Milov Blasts Putin on Riots

Writing on Gazeta.ru Vladimir Milov delivers a one-two punch to the solar plexus of Vladimir Putin on the issue of nationality, along with his partner in opposition Boris Nemtsov.  The latter handles the Caucaus region, while Milov addresses Putin’s weakness much closer to home.  Paul Goble reports:

Russia’s liberals have ceded issues like migration and the violence in the North Caucasus to the nationalists by failing to address them openly and honestly and to offer programs for their resolution, a shortcoming that has helped to marginalize the liberals in Russia and give the nationalists an undeserved victory, a liberal commentator says

In a commentary on Gazeta.ru, Vladimir Milov, the head of the Democratic Choice Movement and of the Institute of Energy Policy, argues that the Manezh Square violence must become “a serious occasion” for re-assessing “the influence and role of nationalism and the factor of inter-ethnic relations in Russian politics.

EDITORIAL: The Rise of the Russian Gestapo

EDITORIAL

The Rise of the Russian Gestapo

Those Nazis sure do love them some Russia!  Little wonder, of course.

Back in January, we republished a piece from Global Voices reporting on the persecution of a young Russian woman who dared to the commit the “crime” (in racist Russian eyes, at least) of marrying a Chinese man and admiring Chinese culture on her blog.

A few days ago, the American neo-Nazi website Stormfront picked up the link in its forum section, sending any number of neo-Nazi thugs scurrying through our virtual pages and leading them to make comments like “boy do I love the Russians” and “they are taking the most direct approach (more than other whites) in the streets, they are a tough folk that’s for sure.”

We’ve previously reported on how right-wing lunatics like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul and David Duke wet themselves when thinking about the racist dictatorship that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Look the other way in Russia, however, toward the “police,” and the situation is little better.

Moscow: For “Russians” Only

Paul Goble reports (also see Michele Berdy’s mocking, acidic piece in the Moscow Times):

A senior Moscow Duma official says that his city plans to “work up a collection of rules” which will help those coming to Moscow to fit in with the style of life of the Russian city and know from a pamphlet to be published outlining “what is acceptable and what isn’t” for all residents in what he described as an “ethnic Russian” city.

In an interview published in today’s Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Mikhail Solomentsev, the chairman the city Duma’s committee on inter-regional ties and nationality policy, said that such a set of rules will help unite newcomers with longtime residents by stressing what the two have in common rather than what separates them. But his comments about this plan make it clear that he believes it is migrant workers and non-Russians who must adapt rather than the Russians into whose city the former have moved, an attitude that almost certainly will exacerbate the already tense ethnic relations in Moscow whatever Solomentsev in fact hopes for.

Lies and the Lying Russian Racists who Tell Them

Paul Goble reports:

Immigrant workers in Russia commit only three percent of all crimes in that country even though they form ten percent of the population, a prominent Moscow rights activist says — and a third of those crimes involve the falsification of documents, the result of their inability to secure legal registration.

In an interview published in Velikaya Epokha Svetlana Gannushkina, a leader of Memorial and the Civil Assistance Committee, singles out for particular criticism Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov who is “eternally claiming that migrants occupy our work places, violation our cultural traditions, speak Russian poorly and commit a large fraction of crimes in Russia.” All this is “completely absurd,” Gannushkina says. The Interior Ministry’s website features figures showing that “foreign citizens and those without citizenship commit about three percent of the total number of crimes,” a figure that has held more or less constant “already for many years.”

EDITORIAL: The Toxin of Russian Racism

EDITORIAL

The Toxin of Russian Racism

We’ve said many times before that the Russia teems with the most virulent and shameless racism imaginable, and the litany of dead, dark-skinned bodies is sure and certain proof of this undeniable fact (click the “racism” link in the “categories” section of our sidebar to read four years’ worth of our reporting on the subject, which may take you days to get through) .

But we’ve also always been careful to point out that, as utterly horrific as these killings are, there is a darker, more outrageous element to the racism found in Russia, namely that it is openly supported not just by the general population but by the government itself.  Russia is, quite simply, a nation of racists and they are proud of it.

