trial of its type, although there were several cases in which soldiers betrayed colleagues to kidnappers, either for money or to avoid being kidnapped themselves, Suntsov says.
And this is from the article that you linked me TWICE, the best you could find: Russians not searching for hostages, Russians killing the hostages in their “ferocious” bombing (“the most terrible thing”), Russian soldiers selling each other, and more. Are you sure it is going to make me a “Russophile” or something?
Oh, and there were just no “atrocities perpetrated by the Chechens on the grand scale” – if compared to the Russian ones (and Soviet, and Imperial Russian, before them). For starters, and to give you a sense of “grand” scale of what happened there, Chechens didn’t flatten Moscow like the Russians did to Grozny. Or even massacre a single Russian village. Even in Chechnya (there are some former Cossack villages in Nadterechny, like Znamenskaya, where Chechnya’s FSB HQ was located until it was destroyed by a suicide truck in 2003, or Starogladovskaya, where the locals re-opened a Soviet-era Tolstoy museum last year, after it was looted twice during the conflict, and I’ll let you guess by whom).
And anyway you are wrong, for example here’s one about Kadyrov’s Sharia (Hero of Russia edition), from just few months ago: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2011/03/10/you-dress-according-their-rules (“This report is dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague, Natasha Estemirova, who encouraged Human Rights Watch to carry out this research and whom we would have been honored to work with on it if not for her murder in July 2009.”)
Yes, Robert, what your propaganist posts confirm consistently is that “the name of the old lady” has never been documented. Yet, you read multiple accounts of real people, you read articles in newspapers, large and small, you meet people who had to flee Chechnya, and you realize that there were hundreds of such old Russian ladies butchered by Chechen half-humans — there were probably many more of those than Chechen old ladies butchered by Russian half-humans. Yet, the reports you post here are invariably about Chechen victims. That is exatly how half-truth and propaganda looks like. You are a revolting individual, Robert.
Revolting, because you cover up this: “One of the five, Victor Zinchenko, 53, whose mother was a poverty-stricken widow, was beheaded in a green forest glade. The video of his death has been played countless times on Russian television, but the part never telecast shows his executioners kicking his severed head about like a football, says Brenner’s wife, Tatyana, who got the full version of the video in a parcel from the kidnappers.”
The “old lady” named Victor Zinchenko? Really?
Oh, I apologize for not providing a piece on the old lady. Admittedly, playing football with a head of a 53-year old man is a civil and appropriate behavior by your standards.
Okay, I, a “revolting individual”, will tell you bout “old ladies butchered by Russian half-humans”. Except the old ladies would be also Russian, too.
For example, Kuznetsova Elena, 70 years old, living in Grozny. On February 5, 2000, Russian forces her shot in the face twice at point-blank range, after checking her passport (where her nationality was clearly stated), then burned her corpse along with the other bodies.
To this day, over 11 years later, no one was indicted in this crime. I wonder how “revolting” would you find this, as opposed to my posts?
Fifty-three-year-old Aina Mezhidova witnessed the murders, and described to Human Rights Watch the appearance of the soldiers as being between thirty-five and forty years of age, with some wearing headscarves and others in masks. She stated that they were all wearing either grey or green military camouflage uniforms.
At approximately 1:00 p.m., Mezhidova was with the Yakhiaevs, Kuznetsova, and a Chechen woman named Koka and her daughter Nurzhan, in the cellar on Second Tsimliansky Lane. Mezhidova told Human Rights Watch what happened when the soldiers arrived:
Six soldiers came into their yard…. Koka left first. She greeted the soldiers, saying “Good morning.” Koka thought that the soldiers would respect her age, so she went first, but a soldier swore and hit her with his rifle and kicked her and she fell back down into the cellar. I saw her fall back into the cellar.
When Koka fell, [Kuznetsova] went out [as well as] Khampash and Musa. The soldiers checked their passports. Khampash asked why the soldiers swore at an old woman and why they hit her. Then the soldiers killed all three. I was just about to come out of the cellar when I saw a soldier killing Khampash. I ran back into the cellar and left through a second exit. Khampash was shot in the head from close range. Khampash was killed first, then Musa and then [Kuznetsova]. She had lived in Aldi for forty years.73
Khampash Yakhiaev’s mother-in-law, Zina Yakhiaeva, saw the bodies of the three victims that same day. She told Human Rights Watch:
On the fifth … I entered my son-in-law’s house. I saw the bodies of my son-in-law and his friend, Musa, lying under the awning. My son-in-law’s hands were bound with wire, he had been shot in the head, shot straight in the face, in the eyes. A young man took photographs. Musa had the same wounds, his head was smashed.
There was a Russian woman … with them in the cellar…. The soldiers killed her and burned her body in the cellar. There is a bad smell coming from the cellar. She was first shot and then burned … Their heads were smashed-they had multiple bullet wounds to the head.
Nurzhan, Musa’s cousin and Koka, Musa’s aunt, gave me the men’s passports. They found them in the men’s mouths. The passports were clean, I think they were first shot and then the soldiers put their passports in their mouths.74
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,RUS,,3ae6a8708,0.html
Thats interesting AT, you consider the Chechens “half human” (nice little bit of Russian racism there) for supposedly playing football with a Russian womans head, how do you feel about Russian “half human” volunteers and Abkhaz playing football with Georgian children’s heads after the massacre at Gagra?
