I am out the door on my way to St. Petersburg for the long weekend. We'll see if we can succeed in taking the new train to Sheremetyevo (which will actually involve metro, train, and then a car or bus...). No doubt there will be something to post about this when we return.
Weekend reading assignments: the comments to recent posts here and here. Maybe we can get a broader debate/discussion going.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Thursday, April 28, 2005
"...how long do they tolerate things getting worse...?"
Buried in the comments and an interesting discussion of a post on Registan about the situation in Uzbekistan were the following paragraphs:
Replace the phrase "or the 'market' economy" with the word "press" (or maybe just add the word "press") and you have a statement which one might reasonably make about Russia today.
Certainly it’s nothing new that people are unhappy, but how long do they tolerate things getting worse and do nothing about it?
If you haven’t been here since 2002, there’s a lot that you’ve missed—the noose on the “free” or the “market” economy grows tighter almost every month, with no sign of positive change. That’s the point. It gets worse, with no reason for anyone to hope for it to get better.
Replace the phrase "or the 'market' economy" with the word "press" (or maybe just add the word "press") and you have a statement which one might reasonably make about Russia today.
Saddam's birthday celebrated in Ekaterinburg
I just tuned in the NTV nightly news, and saw a somewhat funny item. The anchor, introducing this segment, observed wryly that these young people proved the old Soviet joke about how people here are free to stand across from the US Consulate and yell "Down with Bush!"
File under: probably best not to take this too seriously.
28.04.2005 18:40 Saddam Hussein's birthday celebrated in Ekaterinburg
Members of a youth patriotic movement [unspecified] in Ekaterinburg celebrated the birthday of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, reports NTV.
They conducted a noisy rally next to the US Consulate General building. In front of the entrance, they set up a table, covered it with an American flag, and set it with dates and a picture of the former Iraqi leader.
The demonstrators - there were about twenty of them - accused Western nations of violently overthrowing the [Iraqi] regime and forcing the American way of life [on the Iraqi people]. The young people view Saddam Hussein as the last independent president of Iraq. However, they still do not consider him to be an ideal leader.
File under: probably best not to take this too seriously.
More from MosNews.com
Who knew this site had so much interesting content? Some of it is original, some appears to be translated from Russian publications. Here is a digest of sorts:
Here's a somewhat interesting piece about the layers of meaning behind the impersonal constructions one often finds in news reports about Russian political events:
The last story I wanted to highlight is a month old but relevant because it talks about blogging, natch, specifically the blogger who spread the news of the Tulip Revolution and was covered in this space as a "Heroic Bishkek blogger." The MosNews article about this is headlined with a quote from Morrire herself, "My City Died Last Night."
"Russian Orphans Sold to the Highest Bidder," Dmitri Butrin, Gazeta.ru, April 18, 2005.I had a similar reaction to the anti-American tone of the Russian coverage of this case, and was surprised at how many people found their way onto my site using "Pavlis" as a search term - either there's a lot of interest out there, or not much coverage on the English-language internet.
Legal proceedings against Irma Pavlis, who a Chicago jury found guilty of involuntary manslaughter of her adopted son Alexei, was in the Russian headlines last week. In the United States, the case did not get as much publicity, with only the Chicago Tribune and the local media paying attention.
But in Russia, logically enough - after all, a six-year-old boy was killed nowhere else, but in the U.S. - the case received at least 50 publications a day. Most of them referred the reader to Chicago Tribune articles and to AP materials. News editors cynically call the Pavlis news "the anti-American sensation" and spent little time working on them: anti-Americanism sells well both in Russia and out of it.
But what's tragic is that behind the "Americans killing our children" speculations few people can see the real problems. [...]
I have a feeling that not only U.S. foster parents, but also Russian adoption officials bear responsibility for the hard lives many Russian children lead outside Russia. [...]
Let's be frank. Child export, a result of Russia's poverty, can be stopped, but there is no necessity to stop it. It will decline as soon as Russian foster parents' priority rights cease to be sold for hard currency. Anti-American invectives are beneficial for the child trade market dealers - they are bound to use them as a pretext to raise the bribe tariffs. [...]