Reporting from Moscow in a blog post we republish in today’s issue, journalist Julia Ioffe provides an example of what is happening in Russia on a daily basis from her own personal experience.  Ioffe, whose parents fled Russia when she was a child, stood on a subway platform and watched a screaming hoard of Russian skinheads chanting about purging all non-Slavic blood from Russia. She stood and watched as hundreds of ordinary Russians clapped and cheered their message: “Russia for Slavs!” (using the word for “Russian” in Russian that means “Slavs and nobody else”).

Everyone — everyone — who has spent time living on the real streets of Russia knows that the anecdote Ioffe is relating is anything but anecdotal.  It’s fact, it’s conventional wisdom, it’s the real Russia.

Russia’s Rampaging Racism

Julia Ioffe reports from Moscow:

Crossing the underground transfer to the Paveletskaya stop on the circle line in the Moscow metro this morning, I found myself swallowed up by a bunch of singing, rowdy youths.

Decked out in red-and-white scarves, they were on their way to Luzhniki stadium for a soccer match where they would cheer for their team, Spartak — thus the red and white. (These, coincidentally, are also the colors of Nashi, the Hitlerjugend-ish Kremlin youth group.)

The kids were warming up in the metro, having warmed up, it seems, with a couple beers beforehand.

Holding their arms out in a V or clapping, the kids sang. And here’s what they sang:

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Barbaric, Shameless Racism

EDITORIAL

Russia’s Barbaric, Shameless Racism

The Russian language is bizarre and crude, a perfect reflection of the people who speak it, people who turn their backs on a torrent of annual race murders or, even worse, participate in them.

Take the image at left, for instance. It’s a snapshot of a billboard that hangs in many Moscow subway stations, the kind you’re forced to look at as you take interminable rides up and down endless escalators, which are so long because of the subway’s dual purpose as transit and bomb shelter.

The text reads:  “Your country needs your records.  Every minute in Russia three new people are born.”

It’s totally shameless, barbaric racism.  The billboard is saying:  “Lots of babies are being born in Russia, and way too many with dark skin. What are you going to do about it, white woman?”

Russia is not only losing population fast, but the Slavic population within Russia is doing the worst job of all, leading to projections that Russia will soon become an Islamic country.  The Kremlin, to put it mildly, is panicking.

The same people who publish and read such blasphemy, of course, who deny the citizenship rights of dark-skinned “Russians,” who believe that only white-skinned Slavic people can properly even be called “Russian,” these same people refuse to let places like Chechnya be independent.  Instead, using blood violence, they insist that such dark-skinned people remain under Russia’s thumb, enslaved.

But is the word “record” really the best that the Russian language can come up with to convey this idea?  It’s not even a “Russian” word, of course, even someone who doesn’t know a word of Russian could recognize it, if they could get past the Russian script.  Seemingly, Russians lack the initiative to invent their own words for things like “hamburger,” even when the word has a sound like “h” that doesn’t exist in Russian.  So Russians just call it a “gahmboorgehr.”  Even many Russians would have to do a double-take to figure out just what “record” is supposed to mean in this context.  Unfortunately, upon figuring it out precious few would disagree with the idea.

EDITORIAL: Russia and Racism

EDITORIAL

Russia and Racism

After Russia’s pathetic, truly stunning loss to Canada in the quarterfinals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, NBC sportscaster Mike Millbury commented:

I was shocked that it was this one-sided. And I was really disappointed that these guys came with their euro-trash game. It was just. No heart, no guts, no nothing there to back it up. I mean Alex Ovechkin was an average player tonight. I know they’re going to bounce back, but to be that poor and to be that intimidated physically by the Canadians, that really shocked me.

Wikipedia then immediately added the following to Millbury’s entry:  “He was employed by NBC to serve as a hockey analyst during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, during which he caused some controversy by referring to the Russian team as the racist phrase ‘Euro-Trash’.”