AT, your racism, stupidity, and lack of empathy for the victims of Russian actions are unfortunately all too typical of Russians in general.
You are an excellent example of why Russians are at best disliked, and more often hated, from Poland to Afghanistan.
Hell, even the Vietnamese government prefer the USA over Russia.
Andrew, there are half humans among all the ethnicities, as my post clearly says.
And yeah, you’re going to give me the name of this “little Ivan” from “your friends”. Because I totally trust you, an anonymous person on the Internet, and I trust “your friends” too. Let me guess: Ivan Ivanov.
Here’s “a Russian escapee from Chechnya” – the now Moscow-based painter Alexey Kallima, refugee from Grozny since 1994, after the war started and bombs began to fall down on the city, and who is now painting Chechens and even tries to look like a Chechen (with a beard and all): http://visualrian.ru/en/site/gallery/#387107
The documentary film The Three Rooms of Melancholia features a little Russian boy whose parents were killed and he was found by some Chechens in a cardboard box. He lost his memory due to his rape by Russian forces and so they call him Aslan. Maybe he was your “little Ivan”.
Here’s Anna Vasilikhina, an elderly Russian woman who actually remained in her ruined building after surviving the “liberation” (Clinton’s term) in 2000, helped to survive by her Chechen friends (who somehow dind’t play soccer with her head, how strange): http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/grozny/photo_01.html And she lived in building with decaying corpses still there under the rubble already well into 2001: http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/grozny/photo_02.html More after her: http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/grozny/ruins.html – and guess who looted her apartment, after destroying the builidng? Come on, it’s an easy guess.
And so on. So, spare me.
No, Robert, I am not trying to prove anything to you actually. Anyone with a skill to google can prove you wrong. As I am not into publishing propagandistic 5-pagers, I have just to go to google, yandex or any other search engine and to find the truth what happened to the Russian population of Grozny. And this is in addition to a few Russians who I personally know. Again, I know the truth, most of the Russians know it. Most of the Chechens know and admit it in fact. Yet, in a true fashion of a Holocaust denier, you appear to be willing to be building a world of fantasy for youself, a convenient world where the Chechens are nice, harmless people and Russians are barbarians. Well, the Russians and the Chechens were absolutely worth each other in this conflict as far as barbarity and atrocities are concerned. This is the truth and no matter how much time you spend trying to build yourself another reality, it will remain as such, all our disputes notwithstanding.
So apparently you have no “skill to google”.
And yes, I do deny this “Chechen Holocaust of Russians” fairy tale of yours, and no, “absolutely worth each other in this conflict as far as barbarity and atrocities are concerned”. An exmaple: neither Yelstin or Putin or Medvedev would sit down to meet the mothers of the captured Chechen fighters to just release their sons to them – like Maskhadov and Yandarbiyev personally did to the mothers (Russian “old ladies”, you know) of the captured Russian soldiers, at the height of the first war, including in this video at the bottom of the comment. Barbarity? Rather some unheard-of chivalry. In response, he was killed just after he declared a ceasefire and offered to negotiate, and the pleas by his own family to just release his corpse for burial were ignored. And this is barbarity.
Anyway. Could you post the names of the “celebrating families of slave traders”, already? Curiosity is killing me, so go and show me your master of “skill to google” or whatever else.
Promised video (which also includes treatment of the city’s entire population by the Russian government, busy killing them and destroying their property):
Start with reading the references, then exercise your own google skills.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D0%A7%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B5#cite_note-34
More with your favorite anectodes, including names. I challenge you to find one single English-language report of this trial.
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/290776
In any case, Robert, since — unlike you — I have a life and a job, I cannot read and respond to your 5-pagers. If you want to engage in a productive discussion with me, try to make your posts of the same length as an average post here. Otherwise, the format of your postings defies the purpose of your posting here.
Cool, so “I cannot read and respond” too.
Btw, idiot, I already posted about Ramzes’ gang, right here (go and search the page for “Ramzes”). When I contrasted it with the case of the Russian-Nazi (literally) serial killer Artur Ryno and his gang (at least 20 clearly-racist, brutal murders), and the sentences they received (Ryno’s gang got low prison sentences, despite killing many more people, and were never accused of any sort of “genocide”).
And yes, it did receive English-language coverage. Try and get you legendary “google skill” to good use and search for “Ramzes” and “Chechnya” (and remember most of the content vanished from the Internet in the meantime).
Anyway. So according to you, if a Russian criminal gang would kill and rob 10 members of ethnic minorities over the period of 2 years this would be “genocide”, too?
You know, like, for example, when the “St. Petersburg OMON” gang did on a single day (it didn’t take them 2 years) to more than 60 (not just 10) Chechen villagers in Novye Aldi? And when they were really “baby killers”? But with complete impunity?
Oh I know, the murder victims were “slave trader families” (including the two ethnic Russian who were murdered too). And no they’re celebrating!
The ECHR held Russia accountable for the deaths of five members of the Estamirov family, who included a baby and a pregnant woman, failing to carry out an effective and adequate investigation into the circumstances of their deaths, and failing to provide any effective domestic remedy.