Here's a somewhat interesting piece about the layers of meaning behind the impersonal constructions one often finds in news reports about Russian political events:
"The Unspoken: What a Russian Doesn’t Say," Rita Storm, MosNews, April 28, 2005.Good advice for any newcomer to Russia.
[...] When hiring Russian-English translators, Russian news agency editors are often pressed to say, “But you have to understand — you can’t actually translate it the way it is, you have to reword and explain.” So many Russian news items employ the subjectless phrase — “It has been decided, that…” Or, “It has been decreed, that…” The average Russian doesn’t ask about who did the deciding and the decreeing — you just know it’s ’Them’. [...]
Depending on how informed (or misinformed) they are, and where their loyalties are, Russians remain free to blame whomever for a life they don’t like — because responsibility for decisions and changes is often slyly cast off, in the media descriptions. It floats in the air, appearing to settle on any convenient figure. Eskimos have thirty-seven words for “snow”, Russians have a zillion ways of describing something that was done without the slightest idea of who did the doing.
There are other things that can’t or won’t be said, but are meant to be understood. For example, it’s understood that police officials are, in most cases, to be bribed — but since you can’t actually talk about it, how do you do it? No one asks a Russian driver, why he has a small bill tucked into his car documents — just in case he has to present them to a traffic cop. No one asks, why you pin a couple of big foreign-currency bills to the second page of your driver’s license application. It’s understood.
Some things that are taken to be almost a fact of nature and unquestioned are bureaucratic procedures left in place after the Soviet era. For instance, the vast majority of office buildings one can’t get to without being on some list and having a pass. I don’t mean bank buildings or secret think-tank buildings. Ever have to display your passport and show proof of being worthy to get into a little room with three dilapidated computers and no A/C? Better yet, pass through a metal detector first. It might let you through with three kilos of metal on you (in which case you know it doesn’t work), or it might force you to stop and pile out even foil-wrapped chewing gum out of your pockets, but it’s the order of things.
Or what about “sanitary days”? When a big shopping mall/supermarket near my house shut down once a month for a whole day, it always sported a little note on the door, saying, “closed for sanitary day”. Ask any Russian if he or she knows what a sanitary day actually is, and they won’t be able tell you. But tell him or her that a store or an office was closed because of one, and they’ll nod understandingly. Things like that just are — like rain, or thunder.
Maybe it was never a Russian thing to question why things are the way they are. Maybe it’s a leftover from the days when asking innocent questions could ship you off to the Gulag. Just don’t get too frustrated when you don’t get an answer.
The last story I wanted to highlight is a month old but relevant because it talks about blogging, natch, specifically the blogger who spread the news of the Tulip Revolution and was covered in this space as a "Heroic Bishkek blogger." The MosNews article about this is headlined with a quote from Morrire herself, "My City Died Last Night."
"We are going back to the epoch of Stalin’s dictatorship."
Saw this on the always-worthwhile Johnson's Russia List:
Mosnews.com, April 27, 2005Food for thought.
Russia Returning to Ways of Stalin - Academic
Historian and honorary president of the Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Afanasiev believes Stalinism is currently being rehabilitated in Russia.
“Attempts to pass an official or semi-official history of Russia have been made. It is the same as history in Stalin’s times falsified, biased, ideologized,” Afanasiev was quoted by Newsru.com as saying at a conference, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of perestroika.
“We are going back to the epoch of Stalin’s dictatorship. Many historical facts are presented in the way he used to interpret them,” the historian went on.
Afanasiev recalled that World War II started for the USSR not with the invasion by Nazi forces of the country’s territory, but with the participation of Soviet armed forces in battles against Hitler’s enemies in Europe. “But you cannot find it in our school textbooks now,” he said. In his opinion the result of the victory over the Nazis was “not liberation, but the subjugation of Europe”.
The historian explained that the “powerful process” of the collapse of Stalinism started during World War II, when Soviet soldiers, sent to Europe, realized what kind of values the rest of the world lived in. But when they came back, their hopes and expectations were ruined. “Tens of thousands of invalids were sent to the northwestern island of Valaam so they did not spoil the ’aesthetic view’ of Soviet cities. They all were buried at the same cemetery, which was later destroyed,” Afanasiev stressed.
He called Stalin’s power “cannibalistic” and concluded that modern Russia “has no democratic institutions, such as a parliament, a court of justice and so on. There are only plaster casts with
the same names.”
