As a result, there is no longer further need for the publishing of content here on WordPress.  La Russophobe’s content will now appear on her Facebook and Twitter pages, and her readers are welcomed and encouraged to sign up for fast, easy, free, anonymous accounts on those two websites so that they can continue commenting on and adding to that content as darkness falls on neo-Soviet Russia.

(1)  EDITORIAL:  We Told You So

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Estonia Whips Russian Butt

(3) EDITORIAL:  The Russian Economy is Collapsing

(4)  Viking Russia, Land of Barbarians

(5)  Andrei Zubov, Russophobe

(6) Kara-Murza on Putin’s Return

(7)  CARTOON: Yelkin on Putin’s Return

NOTE:  In her latest column on the mighty Pajamas Media megablog, LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld details the absolute vindication of the blog she started on April 2, 2006, in order to  warn the world that neo-Soviet Russia under Vladimir Putin was here for good.

NOTE:  In her latest column on the powerful and influential American Thinker blog, Kim lashes out at the cowardly, craven evil that is Gordon Hahn, a representative Kremlin stooge working feverishly to help lower resistance to Vladimir Putin as president for life.

We Told you So

On September 28, 2011, a perfect metaphor for the horror that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia appeared in The Independent, which has over the years been responsible for some of the toughest and most insightful reporting on Russia (hat tip: Streetwise Professor).

The paper wrote about how thousands upon thousands of stray dogs roam the streets of Moscow, how they have killed Muscovites in packs and how they pose all manner of serious health concerns, to say nothing of betraying Russia’s eternal poverty regardless of the propaganda the state may churn out.  Yet Russians, idiots that they are, are fighting to keep these dogs on the streets, and do what they can to care for them.

Similarly Josef Stalin is beloved by Russians, even though he murdered more of them than any other person who ever lived.

And similarly, the proud KGB spy and murderer of Starovoitova, of Litvinenko, of Politikovskaya, of Yushenkov, of Shchekochikhin, of Girenko, of Klebnikov, of Kozlov, of Estemirova, of Markelov and of so very many others, known as Vladimir Putin, is being embraced as he declares himself president for life. Lenin, Stalin, Putin.

On April 2, 2006, we warned the world that it would be so.

We formed this blog, and for the next five years, five months and twenty-two days, we warned that Putin would never leave power, that he would consistently reduce Russian democracy and increase its neo-Soviet character until Russia was a fully realized neo-Soviet dictatorship. On September 24, 2011, we were proved finally, horribly, undeniably right.

There were those who said Russia could “never go back” to the dark days of the Soviet past. There were those who said Putin would never return to power, that he would fade into the background and allow Dima Medvedev and his successors to build a civilized democratic state.

They were lying. It was La Russophobe that was telling the truth, all along.

Russians will fight to keep stray dogs on the streets of their capital city, dogs which maul and brutalize them, but they will not fight to keep Putin out of power. That really says all you need to know about the Russian people of the new millennium.  They are, as Robert H. Boyle of Sports Illustrated magazine once called them, “desperately screwed up.”

We are not the only ones to have made this prediction, of course.  The brilliant Jeffrey Taylor of The Altantic magazine beat us to it by several years when he called Putin’s Russia “Zaire with permafrost” and “finished” in May 2001.  The world didn’t listen to him, either.

But nobody else in the world has put out this message so consistently and constantly as this blog, La Russophobe, founded by Kim Zigfeld as a response to the nonsensical propaganda put out by the Putin regime regarding its democratic intentions.

Since then, we have watched neo-Soviet tanks roll into tiny Georgia, seen even smaller Estonia besieged by the Kremlin’s computer hackers, watched the president of Ukraine brutally poisoned, and gasped in horror as Russian brutality spread throughout the Caucasus region.  We have seen malignant Russian influence support maniac after maniac across the globe, from Libya to North Korea, from Cuba to Venezuela.

We have seen newspapers closed, reporters murdered, opposition political leaders jailed. Foreign journalists have come in for the same horrifyingly barbaric torture. Over and over, international courts have convicted Russia of state-sponsored barbarism. We have seen the neo-Soviet state we predicted come to horrifying life, and we are not happy about being right. Indeed, nobody could be more unhappy.

But we are proud of our achievement. We have documented this international crisis, and we have given the world fair warning, a chance to avoid the mistakes of the past when the Soviet toxin was allowed to spread and torment the world for decades.  We call upon the leaders of the civilized world to rise now, stand up to neo-Soviet Russia, and end this atrocity before history once again repeat itself to the lasting  detriment of the world and, most of all, the sorry, pathetic and benighted people of Russia who have brought this terror on themselves.

Estonia Whips Russian Butt

Reader “Robert” directs us to a BBC web page which compares the performance of the nations in post-Soviet space on economics, health and democracy. It provides three charts which reveal shocking facts about the failure of Putin’s resource-rich Russia when compared with tiny Estonia, the leader of the group.

First comes economics, which reveals not one but three stunning insights about Russia:

The chart shows Estonia has consistently out-performed Putin’s Russia.  It also shows that even at Russia’s lowest point, 1998, it was still well above the regional average, meaning that when Russians complain they needed to impose dictatorship because of their unusual suffering they are simply lying.   Many countries were worse off than Russia at that time, but they didn’t turn to the secret police.  And finally, it clearly shows that Russia’s rebound begin in 1998, two years before Putin took the reins of power as president, under Yeltsin.

Chart number two shows that Russian life expectancy lags far behind the group average, and that compared to Estonians Russians hardly live at all.

Finally, there is the chart for democracy, and here again Russia’s performance is truly abysmal.

It’s wonderfully ironic that Estonia is so far out ahead of Russia, since Russia has been doing all it can to destroy Estonia, including a brutal and internationally famous wave of cyber attacks. Through it all, Estonia has developed a fully-realized and civilized democracy, spitting in the eye of its giant neighbor and it threats, showing the people of Russia that it can be done. Without oil resources, Estonia has proven to Russia that it can build a vibrant economy that puts Russia’s to shame.

Estonia has won.

The Russian Economy is Collapsing

In 2008, nearly $130 billion flew out of Russia, erasing the modicum of inflows registered in 2006 and 2007. For its size, Russia as an investment destination pales in comparison to South Korea. Total equity portfolio inflow into Russia in 2009 was just $3.4 billion, according to World Bank data, making it the lowest of the big emerging markets by far. India, China and Brazil all registered inflows over $20 billion. A recent opinion poll by the Levada Centre shows that 22% of Russia’s adult population would like to leave the country for good, up from 7% in 2007. It is the highest figure since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when only 18% said they wanted to get out. Over 50% of Russian entrepreneurs said that they wanted leave the country. “From a macro perspective, I don’t want to be in Russia,” says Justin Leverenz, emerging markets portfolio manager at Oppenheimer Funds in New York. “From an investor’s point of view, Russian politics are far beyond what I’m able to analyze.”

Believe it or not, those words appear in a recent article in which the author is trying to put a positive spin on Russia.  Can you imagine what Russia’s economic critics are saying these days?

The Russian stock and currency markets recently set two-year record lows. Capital flight for 2011 is already close to the level it reached in all of 2010. And it’s not even October yet.  Instead of looking for new solutions and new leadership, Russia has just announced that Vladimir Putin will return to office as president for life.

Today, one Russian ruble is worth 0.0313 U.S. dollars. When Vladimir Putin was reelected to a second term in 2004, one ruble was worth 0.0351.  Between 2004 and 2011 under Putin’s rule, Russia’s currency has lost over ten percent of its value.

The World Bank recently issued a dire warning in which it openly stated that Russia’s economy is entirely enslaved by the world price of crude oil and that, given the prospects for a new global recession, Russian debt could soar by a factor of five and anemic growth could be choked off entirely in the coming months.

Russia will ignore that warning.

The International Monetary Fund, by contrast, has warned the Putin regime that it must cut spending immediately or risk disastrous consequences when the inevitable economic downturn comes for Russia. Instead of heeding this advice, Russia is launching a massive program of military and civilian spending  that puts the country recklessly on course for bankruptcy.