Oops.  Wikipedia itself defines the term “eurotrash” and it pertains only to class, not race, according to Wiki.  Millbury was merely saying that the Russians played like spoiled rich kids, soft, weak and craven.  The reference to racism had to be deleted from the Wiki page.  Apparently, the fellow who wrote the Wiki entry on Millbury wasn’t a big Wiki reader himself. Too bad.  Could it have been some Russophile nationalist who rushed to smear Millbury for his tough (and accurate) criticism of Russian’s play?  Possible, very possible.

Virulent Russian Racism on the Rampage

Maria Gromakova in China

Global Voices reports:

The common notion that the Internet empowers those with democratic and liberal values is occasionally challenged by stories coming out of Russian online communities. The blogosphere can certainly be a place where people share valuable content with wide audience, but it can also become a platform for attacking virtual identities. Unfortunately, availability of information and growing connections between virtual and real personalities make online harassment as real as it gets.

Maria Gromakova, a young blogger from St. Petersburg, experienced the evil potential of the Internet first hand. Constant attacks of Russian radical nationalists on her blog turned Maria’s life into a living hell and made her and her small family leave Russia.

Maria studied philology at St. Petersburg University where she concentrated on teaching Russian to foreigners. She also played at a local theater and worked as an anchor at a local TV station. In 2007, Maria started teaching Russian at one of the universities in China. There she met Bo, a professional athlete and her future husband.

Maria has been keeping a blog on Livejournal.com [RUS] since 2005. Colorful posts about life in China quickly made her online diary popular with more 1,500 regular subscribers to the blog posts.

An Open Letter to George Soros

George Soros
Open Society Institute
400 West 59th Street
New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Soros,

It’s no fun, of course, for a writer to get rejected. I’ve been rejected plenty of times by the blogs where I am the Russia columnist, American Thinker and Pajamas Media, and although (most of the time) they were right to do it that doesn’t make it any more pleasant.  But getting rejected by George Soros is a whole different matter.  Probably, it’s about as low as you can get.  This is how it happened to me, as if you didn’t know.

EDITORIAL: The Scourge of Pandemic Russian Racism and the Cowardly Treachery of Barack Obama

EDITORIAL

The Scourge of Pandemic Russian Racism
(and the Cowardly Treachery of Barack Obama)

According to a recent report by the BBC, nearly 60% of black people living in Russia have been physically assaulted in a racially motivated attack, and live in constant fear of such incidents.  A quarter of those surveyed by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy had been attacked more than once and four out of five had been verbally assaulted.

These besieged people are terrified to ride the metro, cower in their homes like prisoners on any nationalist holiday, and avoid all crowds in general. 

Commenters on the BBC story told the tale:

Putin, Dancing with Neo-Nazis

Just say "NO!" to Nazis

Writing on the Open Democracy network Russian journalist Vladimir Tupikin says that the Putin regime is dancing to the tune of the country’s neo-Nazi movement:

On Tuesday 4 August 2009 the St. Petersburg City Court examined the appeal in the case of Alexei Bychin, a young anti-fascist arrested in the summer of last year. According to witnesses, the trial lasted around three minutes and upheld Bychin’s sentence: five years in a maximum security prison. From three to five, as people say in jest. But this time the story isn’t funny at all.

At the beginning of the white nights season in the middle of June 2008, a group of young punk rockers were walking around in the centre of Petersburg. Among them was Alexei Bychin, who had the ironic punk nickname Tolsty (Fatty), because he is thin and small (50 kg, 165 cm). There were girls in the group too.

EDITORIAL: The Putin Kremlin is Clinically Paranoid

EDITORIAL

The Putin Kremlin is Clinically Paranoid

We reported last week on the insane ravings of Vladimir Putin,  statements so detached from reality that they could only come from the mouth of a neo-Soviet lunatic.  But no sooner had we done so than Putin’s man in Ingushetia was spewing paranoia so demented it made Putin look like Gandhi.