Prepare to be watched - for your own good...
Another news item from Echo of Moscow:
28.04.2005. The Federal Security Service (FSB) proposed today to expand the authority of the Russian security servcices to monitor the internet. FSB representative Dmitriy Frolov, speaking at a roundtable discussion devoted to legislative questions in the area of telecommunications, stated that the FSB proposes to implement new requirements for internet service providers in order to prevent the dissemination of extremist ideas on the internet, and also to have the potential to receive information about the addresses of all internet users.Update: more on this story at Mosnews.com - "Russia's FSB Demands Control over Internet."
President-for-life alert!
From Echo of Moscow Radio:
28.04.2005. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan was the first recipient of a new award which has been introduced in that country. This award is called "Heydar Aliyev." It is now the highest government award of Azerbaijan. It is awarded to people who demonstrate excellence in the area of defending the state's interests.
Truly local, truly bizarre
Cleaning up the papers that built up in my backpack while we were visiting Hong Kong, I found the "City" section of the South China Morning Post from April 8, 2005. I had saved it because the array of headlines on the front page of this section (pagew C1) was so consummately local. Check it out:
"Driving school cartel 'stifling competition'"No links because the SCMP archives are all for-pay. Maybe this is only amusing to someone like me who grew up in a household surrounded by newspapers...
"Leech stuck up hiker's nose gives doctors the runaround"
"Customs raid nets cannabis worth [HK]$4.6m"
"Abuse prompts tightening on bids for market stalls"
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
"Labor is cheap and so labor is wasted"
This post about encountering Chinese bureaucracy, on Andres Gentry's blog, eloquently describes the situation in a country that clearly gives Russia a run for its money in terms of frustration-inducing inefficiency. Unannounced and illogical rules, elaborate line-standing and queueing arrangements, seemingly unnecessary procedural steps - they have all of this in China, too, it appears. Gentry encountered Chinese bureaucracy to rival the most inefficient Russia has to offer while trying to register for a Chinese-language proficiency exam:
[...] From start to finish the process took five minutes. So, to recap, we waited four and a half hours for a registration which took five minutes to complete. In addition, seven (seven!) people were necessary to do those five minutes of work.People often wonder why Russia, with its highly educated population, and many people who seem quite capable of solving complex problems in a one-on-one conversation, is not able to produce more wealth more efficiently (not counting wealth-producing, non-renewable things that come out of the ground). The description above provides, I think, some insight into the reasons behind this paradox.
The inefficiency of the process, the lack of publicity and confusion surrounding both the dates for registration and the method of registration, and the fact that in spite of facing the same problems every day of the registration period nothing was improved, well, I just marvel at the managerial incompetence.
[...] like too many things in China, the process was intentionally set up to be difficult, cumbersome, and to waste as much time of as many people as possible.
While I veered between laughter and anger yesterday at the nonsense of having to wait four and a half hours even though we arrived well within the appointed time, and it's difficult to decide how to react when you know that the bulk of your time waiting is taken up by office workers on an extended lunch break, ultimately I think it just makes me a bit sad that the worth of everyone involved, both the office workers who were wasting their own time doing tasks of such mind-numbing simple-mindedness and the students who must waste hours of their day waiting to finish a five-minute process, was so unvalued.
Yesterday's experience in inefficiency was, I believe, hardly unique. Most everyone who has lived in China for a long period of time can come up with countless others: trying to get certificates for your business from myriad government offices that do nearly nothing, the multitudes of shop assistants in nearly every department store who do the work that far fewer could, the armies of people vainly trying to clean dust off the streets, the farm fields divided into ridiculously small plots that simply scream inefficieny. Labor is cheap and so labor is wasted. Labor consists of humans though and wasting humans is a depressing commentary on the value of being a human in China.
That's the thing really: if you make work inefficient then the clear implication is that you don't want to fully use the human talent at your disposal. You are content wasting your workers' time and skills doing things [...] far below what they are capable.
Liberté
For some reason, it feels more appropriate to post this to my "news, views, and impressions" blog (this one) rather than to my graffiti blog.
Liberte graffito in front of the entrance to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall,
with the Hotel Pekin in the background, 9:31pm, April 27.