(…)
On February 5, 2000, family members found the bodies of 67-year-old Khasmagomed Estamirov, his son, 37 year-old Khozh-Akhmed Estamirov, the latter’s wife, 29 year-old Toita Estamirova, who was eight months pregnant, her one-year-old son, Khassan Estamirov, and Khasmagomed Estamirov’s cousin, 50 year-old Saidakhmed Masarov. The house and family car had been set ablaze, and the bodies were burnt but still recognizable with visible bullet wounds.
(…)
The killings of the Estamirov family occurred after Russia’s federal forces had taken control of Grozny and had launched sweep operations in the city’s suburbs, including Aldi. At least 60 civilians were summarily executed on February 5 in Aldy and Chernorechie, another suburb.
(…)
Great numbers of civilians have been extrajudicially executed in the course of both Chechen wars, and very few perpetrators have been brought to trial for their crimes. The ECHR first found Russia guilty of serious human rights violations in Chechnya in February 2005, ruling that Russia had used disproportionate force in its military operations, indiscriminately targeted civilians, and failed to adequately investigate civilian deaths.
http://reliefweb.int/node/216254
“Gulag…, man-made famine in Ukraine, collectivization, the executions during the purge years and civil war. A low estimate for the total death toll is around 10 million.”
That blows the Rummel’s lies out of the water.
Maimuni!
Boy, O boy, do you have problems understanding the English language. For your limited grasp of it, here is what Rudolf Joseph Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii actually said – wrote: vide Wikipedia:
“Rummel’s counted exactly 42,672,000 deaths due to democide during Stalin’s regime inside and outside the Soviet Union, rounding to the nearest thousand. This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million Soviet citizens. Rummel has responded that this is based on a figure from Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror from 1968 and that Conquest’s qualifier “almost certainly too low” is usually forgotten. According to Rummel, Conquest’s calculations excluded camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945. Moreover, the Holodomor that killed 5 million in 1932-1934 (according to Rummel) is not included.[24] Rummel wrote:”
So you confusing the Ukrainian “holodomor” of 10 million during 1932 -33, with the combined total of the Soviet Socialist Russian slaughter between 1939 – 1953, says a lot about your lack of intelligence, and or mental reasoming.
Go on baboon reread the above, then and only then comment on it. But I’ll venture to say that it will make no difference to the truth as the damage suffered by your communist indoctrinated brain is too severe and irreparable. And you can tell your political commissar so, courtesy of me.
One source of the difference is that Conquest too conservatively estimates the death toll in the camps as 12,000,000 for the years 1936 to 1950, when for just the post-war period alone, 1946-1953, the toll probably exceeded this (see Appendix 8.1). The mid-total of those killed in the camps during the Stalin years is 32,584,000 (less than 2,000,000 of these foreigners); about 7,000,000 more were killed in other years. It is significant here, therefore, that the overall, mid-total of camp deaths based on these numbers already has been shown not to be excessive (lines 38 to 56). Second, Conquest excludes the 5,000,000 intentionally starved to death in the Ukrainian famine (this intentionality and number Conquest establishes in a much later work), and the perhaps 333,000 famine deaths Stalin was responsible for in the post-war period. Third, excluding those killed in collectivization and the camps, Conquest only allows for a million executions during the period, which he believes is “certainly a low estimate.” Indeed, a million executions is probably a safe estimate for the Great Terror period alone. I get from the Appendices (4.1-8.1) a total of 4,565,000 more killed in Stalin’s terror throughout his 25-year reign. Finally, Conquest ignores the millions that died in deportations after the collectivization period (in a much later work Conquest himself calculates that 530,000 died alone in the deportation of eight nations during the war; this excludes the death toll among Ukrainians, non-Volga German-Soviets, Greek-Soviets, Korean-Soviets, etc.–see Appendix 7.1).[30]
Conquest himself maintained that his figure was off by about 50% and that the most likely estimate was on the order of 30 million.[30][31]
In total; Rummel estimates that the former Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of 62 million people, including 7 million foreigners and 55 million citizens.[30] This includes 4 million in the civil war; 2 million under Lenin’s New Economic Policy; and 7 million murdered by Stalin’s successors.[32] (The commonly cited estimate of dead in the civil war is around 14 million, but Rummel is here counting only democidal killings by the Communists during the war).
I think Solzhenitsyn also provides a figure of at least 50 million. How quickly these Russophiles forgot. If they remembered and cared to begin with, that is.
Actually,
Systematic studies of the subject did not start until the 1990s (the numbers quoted before were estimates derived using methodologies that were sometimes vague). Already in 2002 Stanislav Kulchytsky, a distinguished Ukrainian historian, concluded that the number of the Holodomor victims ranged between 3 and 3.5 million (excluding Krasnodar Krai)[15]. Similar results were published on the eve of this year’s celebrations by the Demography and Social Research Institute of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, according to which the famine had claimed 3.2 million lives, including around 800 thousand children[16]. The lists of names compiled in particular districts identified 800 thousand Holodomor victims whose names are known.
http://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2008-12-08/ukraine-remembers-world-acknowledges-holodomor-ukraines-histori
Rummel: I find his estimates not credible. Over 1.5 million murders goes for “Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing” after WWII, while “Japan’s Savage Military” including the long total war against China and the crimes of the Pacific War scores less than 6 million? That’s jut not very serious.
18 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953. Nobody knows how many died, though she offers, “reluctantly” the almost certainly low official figure of 2.7 million camp deaths. ”
That’s about 100 thousand per year? Do you know how many inmates per year die in modern American prisons? Also about 100 thousand.