Russia will not heed that advice.

Meanwhile, Russia has purged from the ranks of government its leading and most-respected economics guru, Alexei Kudrin, who had been the voice of reason.

Russia is doomed.

Alexei Bayer, writing in the Moscow Times:

The origins of the Russian state and its early history help explain the country’s modern political makeup.

According to the Kievan Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1110, Slavic tribes invited Scandinavian prince Rurik to rule over them in the 9th century. But the history of the Viking expansion in Western Europe suggests that an “invitation” was hardly necessary. In the West, the Vikings began by raiding settlements, pillaging them and dragging their inhabitants off to slavery. They set up outposts to collect tributes, gradually becoming feudal lords. They adopted the local language and customs and eventually melded with the local population.

The Norsemen followed the same pattern in Britain, France and Sicily. The Varangians, as they were known in Russia, became feudal lords and the name of their tribe, the Rus, gave Russia its name just as Normandy was named after the Normans.

Soon Rurik’s descendants and other Varangians adopted the Russian language and merged into Russian society, creating the Russian state. Assimilation occurred in the West as well, but the difference in Russia was that the division between “foreign” rulers and the people was never erased, persisting through the ages. Most of the time, the rulers and the people lived at peace, but in the 16th century, Ivan the Terrible waged a war on his people that was just as brutal as his campaign against the Tatars.

Peter the Great reasserted Russia’s origins as a Viking state by gaining access to the Baltic and establishing St. Petersburg in the land of his ancestors. The new capital has often been referred to by Russian authors as a foreign city. Peter also ushered in a new foreign invasion. Over the next century, Russia had three foreign-born rulers and a steady stream of foreign aristocrats, artisans, farmers and adventurers seeking work, profits and favors from the court.

Of course, the aristocracy and royalty were often foreign in many other countries in Europe. The fact that Russian rulers came from abroad or that in the 19th century the aristocracy spoke mostly French does not mean much. But the Russian people have always shown not only a strange alienation from their rulers, but also a complete disengagement from their state. They have behaved like an occupied nation, never demanding a voice in their own affairs and implicitly recognizing the right of the Varangians to rule. Gentler rulers were never popular. Especially despised were those who tried to find common ground with the people or were “too Russian,” such as Nikita Khrushchev andMikhail Gorbachev. The most respected leaders were harsh — and frequently foreign, such as Catherine the Great and Josef Stalin.

On the other hand, the only major popular rising in Russian history — the 18th-century Pugachyov rebellion — bore the hallmarks of a war of liberation, with its leader styling himself as a truly Russian tsar.

The Bolshevik regime was established along the same lines. Based on an imported ideology, Marxism, it initially considered Russia a steppingstone toward a worldwide proletarian revolution. This did not pan out, and later Soviet elites were drawn from the Russian people. But the ruling elite remained a separate, foreign caste. Stalin unleashed a brutal war on his own people that was far more destructive than the German invasion.

Today’s Russia, though ruled by Russians, is another variation on the Varangians. The ruling bureaucracy — starting from Prime MinisterVladimir Putinand the members of his clan — act like voracious invaders, stripping Russia’s assets and sending them offshore. Anyone trying to stop or expose this despoliation risks going to jail or worse. The massive neglect of investment, infrastructure, education and other aspects of Russia’s future can only be understood by accepting Russia as a Viking state.

“Why do you hate your own country so much?” This was the angry reaction of one Russian who had just listened to a devastating critique of everything that Communism had done to his country between 1917 and 1990. The event was a seminar at the Moscow School of Political Studies and the speaker who had provoked this outburst was Andrei Zubov, one of Russia’s most brilliant — and most controversial — historians.

Zubov, who is the editor and co-author of a two-volume history of Russia in the 20th century, has a burning desire to make Russians face up to the realities of the Soviet era. He used his talk (which I attended as a participant in a later seminar) to describe in relentless detail the way in which all that was good in Russia’s past — not least the flowering of culture that took place in the second half of the 19th century — was destroyed by Lenin, Stalin and their associates. But his remarks about today’s Russia were no less striking.

For Zubov, Stalinism was worse than Nazism since it left nothing untouched; art, literature, education, the whole of civil society was sacrificed to the goal of creating Homo Sovieticus, a new type of man never before seen in the history of the world. He quoted a Bolshevik writer in 1923: “Parental authority? No such thing. The authority of religion? Ditto. Traditions? There aren’t any. Moral feeling? The old morality has died, but a new one has yet to appear.” Morality had to be totally subject to the interests of the class struggle.

As the Communists tightened their grip on society, Zubov explained, there was open talk of the abolition of the idea of the family, of belief in God, of love for one’s fatherland and reverence for the memory of one’s ancestors. “Pushkin and Dostoevsky were thrown overboard from the ship of revolution without a second thought; national history was ridiculed and then forgotten; countless experiments destroyed the system of educating the young.” For the Bolsheviks the complete destruction of the fabric of society was vitally important because it enabled them to strengthen their power over people.

The new Soviet man was trained to lie in order to live. “He could talk at a party meeting about proletarian internationalism and the brotherhood of workers, while knowing that any unsanctioned meeting with a foreigner would immediately mean a summons to the KGB with dire results for himself and his family.” He learnt not even to consider trying to build a better life with neighbours, colleagues, fellow villagers or citizens.

How much has changed since 1990? Zubov quoted a remark made by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in that year: “The clock of Communism has struck its last hour, but the concrete structure has not yet collapsed. How can we manage to be liberated, rather than being crushed under the ruins?”

In Zubov’s view, despite all the changes that have taken place over the last 20 years, “we have not yet been able to struggle out from under the concrete blocks”. Step by step Soviet attitudes had regained the ground they seemed to have lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian government, both central and local, was more authoritarian since the mid-1990s.

It was outrageous, he said, that the Lenin mausoleum still stood in Red Square and that so many statues of Soviet leaders adorned Russian towns and villages. Germany, by contrast, had preserved as memorials of the Nazi era, not statues of Hitler, but concentration camp sites. If statues of past statesmen were needed, it would be better to honour Pyotr Stolypin, who as a reforming prime minister in 1906-11 represented the last chance of avoiding the catastrophe that followed.

The message to his audience — made up of politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs and government officials from all over the country — could not have been clearer. Unless and until Russia rids itself of all vestiges of the Soviet regime it will remain a dysfunctional society.

Zubov’s speech was clear, well argued, delivered without oratorical flourishes, but informed by profound grief at the damage inflicted on the country by its misguided leaders over the past century. As he remarked later, he wept many times as he worked on his new history.

The reaction of his Russian listeners was as interesting as the speech itself. One man, furious at Zubov’s remarks, referred movingly to the sacrifices his father and grandfather had made in defending the country against foreign aggressors — was Zubov condemning all those who had fought for the Soviet Union in the Second World War?

Zubov replied by quoting a famous war poem by Konstantin Simonov, “Remember, Alyosha”, which speaks of the soldier’s love of Russia, “the great bitter land I was born to defend”. Those who fought in the war, Zubov said, were defending not the Communist ideology or the Soviet state, but the Russian land. Many people both in the army and in the home front dreamed that after victory over Hitler they would liberate their country from Stalin, “but Stalin stole the people’s victory and enslaved the Russians”.

To judge from comments made after the session, it seemed that more of the attendees sided with Zubov than with his critics. Many of them were in their twenties or early thirties, and had no experience of life under the Soviet system. Whereas their parents had Soviet ideology rammed down their throats in the Pioneers or the Komsomol, they belong to the internet generation. Their views about Russia and its place in the world are increasingly formed, not by state-controlled TV, but by popular bloggers who have no inhibitions about exposing corruption in high places and attacking the way Russia is run. The internet is where the most vibrant political debates take place.