Liberte graffito in front of the entrance to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall,
with the Hotel Pekin in the background, 9:31pm, April 27.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Photodomination
Some of you may wonder why I have been so photo-heavy in my posts of late. For one thing, I haven't had the inclination to translate anything lately - it just seems like it takes so much time to do a good job of that. Also, I've had lots of good (I think) photos to post. And let's be honest, laziness does play a role as well - a picture is worth a thousand words, and while it may take some effort to get pictures worth posting, getting them and posting one is certainly less effort than banging out a thousand words of original content.
But the main reason, I think, is that for the moment at least I've grown tired of the news here. The main story yesterday was Putin's address to the Federation Council, often referred to as something like the State of the Union address given by the President of the US. I didn't have the patience to watch the speech, read its text, or analyze it. What I was able to pick up from some of the coverage on NTV was that even some Russian political pundits are willing to state publicly that Putin's speeches in the past have had little to do with the policies his administration has then pursued. Triumphalist and optimistic talk, backed up by nothing and thunderously applauded by a gallery of careerists, sycophants, and opportunists. If things keep going in this direction, we'll have to ask the old-school Kremlinologists to come out of retirement and help us read between the lines, because more and more Putin and his team hew to one party line in public statements while the real policies are made and implemented far away from the eyes of the average Russian citizen.
Oh, and the 60th anniversary of US and Soviet soldiers meeting on the Elbe was also one of the top 3 stories on both NTV's 7pm news and RTR's Vesti news program last night. I should mention that I inherited from my father a Soviet poster commemorating this event and was proud to have it hanging in my office when I worked on a program at a US university for Russian and US military officers, and that generally I think the experience of being allies in WWII shows that the US and Russia should be able to cooperate for everyone's greater benefit.
However, I'm sad to admit that for some reason all the coverage of this anniversary on Russian TV did was spike my cynicism level. Both programs highlighted the fact that Presidents Bush and Putin had issued a joint statement on this occasion. For Putin, this is a big deal. Bush, on the other hand, may not even know that the statement went out with his name on it. And my American readers will correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt the 60th anniversary story ran as one of the top items on any of the evening network news programs in the US. So my take on this was that it's just another example of Putin desperately grasping at parity with other world leaders, and the TV coverage just another example of people here wanting to remember when their country was ascendant rather than on the decline.
So, given that I've not of late been possessed of my usual sunny disposition, maybe the preponderance of photo posts in the past few days is for the best.
But the main reason, I think, is that for the moment at least I've grown tired of the news here. The main story yesterday was Putin's address to the Federation Council, often referred to as something like the State of the Union address given by the President of the US. I didn't have the patience to watch the speech, read its text, or analyze it. What I was able to pick up from some of the coverage on NTV was that even some Russian political pundits are willing to state publicly that Putin's speeches in the past have had little to do with the policies his administration has then pursued. Triumphalist and optimistic talk, backed up by nothing and thunderously applauded by a gallery of careerists, sycophants, and opportunists. If things keep going in this direction, we'll have to ask the old-school Kremlinologists to come out of retirement and help us read between the lines, because more and more Putin and his team hew to one party line in public statements while the real policies are made and implemented far away from the eyes of the average Russian citizen.
Oh, and the 60th anniversary of US and Soviet soldiers meeting on the Elbe was also one of the top 3 stories on both NTV's 7pm news and RTR's Vesti news program last night. I should mention that I inherited from my father a Soviet poster commemorating this event and was proud to have it hanging in my office when I worked on a program at a US university for Russian and US military officers, and that generally I think the experience of being allies in WWII shows that the US and Russia should be able to cooperate for everyone's greater benefit.
However, I'm sad to admit that for some reason all the coverage of this anniversary on Russian TV did was spike my cynicism level. Both programs highlighted the fact that Presidents Bush and Putin had issued a joint statement on this occasion. For Putin, this is a big deal. Bush, on the other hand, may not even know that the statement went out with his name on it. And my American readers will correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt the 60th anniversary story ran as one of the top items on any of the evening network news programs in the US. So my take on this was that it's just another example of Putin desperately grasping at parity with other world leaders, and the TV coverage just another example of people here wanting to remember when their country was ascendant rather than on the decline.