Click to access t6762004.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
And you point is that modern American prisons are no different from the GULAG? You conveniently forgot, of course, that every one of those American death was from natural causes such as age or illness (not counting a two dozen or so executed every year mainly in Texas).
No American prisoner died from hunger or from intentional exposure to 50 degrees below frost or from 18 hour work days. Not even to mention that the vast number of prisoners in the GULAG were completely innocent men, women and even minor children.
I bet you didn’t read Conquest’s “Kolyma” or Applebaum’s “GULAG.” Are you some kind of an apologist for the crimes of Stalinism? If so, don’t worry, your beloved fatherland is firmly set to return to those glorious days. Not there yet, but trying hard.
Or what are you trying to say?
“And you point is that modern American prisons are no different from the GULAG?”
Of course not. My 2 points are:
1. The war of drugs here in USA is insane.
2. The number of GULAG prisoners wasn’t that much higher than the number of prisoners in modern US jails.
“You conveniently forgot, of course, that every one of those American death was from natural causes such as age or illness (not counting a two dozen or so executed every year mainly in Texas).”
You misunderstood me.
Of course, Ostap Bender boy is a big fan of left wing terrorists like the FARC, who tend to benefit from the export of drugs to the US.
Why would he want them restricted in any way.
In addition, the percentage of the population in Gulags was about double that of the current US prison population, who are in prison for committing actual crimes, rather that simply being of the wrong political/racial persuasion.
Your posts are so vapid it is easy to misunderstand them Maimuni
The FARC used to be terrorists, or revolutionaries, or freedom fighters (“one man’s terrorist…” etc), but now they’re just a drug cartel – the biggest one: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/8296-farc-becoming-drug-cartel-police.html
Wait until AT says something like: “Not every Colombian family is a narco trader family, but quite a few of them are (so they deserve to be murdered)”. Or maybe would he rather say this about Afghans – indirectly killing tens of thousands of Russians every year with their heroin (and yes, some Russians claim this is “genocide” too).
RV wrote: “I think Solzhenitsyn also provides a figure of at least 50 million.
He did it in the 1970s as an act of anti-Soviet propaganda. The way he did it was insulting to logic. Here is how:
He looked up the population of the Russian Empire in 1913. Call it N.
Then he postulated that the natural population growth is r =1.7% per year.
He then postulated that the natural population in 1953 should have been N*(1+r)^40
He then looked up the population of the USSR in 1953. Call it G.
Then he subtracted G from N. The resulting difference is, to him, the number of people killed by Stalin.
In the 1990s he was asked why he did it. His response was: “Since the Soviet government refused to reveal its numbers, we felt free to invent our own.”
Also: Rummel’s figures are based on Solzhenitsyn’s.
Maimuni,
Wrong as usual, you lying communist indoctrinated banana head!!!
Read my above factual article, before you open your stupid mouth, as Rummel’s figures are NOT based on Solzhenitsyn’s. Just like no comments of yours are based on factual data – only on dreamed up neo soviet propaganda.
@Bohdan: As an expert, I know what I am talking about. But if you disagree, feel free to describe the exact algorithm that Rummel uses.
@Maimuni: You are funny?? your comment “As an expert, I know what I am talking about.” a hearty LOL – what you an expert? ha, ha, ha – you an expert? in what? only in spinning B/S, comrade russophile.
For your information the word “expert” consists phonetically of two syllables, i.e. ex and spert. The first is “ex” or ‘x’ which is an unknown quantity, and the second is “spert ” which is a drip (i.e. idiot) under pressure – perfect descriptions of you comrade.
As for me wasting my time in supplying you with the “exact algorithm that Russel uses” would be like water of a duck’s back as far as you are concerned. Because if you cannot fathom simple mathematics, how in hell’s name are you going to understand complex ones.
Hint! very strong hint! reread Rummel’s article as I have verbatim posted it. Then if you still cannot understand it, give up and return to your beloved Ozark mountains, and your redneck base where your mentality fits in like a glove.
“You are funny?? your comment “As an expert, I know what I am talking about.” a hearty LOL – what you an expert? ha, ha, ha – you an expert? in what? only in spinning B/S, comrade russophile.
For your information the word “expert” consists phonetically of two syllables, i.e. ex and spert. The first is “ex” or ‘x’ which is an unknown quantity, and the second is “spert ” which is a drip (i.e. idiot) under pressure – perfect descriptions of you comrade.”
Thanks, Bohdan, for demonstrating your intellectual prowess once again.
Maimuni!
Think nothing of it comrade! The pleasure is all mine!!
Besides it is a real pleasure of always showing you up for what you really are, an irrelevant communist propagandist who cannot differentiate between fact and fiction, and who obviously has problems thinking rationally.
Tell me have you ever thought of writing space fiction thrillers. In that department you’d be a moral certainty. I mean what else, you have a vivid imagination that borders from the sublime to the ridiculous – necessary traits in that field.
La Russophobe, all bad news about Russia all the time is very, very tiresome. There appears to be some glimmer of hope, however, because of Medvedev’s repeated expressions of dissatisfaction with Russia’s persistent dismal state.
“The proposition that the government is always right is manifested either in corruption or benefits to ‘preferred’ companies,” he said.