The indispensible Paul Goble reports that Yunus-Bek Yevkurov believes he had discovered the identity of those who are relentlessly gunning down his cabinet members and police officers.  Islamic radicals? Of course not!  The culprits are America, Britain and Israel.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Autonomous Jewish Fraud

 

EDITORIAL

The Autonomous Jewish Fraud

That tiny red dot in the lower right corner of the map of Russia is known as “The Autonomous Jewish Oblast.”  It was created in 1934 as part of Josef Stalin’s efforts to purge European Russia of all undesirables, much as his good pal and ally Adolf Hitler was doing in Germany.  By 1939, there were nearly 18,000  jews living in the Oblast.  Twenty years later, there were less than 15,000. Today, less than 3,000 jews call the region home and ethnic Russians make up 90% of the population.

You’d think Russia was done with practicing ridiculous fraud in the AJO, but it’s far from the case.

Images from Russia’s Racist Wasteland

A Russian photographer offers the following images of migrant workers in Moscow, how they live and how they work. Their indomitable spirit is an inspiration to us all, as is the rancid nature of their neo-Soviet oppression. Click the link for many more (hat tip Global Voices).

EDITORIAL: Putin’s Russia, in Black and White

EDITORIAL

Putin’s Russia, in Black and White

Russia in Black & White

Well, maybe this one will do it.

Last week the AFP reported that a Russian ice cream bar was being marketed with the poster shown at left, which declares:  “Everybody’s talking about it — darkness inside of whiteness.”  It is emblazoned with a likeness of U.S. President Barack Obama.

AFP quoted Andrei Gubaidullin of Voskhod Advertising Agency, who created the ad: “For Russia, this is not racist. It is fun and that’s it. We don’t consider teasing ethnic groups racist. It is just seen as a joke.”

Is this sufficiently blunt trauma for Mr. Obama to wake up and realize the horror of the neo-Soviet state arrayed against him?

If not, there’s more. Much more.

Another Barbaric Race Murder in Putin’s Russia

Tang Quoc Binh, the latest victim of Russian barbarism

Voice of Vietnam reports:

Tang Quoc Binh, a 21-year-old Vietnamese student, was fatally stabbed by a group of strangers near a metro station in Moscow on January 9 when he was going home.  Binh was taken to a local hospital for treatment, but he died the next day due to serious wounds. The gangsters were said to have run away after stabbing Binh.  The Vietnamese Embassy is coordinating with the local administration and the Vietnamese community in Russia to take care of Binh’s funeral and trace the murderers. Born in the northern province of Hai Duong in 1988, the first-year student was studying at the State University of Management (GUU) in Moscow.

EDITORIAL: Mr. Obama, How Dare you Stand Mute on Russian Racism?

EDITORIAL

Mr. Obama, How Dare you Stand Mute on Russian Racism?

If you were to simply peruse the news accounts of race violence in Russia during the last two weeks, they would read like pulp fiction — and the realization that they are nothing like fiction, but the cold, hard reality of daily life in the neo-Soviet dictatorship for hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned people, both visitors and residents, this realization would surely curdle your blood.

The silence of Barack Obama in the face of this outrage, just as certainly, would make your blood run cold.

Russia’s Coming Fascist-Racist Nightmare

Last week, a black American teenager, a tourist from Rhode Island, was stabbed in Russia, in just the latest in a long series of brutal and barbaric racial attacks in which Russia leads the world. In another, a 20-year-old Tajik worker had his head cut off and stuffed in a dumpster. These events continued apace even as the Russian economy was supposedly flowering. What will happen now as it collapses? When will dark-skinned people, of any nationality, realize that they have no future in Putin’s Russia?  Paul Goble reports:

Rising unemployment, cuts in the size of the military, drug abuse and alcoholism, corruption, and increasing attacks on ethnic minorities “have created [in Russia] a very favorable basis for the development of fascism,” according to one of the leading foreign policy commentators in Azerbaijan.
Indeed, the situation is so dire and Russia is so “pregnant with fascism,” says Vafa Guluzade, that ethnic Azerbaijanis – and presumably members of other groups from other post-Soviet states – now resident in the Russian Federation should “leave there before it is too late”.