These are the people, Zubov believes, who have the potential to end Russia’s isolation and establish the country as a respected member of the international community. Yet, as he points out, true modernisation is a long and arduous process requiring enormous political skill. It is not impossible that after all the suffering of the past century Russia could still become not necessarily a great but a Western country with a developed and responsible civil society. “Alternatively, if we shut ourselves off from the West we may try again to create the simulation of a powerful modern state but with a quickly deteriorating people, enslaved by a corrupt elite — a colossus with feet of clay, doomed to fall sooner or later.”

One of the surest signs of repression in Russia is a flourishing culture of political jokes. The 1930s and the 1970s, in particular, bear testimony to this. In 2008, when Vladimir Putin tricked term limits by becoming prime minister under hand-picked President Dmitri Medvedev, a new joke was born in the Moscow intelligentsia’s kitchens. The year is 2020. Putin and Medvedev are in a bar, drinking beer. Putin looks up and asks: “Dima, do you remember which one of us is president, and which one is prime minister?” Medvedev thinks for a short while, then replies: “I think you are president, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and I am prime minister.” “Then it’s your turn to pay for the beer,” responds Putin.

Vladimir Putin’s weekend announcement of his return to the Kremlin in 2012 was hardly surprising—except, perhaps, to the wishful thinkers, both in Russia and in the West, who continued, in spite of the facts, to hope for a “Medvedev thaw.” The outgoing president himself, in his speech at the ruling United Russia party’s congress, hinted that the 2012 switchover was planned from the very beginning, ridiculing experts who spent hours of airtime and pages of op-eds debating his future plans for Russia. To be sure, the “Medvedev presidency” was a brilliant public relations move. While the regime further strengthened authoritarian controls (suffice to mention increasing the presidential term from four years to six, and giving a new prison sentence to former oil tycoon turned Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky), Medvedev’s phony reformist rhetoric lulled a large part of potential opposition supporters inside Russia, as well as some of the leading opinion-makers in the West, who would otherwise be more vocal in their criticism of the Kremlin. If there is one positive outcome of last weekend’s announcement, it is that they will finally have to face the reality—though the White House statement that its “reset” with Moscow will continue regardless of who is the president of Russia, already raises some doubts.

Other outcomes are not so positive. With Putin’s return to the Kremlin, analysts are predicting a new “brain drain”—an exodus of Russia’s educated and creative young professionals who will not see a future with a ruler that plans to remain in power longer than Joseph Stalin (on the current timetable, until 2024). Another likely result is a renewed crackdown on what remains of Russia’s independent media and the already-illusive civic freedoms; a new round of repressions against the regime’s political opponents; continuing corruption; and a more confrontational stance toward the West and the ex-Soviet “near abroad,” especially as Russia’s increasingly shaky economic situation will necessitate diverting people’s attention elsewhere (the government recentlyadmitted that the budget would only balance at an elevated oil price of $116 per barrel—with the current price being $104).

The most dangerous result of Putin’s attempt to cement his power, however, is an increased likelihood of upheavals. Popular discontent is rising: the August surveys by the independent Levada polling agency showed that 54 percent of Russians disapprove of the current government, while 64 percent would like to see the composition of the United Russia–dominated Parliament change “significantly” or “totally.” According to the same polling data, most Russians also believe that the upcoming parliamentary elections on December 4 will be a farce. With nine political parties across the spectrum—from the left-wing United Labor Front to the center-right Popular Freedom Party—denied registration and barred from the ballot, and a strict de facto censorship operating on national television, it is difficult to disagree with them. The 2012 presidential vote, meanwhile, is expected to be as predetermined as the “elections” in 2000, 2004, and 2008. With change through the ballot box made all but impossible, Russians’ growing impatience with the regime will likely be manifested in other ways. Recent street protests in Kaliningrad, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok may be an early sign of things to come. Russia’s rulers, who like to accuse opposition leaders and Western countries of preparing a “color revolution,” are doing everything to provoke a Tunisian-style uprising. The responsibility for its consequences will be wholly theirs.

Medvedev, who—just as the joke suggested—will shortly be relegated to the premiership, has faithfully kept to his scripted part. For nearly four years, he had the power—with a stroke of a pen—to dismiss Putin, pardon political prisoners, end censorship, and give the opposition access to elections. After all, history has known such unlikely transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, perhaps the most famous being 1970s Spain. Had Medvedev done this, he would have had the support of the most active and educated part of Russian society, as well as of world opinion. He could have changed Russia’s history. Instead, he chose to remain in it as a sad and inconsequential footnote.

Source: Ellustrator.

SPECIAL EXTRA EDITORIAL

Putin, President for Life

(1) EDITORIAL:  Prokhorov in the Woodshed

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Drunken Russian Killers

(3) EDITORIAL:  Does Britain Remember Chamberlain?

(4)  EDITORIAL: An Open Letter to Donna Welles

(5)  Cameron as Chamberlain

(6)  Russia and its Slaves

NOTE:  On September 22, 2011, the Russian stock market lost over 8% of its value on news of declining international demand for crude oil, and it is down over 30% since early April.

NOTE:  Stalin on school notebooks for children! What will those Russians think of next?? (Hat tip:  Reader “Garnet”)

NOTE:  An American is dancing at the Bolshoi! Another sign of the apocalypse for Russia! 

NOTE: The Russian website GolosRuNeta is holding an online straw poll for president. Way out in the lead is Russian Orthodox priest, actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, writer and all-around weirdo Ivan Okhlobstin. Who says Russians don’t take the future of their children seriously?? Vote now, and often.

Prokhorov in the Woodshed

Last week saw the Right Cause party of oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov go down in flames.  It used to be the case that the Kremlin liquidated politicians (like former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov) because they were too anti-Kremlin. But those days are over. Now, it’s going after all political figures who are not pro-Kremlin enough!  It is the natural progression as Russia returns to a neo-Soviet state.

Two huge myths about Russia were exploded this week, first that the existence of Prokhorokov’s party showed Russia had some sense of democratic civility and second that the June airliner crash in Petrozavodsk was due to the age of the plane and its Russian make.

Now, the entire world can clearly see that Prokhorokov’s party was a total sham and, as we report elsewhere in today’s issue, that the plane crashed because of the classic Russian reason, the crew was drunk.

But will the world learn anything from the destruction of these myths? Will it stop wondering whether there is any real opposition in Russia, and what kind of government Russia has? Will it see that the government of Russia is corrupt and incompetent, and that it sustains itself by crushing real opposition and creating straw-man, Potemkin opposition just as was the case in Soviet times?

Will it see that all of this is predictable, when a country is ruled by a proud KGB spy?

From the beginning, Prokhorov openly proclaimed himself a supporter of Vladimir Putin. Told to make it seem like he was an opponent, Prokhorov did so, in order to make the Putin regime seem more legitimate.  But when he foolishly did so in his own way, without first getting the written approval of the Kremlin for his every word, Prokhorov was simply liquidated, just like Mikhail Khodorkovsky before him.

But Khodorkovsky expressed real opposition to Putin, while Prokhorov was merely a sham.  These days, however, the Kremlin cannot even tolerate sham opposition that is not sufficiently servile, and it obviously went wrong in choosing Prokhorov in this regard.  One might think the Kremlin would be at least a little embarrassed by this error, but instead it seems pleased, as the government was in Soviet times, to show its power, its ability to crush and destroy.

Perhaps the most pathetic result of this decision is that now some in Russia are talking about the pathetic Grigori Yavlinsky and his Yabloko party being asked to step into Prokhorokov’s shoes as the designated shame party of liberalism.  One would not have thought Yavlinsky could sink any lower into the mire of despotism after his craven failure to lead Yabloko in open challenge to the Kremlin when it was blithely excluded from the Duma, but in Russia there is no nadir which cannot be worsened, it seems.

Drunken Russian Killers

When a TU-134 jet went down in Petrozavodsk, Russia on June 20th this year, some people (the Russian government included) wanted to blame the aging plane itself.  Now, they own the poor plane an apology.

The 47 Russians who lost their lives on that flight were not killed by the plane, nor were they killed by any “evil” Chechen terrorist. They were killed by a fellow Russian, the navigator of the plane Aman Atayev.  He was drunk at the wheel.