“My choice is different. The Russian economy ought to be dominated by private businesses and private investors. The government must protect the choice and property of those who willingly risk their money and reputation.”
. . .
Medvedev said that the country must begin to tackle the problem immediately to avoid “the point of no return from the (economic) models that are moving the country backwards.”
“Corruption, hostility to investment, excessive government role in the economy and the excessive centralization of power are the taxes on the future that we must and will scrap,” he said.
Yes, his words are nice. But Russians have a good saying, that one can’t put words in one’s pocket.
The fact is that Medvedev can’t do anything to make Russia a better place until he removes Vladimir Putin from power. He shows no inclination to do so, and in fact may allow him to return to power shortly as president for life.
LR, you are really obsessed with the guy, aren’t you? What exactly you think will change if Putin is replaced by Shmutin tomorrow?
Why do you ask that question? Why not ask what would change if Putin were replaced by Nemtsov, Ryzkhov or Khodorkovsky, you witless troll?
Me, a troll? Define a troll then. I raise legitimate questions and provide substantiated answers. Those who lived in the Nizhny Novgorod region under Nemtsov — like I did — can reasonably assume that nothing good will come out of this. Khodorkovsky, I sure, would do a lot to enrich himself even more. I cannot say anything bad about Ryzhkov… or any other Russian “liberal” to this extent (I consistently and faithfully voted for their party in the past), except for that they have been political failures. They have failed to secure popular support. They have failed to consolidate. They have even failed to identify and promote issues that Maybe Russia would benefit if someone imposed them on the nation, in the role, say as benevolent tsars or dictators. On the other hand, is this really the cause we are trying to advocate here?
the text was not properly edited: I meant “They have even failed to identify and promote issues that would make them genuinely popular protest figures”
AT,
Do you know what “Potemkin-something” means? What you showed seems to be the city’s main street, Putin Prospect (no, seriously Putin – it used to be Victory, previously Lenin). Of course it’s representative. What else are you going to show me – Kadyrov Mosque, that is actually the biggest in Europe? And built in the place where residential building were once located before the Russian Army destroyed them, killing so many people, but that’s just a detail, because the people were too reconstructed. Or weren’t they?
If you want, you can belive in things like “The president also added that all new buildings will have earthquake protection” by this something called “The Voice of Russia” (http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/01/15/39860392.html), it’s your choice. Anyway, the buildings during the reconstruction boom were largely built like this: http://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/16480/
And about the earthquakes, in 2008 (a minor one happened, far from Grozny), and also “elections” and the general life in this Russian-ruled paradise (and “the most peaceful place in Russia”, according to Kadyrov):
Chechnya has been literally shaken this month. According to Russian sources, 25 tremors were registered in Chechnya on October 11-12 alone (Novye Izvestia, October 13). The epicenter of the strongest shock, which took place on October 11 and was estimated at 6 on the Richter scale, was located in the mountainous part of Chechnya—the Kurchaloi, Nozhai-Yurt, Shali and Gudermes districts. After the earthquake, the authorities tried hard to convince the population that nothing had happened. This was because the elections for Chechen parliament, known as “Kadyrov’s parliament,” were scheduled for the very next day and the authorities were really afraid that the aftermath of a natural disaster would reduce the voter turnout. Moreover, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov stated during a television interview carried live by the central Russian TV channels that the voter turnout during the “elections” in Chechnya would “be no less than 100 percent and maybe even more” (RIA Novosti, October 12; North Caucasus Weekly, October 16).
On October 12, Election Day, people buried their relatives who died during the earthquake. Thirteen people were killed and hundreds wounded—dozens of those—and more than 1,000 homes were destroyed. In such villages as Bachi-Yurt and Mairtup in Kurchaloi district, the level of destruction of homes reached almost 90 percent. Mystery surrounds the degree of devastation in Kadyrov’s home village of Tsentoroi, which is also in Kurchaloi district. Apparently a decision was made that the earthquake could have no consequences in the village where Kadyrov resides. At the same time, people found out after the elections that on the day that the authorities were trying to instill calm in the population, hospitals, schools and administrative buildings lay in ruins in Kurchaloi and Shali (Polit.ru, October 14).
Above all, people were relieved that the earthquake spared Grozny, where its force was negligible. Had the earthquake been more powerful there, the dilapidated houses that had been damaged by Russian aerial bombardment would have crumbled in front of everyone. The Grozny residents were only frightened, and fear of aftershocks forced many to leave the Chechen capital and take refuge with relatives in nearby villages. However, those who did not have means to leave the city spent two nights in a row under the clear skies because they did not want to risk entering the high-rise residential buildings. They knew well that those buildings were not safe because they had undergone hasty cosmetic refurbishment of their facades for the sake of the Chechen president’s loud and beautiful public statements, not for the benefit of the people of Grozny.
On October 16, Putin, who arrived in Chechnya to inspect the devastation caused by the earthquake, stumbled on the phenomenon of Kadyrov, who, without waiting for the federal assessment of the devastation in the area, issued an order to begin reconstruction in the hope that he would eventually receive funds from Moscow. To this, a visibly irritated Putin, who had hoped to appear against the background of destroyed houses, remarked that nobody should violate financial laws: first an assessment must be made and only then the funds will follow. Putin’s remark was intentionally kept secret from the people of Chechnya because it was necessary to show Putin as always pleased with Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya.
