EDITORIAL
The Rat Bastard Named Vladislav Surkov
That’s Vladislav Surkov you see standing at the lectern in the photograph at the left, the bright red lectern emblazoned with the word “NASHI.” Nashi, meaning “us Slavic Russians,” is the Putin youth cult founded by Surkov several years ago to emulate the Hiterjugend created in Nazi Germany. He fondly refers to his creation as the “combat detachment of our political system.”
From the lectern Surkov told the Nashi cultists to “train their muscles” in preparation for the upcoming presidential elections in Russia which in his words “must be won by [Dmitri] Medvedev, [Vladimir] Putin and United Russia.”
As blogger Vladimir Kara-Murza points out, Surkov’s utterance is boldly illegal and treacherous. It “stands in violation of Russia’s commitments under the OSCE Copenhagen Document, which calls for ‘a clear separation between the State and political parties’ and requires ‘political campaigning to be conducted in a fair and free atmosphere in which neither administrative action, violence nor intimidation bars the parties and the candidates from freely presenting their views.'”
In other words, Surkov is, illegally, using the power of the Kremlin to directly support a single political party to the detriment of all the others, and that unquestionably violates both Russian and international law.
Kara-Murza reports that Surkov flew into Washington DC last week to lobby the Obama administration against passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011 (S.1039), which proposes to revoke US visa privileges from Russian officials “responsible for … gross violations of human rights committed against individuals seeking … to obtain, exercise, defend, or promote internationally recognized human rights and freedoms, such as the freedoms of religion, expression, association, and assembly and the rights to a fair trial and democratic elections.”
The mere fact that Surkov believes the Obama administration will meet with him, much less that it might let itself be influenced by him into opposing this legislation in defense of basic human rights, speaks volumes about how loathsome and repugnant the Obama regime truly is. It is time for the Republican Party to put up or shut up: If they do not begin to denounce Obama’s cowardice, they are equally to blame for the consequences of that cowardice.
La Russophobe 
Creeps like that should be banned from getting a visa to visit the USA, or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter.
“The mere fact that Surkov believes the Obama administration will meet with him, much less that it might let itself be influenced by him into opposing this legislation in defense of basic human rights, speaks volumes about how loathsome and repugnant the Obama regime truly is.”
HAHAHAHA
Aparently the clown who makes this site is forgetting how Bush personally met with the dictator of Uzbekistan, a man who has his opponents boiled alive. But then again, the readers of this site are also the ones who probably still think Bush was a great president, as opposed to the worst president since Carter, and very likely the worst since Hoover. Morons.
http://www.slate.com/id/2120004/
The Brother Karimov
America’s friend, Uzbekistan’s dictator.
The “clown” (do you really think using such words — and HAHAHAHA — proves you aren’t one?) has REPEATEDLY attacked George Bush for his outrageous misconduct. We are among the world’s toughest critics of Bush’s Russia policy. If you were not a rude illiterate goat who comments without reading first, you’d know that.
Doesn’t the fact that Obama is following in the footsteps of Bush mean he should be condemned even more harshly because he said he’d be different?
Does Bush’s misconduct mean it’s OK for Obama to do the same? We don’t think so. Obama is the president now, not Bush. Talking about Bush now is the height of stupidity, it has nothing to do with whether Obama’s policies are right or wrong.
You don’t even try to defend Surkov or Obama, becuse you can’t.
Do you know the guys next to him? :-)
If only he was still right next to Khodorkovsky!
Bush’s policy towards the Asian regimes of Putin and Karimov had two phases: it was appeasement at first (even “looking into his eyes and finding honesty”), followed by a mini-Cold War confrontation later.
As opposed to Clinton’s shameful continous policy of appeasement of Yeltsin. So, Yeltsin’s goons just killed hundreds of mostly unarmed people in central Moscow and his tanks shell the parliament? “He’s defending a young democracy!” Yeltsin’s forces kill thousands of mostly unarmed people in Grozny? “He’s just like our Abraham Lincoln! And let’s give him more money.”
And while Clinton expressed regrets for not acting to break the genocide in Rwanda and for the slow-to-act US/NATO policy Bosnia too, he never apologized for his criminal complicity in Russia.
Now, Obama turned the clock back on Putin with his infamous “Reset” idiocy, so I wonder why he didn’t do it with Karimov too? Oh wait, he did! Already in 2009.
Barack Obama courts human rights abusers in Taliban fight
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5949217/Barack-Obama-courts-human-rights-abusers-in-Taliban-fight.html
Four years ago Mr Bush decided he could no longer tolerate Mr Karimov’s politics after troops opened fire on an uprising in the eastern city of Andijan with the loss of hundreds of lives.
(…)
But after Mr Obama’s first approaches this year, Mr Karimov authorised the use of a US base as part of supplying the new US surge of troops into Afghanistan.