Guluzade, who earlier served as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Arabic translator and as the late Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev’s national security advisor, said that the situation in Russia today resembles the one in Germany in 1933 which brought Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power there. “God forbid that Russia will repeat the fate of fascist Germany,” he continued, a danger that could prove threatening to a large number of states given Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. As a result, he said, the entire world should be paying close attention to what is taking place in the Russian Federation now. 

“The present leadership of Russia has led its people into poverty,” the Azerbaijani analyst added.

Annals of Russian Racism

Below is a screen shot from the website of the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda network known as Russia Today, dated November 28th.  It says that a representative of the Ukrainian Chess Federation had a chess trophy he was carrying in his luggage stolen during baggage handling at an airport.  When queried, the airport security director blamed Georgian thieves, according to Russia Today:  “Going into the the things of our passengers is widespread among Georgians. We’re wrestling with this problem, but defeating evil that has been accumulating for many years is difficult.”

There’s just one problem. He had no reason to blame the Georgians, and didn’t.  The airport where the theft took place was in Kiev, Ukraine, and the representative was flying in from Germany.  According to the Other Russia, the security director didn’t say Georgians were the likely thieves, he said Ukrainian baggage handlers were. But the Russian word for baggage handlers — gruzchik — is similar to the Russian word for Georgians — gruzin — and therefore Russia Today translators had a wonderful opportunity for a Freudian slip, of which they took full advantage.

Race Murder Explodes in Putin’s Russia

The Moscow Times reports that already this year Vladimir Putin’s Russia has seen a shocking 114 race-motivated murders, a shocking average of than two each and every week.

More than 100 people have been killed in hate crimes in Russia this year, with natives of Central Asia being the most frequently targeted victims, according to figures released this week by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. Through Nov. 15, a total of 114 people died in racist attacks, 37 of whom hailed from the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, according to the nongovernmental organization.Alexander Brod, head of the NGO, said this week that another 357 victims were injured in the 269 hate crimes that his organization managed to register in the same period, Interfax reported Tuesday.

EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Ignorance

EDITORIAL

Annals of Russian Ignorance

The black voters cast their ballots without thinking. The victory of democracy and tolerance in the United States is a sham. Obama won simply because of the black majority that voted for his skin color and not his views or policies.

–Russian political analyst Alexei Chadayev, quoted in the Moscow Times

Sometimes (well, most of the time) Russian ignorance is so mind-bogglingly deep and wide that there simply are no words to describe it. Often, when one Russian tries to correct another, it only makes matters worse.

Take Moscow Times columnist Boris Kagarlitsky, for instance, in our view one of the most hopelessly ignorant human beings on the planet. Trying to correct Chadayev’s shameless racism, he points out:  “Blacks have never constituted a majority in the United States, and even if the Latino population were added, the aggregate sum would still represent a minority of voters. The truth is that the majority of Americans who voted for Obama were not black.” 

Even Kagarlitsky, a rabid Russian nationalist and Kremlin apologist, is shocked and embarrassed by this so-called intellectual’s naked barbarism, and chides: “Not only do our pundits have a distorted view of what is happening overseas, they are detached from domestic realities as well.”  Appparently he doesn’t stop to think that this ignorance might bleed into the Kremlin as well. 

Or reach himself — but any educated American would instantly realize that it has.  After all, he’s one of those pundits.  Kagarlitsky’s comments are just as stupid as those he purports to criticize, if not stupider. And given the breathtaking, apelike stupidity of Mr. Chadeyev, that’s saying quite a lot.

Putin is Responsible: Part III — Race Violence

This is the third part in our series today on material in the Russian press blaming Vladimir Putin’s policy failures for the wave of national catastrophes sweeping over Russia. Paul Goble reports:

The number of extremist crimes in the Russian Federation rose 62.4 percent from 2007 to 2008, senior officials say, but Moscow experts suggest that this figure “has nothing in common” with reality and that the actual number of hate crimes is perhaps five times greater than the number reported. Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Investigation Committee of the Russian Federation Procuracy, has said that there had been 380 hate crimes reported to the authorities in the first three quarters of 2008, “62.4 percent more” than in the same period a year ago.