Robert, no, neither Russians murdered in Chechnya in the name of independence, nor the locals killed in the name of restoring the constitutional order cannot be brought back. But this does not mean the city should not be rebuilt, that new mosques should not be constructed on the sites of burnt presidential palaces. As for the earthquake that affected several villages, what does it have to do with the reconstruction effort? Propaganda again? As far as the information from the rebel site is concerned, I am sure that some of the buildings were built like that. As usual, it looks like you have no idea whether this is typical or not. Not claiming what I know, I read some actual posts from some actual blogs where actual people actually say that they are satisfied with the reconstruction effort. Most media articles confirm this. Between a rebel propaganda site, posts of real people and articles from major newspapers, I wonder what you think is the most credible information source. Pathetic, really.
Are you really that dense? If an earthquake took place in Grozny, this hastily-restored city would go crashing down.
Whatever “a rebel propaganda site” are you talking now? Tell me the truth, are you abusing alcohol again?
Robert, you have no idea what would happen in Grozny if an earthquake hits it. In any case, making a lengthy post how an earthquake destroyed old buildings in a village is a poor argument what the effect of an earthquake on new buildings in Grozny would be.
As a structural engineer, and having seen how Russians “build” yes, I can almost certainly guarantee Grozny will come crashing down.
Russian contractors have a nasty habit of moving reinforcing from one pour to the next to cut down on costs (they still pocket the full amount) leaving maybe 20% of the design requirement of reinforcing in the structure.
Russian building inspectors just get paid off to look the other way. Another example of corruption in action AT
Russian built = deathtrap.
AT,
You didn’t answer my question, so I’ll ask again:
Were you drunk, as usual, or were you just a dumbass, as usual?
Please answer me, curiosity is killing me.
Or maybe you really believe http://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/ is actually “a rebel propaganda site” – after all, every Chechen murder victim was a “slave trader” (and their families are “celeberating” – btw, can I get the names already – how many time should I ask you?), and so on.
Oh, and there are dozens of known but unexhumed mass grave place sites in Grozny, generally being avoided instead of exhumed, by the “authorities”. I guess it’s not a priority to take some skeletons out of the closets, or maybe rather more like from the long-forgotten basements, before building one of the world’s biggest mosques. First things first, right?
You posted an article from NYT about the city’s recovery, and here’s a NYT aricle about the darker side of this:
“Many, many bodies are found,” Ms. Estemirova said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30grozny.html
One year later, her body was found too.
But hey, she was only half- “slave trader” – her mother was Russian. And her killers were Chechens but wearing uniforms of the Russian police. So, how are we going to classiffy this one? I wonder.
Many of the bodies in the mass graves are ethnic Russians too, of course. Central Grozny was once mostly Russian. And after it was “liberated”, it was gone.
Not every Chechen family is a slave trader family, but quite a few of them are. And quite a few of those propably celebrate their publicity in the West. So are there any reasons not to believe that the site you quote is not rebel propaganda?
Thats not what you said before AT.
You are a racist little chap aren’t you?
Actually more Russians are involved in the slave trade than anyone else, it’s called human trafficking and Russia is the world.
So you Russian slave trader, go and get an education.
Not every Russian family is a slave trader family, but quite a few of them are. And quite a few of those propably celebrate their publicity in the West. So are there any reasons not to believe that the site you quote is not imperialist propaganda?
A delicious copypasta.
And anyway (this was just one click away for you, but you are too stupid, and I guess confised with Kavkaz Tsentr, because hey, it’s “Kavkaz”, and everyone in the Kavkaz is a slave trader),
The Internet mass medium named “CAUCASIAN KNOT” was founded by the International Society “Memorial” in 2001. Since 2007, it is an independent electronic medium operating under the aegis of the Information Agency “MEMO.RU”. The main partners of the “CAUCASIAN KNOT” are: the Institute of Human Rights, the “Panorama” Information and Research Centre, website bbcrussian.com and Internet medium “Gazeta.Ru”. The edition is funded from various charitable foundations. The “CAUCASIAN KNOT” has its Registration Certificate: El No. 77-4864 of October 17, 2001.
http://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/AboutCaucasianKnot
“Admittedly”, you can’t read but you couldn’t admit it until I had you to post it yourself.
And “The video of his death has been played countless times on Russian television” indeed. Russian propaganda (Rosinformcenter, estabilished by Putin in 1999) expoited this and the other such incidents as best as they could to change the public opinion. They even showed this the soldiers to make them more aggresive – with predictable results (the murder of Elena Kuznetsova included).
Here’s an interview with the man who headed Rosinformcenter – the FSB general Aleksandr Mikhailov: http://www.agentura.ru/english/experts/mihailov/
Note how one of his previous job was to lie there were no live hostages in Pervomaiskoye in 1996, as all were supposedly executed – because the decision was everyone there was to be killed:
Question: As far as I understand, you were set a task: to convince the public that there were no hostages there.
Mikhailov: On the very last day! The very last day, on the eve of the decisive strike.
And it was a 100% FSB-run operation, like Beslan (where the chekists didn’t lie there were no hostages – just said there were only about 300 of them, and in fact about 300 were killed), but the massacre was averted only because on the last the Chechen fighters… fought their way out of there (!) – without harming their hostages (not even the Russian troops they captured).