Mr Karimov’s record has hardly changed however. Human Rights Watch says 6,000 people are currently incarcerated in Uzbekistan for “non-violent religious offences”. Journalists and activists continue to be imprisoned.
(…)
“Democracy in Uzbekistan has no financial support any more from the United States,” he said. “It only cares about Afghanistan.”
But of course, few really criticised Obama for this, as he’s apparently some sort of messiah, as opposed to Bush, an antichrist.
About Clinton administration’s complicity in the Russia’s imperialist aggression and murder:
http://www.fas.org/news/russia/2000/russia/part04.htm
Russian troops committed widespread atrocities in both the first (1994-96) and second (1999-present) Chechen conflicts. Amnesty International has reported on “filtration camps” where “men, women, and children-are routinely and systematically tortured: they are raped, beaten with hammers and clubs, tortured with electric shocks and tear gas.”1 Indiscriminate air, rocket, and artillery attacks on civilian targets killed tens of thousands of civilians over the course of the two wars, in which much of the Chechen capital of Grozny was razed and hundreds of thousands of Chechens, ethnic Russians, and other nationalities living in Chechnya were driven from their homes. The 1994-96 operation resulted in up to 80,000 casualties alone.2
Despite worldwide condemnation of Moscow’s first brutal campaign, the administration was largely silent. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher met with Yeltsin in March 1996, he failed even to raise Chechnya as an issue. His staff explained it as an oversight.3
The low point, however, came a month later, when Clinton at his April 1996 summit meeting with Yeltsin was asked “whether the United States should have been more critical of Russia’s use of force, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives.” Clinton responded, “I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country in which we lost, on a per capita basis, far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the 20th century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state has a right to withdrawal from our union.”4
As the New York Times reported, “[e]ven Mr. Clinton’s aides were appalled by [his] off-the-cuff remark”5-as well they might be. Clinton’s comments ignored the difference between the union of American states, which shared a common language and culture since their beginnings and voluntarily formed a union less than a century before the Civil War, and the Chechen culture, which had developed separately from Russia’s for centuries prior to its annexation in the nineteenth century.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: President Clinton, responding to a question in Moscow, April 21, 1996, about Russia’s war against Chechnya, compared it to the U.S. Civil War and “the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state has a right to withdraw from our union.” A few days later, the widow of Chechen president Dzokhar Dudayev told CBS News that Clinton’s support for Russia’s war in Chechnya had, “in effect, signed her husband’s death warrant.” A few hours after Clinton had compared Yeltsin to Lincoln, a Russian warplane rocketed Dudayev’s car.
Chechens speak a non-Slavic language, are predominantly Muslim, and have a distinct national culture. Chechnya did not freely join Russia; it was forcibly annexed by the czars after the Napoleonic Wars-an annexation the Chechens resisted ferociously for decades during a savage Russian campaign that took thousands of lives. The stubbornness of the Chechen resistance has been proverbial in Russia ever since.
More recently, after a brief period of independence following World War I, Chechnya was occupied again by the Bolsheviks. After its liberation from the Nazis in the Second World War, it was subjected to one of the most notorious of Stalin’s many atrocities during 1943-44, when whole nationalities from the North Caucusus–including not only Chechens but Balkars, Ingush, and Karachai–were deported for alleged “collaboration” with the Nazis from their homelands to Central Asia under conditions that led to the deaths of as many as a third of the almost 620,000 deportees. The survivors remained in exile until the late 1950s, more than a decade after their ordeal began-further fanning their disaffection.6 A less persuasive parallel to the history of the United States would be difficult to frame.
In addition to its inaccuracy, such a statement coming from the President of the United States undercut those in Russia protesting the purpose of the war, the high civilian casualties, and the human rights abuses taking place. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s former acting Prime Minister, took his Russia’s Democratic Choice Party into opposition against the Yeltsin government because of the war in Chechnya. But the party and the anti-war cause found no succor from the Clinton administration.
The Clinton administration’s failure to ensure that there were any significant consequences for Russia for its conduct of the Chechen war for five full years-explicable only by its blind devotion to Russia’s government elite and President Yeltsin personally–effectively put it on the side of Russia’s military, and against ordinary Russians. Public opinion in Russia toward the first Chechen war (1994-96) was decidedly negative. Russians were opposed to a war they saw resulting in high Russian casualties caused by military ineptitude in the pursuit of Moscow’s desire to exert its will over the people of Chechnya.
Worse, by pressuring the IMF to grant $10.2 billion in credits to Russia in February 1996, the administration effectively used the Fund to subsidize not only Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, but also the Kremlin’s war effort in Chechnya, thus squandering an important opportunity for American leadership, and giving Moscow every reason to expect similar indulgence if Russia again tried to crush Chechnya.