So even if the passengers had been flying in a brand new Boeing aircraft made in America with the latest technology, they still would not have been safe.   Atayev’s mother says he turned to drinking as a result of his recent divorce, yet another omnipresent Russian social ill.  She says so as if he were somehow the innocent victim of that divorce, but in fact one Russian man murders his wife every forty minutes, so it’s quite likely he brutalized his wife emotionally or physically or both, and that’s why she left him.

Bogus orders given by the drunken Atayev directly caused the plane to drop out of the sky.  And the incident was hardly an aberration in Russia. As the Moscow Times reports:  “The committee’s report sheds light on why Russian airlines are the world’s most deadly this year, surpassing the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, with 119 deaths in eight fatal crashes, including this month’s crash that killed most of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team.”

Russia is such a basket case of a country that it’s actually possible to imagine that Kremlin made up the story about the navigator being drunk to hide the fact that Russian planes are mechanically unsafe and unsalvageable, in order to avoid more widespread panic.  If the pilot is blamed, then maybe the Kremlin can just crack down and save lives.

But if the Kremlin thinks so, it is out of its mind.  Russia can no more control its drunkenness than it can control its winters, and drunk pilots mean nobody is safe on any plane, no matter how modern or foreign-made.

Incidents of drunken flying are legion in Russia. The MT continues:

Drunken crew members have tarnished the safety and reputation of Russian airlines in recent years. In 2009, an S7 pilot was removed from a flight from Germany on suspicion of being drunk.

Later that year, an Aeroflot pilot was removed from a New York-bound plane in Moscow after passengers, including socialite Ksenia Sobchak, accused him of being drunk. The airline later said tests revealed no signs of intoxication and the pilot might have suffered a stroke.

The Investigative Committee confirmed last year that a drunken pilot was to blame for the 2008 crash of anAeroflot-Nord 737 jet in Perm that killed all 88 people on board.

And Russia’s Kremlin KGB rulers are also drunk at the switch.  They have done nothing to make Russia’s skies safer, instead they have ignored the problem until after each spectacular crash, and then they mumble about criminal charges.  Russia has invited the world to Sochi in 2014 for the Olympic Games. How many visitors will make it out of Russia alive?

Does Britain still Remember Chamberlain?

Simon Tisdall, a columnist for The Guardian in Britain, says Russians think of British Prime Minister David Cameron a “useful idiot” who offers the KGB regime of Vladimir Putin “de facto, unthinking legitimization.”

Tony Brenton, Britain’s ambassador to Russia from 2004 through 2008, says that “Russia’s ruling elite has become immovable and predatory, elections are fixed, corruption is on a par with Nigeria, the legal system is pliable, and the police and security agencies untouchable.” He says its government is a sham:  “While Dmitri Medvedev enjoys the title of president, Vladimir Putin continues to call the real shots.”

But despite that, the British idiot-in-chief recently traveled to Moscow and inked hundreds of millions in trade deals in exchange for ignoring Russian human rights atrocities and the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Taking his cues from America’s coward-in-chief Barack Obama, Cameron is attempting to curry favor with the Kremlin in order to score cheap political points at home.  In our issue today, we republish an essay by Russian Pavel Stroilov warning Cameron about the dangers his stupidity present for British national security.

Of course, it’s hard to blame the Brits too harshly when the President of the United States is an even more egregious traitor to democratic values in Russia.  But it’s still possible. Because the USA did not have a barbaric murder like that of Litvinenko to remind it of the true horrors of the neo-Soviet state, and Britain does. Nor does the USA have a Neville Chamberlain, who attempted to appease Nazi Germany and saw the results as bombs rained down across his country.

Have the Britons completely forgotten Litvinenko and Chamberlain? Are they so panicked by the global economic downturn that they are prepared to abandon their national security and their basic national values in hopes of receiving some of the bounty of Russia’s oil wealth?

If so, they should look at their financial pages.  The Russian stock market and national currency just took their biggest hits in two years.  The Russian stock market has now lost nearly one third of its value in just the last six months.  Russia can’t even help itself, much less other nations.

And they should look at Russia’s leadership. Do they really think they can trust a clan of proud KGB spies who spent their lives learning how to destroy Britain and trying to?

An Open Letter to Donna Welles

Blogger Donna Welles is having trouble understanding why Russians don’t understand why jokes about xenophobia are funny.  Herein, we explain it to her.

Dear Ms. Welles,

We thought we’d help you out with your conundrum about Russians and xenophobia.  You relate a “joke” about it told to you about Russia by a Russian who asked you why it was funny.  You suggest it might be because the joke wasn’t invented by a Russian, and therefore isn’t tortuously illogical enough for a Russian to comprehend.  But that isn’t it at all.

The reason is much more simple:  For Russians, xenophobia and racism are normal, not unusual, and certainly not suspect.  Russians believe that all people, just like them, hate those from other countries and want to see them destroyed.  It’s necessary to view the world like that, you see, if you want to live by such a view yourself.

Similarly, Russians reject other liberal values like democracy and freedom that are embraced by people in normal, civilized countries. When given the chance, Russians happily selected a proud KGB spy to lead their country, and they applauded as he wiped out all the democratic reforms that had been implemented by his predecessor.  Now, there are no real opposition parties in the national legislature and governors and mayors are appointed rather than being elected. Newspapers are under state control and television is actually operated by the state just like it was in the USSR.

These issues actually reinforce each other, of course. Textbooks in Russian schools don’t teach students about the values of diversity or the accomplishments of people in other countries.  They tell Russian students (and by “Russian” they mean white and Slavic and Orthodox) that it is only their achievements that matter, and that the whole world is trying to destroy them. It’s the same tactics that passed for education in Soviet times, and many of the teachers are Soviet teachers, never replaced.

So a “joke” about xenophobia is no funnier to a Russian than a joke about democracy or freedom would be to an American.

You tell a story about your black friend Sean being pelted with snowballs in St. Petersburg.  Sean was lucky!  Many black people have been murdered outright for the crime of trying to use the subways in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and thus rubbing elbows with Slavic, Orthodox Russians and contaminating them. Russians approve of such actions as a people, and that’s why you didn’t notice any advocates for diversity or defenders of civil liberties in Russia.  They’ve all been liquidated by the regime, most prominently the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

But in the end, of course, the Russian was quite right:  the “joke” isn’t the least bit funny.  Because it reflects the sad fate of Russians as they try to go it alone it the world, not realizing that their pathetically backwards economy (which results from their pathetic ignorance) isn’t remotely close to being good enough to shoulder the load.  As a result, friendless and isolated, Russia is once again on the pathway to national collapse.

Very truly yours,

La Russophobe

“Russian democracy has been buried under the ruins of New York’s twin towers”, famous KGB rebel Alexander Litvinenko wrote in 2002. The West, he warned, was making a grave mistake of going along with Putin’s dictatorship in exchange for his cooperation in the global war on terror. He would never be an honest partner, and would try to make the Western leaders complicit in his own crimes – from political assassinations to the genocide of Chechens. As a KGB officer, Putin would see every friendly summit-meeting as a potential opportunity to recruit another agent of influence.

David Cameron, whose summit-meeting with Putin coincided with the sombre jubilee of 9/11, would be well-advised to remember these warnings. The previous generation of Western leaders – from Bush to Blair to Schroeder to Berlusconi – has discredited itself by their ‘friendship’ with Putin, and got nothing in return. As The Spectator revealed this summer, there are serious questions to be asked about Russian secret service’s alleged links to Al-Qa’eda. Hopefully, the Prime Minister may have even asked those questions in Moscow.

Indeed, Litvinenko’s ghost haunted this summit-meeting in several ways. Poisoned by radioactive polonium slipped into his tea, in 2006 dying Litvinenko pointed his finger at Putin as his murderer. The then Labour government ignored that accusation and only requested an extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, the man suspected of actually administering the poison. Putin angrily refused, and then made Lugovoi a national hero. In contrast to the government of the day, however, the Tories in opposition bravely accused Russia of a state-sponsored murder on British soil. Five years on, with the conflict in no way resolved, did the Prime Minister dare repeat this to Putin’s face?

Putin, meanwhile, urgently needs to recruit a new influential Western ‘friend’. Next year, he will probably start his third presidential term – but hardly anybody believes in fairness of Russian elections anymore. So he seriously fears a Ukrainian-style ‘Orange Revolution’, or some other Arab-style ‘Russian spring’, in 2012; and he is preparing to counter this largely imaginary threat with a very real, very brutal response. Russian police have just been given discretionary powers to use water cannons, tear gas, electric shockers and truncheons to disperse peaceful demonstrations. The likely next step will be a nationwide campaign of persecution against opposition activists, ‘cleansing the political field’, as the Russian newspeak calls it. The intimidating term ‘cleansing’ (‘zachistka’) alludes to the infamous ‘cleansing operations’ against Chechen villages.

In a sense, the political zachistka of Russia is already underway. Traditionally, the KGB would begin any massive operation from trying it out in a smaller training ground. In the past couple of months, a ruthless purge has been carried out against the leading opposition figures in Yekaterinburg: Russia’s fourth largest city and a traditional pro-democracy stronghold. Russian opposition groups are mainly regional, and the opposition community in Yekaterinburg had been one of the strongest. By now, however, its leading figures have been driven into exile, imprisoned, or are facing criminal charges.

Having received threats to his life, journalist and human rights campaigner Sergei Kuznetsov has fled to Israel and asked for political asylum there. He has also applied for asylum in the UK through the British embassy in Tel Aviv, but was detained by the Israelis after trying to board a plane to London without a visa. Speaking from an Israeli prison, he says he still does not feel safe: “I have heard from several sources the Israelis have been under pressure from Moscow to stop me getting to London, to put me in prison, perhaps even to send me back in violation of the Refugee Convention”.

Kuznetsov is a veteran dissident and former Soviet political prisoner, who has won a landmark free speech case against Russia in European Court of Human Rights. He is obviously not someone who can be easily frightened, so his fears deserve to be taken seriously.

The next two victims were police whistleblower Igor Konygin, and Evgeny Legedin, the local coordinator of ‘Strategy 31’ — the national campaign of street protests on the 31st day of each month which has it, in defence of Article 31 of Russian Constitution which guarantees the freedom of street protest. A criminal libel case has been started against them for accusing the regional prosecutor of covering-up corruption in the police. Legedin has fled to Britain and asked for political asylum. Konygin, staying in Yekaterinburg, faces up to three years in prison.

The latest victim is Maksim Petlin, a local parliamentarian and Yekaterinburg leader of the democratic ‘Yabloko’ party, arrested two weeks ago for his campaign against a controversial construction project. Typically for Putin’s Russia, the authorities accuse him of extorting money from the company under the pretext of environmental concerns. Petlin’s friends say the real reason is his leading role in ‘Strategy 31’ and other street protests.

On the bright side, however, both Kuznetsov and Legedin can give the West very detailed, up-to-date, first-hand information about the situation in Russia — including every link in the chain of command of Putin’s repressive machine. Both told me that the man in charge of ‘cleansing’ Yekaterinburg was Nikolai Vinnichenko, the official Representative of President of Russia in the Urals. Having accomplished his mission, Vinnichenko has been promoted to the position of President’s Representative in the North West. According to Legedin and Kuznetsov, this means St. Petersburg’s opposition groups are next in line for persecution.

Besides, dozens of political prisoners from earlier purges are still in the Putlag, Russian troops are still in Georgian territories, and Putin’s bailiffs have just raided BP’s Moscow offices, certainly in a deliberate attempt to humiliate a British company ahead of Cameron’s visit.

In this situation, it was very important for Putin to get — and for Cameron to avoid — sentimental photographs in the style of Blair hugging Gaddafi, or statements about discovering Putin’s soul in his eyes. In event, they only got as far as jokes that “David would have made a very good KGB agent”, his own “we are stronger together” line, and no public scandal over Litvinenko’s murder or political prisoners. Even that, however, will be seen in the Kremlin as a considerable success and a sign of Cameron’s weakness. To assert his independence, he will need to take a tough line on Russian human rights abuses in the future. Perhaps, offering sanctuary to Putin’s critics like Kuznetsov and Legedin would send the right kind of signal to the Kremlin.

In their comments, today’s Russian dissidents echo Litvinenko’s decade-old warning. “The Russian regime today is pretty much like Nazy Germany in 1936 or 1937,” Legedin says. “Merely by coming to shake hands with the dictator at such a moment, you inevitably risk accusations of appeasement. The only sensible way to deal with these gangsters is a complete boycott.”

Frederick Douglass spent much of his life speaking about the hardships of slavery — but even he, at times, realized that words were not enough. Instead, he turned to music: “The mere hearing of [slave] songs,” he said, revealed the “physical cruelties of the slave system; for the heart has no language like song.” Today, spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” and “God’s Going to Trouble the Water” continue to convey American slaves’ anguish, frustration and hope.

Less familiar to Americans, however, is the music of Russia’s serfs, who were emancipated in 1861, on the eve of President Lincoln’s inauguration. Although the slaves and serfs were separated by vast distances and significant historical experiences, each group endured years of bondage by turning to song. Likening the songs of Russian serfs to those of American slaves, early 20th-century actor and slave descendent Paul Robeson observed that both groups had “an instinctive flair for music … [a] faculty born in sorrow.” But their musical traditions have striking differences, too — differences that help us understand the contrasts between the two systems.

Common types of American slaves’ songs include work songs, sacred spirituals and social songs, a category comprised of narratives, ballads and dance songs. Pre-20th-century Russian folk songs consist of ritual songs, which relate to changing seasons or holidays, and family ceremonial songs, sung during weddings or funerals. Serfs also sang non-ritual songs, which included all other types of folk music, like historical epics, dance songs and work songs.

Both groups sang work songs as they labored in the fields; for both, such songs moderated the pace of labor. When African-American slaves hoed corn, for example, they sang songs like “Shock Along John” and “Round the Corn Sally.” These tunes, found in the 1867 volume “Slave Songs of the United States,” contain only two lines per verse and are repetitive and cadenced. In the hayfields, Russian serfs sang rhythmic pokos, or hay-making songs, to regulate the movement of their scythes.

The synchronization of action through song was crucial for physically challenging tasks. In Russia, groups of 50 to 125 serfs were harnessed to boats and forced to pull them upriver. A brutal job, barge-hauling was despised by all. Serfs endured this work by singing a song known as the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” or “Hey, Ukhnem.” “Ukhnem” translates to the English equivalent of “heave-ho,” and comes from the “ukh” sound that serfs made with each collective tug. As the serfs pulled in unison, this song coordinated their efforts.

American slaves employed song in a parallel way as they rowed together. In early-19th-century Savannah, the observer John Lambert recorded that four slaves rowed “to a boat-song of their own composing. The words were given out by one of them, and the rest joined the chorus. … The tune of this ditty was rather monotonous, but had a pleasing effect, as they kept time with it at every stroke of their oars.”

Such songs were an integral part of the serfs’ and slaves’ daily lives. Music served both a practical and a creative purpose as it helped slaves labor in unison and entertained them during, as one serf described it, the “heavy, monotonous work [that] much dulled [the] mind.” Nineteenth-century observers noted the exceptional musical talent of both groups when they sang, danced or played musical instruments. The serfs and slaves each performed solo and group songs, employed forms of call and response, and danced as they sang.

Differences in sound were marked, however: American slaves created songs with complex overlapping rhythms that were enhanced by vocal performances of swooping, moaning and shouting, while Russian folk music was characterized by its dissonant heterophony and deep, resonant sound.

The content differed as well. Both groups drew strength from their Christian faith in times of anguish and joy. The lyrics and style of Protestant hymns were well-known to slaves, who sometimes attended church with their masters or participated in camp meetings. Blending African and Western musical traditions, however, American slaves created wholly original songs – spirituals – that are filled with religious language, symbols and ideas.