Sure Robert, you are also seeing FSB agents under your bed. Nothing is what it seems to be, only Robert knows the truth.
How right you are, comrade Absolute Trash, for once you are 100% right when you say “Robert knows the truth.” So unlike the lies you make up.
And what “seems to be”? All hostages were indeed dead in Pervomaiskoye (“hanged and shot” – in reality none were executed, not even the captured OMONs) as General Mikhailov claimed when his fellow butchers were preparing for “the decisive strike” to obliterate the village with rocket artillery (already in position) and air power, at dawn of the next day?
“FSB-run operation, like Beslan” — you are a psychopat, Robert. This probably explains the lengthy articles, the frequency of postings and many other things. To think that I tried to make a discussion with a raving lunatic.
No AT, you are the nut-job.
There is a great deal of evidence that the FSB were involved in the Beslan incident, for example the fact that the many of the gunmen involved had recently been in FSB custody, but were released.
Then there was the decision by security forces to use tank fire, incendiary rockets etc in order to take out the terrorists and the hostages, giving Putin a major propaganda coup.
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1077879.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/moscow-metro-blasts-another-fsb-inside-job.html
Of course AT, you approve of Russian crimes against minorities, neighboring states etc, why don’t you approve when Russia does the same thing to Russian citizens?
Actually I was just talking to this idiot only about the chain of command (and responsibility), I wasn’t even talking about a theory of deliberate provocation.
And according to Basayev himself, the FSB had wanted him to lead a Nazran-style large-scale attack on the government complex in Vladikavkaz, where they set up a trap (and that’s why they released his former men, removed roadblocks, etc), but he has outsmarted them:
In the statement on the KavkazCenter Web site, Basayev said that a Russian double agent had been among the hostage-takers. He said that top security officials in North Ossetia had opened a safe route beginning Aug. 31, 2004 — the day before the Beslan siege began — for rebels to reach the regional capital, Vladikavkaz. The alleged double agent was supposed to have gained Basayev’s confidence and then led his men into a trap as they were en route to seize regional government buildings in Vladikavkaz on Sept. 6. Instead, as they were supposed to be performing reconnaissance, the militants seized the school, Basayev said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-08-31-beslan-mothers_x.htm
The official Russian investigation into Beslan ignored the question of why warnings were ignored, roadblocks were removed and known terrorists were not apprehended, but an explanation came from an unexpected quarter. Shamil Basaev, the Chechen terrorist leader who planned the Beslan attack and was killed on July 10, 2006, in a letter entitled, “We have a lot to tell about Beslan …” published on the separatist Web site Kavkaz Center, Aug. 31, 2005 wrote that the attackers were pushed toward the seizure of the school by the leadership of the special services of North Ossetia with the help of their agent, Abdulla (Vladimir) Khodov. According to Basaev, Khodov carried out the terrorist acts in Vladikavkaz and Elkhotovo with the help of the secret services in order to win the trust of Basaev. He then suggested to Basaev a suicide mission to seize the parliament and government of North Ossetia. However, Khodov, after a month, confessed to being an agent and Basaev persuaded him to become a double agent. In that capacity, he led the Russians to believe that the terrorists were preparing to seize the North Ossetian government and parliament on Sept. 6, the anniversary of Chechen independence. The Russian special services, Basaev wrote, “intended [on Sept. 6] to meet the group as they entered Vladikavkaz and destroy them. On Aug. 31, they opened a corridor for us for the active collection of intelligence, but we used it to enter Beslan [and seize the school], changing the date and objective of the attack.”
http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/01/beslan-putin-politkovskaya-basaev-dzasokhov-chechen-opinions-contributors-david-satter.html
Huh, “psychopat “? It’s not even a real word. And you are just an idiot, “AT”. No, really you are. I’m just stating the fact (about you being a complete idiot):
I guess it might be some news for you, because apparently it’s 2004 and not 2011, and after all you have right to not be informed about such a trivial matters as a massacre of Caucasians, but everyone there, regardless of branch (MVD, armed forces, it doesn’t matter, because I mean everyone, with exception of Ossetian irregulars), were under the direct command of the FSB generals who flew from Moscow, acting on orders of Colonel Putin, and who even threatened to arrest the PRESIDENT OF NORTH OSSETIA if he came to negotiate as requested by the hostage takers (at least according to him), and so the civilian authorities who tried to negotiate were literally powerless.
Just like at Pervomaiskoye. And like at Nord-Ost, too.
And this is how the FSB takover took place:
2:00PM. Beslan. Anti-crisis headquarters. In Beslan’s city hall. Actually, there are two headquarters in the same building. Or even several. One gets the impression that already the first day, in the first hours, all efforts were made to scatter responsibility and cover those who really gave the orders in Beslan. On the first day several structures from the FSB, the 58th army, and the ministry of Interior, the functionaries and North Ossetia executive power are formed. It is supposedly president Dzasokhov who manages all. But neither the site of dislocation is defined nor the actions are coordinated. On the second day of the terrorist act the general Andreyev, head of North Ossetia’s FSB, becomes the leader of the counter-terrorist operation (according to Torshin’s report, Putin personally appointed general Andreyev). About one day and a half was spent for the appointment of this “pointsman”.