Following hundreds of deaths in September 1999 bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk, which Russian officials said were the work of Chechen terrorists,7 the government had no difficulty marshalling support for its war aims. Anger over the bombings, the relatively low number of Russian military casualties in the early stages of the second war, and the decisive leadership Putin displayed after a lack a vigor in the Kremlin for so long made the second war popular with all segments of the Russian population. Virtually all the political parties participating in the December 1999 Duma election supported the war, and it was a significant reason for Putin’s popularity.8
The failure of the Clinton administration to apply pressure and diplomacy to encourage a political solution in Chechnya may have actually encouraged Russia to broaden its war objectives in 1999. Originally, the military objective was to create a “cordon sanitere” around Chechnya. Then the objective became to establish a security zone inside the Chechen Republic. With the popularity of the war at home and no penalty to pay abroad, the goal became the division of Chechnya along the Terek River. Finally, far from seeking a political settlement, the objective became the “complete extermination of the rebels and seizure of the entire territory of Chechnya.”9
As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski testified recently:
[I]t is tragically the case that the administration’s indifference to what has been happening in Chechnya has probably contributed to the scale of the genocide inflicted on Chechens. The Kremlin paused several times in the course of its military campaign in order to gauge the reactions of the West, yet all they heard from the president were the words ‘I have no sympathy for the Chechen rebels.’10
Moscow’s ultimate goal of reoccupying all of Chechnya necessitated the siege and capture of the Chechen capital of Grozny, which Russian troops had occupied and lost in the first Chechen conflict. During the last months of 1999, Grozny was subjected to a savage rocket and artillery bombardment that caused massive collateral damage and heavy civilian casualties, triggering the flight of over 220,000 refugees. The devastated Chechen capital was then subjected to attack from five directions, beginning on Christmas Day 1999. It was largely in ruins by the time it was occupied in February 2000.
As the Russian attacks on Grozny were gathering momentum, President Clinton referred in a Time magazine article on New Year’s Day to the impending Russian “liberation” of the Chechen capital of Grozny, already wrecked by the unrelenting Russian bombardment11–a phrase, as Dr. Brzezinski testified, that “is going to haunt the president and embarrass the United States for a long time to come.”12
Recently, the Clinton administration-at long last willing to acknowledge the horrors of the war in Chechnya-has nonetheless sought to absolve itself of responsibility by complaining that it has little leverage on Russia: as Secretary Albright stated after the G-8 summit, “I think, frankly, we have had a marginal effect” on the conflict. After dispensing over $20 billion in U.S. aid to Russia during the course of eight years, using American leverage to force further tens of billions from the IMF and the World Bank, and having never conditioned any of it on a political settlement in Chechnya, that is a remarkable statement indeed.
The damage to Russia, Chechnya, and the region is broad. Former Premier Yegor Gaidar estimated in January 2000 that the war was costing Russia $148 million a month.13 With Russia’s limited resources, these funds could have made a sizable contribution to its economic recovery and debt service.
The Clinton administration’s failure to respond meaningfully to Russia’s treatment of Chechnya may also have encouraged Russia’s efforts to intimidate its neighbors, and discouraged those nations from resisting such intimidation. As Dr. Brzezinski further told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
[S]ome of Russia’s immediate and most affected neighbors, such as the presidents of Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Estonia, have been perplexed by the U.S. disregard of the longer-term effects on Russian foreign policy of Moscow’s reliance on indiscriminate force in coping with Chechnya. Georgia is extremely vulnerable. We see some evidence of rising Russian pressure in Estonia and Latvia already. The Central Asian republics are beginning to make some degree of their own accommodation with Moscow, largely because of the way they interpret our passivity on Chechnya.14
These actions are fraught with risks for the stability and security of these nations and for U.S. interests in the region. Yet they too have drawn little effective response from the Clinton administration.15
But of course, Clinton and his team were not alone in enabling Yelstin, and consequently the rise of Putin.
Snippets from the international press in the second week of February, 2000, even before the official beginning of Putin era (when he was still “just acting president”, like now he’s “just prime minister”), about the wide range of sickening moves by the various world statesmen and institutions:
“The West’s Leniency”
Baudoin Bollaert judged in right-of-center Le Figaro (2/16): “NATO’s secretary general is on his way to Moscow…. Another sign of the West’s leniency toward the Russian leaders…. For the United States and Europe…’there is no other choice but Putin.’… The fact that Putin is sending Zhironovsky to Baghdad or that he may be negotiating with North Korea changes nothing. Everyone continues to close their eyes. Europe refuses to ‘humiliate’ Russia. ‘As for the United States,’ according to a diplomat, ‘it doesn’t have a policy, it has obsessions.’ Cuba, Iraq and Sudan. Not Russia, with its natural resources, its size and its nuclear weapons.”
“Our Friend Putin”
Jean-Luc Mano held in right-of-center France Soir (2/15): “The United States says nothing. Europe is barely protesting. Moscow is being granted a new deadline for its debt…. And what is France doing? Our foreign minister met with Putin, and after saying that what was going on in Chechnya was not particularly ‘pretty,’ he admitted to the press that Putin ‘was a real patriot.’… In other words, his killings are patriotic…. If Putin comes to Paris, we can be sure he will not be reprimanded…. Russia is a great nation, a nuclear power. Why would anyone risk its anger for a handful of Chechen rebels?”
“From Vienna To Grozny”
Left-of-center Le Monde said in its editorial (2/9): “With reason, the EU has taken political measures against Austria to show its indignation…. Washington has also shown its displeasure…. When, during the same week, Russian troops killed off the last Chechen civilian in the streets of Grozny, no one said a word of condemnation or showed the slightest indignation…. Russia, which aspires to become part of the international community, has just annihilated a city…. The Russian army is on a rampage of revenge, under the silent gaze of the West…. It is ethnic cleansing of the sort Milosevic dreams about…. But the West says and does nothing. The United States is totally complacent and Europe is almost as bad. Such a double standard in treatment and attitude between Vienna and Grozny turns the West’s talk of human rights into an incredible.
“Russia’s Helper In An Emergency–NATO”
Centrist Sueddeutsche Zeitung of Munich opined (2/16): “Robertson’s host, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, had accused NATO of ‘aggression and genocide’ [on Kosovo]. It is an astute move on Ivanov’s part to now welcome the head of this supposed gang of murderers. The improvement of relations with NATO comes at the best possible moment for Russia, and at the worst possible moment for NATO. Russia has committed a war crime by leveling a city on its own territory. The pictures of a devastated Grozny beamed around the world. Moscow is eager to get rid of such negative publicity.
“Wrong Message”
Right-of-center Frankfurter Allgemeine contended (2/14): “The agreement between commercial banks and Russia on the cancellation of debts…sends the wrong message. There is good reason why the IMF has thus far hesitated to pay further loan tranches to Moscow. Thus far, the West has waited in vain for comprehensive economic and structural reforms in the country. Vladimir Putin has not yet presented a convincing economic policy concept, but he will now be able to take advantage of the negotiating solution with the London Club in the upcoming presidential campaign. Now it is necessary to urge the negotiating leaders in the Paris Club not to waive considerable amounts of debts without getting anything in return. In view of the tense domestic situation due to the war in Chechnya, it is not advisable to hand over this last trump card to Russia.”
“Time For West To Act”
Left-of-center Frankfurter Rundschau judged (2/11): “When the Bundestag discussed Germany’s policy toward Chechnya, Foreign Minister Fischer said that he is unable to impose sanctions on Russia…since Russia should not be driven into isolation. By saying this Fischer mixed up cause and effect. With the second war in Chechnya, Russia has now isolated itself. The latest credible reports about systematic torture, the disappearance of Chechens, and the killings committed by Russian soldiers and units of the Interior Ministry will even deepen this isolation. Half a year after the beginning of the war in Chechnya, more innocent people have died in this war than in the entire Kosovo war…. Although Fischer admits that Russia is waging ‘its war against a whole people,’ he does still not want to impose sanctions on Russia. In the meantime, the Russian air force is now dropping vacuum bombs in the Chechen mountains, and in the lowlands it is building new concentration camps. What must happen before Fischer and his colleagues in Europe’s capitals and in Washington not only talk but take action?”
“Too Many Guilty Silences On Chechnya”
A commentary by Sandro Viola in left-leaning, influential La Repubblica held (2/12): “True, the Russians conquered Grozny a week ago. True, both political objectives for which Yeltsin and Putin decided to wage this dirty war last September seem to have been achieved: to pave the way for Putin’s election as president on March 26, and to wash away the defeat suffered by Russian troops in ’94-’96. But what is the high price for these two results, how much frustration and political embarrassment are falling on Russia and its leaders from the Grozny ruins…. The post-Yeltsin Russia…[is] burdened by the horrors of a war in which one-and-a-half ton bombs were thrown, with 200,000 refugees still prevented from getting aid from international organizations and without the economic possibility of beginning some sort of reconstruction of Chechnya’s ruins…. We cannot let silence fall on the Chechen war. To begin with, Moscow has to allow international organizations to take care of the most urgent needs of the refugees.”
“West Readies Itself For Long Putin Era”
Vrt TV correspondent Johan de Poortere observed in independent Catholic De Standaard (2/16): “George Robertson is coming to Moscow to put the NATO-Russia relationship on the right track again and Bill Clinton has spoken highly of Vladimir Putin. The West is preparing itself for a long Putin era…. Robertson…distinguished himself from his predecessor by his moderate criticism on Chechnya…. Clinton, too, reiterated in an interview with CNN that Russia has the right to act against ‘semi-military groups that make themselves guilty of terrorist practices.’… Who is Putin?… Except for a few vague statements about the need for a ‘strong state’ and ‘moral recovery’ of Russia’s society, Putin has not shown his cards. So far, the Putin era has coincided with a bloody, merciless war…and a never-seen-before media manipulation. Nevertheless, Western leaders are apparently willing to give Putin the benefit of the doubt.”
“Double Standard, Or Different Standard, For Russia”
Leopold Unger wrote in liberal Gazeta Wyborcza (2/16): “It’s a great victory. So great that Vladimir Putin interrupted his skiing fling in the Caucasus to inform the nation in person. The end of the war in Chechnya? No. It’s just that the London Club banks…agreed to reduce Russia’s debts by one-third…. By doing so the banks signed not a financial but a political check for Putin–they voted in advance for the former head of the Federal Security Service in the presidential elections. And the Western bankers’ decision to reduce Russia’s debts came at a very significant point of time. Russia has now a colossal foreign trade surplus of 30 billion dollars thanks to its oil, and it exceeds any limits in its bestiality toward the Chechens…. The world is shaken and it cries ‘double standard’ when comparing the reaction of the West toward Putin and toward Haider…. [But] if the West does not force Putin in a corner as it does to Haider…it is not because of a ‘double standard’ but a ‘different standard’ policy. This ‘different standard’ is based on Russia’s megatons [of weapons], its capacity to harm the world and international peace being dependent on it. One can turn an angry face to Haider without any risk. With Putin, one must talk–just because of the risk.”
“Horrors Of Chechnya Financed By Our Blood Money”
Under the above headline, the independent Hong Kong Standard’s editorial stressed (2/8): “Mr. Putin has promised that economic changes will be introduced quickly. If they implement the recommended policies, the IMF will have no choice, under its own rules, but to hand over the money. The organization has no brief to act on political grounds. Once again, this shows that economic reform and political reform have to go together. It’s a lesson that we in this part of the world still refuse to acknowledge.”
“Why Should Chechens Be Denied?”
Pro-West, Bangla-language Ittefaq commented (2/14): “We don’t deny that Chechnya is a part of Russia. However, how could the people of Chechnya’s demand for independence be denied? Why can’t Chechnya be free if the Soviet Union could be disbanded, the Central Asian republics could gain independence, and East Timor could move toward independence? The Chechens are alone in their struggle…. Can’t the world community adopt any effective measure to stop the fighting and restore the right of self determination to the people of Chechnya?”
“Western Abandonment Of Chechnya”
Independent Al-Rai Al-Aam (2/14) ran this piece by Abdullah Al-Shaikh: “While the West stood with East Timor to help grant them self-determination, we notice that Chechnya was abandoned. Even the UN was silent about the massacres. Where are the Arabs who demonstrated against the raids that took place in Baghdad? Where are the human rights organizations?”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2000/02/wwwh0f1a.htm
[“The raids in baghdad” thing that outraged the Arab world was the bloody crackdown on the uprising in Saddam City, how the Sadr City was called back then, that followed the assassination of the Grand Ayatollah Sadr by Saddam’s goons in 1999 – more about it http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11844/section/4 here.]
What do the Bush administration and the Uzbek strongman have anything to do with the issue at hand? Who said Bush was a great president? Bush was a terrible president, that’s why any Republican candidate would have lost to any Democratic candidate. So?
Do Bush’s follies justify Obama’s kid glove treatment of Russian dictatorship? Obama was elected because he promised he would do things differently and make everything better. So far, in great many aspects, he continues in the same way and things got worse
@Aparently the clown who makes this site is forgetting how Bush personally met with the dictator of Uzbekistan, a man who has his opponents boiled alive.
“Aparently” the clown who commented is forgetting how Bush’s administration cut ties with the dictator of Uzbekistan in 2005 even at the cost of the US strategic base there, which was vital for the conflict in Afghanistan.
Now, here’s the said Islam Karimov personally meeting with the dictator of Russia, a man who burns children alive:
http://visualrian.ru/en/site/gallery/#165187?1208167443
And here’s the same Karimov, but repeatedly with “the liberal” “president” Medvedev, of course already after the Andijan Massacre:
(and so on)
And in August 2005, just two months after the article from your link:
Uzbekistan kicks US out of military base
Pentagon given six months to quit as Washington’s relations with hardline dictator sour in wake of civilian massacre
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/aug/01/usa.nickpatonwalsh
A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who was sacked after criticising western support for the Uzbek regime, said: “The US has managed to hand the dictator Karimov the propaganda coup of kicking out the world’s greatest power. Western policy towards Uzbekistan has been unsustainable for a long time.”
He said the Uzbek decision to curtail relations with Washington was “due to a change-around in economic policy. There has been no significant investment from the west for a while; it’s all Russian and Chinese state-owned companies.”
“Karimov took the decision years ago not to have democracy and capitalism, it just took the US a lot longer to work that out.
“If they had any dignity they would have jumped before they were pushed.”
He said the move would put pressure on other central Asian states to turn away from the west, towards China and Russia, because of their reliance on Uzbekistan’s resources.
The New York Times also quoted a senior state department official as saying that the Uzbek demand was connected to US support for neighbouring Kyrgyzstan’s refusal to send home those who had fled Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre.
The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has phoned the Kyrgyz government about 29 of those who fled, now being held in the southern city of Osh, and asked that they be ferried out by the UN to a neutral third country.
(The article says: ‘The Uzbek authorities are accused of killing and jailing ordinary Muslims under the guise of fighting religious extremism and terrorism, and the state department says torture is used by police in Uzbekistan as a “routine investigation technique”.’, but of course the so-called Russian authorities are accused of exactly the same.)
It actually means just “OURS”. Surkov himself is half-Chechen..
The only thing the world should do is very simply indeed; just to let russia continue to desintegrate – everybody knows that the process of slowly rotting from within of russia is going on and NOBODY OR NOTHING will stop it. By the way, how any country or institution can be foolish enough to waste a single $ in investing in russia; a country that is heading for a civil war. Make no mistake; comes 2012, Putin will restore the soviet/russian ‘glory’ by opening again the gulags, and the russian people will be declared the slave of the state – strangely enough they don’t mind. The rest of rubbish printed is meaningless. For God’s sake the russian army is being fed with the dog food, and the russian population all over siberia [which is slowly being taken over by its rightful owner, China, by the way] eats meat once a year, according to the French documentary shown on France24…Russia’s humiliation is simply cosmic….
Robert,
I think you had better start your own blog.
We tried to tell him…
We’ve actually invited him on more than one occasion to publish content on this blog, he doesn’t want to blog he just wants to comment.
Robert,
Ignore those Russophile propagandists, they are just jealous of your excellent input. What’s that old saying? “jealousy is a curse.”
Usually blogs have “only one” contributor.
Are you this “rts” fellow?
Just look at this guy’s face really carefully and you’ll see the face of a little boy who was regularly beaten up by others when he was young. What a dweeb – he’s now in a position to get back at the world and he’s doing it with a vengence. The only good news is that in his heart he knows he is a cowardly pansy. Just the sort to ‘lead’ this kind of macho movement, like all those acne-scarred skinny masturbating little Nazi perverts who brought us the devastation of WWII through their self-hatred.
A little off topic but interesting.
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/06/21/294331
A little background.
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/05/25/289699
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/05/30/290287
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/06/17/293912
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/06/18/293916
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/06/18/293954
http://zik.ua/en/news/2011/06/20/294009
“…Nashi, meaning “us Slavic Russians”…
I am afraid you are lost in the forest of the Russian politics. How come Surkov, half Chechen turned into “Slavic” nationalist? It was the same Surkov who speaking to the young Chechen audience in Grozny remarked “I look at you and think what a beautiful people WE are!” “Nashi” is the Kremlin’s puppet organisation which has nothing to do with any nationalism.
First of all, you idiot, we were referring to the meaning of the WORD “nashi” not the organization. The WORD means “us Slavic Russians” to Slavic Russians. It’s the pronoun version of “russkii” as compared to “rossiskii”
Second of all, if you think Nashi is ANYTHING other than a pure lily white organization of Slavic youth who work IN RUSSIA (which means NOT Chechnya) to keep Putin in power, you are a true psychopath and illiterate beyonds words.
Thank you for your prompt and passionate reply. “Nashi” as a pronoun means just “ours” in Russian without any “Slavic Russian” connotation. “Nashi” could be anybody; Slavic, Chechens and even Russophobes. You either write about Russia in your blog without adequate knowledge of the Russian language or present your philological fantasies as political reality.
I am sure you know that Surkov’s “Nashi” (organisation) is a “multicultural” pro-Putin organisation which has nothing to do with Russian nationalism. You are lying to your readers stating otherwise.
You can’t find a single Russian nationalist who supports Putin’s junta which brutally suppresses ethnic Russian political movements. Have you heard about 282 article of the Russian Criminal Code?
It’s pretty hilarious that you write about knoweldge of Russia without citing ANY SOURCE WHATSOEVER to document your own claim.
Slavic Russians do NOT consider people who are not Slavs to be “nashi” just because they hold Russian citizenship. And if you think they do, it is only because you have never had a conversation with a non-Slav, or read a newspaper in which the classified boldy say “no dark skins wanted.” For Slavic Russians, only Slavic Russians are true citizens of Russia.
Nashi is certainly NOT multi-ethnic. It is a Slavic organization funded by the Kremlin to bolster the Slavic regime of Slav Vladimir Putin and Slav Dimi Medvedev. Nashi is a racist term as used on the streets of Russia and it is a racist term as used by the Kremlin in regard to the youth cult of Vladimir Putin.
Your notion of the meaning of “nationalism” is rather inaccurate. Nationalism is not a synonym for racism. However, in Russia it is certainly true the nationalism and racism are closely related, and the Putin regime is deeply racist and nationalist, and uses these notions as weapons to maintain power. The fact that there are other apelike Russians who are even more racist than Putin does not make him some type of moderate. He is a homicidal maniac carrying out a pogrom in the Caucasus and ruling from within a lily-white cohort of proud KGB spies.
OK, look through the list of people in the “Nashi” leadership.
1)Vladislav Surkov aka Dudaev Aslambek Andarbekovich – half-Chechen;
2)Vasily Yakomenko – Ukrainian;
3)Robert Schlegel – German;
4)Arthur Omarov – of some obscure nationality from the North Caucasus etc.
If you follow their “Seliger” event you know that the participants come to the camp from all national republics of the Federation.
I am not here to be Surkov’s advocate. What I am saying here is that neither Putin/Surkov nor their stupid puppets have anything to do with the interests of the ethnic Russians who are being legally and culturally discriminated by the junta.
Neither Putin nor Medvedev have EVER appealed to or associated themselves with ethnic Russians. Their policies are anti-Russian (take, for example, multi-billion sponsoring of Chechnya at the expense of the Russian ethnic regions).
Have you ever heard the words “Uncle Tom”? There are some black people in the Republican party, and in fact the only black person on the U.S. Supreme Court is a Republican. But black people vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats. Get it? Just because Nashi isn’t as purely racist as you want it to be doesn’t mean it isn’t insanely racist by the standards of any normal person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashi_(youth_movement)
It’s very offensive, and makes you look completely ridiculous, for you to speak to us as if we don’t know what we’re talking about. We’ve been blogging Russia for many years and are the most powerful and influential English-language Russia bloggers on this planet.
First, “Russian nationalist” is right here.
(If he’s not one of these “ultra” type of nationalists, I could even share much of his opinions, I guess. And there are people who were claiming to be or were branded as Russian nationalists who I more or less respect, even if they were also militaristic, even some veeery controversial figures (like General Vlasov), if only they were nationalists in a good sense – actually patriots.)
Second, Wikipedia should never be cited as a primary source, even if it’s right, because everyone can write (or delete) there anything, any information and any disinformation. Seriously: me, you, Dima Medvedev when he’s not twittering, everyone can do this, anytime.
Third, consider getting off this high horse of yours, maybe.
But, umm, didn’t you notice the FOOTNOTES in the Wiki article?
The view of the battlefield is much better from the high horse than from the low one. You should try it sometime!
Hi Robert. I am not of that breed of “Russian nationalists” who harass the Central Asian labour migrants and measure their own skulls in search of “Russianness”. I am among those “democratic nationalists” who support the establishment of the Russian national state based on genuine democratic principles under the Russian cultural umbrella.
I see as Putin and Co. are dragging us into the second edition of the USSR which existed and survived ONLY on the bones of millions of ethnic Russians. I see the Russian Civil war, Stalin’s collectivisation/industrialisation, and the ethnic Russians’ sacrifices made during the WWII as genocide of my people.
Like if the tsars were any better. Speaking of “builing on bones”, you know the story behind St. Petersburg (the city with a German name, but built by Russian slaves). Russian history in general is incredibly tragic and the various revered figures commited sometimes even simply absurd (Ivan the Terrible’s madness) crimes against Russian people(s) in the name of some supposed “national greatness” or just personal gain. Which yes, could be said about many nations (like Dracula is a national hero for Romanians and he’s right there with Ivan on the crazy scale), but Russia somehow still got it worse than most others.
Robert, to make comparisons between the Imperial Russia and the genocide conducted by the Bolsheviks against the Russian people is like to compare the Boston Tea Party and the battle of Stalingrad. Ivan the Terrible definitely had a bee in his bonnet but he doesn’t look so “terrible” if you compare him with, say, Henry VIII of England, Ivan’s contemporary.
1)When you blog on Russia you heavily rely on secondary sources, that is, SOMEBODY ELSE’S interpretations of events. Just by coincidence you pick up interpretations you like.
2)You don’t make your own research analysing PRIMARY sources which are of course in Russian what make your conclusions intellectually shallow and one-sided what you try to compensate by “intensity” of your vocabulary.
That is why, no wonder you make a major blunder associating Putin and Co. and consequently “NASHI” with Russian nationalism. If I were you before claiming that connection I would’ve asked myself WHAT are the major manifestations of any nationalism? How do Putin-Medvedev’s policies fit this definition? It’s the ABC of any political research especially expected from those who claim to be pundits of the Russian politics.
If you had made your research you would’ve known about Putin’s conscious policy aiming to suppress any ethnic Russian political activism; about appalling political inferiority of the Russian ethnic regions (“oblasti”) as compared to the national REPUBLICS headed by aboriginal non-Russian presidents; about billions of roubles being pumping up into the non-Russian republics of the North Caucasus at the expense of ethnic Russian regions; about rampant tribalism and ethnic non-Russian nepotism fostered by Putin’s junta. You would’ve known that people get arrested just for wearing “I am Russian” tee-shirts etc.
To put in a nutshell I am afraid the honour of being the primary Russophobe is not yours. The major Russophobe is Putin and Co.
But you don’t rely on ANY sources. Your own statements have no weight or value whatsoever. Think about it.
Ok, to give you a flavour of the Russian nationalism opposed to the corrupted Putin’s junta.
http://shiropaev.livejournal.com/
http://krylov.livejournal.com/
http://vadimb.livejournal.com/
But really, but the guy is right. It’s just a pro-Putin youth organization, Putinjugend, nothing more.
You know the gangster clique ruling Russia are not really nationalists – who should care for Russian interests (“Devotion to the interests or culture of one’s nation”), and not for their own power and money – right?
Please take a look at this classic article from 2006. It’s full of absolutely hilarious quotes, but just see who they are (literally) crawling for:
http://www.kommersant.com/page.asp?idr=530&id=693680
And, of course, how they translate “Nashi” even there.
And also here are Nashi who are def. not quite Slavic (and you can see it, unlike when you look at Pushkin): http://img.rian.ru/images/5706/91/57069137.jpg
Btw, the very notion of the Russian populace being “Slavic” in majority won’t really stand up to scrutiny – but that’s another thing.
We didn’t say Russia’s Slavs were the majority. But they hold all the political power, until they are overrun by the Muslims.
The nationalists don’t admit they don’t care for Russian interests. We agree with you that their actions are harmful to Russia, but they don’t see it that way, and they use their claim of loving Russia to leverage political support. Nashi says that if YOU don’t love Russia the way THEY love Russia, you are not really Russian.
We didn’t say Nashi openly preaches racism. They don’t have to. But the message of their organization is the same as the Hitlerjugend, as you yourself admit, and that’s as racist as can be.
The waterline between Putin/Medvedev/”Nashi” on the one hand and Russian nationalists I belong to on the other hand is obvious. They argue for imperative of the state as such when we support supremacy of the Russian ethnic AND cultural interests. Putin’s policy to preserve the status quo is conducted at the expense of the Russian ethnic interests now. (When I say “ethnic” I imply ALL people under the Russian cultural umbrella irrespective of their actual ethnic background). We don’t care about the state for the state’s sake only.
The majority actually is “Slavs” but they’re not “really” Slavs, more like mostly Ugro-Finnish really, Norsified. Which is NOT a bad thing, absolutely, Slavs are not any kind of “master race” (more like a “slave race”, literally: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave), I’m just a saying that if Russian nationalist need to build some real identity around anything, it has to be Russian-speakers, not any “Slavs” which today really makes as much sense as them being “Aryans”.
Hitlerjugend was actually huge into this whole “Aryan” total BS (and just look how much “Aryan” Hitler looked like! not at all) and would never, EVER accept any “Negger”, you know? Unless he was as white as Pushkin, becase after all they accepted a Jew “with pure Aryan features” (see the video below) just because he told them he’s a Russian German (Salomon Morel, and previously he was in the Komsomol – the Soviet youth organisation, you know, which the Nashi is really more like it than it is like the HJ).
And here’s little something about the state of Nashi today (2011):
http://seansrussiablog.org/2011/02/12/nashi-is-a-waste/
Eh. I meant Salomon PEREL. Not Morel.
Salomon Morel was a completely different person, and a terrible criminal:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/holocaust-jew-accused-of-war-crimes/2005/07/10/1120934125780.html
Robert, of course Russians have a share of Finnish blood (especially those who live in the Russian North-West). Nevertheless the genetic research (below) demonstrats the direct relation between Russians and Poles/Ukrainians.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2253976/
The ethnic Russians, as you argue, don’t hold the political and economic authority in Russia. Authority in Russia is a business matter of a few related to each other families. I strongly suggest you to look through Marina Litvinovich’s report on corruption links between members of the Russian government. What a shame that there are almost no any ethnic Russians among those guys!
http://election2012.ru/reports/1/
“However, in Russia it is certainly true the nationalism and racism are closely related, and the Putin regime is deeply racist and nationalist….. The fact that there are other apelike Russians…”
Racism is a universal problem. However, you should take pride in the fact that few bigots and xenophobes match the level of your racism and your constant comparison of Russians to “apes”.
This is a topic that’s near to my heart… Cheers! Exactly where are
your contact details though?
ROBERT ii’m revealing or outing you! r
you changed your name but moshe10000 i know you
you hate bush or anybody who was a decent patriotic democratic christian
go back to russian or israel and enjoy your thug life!
you are jealous of anybody with descent blood lines and roots and not an illegitimate khazaar