Moreover, he added, many of the hate crimes registered this year are more violent and destructive of human life and property than they were in earlier years, a disturbing trend that he suggested the Russian Federation’s militia and prosecutors are doing everything they can to reverse. But as frightening as the data Markin presented, independent experts disputed it, arguing that the authorities were including many incidents that should not be counted as hate crimes even as they ignore the far larger number of criminal actions that are never reported to the militia or that the militia refuses to deal with at all.

EDITORIAL: The Story of David and Goliaputin

EDITORIAL

The Story of David and Goliaputin

See that fellow above? Sure, you see him. He’s the one standing next to the burning cross and wearing the KKK costume.  The one who’s probably just about ready to go lynch some black and/or Jewish children, and likely salivating at the prospect.

His name is David Duke, an infamous American wacko and racist, proud card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Think of him as Pat Buchanan without the pretense.

And guess what! Just like Pat, David Loves Vladimir Putin’s KGB-dominated, hyper-racist state of Russia!

The Sunday Shock: Chechens Take over the Russian Army!

Paul Goble reports:

Because of an unusual combination of circumstances, Chechens could easily make up one-third of young Russian citizens to be drafted this fall, a figure that means non-Russians would easily form more than 50 percent of that draft class and one that is certain to disturb Russian commanders and politicians, according to a Moscow military analyst. In an extensive article in the current issue of “NG-Regiony,” Vladimir Mukhin calls into question official claims that the just-completed spring draft cycle was successfully fulfilled and points to even greater troubles ahead this fall in complecting the Russian Federation’s armed services. It is true, Mukhin says, that the military was able to draft the 133,200 young people in the plan and that 21.5 percent of them had higher educations, double the figure from a year earlier. It reduced the number of evaders to 6700, a quarter the rate one year earlier. But the military was able to do that only by drafting individuals whose health is at the very least questionable.

Human rights groups like the Soldiers’ Mothers committees believe that as many as half of those drafted should not have been because of poor health, and even the General Staff announced this time around that 30 percent of those it was calling to the colors should not have been. But the prospects Moscow faces this fall are even more problematic, Mukhin continued. On the one hand, the services will have to draft 200,000 young people all at once, 180 percent of the number drafted this spring, and on the other, it will have to fill simultaneously two classes who will be leaving service at the same time because of changes in the length of service required. Indeed, Mukhin argued, “such a large influx into the army as is scheduled to occur this fall has not happened before in post-Soviet Russia to their more senior commanders and the media, about whether they will be able to cope.

In this situation, Mukhin says, “it is not excluded that in order to fulfill draft quotas for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and other Russian forces, the military commissariats will begin to draft young people from Chechnya,” a step they have not taken in recent times because of the troubles there but which could generate about 70,000 draftees this fall. Because Chechens are “more healthy and accustomed to the military way of life than are young people from other regions,” few of them would be excluded under the new and more relaxed health grounds. And if Moscow does decided to take this step, Mukhin writes, then this fall “every third new draftee could be a Chechen.” Mukhin’s article is not the only one focusing on these problems. “Gazeta” reported that the military’s draft program on “The New Face of the Armed Forces” anticipates retaining the draft until at least 2030, thus eliminating one means commanders might have to maintain Russian dominance in the army.

And an essay carried by Sobkorr.ru discussing the situation argued that the desire of commanders to continue to rely on draftees not only reflects the continuing impact of what it called a Soviet-era mentality but also raised questions about what kind of conflicts Russia’s military in fact needs to be prepared for. Obviously, there are certain steps Moscow could take to address this situation – drafting a higher percentage of ethnic Russians than of others as it has done in the last two draft cycles or reducing the size of the military – but neither of those are attractive militarily or politically and consequently underscore just how many problems the Kremlin now has in filling the ranks.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !