September 2, 2011 — Contents

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 2 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The Failure of Russian Aerospace

(2)  EDITORIAL:  The Horror of “Normal” Life in Russia

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Ukraine Declares War on Russia

(4) The Horror of Childbirth in Putin’s Russia

(5)  Stuck in a Russia Elevator

(6)  Russians Spit on their Own History

(8) Putin is the Disease

(9) LR Welcomes Visitor #3,000,000!

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment on the powerful and influential American Thinker blog exposes the absolute failure of Barack Obama’s ridiculous effort to “reset” relations with Russia, which now seethes with more anti-American hatred than ever.

NOTE:  Kim’s latest piece is also up and running on Pajamas Media. It analyzes the sensational recent arrest of a high-ranking Moscow police officer in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, showing how the trail inevitably leads right into the Moscow Kremlin.

NOTE: It is the 7-year anniversary of the Beslan disaster. 

EDITORIAL: The Catastrophic Failure of Russian Aerospace

EDITORIAL

The Catastrophic Failure of Russian Aerospace

Russia’s aerospace program appears to be collapsing.

The latest series of horrifying incidents began in June with the crash of a TU-134 airliner while attempting to land near Petrozavodsk, killing all of its nearly four dozen passengers.  The government was forced to order the entire model out of service.

Days later, a MiG-29 fighter jet crashed inexplicably, and the government was left with no choice but to order that model out of service too, even though Russia had just inked a larger sale of the model to India.

Then, in an epic humiliation, when Russia rolled out its version of the F-22 Stealth Raptor during its annual international air show an engine collapsed during takeoff and the plane could not get airborn.

Next, a swarm of bees attacked a Moscow-bound Boeing 757, from the inside.

And most recently, an entire Russian ice hockey team was wiped out in a horrific crash  near the city of Yaroslavl on the Volga.

Meanwhile, objects even higher up began dropping out of the sky.

EDITORIAL: The Brutality of “Normal Life” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia

EDITORIAL

The Brutality of “Normal Life” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia

In our issue today we republish two stories about ordinary life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. One story involves an adventure with an elevator, the other with childbirth.  They are absolutely required reading for anyone who is interested in understanding what is going on in Russia today.

Anyone who has spent any time living a real life in Putin’s Russia will instantly recognize the truth and the horror reflected in these stories. And nobody who has not lived in Russia can truly appreciate how awful it is to experience so-called “life” of this kind up close and personal.  This is what it means to live in a neo-Soviet state ruled by a proud KGB spy.  It sucks.

But let’s be perfectly clear:  The people of Russia are not the innocent victims of this type of horror.  To the contrary, their reckless and irresponsible behavior is the root cause of it.

EDITORIAL: Ukraine Declares War on Russia

EDITORIAL

Ukraine Declares War on Russia

Ukraine has got the message.

Kommersant reports (English synopsis) that the Ukrainian government has embarked upon a massive and ambitious plan to develop and exploit domestic shale gas resources, thereby reducing its dependence on Russia by a factor of three. Not long after that, Ukraine was issuing bellicose threats to Russia and harshly snubbing the Putin regime.

The reason for this action is obvious:  Ukrainians don’t trust Russians any more than Georgians do.  Slowly but surely, the malignant Putin regime is managing to spoil every one of Russia’s geopolitical relationships in post-Soviet space.

The Horror of Childbirth in Neo-Soviet Russia

Journalist Natalia Antonova, writing on Foreign Policy’s website:

“Russia needs babies” may as well be the unofficial slogan of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia Party. The country is in a demographic crisis, shedding 2.2 million people (or 1.6 percent of the population) since 2002, and the government is trying to encourage more women to bring Russian citizens into the world. This year, when I unexpectedly got pregnant soon after receiving my visa to work in Moscow, I became a test case.

Since the Soviet days, having a baby in Russia has been commonly understood as a nightmare of understaffed state hospitals and forbidding bureaucratic mazes. Feminist author MariaArbatova‘s My Name is Woman, an alternatively harrowing and hilarious account of childbirth in the 1970s, was the grim reality for many. Arbatova described being left completely unattended during the final stages of labor, which nearly resulted in her death and the death of her twin sons.

Stuck in a Russian Elevator

Michele Berdy, writing in the Moscow Times, shows bilingually how little different Russia really is from the USSR:

Ваш лифт не сдан: your elevator hasn’t been certified for service

In an old Soviet joke, a hare runs for his life in the forest. A bear asks him why he’s running, and the hare says that camels are being caught and shoed. Bewildered, the bear points out that the hare isn’t a camel. The hare replies: Поймают, подкуют, а потом доказывай, что ты не верблюд (They’ll catch you and put shoes on you, and then go and try to prove that you’re not a camel).

Today доказывай, что ты не верблюд (prove that you’re not a camel) is used any time you can’t prove something obvious to an obstinate bureaucracy.

For example — that you have an elevator.

Russians Spit on their Own Fellow Citizens, History

Simon Shuster, writing for Time magazine’s website:

Alexander Smirnov has never gotten over the euphoria of August 1991. He was a college student in Leningrad at the time, lanky and pale with Coke-bottle glasses, and on the morning of Aug. 20, 1991, he walked out onto the central square of the city to find a sea of people taking part in one of the largest demonstrations Russia had ever seen. The day before, a military coup had begun.

The heads of the KGB, the army and police, along with a few other obdurate communists, had seized control of the Soviet Union from President Mikhail Gorbachev, and ordered tanks into Moscow to impose a state of emergency. In response, hundreds of thousands of people went onto the streets across the empire to stop the return of the bad old days of the Communist state. “We were prepared to lay down in front of the tanks,” Smirnov says. And in Moscow a few of them did. Only three days after the military junta began, the civil resistance defeated it. On Aug. 22, the coup leaders were arrested, and the Soviet Union never recovered. Four months later, on Christmas Day, it was dissolved.

Putin is the Disease

Putin is the disease, democracy is the cure.

The Moscow Times reports:

Siberian investigators are seeking jail terms over a prank in which a billboard (shown above) for a clinic treating sexually transmitted diseases was doctored to include less-than-flattering portraits of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin.

LR Welcomes Visitor #3,000,000

On Tuesday, August 30, 2011, La Russophobe was pleased to welcome visitor number three million to our blog.  Over the course of five years since our blog was founded we have averaged 600,000 visitors and 10,000 comments per year.  We remain the only major Russia blog on the planet which openly shares our traffic and comment data with our readers, and we remain unrivaled in our ability to provoke and educate a wide range of readers from across the globe about the topic of Russian politics, as well as in our ability to reach into and influence Russia itself.  No other Russia blog has shown our longevity, consistency and stamina to date, and no other Russia blog has contributed as many translations from Russian sources or achieved comparable influence in the mainstream media (we’ve even been cited as authority by the lofty likes of the New York Review of Books!).  Our readers are as much a part of LR as our contributors and editors, so pat yourself on the back, and let’s redouble our efforts to challenge the satanic evil that is the neo-Soviet dictatorship!