Rephrasing stories from the Old Testament in spirituals like “Go Down, Moses,” slaves linked their bondage to that of the Israelites in Egypt. Inspired by New Testament stories as well, slaves sang spirituals like “Run to Jesus,” “I am Bound for the Promised Land” and “Steal Away,” which brought slaves hope of salvation in the mortal world and the divine.

Barely concealed messages lay embedded within the lines of these songs. In “Go Down, Moses,” slaves sang: “No more shall they in bondage toil,/Let my people go;/Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil,/Let my people go.” Other spirituals like “Steal Away” functioned as direct invitations to flee. Phrases like “I hain’t got long to stay here./Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus” served as a signal for potential runaway slaves. Christianity helped American slaves create a body of music that was both spiritually elevating and powerfully subversive, offering hope of heavenly peace or earthly escape.

The serfs’ ritual songs, on the other hand, anticipated the occurrence of events or marked holidays and seasonal changes. For example, folk songs sung during Maslenitsa, or Shrovetide, the week-long period preceding Lent, contain themes of nature and fertility. In the song “We’re Waiting for Maslenitsa,” serfs sang: “We’re waiting for Maslenitsa,/We’re waiting, my dear, we’re waiting./We’ll treat ourselves with cheese and butter,/we’ll treat, my dear, we’ll treat./On the hill stands a green oak tree,/A green oak tree, my dear, a green oak tree.” During their celebration, serfs feasted on special foods as they prayed for the swift arrival of spring, with its green oaks and abundant flowers.

One fascinating difference between slaves’ spirituals and serfs’ sacred folk songs is that while American slaves often sang about escape or emancipation, Russian serfs rarely did. According to the Russian scholar V. Ja. Propp, the number of songs that addressed the travails of serfdom was almost negligible when compared to the vast array of other types of folk songs.

What accounts for this surprising difference? Surely serfs did not prefer to remain enslaved? For one thing, serfs may have been hesitant to share subversive music with transcribers, or tsarist censorship might have prevented the publication of such music.

A more convincing answer is that a “free North” did not exist for the 23 million serfs who composed 40 percent of the Russian nation in 1860. Serfdom was concentrated in Russia’s central and western provinces, but was legal throughout. Deterrents to serfs who considered flight included both the great distance from central Russia to its borderlands, where serfdom was less common, and the threat of capture once there. The Yale scholar John MacKay argues that an absence of sectionalism in Russia accounts for a general lack of an idea of a “land of liberty” in serf consciousness. Perhaps serfs viewed acts of insubordination or rebellion as more viable alternatives to escape; the existence of several Russian folk songs praising serf uprisings supports this theory.

By contrast, slaves comprised approximately 13 percent of the American population in 1860, where slavery was legal in only about half the country. Viewing the free Northern states and Canada as viable safe havens, slaves sang more frequently about escape than insurrection, revealing their abiding desire to “steal away” to a concrete destination where other blacks lived freely under the protection of law.

Each group’s musical heritage was as unique as its conditions of bondage. Although Russian serfs and American slaves employed work songs in comparable ways, American slaves were singularly inspired to sing of their desire for earthly and heavenly escape. But for both groups, music ultimately served as a shared outlet of expression. Their songs were, in the words of Douglass, “like tears … a relief to aching hearts.”

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Vladimir Putin, on the Take

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Why now, Mr. Medvedev?

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Russian Atrocities in Syria

(4)  What’s Wrong with the Russians?

(5)  The Kremlin’s Eye turns towards Piter

(6)  CARTOON:  The Kremlin Walls

(7) Ukraine whips Russian Butt at Miss Universe

NOTE: Why do Russians ignore the fate of their own 9/11 victims? Is it because they are cold barbarians, or is it because their government is hiding something, like the fact that it killed them, not terrorists?

NOTE: Nobody pretends to be a wild pig like a Russian pretends to be a wild pig.  Nobody.

NOTE:  Ouch! Ouch! More Russian sports glory . . . not.

NOTE:  Russia Sucks! In a variety of fashionable colors!

NOTE:  Americans in school in Moscow. See it now.

EDITORIAL

Vladimir Putin, on the Take

We recently published a Special Extra post which contained a translation of an item from the Russian web.  In it, a Russian website interviewed a high-ranking Russian corruption investigator who revealed shocking details about his investigation of Vladimir Putin for personal corruption while Putin was serving in the government of St. Petersburg.

In an almost casual fashion, as if it were obvious to everyone, the investigator reveals that Putin had both hands in the cookie jar of budget revenues in Piter.  And, of course, to any human with a brain it is obvious. How else would Putin be able to afford to sport expensive watches and live in a network of palaces that span the globe?  And if Putin were not personally corrupt, how could corruption flourish so openly in Russia, so that Transparency International routinely finds Russia to be the single most corrupt major civilization on this planet?

The fact that Putin’s personal corruption is so well documented, even in Russia itself, just goes to prove that Russians approve of it, just as they approve of Putin’s brutal crackdown on democratic values, including his brazen murder of political opponents like Starovoitova, Politkovskaya, Estemirova and Markelov. Indeed, we recently reported on the fact that a new arrest in the Politkovskaya case clearly shows the involvement of high-level Russian law enforcement in her killing.

There is only one word for people who would not just tolerate but encourage corruption of this kind by their leaders:  Barbaric.  It seems that Russians view corruption as an ideal, something they themselves aspire to, and look up to Putin for doing it so well.  Maybe it’s the main reason for Putin’s widespread popularity, maybe Russians are carefully taking notes so that one day they too can hope to steal just as much and kill just as many as their beloved leader.

During the era of Stalin, many in the outside world chose to see Russians as being the victims of Stalin just like they were. But what if those people were wrong. What if Russians didn’t oppose Stalin (in fact, of course, there never was any significant uprising against him). What if Russians supported Stalin, saw him as one of their own, and wanted him to go on stealing from them and killing their neighbors just as long as he possibly could?

That would explain, of course, why so many Russians turned in their neighbors, and why Stalin lasted so long. It would explain why Russians quickly chose to hand power back to the KGB after the USSR collapsed.  In today’s issue, a well-known Russian film director emphatically states that Russians simply do not have respect for the lives of their fellow citizens, and that would explain why Russia is such a brutal place, with a world-leading murder rate and horrifically poor levels of cooperation and production.

It would explain why the USSR collapsed in failure, and why Russia is on the fast-track to do the same.

We condemn the craven actions of the people of Russia in looking the other way as their “president” and “prime minister” steals them blind. We condemn them for condemning their children to repeat the horror of the USSR, living in a country permeated by lies and corruption, a country hellbent on self-destruction.  And we call upon the leaders of the Western world to confront Russian corruption and demand that the country produce a civilized government, before it is too late.

Why now, Mr. Medvedev, why now?

Last week any intelligent Russian citizen had just one question in response to a pair of orders emanating from their so-called “president”:  Why now, Mr. Medvedev, why now?

First, in response to the crash of an airliner that killed an entire Russian professional ice hockey team, Medvedev ordered the airline shut down.  But intelligent Russians were asking:  Why didn’t you shut them down before the crash, Mr. Medvedev? Why did you wait so long?

Then, in response to growing civil unrest, Medvedev authorized the Russian Gestapo to utilize water cannons, tasers and tear gas on peaceful opposition protesters who fail to disperse upon the illegal order of the authorities.  Intelligent Russian citizens were asking:  Why now, Mr. Medvedev?

The answer to the second question is obvious, of course:  Medvedev is giving broad new powers to the “police” to use violence because of the upcoming presidential elections.

And the answer to the first is just as obvious:  Medvedev was waiting for permission.  Medvedev was scheduled, by accident, to give a speech in the same city where the crash occurred just after it happened, and he went forward with the speech just as if the crash had never happened.  That’s because nobody told Medvedev he could talk about the crash, so he couldn’t even if he wanted to.  And the content of his speech implied that Medvedev doesn’t really care about anything, least of all the fate of his countrymen.

So, unless his boss Vladimir Putin gives him permission, you won’t hear Medvedev talking about the horrifying class system in Russia’s airline industry.

It is fact no thinking person can dispute that Vladimir Putin would have been discharged as Prime Minister long ago if he were not named Putin.  In today’s issue, we highlight the clear proof of Putin’s personal corruption, and it was he who failed to reform Russia’s airline industry to make it safe enough for ordinary Russian people to fly on.  Instead, he chose to squander Russia’s precious resources on cold-war confrontation with the USA and on a brutal crackdown on democratic values. He chose to fiddle with the revival of the USSR while Russia burned.

Russia’s air safety record is many times worse than the world average, and responsibility for that lies directly at Putin’s feet.  Other Russian prime ministers have been instantly fired, by Putin himself, for far less egregious offenses.  Putin routinely castigates former prime minister Mikhail “2%” Kasyanov for personal corruption, yet Medvedev does nothing to discipline Putin for his own, far greater, graft.

Luckily for Putin, he has the job security of a sham president and no supervision of any kind.  If anyone were to fire anyone, it would be Putin firing Medvedev, and that’s likely just what will happen in a few months from now.

The Evil Empire shows its Russian Face in Syria

We’ve previously reported on the appalling lack of openness to charity displayed by Russian citizens, especially in comparison with the much more generous Americans. The data clearly shows that Russians simply don’t care what happens to their fellow man. Two other items in today’s issue, an essay by Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky and an editorial about personal corruption by Vladimir Putin, confirm emphatically that Russians simply don’t give a damn at best, at worst they wish their fellow citizens harm.

And that’s just other Russian citizens. When it comes to people from other countries, you may as well consider Russians to be sadists.  Take Syria, for example.

A shocking recent headline read:  “Russia resists Syria sanctions, Assad forces kill 15.”  The Syrian government has now cold-bloodedly murdered roughly the same number of Syrian citizens as the tally of Americans wiped out in the 9/11 terror attack on New York City.  And Russians are helping them do it!  Syrian citizens, of course, are furious at Russia, and have declared a “day of rage” to show their anger at the Putin dictatorship.

The government of Russia consistently supports dictatorships that murder their own people, throughout the Middle East and throughout the world.  In the Middle East, Russian actions are particularly vile.  The countries of the Middle East are struggling against dictatorships that were, in many cases, armed and supported by the USSR. People are risking their lives for freedom and better lives for their children, and Russia is attempting to turn back the clock on freedom in the region just as it has done at home.

And there should be no doubt as to why Russia is doing this. Russia does not want stable democratic countries in the Middle East because that would minimize the price of crude oil, and Russia wants to maximize it. Russia does not care how many innocent people need to be slaughtered by maniacal regimes like the one in Syria, so long as the price of oil, upon which Russia utterly depends, continues to rise.

Of course, Russia also fears the “contagion” of democracy might spread from the Middle East to Russia itself, since the country’s own dictatorship is even worse than those we find in the Middle East.  So Russia stands strongly in favor of repression and misery, and eagerly helps the regime in Syria murder its own people.

Time and again, Russia has seen this disastrous foreign policy blow up in its face. First in Egypt and then in Libya, Russia has suddenly found itself on the outside looking in, hated by the successful rebels who have tossed out the corrupt and evil regime that Russia supported. The same thing is happening again now in Syria.  If the people of Russia allow their government to continue this crazed policy, Russia like the USSR will only become ever more isolated until, like the USSR, it collapses in failure and despair.

“Cursed be those who express our thoughts before us!”

— Aelius Donatus, Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric

Donatus, living in ancient Rome, was fortunate – he wanted to be the first to express a seditious thought. If I, living in today’s Russia, wish to express an opinion that someone might find offensive, I need to attribute it to some recognised authority, ideally an eminent Russian thinker. Otherwise I will be accused of every sin in general, and of hatred of everything Russian in particular.

So, here are my thoughts.

“I am particularly suspicious, particularly distrustful of a Russian in power – a recent slave himself, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he is given any authority over his neighbour. “  Thus wrote Maxim Gorky in his ‘Untimely Thoughts’ninety years ago, but just as timely today.

We encounter despots on an hourly basis – the doorman demanding to see your pass; the woman in the ID card office asking for extra documents; the customs officer going through your luggage – at such moments you have a clammy sensation of terror and humiliation – another symptom of slavery. In Gorky’s words, we are recent slaves who, having cast off “our outward slavery, continue to feel ourselves slaves within”. This is how we should understand Chekhov’s remark that we must “squeeze the slave out of us drop by drop”. And that is not easy.

“Truth”, to quote Gorky again, “in its ‘honest’ form, untainted by the interests of individuals, groups, classes or nations …. is highly inconvenient to the man in the street and therefore unacceptable to him. This is the damned annoying thing about ‘honest truth’, but it is still the kind of truth we need most”. So, let’s talk honestly about  us – Russians.

When analysing the Russian character, we can undoubtedly count among its positive elements sensitivity, kindness and hospitableness, quick wittedness, sympathy and compassion, as well as a capacity for self-sacrifice and altruism. Its main negative features, on the other hand, are inconsistency and low self-esteem, cruelty, lack of belief in oneself and one’s future, indifference to one’s present, lack of interest in, and respect for, property. The Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev discussed this in his 1915 article ‘The Psychology of the Russian People. The Soul of Russia’, where he wrote, “Russia is a country of unbelievable servility and terrible humility, a country lacking any consciousness of the rights of the individual, and which fails to stand up for the dignity of the individual…” Is it hard to read this? It certainly is. But there it is – the honest truth.

“We encounter despots on an hourly basis – the doorman demanding to see your pass; the woman in the ID card office asking for extra documents; the customs officer going through your luggage – at such moments you have a clammy sensation of terror and humiliation – another symptom of slavery.”

Where did this aspect of the Russian character come from? I think a lot of it can be explained by our history, in which slavery, in the form of serfdom, survived until the middle of the 19th century. Serfdom existed in Russia until later than anywhere else, and was abolished a mere 150 years ago, whereas in most Western countries it ceased to exist several hundred years earlier, in the 12th-14th centuries. In Europe such concepts as civil society and economic relations as the basis of life, with the concomitant organisation of production, are also several centuries old. We need to admit that Russia lags several centuries behind Western Europe.

The abolition of serfdom led to widespread misery and disaster. The peasants may have been granted personal freedom, but they received no land outright, and had to pay the landlord to redeem it or work out an obligation to their landlord to have the use of it. They had expected their liberty and land, but their expectations were cruelly dashed. The government of the day delayed the publication of the Emancipation Manifesto signed by the Tsar until they had redeployed troops around the country. In the Kazan and Penza districts gunfire was used to disperse angry peasant crowds. The clandestine organisation ‘Land and Liberty’ was founded in 1876 to spread discontent with the reforms among the peasants and provoke social unrest, and the government responded with renewed force. It was only five years after the abolition of serfdom that the terrorist Karakozov made an attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II.

Firs, the old servant in Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’, says that all these troubles began with the Emancipation: “The peasants had their masters, the masters their peasants, and now everything’s all over the place, there’s no sense any more.” Emancipation aroused feelings of panic among the peasants, who were left without anywhere to turn for their social needs. Their landlord may have been a despot to them, but he also provided for their basic needs from cradle to grave. Over time this system had inevitably become, if not a tradition, at least a way of life. To quote Gorky again, “The conditions in which they [the Russian people – AK] lived could foster neither respect for the individual, nor any concept of civil rights, nor a feeling for justice – they lived without any rights, under total oppression, shamelessly lied to and subject to bestial cruelty. One can only be amazed that after all that the people retained a degree of human emotion and a certain amount of common sense.”

Chekhov’s phrase about “squeezing the slave out of us drop by drop” says a lot. Not about the author’s own serf background, but about the fact that Russians have an inbuilt tendency to defer to people in power. Consider me, for example – I have written about this before. As you walk through the Kremlin’s corridors of power, the higher the official you meet, the ‘lower’ you become. I get to then Prime Minister Kosygin’s office, and …can’t even touch the door handle.  As French writer Pierre Beauchamp wrote, “Palace doors are not as tall as people think. The only way to get through them is to bow low.”

This is a typical Russian thing – reverence towards the bosses. You need to constantly ‘squeeze’ this inherited Byzantine trait out of yourself – this residual feeling of obsequiousness, cringing, fawning and servility. You smile particularly widely at a VIP – it’s terrible, but there it is. If, on the other hand, someone is not, or not yet, a VIP, you can be as rude to them as you like, and even spit contemptuously in their direction after they pass. As Saltykov-Schedrin remarked, “We have no middle way – we either kiss someone’s hand or slap their face”.

Slavery is a vertical, a continuation of ‘Byzantine excesses’. For us Orthodox, God is above us, and we won’t sit in church – we either stand or kneel. And we see the earthly powers-that-be also as having their place on that vertical, between the individual and God. That is why a Russian idolises power, and a Swede, for example, not. Catholic churches have pews, and it seems to me that if you can sit, and your legs don’t go numb, then you can direct all your thoughts towards prayer, and not just long for the service to end. For Protestants, God is on a horizontal; that is why you can sit with him at a Communion table.

“The lack of a sense of responsibility that is characteristic of Russians is perhaps the most terrible legacy of slavery.”

Nikolai Berdyaev said that “freedom is difficult, slavery easy”. Indeed, being a ‘slave’ is very convenient: the boss takes all the decisions, “and I won’t lift a finger until someone tells me to”. The lack of a sense of responsibility that is characteristic of Russians is perhaps the most terrible legacy of slavery. A lack of responsibility to your country, the society of which you are a member, even your own parents and children!  And without a sense of responsibility there can be no sense of guilt. To quote Berdyaev again, “A feeling of guilt is the feeling of a master”. And this is why it is naive to call for a collective national act of repentance for the evils of Bolshevism.

I believe that the sense of historical guilt for Nazism shown by the German people demonstrates that this is a nation capable of taking responsibility for those tragic years when it took a conscious decision that resulted in monstrous acts of evil against humanity. We, on the other hand, do not suffer from a sense of historical guilt – we are convinced that Bolshevism was imposed on us, hammered into our souls, and that we are not responsible for anything – it is ‘THEY’ who are responsible! And how many more centuries will this continue?

In Russia, taking part in a demonstration that hasn’t been sanctioned by the government can cost citizens their right to work in federal agencies. Officially dubbed “unreliable” citizens, opposition activists and other political protesters are entered into special blacklists drawn up by law enforcement agencies for purposes that are not entirely understood. It was on such a blacklist that Vera Sizova, a retired resident of St. Petersburg, unexpectedly found herself – upon being told that she was banned from working for the 2010 Russian Census because of her son’s opposition activities.

Sizova first got the idea to work as a census-taker when she received a call from the Russian Federal State Statistical Service (Rosstat) asking about her son, Maksim Malyshev. “The commissioner for the census in the Kalininsky District of St. Petersburg, Elena Sviridkina, called,” explained Sizova. “She proposed that Maksim work for the census as a group leader. He had already worked for the 2002 census as a deputy group leader – he had experience. But Maksim is very busy with work, so I decided to ask for the job myself. They accepted me, inviting me to go through training and build up a team.”

Her first day of work was typical: Sizova was registered into her new position, given the necessary documents, and promised an employment contract. “But in the evening Sviridkina called me and said that I wasn’t going to get the contract because my son and I were on a list of people that the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Regional Main Department of Internal Affairs (GUVD) has compromising information about,” Sizova said.

Maksim Malyshev is the head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Left Front, a socialist opposition organization that holds a variety of sanctioned and unsanctioned anti-government protests. Their members are often arrested for participating in and organizing rallies such as the Day of Wrath, which is held monthly as a venue for Russians to voice their general grievances against local authorities. In its time, Garry Kasparov’s Other Russia opposition coalition included the Left Front within its ranks.

The news that her son’s opposition activity would bar her from working the census came as a shock to Sizova. She sent three inquiries to Rosstat demanding an explanation, and in the end got a response with a different reason altogether – that she had failed to take a pre-training test on time. The pensioner said that while this was true, it was because she was sick on testing day and in any case had been told by on-staff statisticians that “it wouldn’t be a problem.”

Sizova attempted to fight the decision in court. At the end of January 2011, she filed suit against the local Rosstat branch in St. Petersburg’s Petrogradsky Regional Court. “According to the Civil Code, you can see how they hired me; since I worked there for one day, they admitted that I was fit for that position,” Sizova explained the essence of her case.

The suit, however, was thrown out. During the hearing this past June, Elena Sviridkina again invoked the blacklist of unreliable citizens. “Before the beginning of the census, all branches of Rosstat were given an order to do checks on the census-takers against the GUVD databases – if there were issues with anyone, they wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the census,” Sviridkina said. “We checked Sizova – she turned out to be on the list. We don’t have the right to let her go out to people.” A copy of the blacklist for the Kalininsky District obtained by the Moskovsky Novosti newspaper did indeed include Sizova and her son on it, along with four other people.

The Petrogradsky Regional Court did not see the existence of such a list as particularly unreasonable. According to the court’s judicial ruling, checking lists of people with the police is not a violation of Vera Sizova’s rights, “since by its very nature it’s meant to protect an unlimited group of people who are going to give over personal information about themselves during the census.” Sizova has already appealed the decision in St. Petersburg City Court. “I’m prepared to go to the Supreme Court,” she insisted.

But Rosstat appears to be intent on holding its ground. “There is nothing surprising in that Rosstat would check out the backgrounds of the people who are going to collect citizens’ personal information, go to their house – no,” a source in the agency told Moskovsky Novosti, also confirming that the order to do the checks against the police database was indeed sent to all regional Rosstat branches. The St. Petersburg and Leningrad Regional GUVD did not deny the existence of the blacklist, either. “But I can only say anything about it to citizen Sizova, and at that, only in response to an inquiry,” said Vyacheslav Stepchenko, head of GUVD public relations.

Malyshev is puzzled as to why his mother should suffer from his own unapologetic adherence to oppositionist views, especially considering that they did nothing to prevent him from working for Rosstat in the past. “I took part in protests, but that didn’t bar me from working for the 2002 census. Now, clearly, the authorities have decided to secure themselves against unreliable persons, so that the public doesn’t get any information about violations,” Malyshev told Moskovsky Novosti.

A situation in which a mother has to answer for her son’s opposition activity is manifestly unlawful, says Anatoly Kucherena, representative of Russia’s federal Public Chamber commission on law enforcement agencies control and judicial-legal system reforms. “And in general – what does ‘compromising information’ mean? If the police have suspicions upon which to begin criminal proceedings, they should work to file that case. If there’s no basis to do so, then a person and their relatives have the right to live a normal life,” Kucherena said.

Director Pavel Chikov of the Agora human rights association believes that the blacklist itself is a gross violation of the presumption that one is innocent before proven guilty. “The state has the right to collect any sort of information about citizens, particularly if it’s negative, only when they are suspected of having committed a criminally punishable offense and only with the goal of investigating that particular crime. De-facto, the St. Petersburg police have introduced a state of emergency that limits the constitutional rights of city residents and punishes them with a blow to their rights, however it wants to, without a court or investigation,” Chikov told Moskovsky Novosti.

The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that it is illegal for Russian law enforcement agencies to draw up blacklists of unreliable citizens – at the end of June 2011, the court declared a police transport database in the Volgo-Vyatsky region called “Watchdog Control” to be unlawful. The successful case was filed by Sergei Shimovolos of the Nizhny Novgorod Human Rights Society, who was arrested in 2007 under suspicion of “extremism” as a result of being included in the database.

Question: Is this a view of the Kremlin from the outside looking in, or the inside looking out?

Source: Ellustrator.