EDITORIAL: There’s Sick, and then there’s Russian Sick

EDITORIAL

There’s Sick, and then there’s Russian Sick

Russia’s ability to surpass itself, week after appalling week, with ever lower levels of vile, nauseating, subhuman conduct is truly breathtaking.

Last week, Echo of Moscow Radio broke the story of how the annual Nashi orgy of xenophobia and aggressive nationalism known as Camp Selinger, a government-funded festival of barbaric outrage, plumbed inconceivable new depths by putting the virtual heads of opposition political leaders on pikes and decorating them as Nazis.

The Kremlin’s youthful thugs did not hesitate to include octogenarian Lyudmila Alexeeva among those so assaulted.

You read that right:  They put an eighty year old woman’s head on a pike and stuck a Nazi hat on her head. She’s a human rights activist. She’s utterly defenseless and frail. And she’s a Nazi.

Alekseeva on Putin’s Powerless Power

Paul Goble reports:

Moscow’s efforts to resolve the challenges it has faced in the North Caucasus over the last 20 years by force alone, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the grand dame of Russia’s human rights community says, have demonstrated “the powerlessness of [that kind of] power” and have contributed to the spread of “civil war” across the region.

In a comment in Osobaya Bukhva, Alekseyeva argues that even a “superficial” examination of what has taken place in that region shows the non-expert that Moscow is not solving the problems it faces but making them worse.
Moscow’s policy failure in this regard “began in Chechnya, [but] now it has spread already almost in all republics,” because the central powers that be have “not changed their tactic” and have acted in ways that lead either the victims or the families of the victims to “go into the woods” to take revenge.

EDITORIAL: He-Man Putin shows Snegurochka Who’s Boss

EDITORIAL

He-Man Putin shows Snegurochka Who’s Boss

Well, it’s another horrifying new low in the annals of Russian barbarism.

Dressed as Snegurochka, the Russian version of Mrs. Claus, 82-year-old human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseyeva appeared on New Year’s Eve (which Russians celebrate in lieu of Christmas) on Tverskaya Street, Moscow’s Fifth Avenue.  She waved happily to the assembled crowd. She posed for pictures and signed autographs.  A throng of her supporters and admirers gathered to congratulate her on her recent major award from the EU.

Care to guess what happened next?