2:27PM Mozdok. Airport. The FSB director Patrushev arrives from Moscow. However from Mozdok he does not go to the anti-crisis headquarters. Nobody will see him there in the next two days. Still, there are lots of high officials there in the headquarters. General Vasily Andreyev, president Dzasokhov, parliament speaker Taymuraz Mamsurov, State Duma deputies Rogozin and Markelov, deputy Prosecutor General Fredinsky. Later that day Patrushev’s deputies Pronichev and Anisimov arrive from Moscow, as well as the head of the FSB Center of special assignment general Alexander Tikhonov, commanding the groups Alpha and Vimpel. And also the FSB head of the South Federal District, general Kaloyev. (Notice that general Valery Andreyev commands his own bosses!) However in reality it is not chaos, as various journalists who investigated Beslan’s tragedy interpret it. The methodic of covering up responsibility is in play. Here is what Novaya Gazeta writes (issue 64, 2005): “At the same time, the witnesses who were present in the headquarters say that Moscow’s FSB agents and employees of the presidential administration created their own parallel headquarters, where neither Andreyev nor even Dzasokhov could go. The role of Pronichev and Anisimov in the administration of the Counter-terrorist headquarters is not clear to this day. The materials of the criminal case do not contain their interrogations as direct witnesses.”
But who are these representatives of the presidential administration? Here they are in the report of the North Ossetian parliamentary commission. I cite Novaya Gazeta again: “According to the North Ossetian commission it is the representatives of the federal center who bear responsibility for the deliberately false information about the hostages: the employee of the presidential administration, deputy press-secretary of the RF president Dmitry Peskov and the employee of Moscow’s State Broadcasting Company office Vasilyev. According to the testimony of the vice-speaker (of the Ossetian parliament) Kesayev on September 2nd he was called to the operational headquarters to talk about informing the population about the real quantity of hostages in the school. The Moscovites presented themselves as employees of the presidential administration’s information department and asked him not to disclose any information that contradicts the official version.” Actually, this is a criminal offense. But who cares. The North Ossetian commission turned out to be much more honest than Torshin’s commission.
Ossetia’s president Dzasokhov was finally interrogated. He “admits several times that in essence all the decisions in Beslan were made by Patrushev’s deputies: the FSB generals Pronichev, Anisimov and Tikhonov.” Pronichev, first deputy director of FSB, a general-colonel, already has the necessary experience of “liberating” hostages, in particular in the Theater Center on Dubrovka. With gas. When they killed 129 hostages, by official count. They killed them and thus liberated them.
The North Ossetian commission is convinced that the real leaders of the Counter-terrorist operation were high FSB officials. The commission harshly criticizes the fact that the criminal case does not contain the interrogations of the main participants of the counter-terrorist operation: generals Pronichev, Anisimov and Tikhonov and the FSB director Patrushev.
September 1st. Beslan. End of the day. The terrorists wait in vain. Their demands to bring Dzasokhov, Ziazikov, Aslakhanov and Roshal (rather Rushailo) were not executed, supposedly “because there was a real danger they might be killed”. Ziazikov, Ingushetia’s president spent the three days of the tragedy in Moscow’s President Hotel, supposedly it was Putin who “left him out of the game”. No signals come in from Putin’s advisor on North Caucasus. Also, according to the federal law about terrorism the demands of the militants about the withdrawal of troops from Chechnya cannot be subject to negotiations as they threaten the base of the constitutional order and the wholeness of the Russsian Federation.
Instead, the operational headquarters proposed the militants to exchange the hostages for the suspects arrested in Inhusgetia for the attack on Nazran. Ikarus buses were prepared in case the militants agree. (This is the data of Torshin’s federal parliamentary commission, so we better not trust it).
September 1st. Second half of the day. A “black widow”, a female suicide bomber detonates herself. Hostages and terrorists are wounded and killed. The “widow” herself is torn into pieces. Before this the hostages saw this woman arguing with other terrorists.
September 1st. 4:30PM. The literature office. Another seven male hostages were executed by the militants.
September 1st. After 8:00PM. The plane carrying Dr. Roshal lands in Vladikavkaz. After midnight Roshal is in the anti-crisis headquarters over his cellphone. He is told from the school: “If you try to arrive to the school alone we will shoot you. Only with the presidents of Ingushetia and North Ossetia. /…/ We don’t need you alone! You make twenty steps toward the school and you are a corpse.” Here Roshal’s mission ends. He was clearly confused with Roshailo.
September 2nd. 9:30AM. Beslan. Anti-crisis headquarters. I cite the book “01.09. Beslan’s File” written by Spiegel journalists based on documental testimonies, I remind. “The ratio of forces in the anti-crisis headquarters changes to the FSB favor. Its vice-chief Pronichev and general Alexander Tikhonov, commanding the anti-terrorism groups Alpha and Vimpel discuss the possibilities of a raid. North Ossetian politicians heavily protest. They beg the FSB not to undertake anything.”
Absolute Trash – you of all comrades would know what a “psychopat” and a “raving lunatic” are. After all you see a classic one every time you look in the mirror.
For your information Robert is very interesting to read with his factual articles, so unlike the neo soviet trash you vomit ad nauseum. Neither does he senselessly rave on like you do.
God almighty! if Putin employs Trash like you – there is no hope at all for your beloved fascist Russia. It’s going down the sewer ‘gurgler’ like a ton of bricks. Give up and return to your beloved PRAVDA.ru or Russia Today, believe me you belong there comrade.