So, given that I've not of late been possessed of my usual sunny disposition, maybe the preponderance of photo posts in the past few days is for the best.
Stopmotosniato
I know that the "Moscow native looking anachronistic next to a cutting-edge ad" genre of photos has been worn out over the past 10 years by many photographers, here's my attempt at a contribution to that body of work.
Elderly lady selling pussy-willows next to Motorola ad
on Triumfal'naia Square, 9:54am, April 22.
Elderly lady selling pussy-willows next to Motorola ad
on Triumfal'naia Square, 9:54am, April 22.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Memories of Hong Kong
Please humor me as I go off-topic here, with some photos from our vacation in Hong Kong earlier this month. The ones I'm posting here are not your typical tourist vistas, I figure you can see those here and here. It's surely a matter of taste, but I liked these photos best of the many which we took over the 5 days we spent in Hong Kong:
Self-portrait taken from the front seat of the upper level of a double-decker bus, showing the single thing that most impressed me about HK - the sheer verticality of the city, April 4.
"Slow," taken from the Central-Mid-levels Escalator, April 4.
Since I've devoted substantial space in this blog to the Moscow metro, I need to include at least one photo of the Hong Kong subway here. The subway was quite clean, just like the rest of the city; the MTR trains differ from any other subway or train I have ever been on in the fact that all of the cars of the train are open to each other, which creates the impression of being in one long, flexible train car. April 5.
The view from the bus on a hilly road on Lantau Island, where we had just seen the world's largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue. Note the "Hello Kitty" toy hanging from the mirror, and if you look closely in the smaller mirror you can see me taking the picture and Lorina keeping her distance from her camera-crazy husband. April 6.
Self-portrait taken from the front seat of the upper level of a double-decker bus, showing the single thing that most impressed me about HK - the sheer verticality of the city, April 4.
"Slow," taken from the Central-Mid-levels Escalator, April 4.
Since I've devoted substantial space in this blog to the Moscow metro, I need to include at least one photo of the Hong Kong subway here. The subway was quite clean, just like the rest of the city; the MTR trains differ from any other subway or train I have ever been on in the fact that all of the cars of the train are open to each other, which creates the impression of being in one long, flexible train car. April 5.
The view from the bus on a hilly road on Lantau Island, where we had just seen the world's largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue. Note the "Hello Kitty" toy hanging from the mirror, and if you look closely in the smaller mirror you can see me taking the picture and Lorina keeping her distance from her camera-crazy husband. April 6.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Nighttime reflection
It's been too long since I posted photos here...
Hotel Pekin reflected in a big puddle on 2nd Brestskaya St.,
11:53pm, April 19. The blur in the upper right-hand corner
is a passing car. Arty, right?
Hotel Pekin reflected in a big puddle on 2nd Brestskaya St.,
11:53pm, April 19. The blur in the upper right-hand corner
is a passing car. Arty, right?
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
More on recently re-appointed Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov
Another article that I've translated (partially) off the Novye Izvestiia website:
"Other than prosecuting I don't know how to do anything."
["Кроме как прокурорить я ничего не умею"]
Vladimir Ustinov is going for a second term
By Sergei Tkachuk, Novye Izvestiia, April 13, 2005
[...]On the subject of whether he was prepared to manage the prosecutors for another five years, Mr. Ustinov said the following: "My whole life has gone by in the prosecutor's office. I haven't known any other work life and can't imagine myself doing anything different, although someday I'll have to think about that, too." He even cracked a joke on the topic, "Other than prosecuting I don't know how to do anything, I'm a third-generation prosecutor, and so my answer is unambiguous."
The experts consulted by Novye Izvestiia (NI), however, have strong doubts that Mr. Ustinov is the best choice for the job. For example, Yabloko deputy chairman Sergei Mitrokhin told NI, "There is no doubt that Ustinov's term will be extended, because he is a loyal ally of the Kremlin in all matters. In that sense, they won't be able to find a better replacement." According to Mr. Mitrokhin, "Ustinov shouldn't be in the prosecutor's office." "From the standpoint of efficiency the prosecutor-general's office can't even be awarded a 'C', they haven't solved a single socially significant murder or terrorist act," opined the politician, "instead all of the political orders of the Kremlin have been fulfilled 100%. Just look at the heroic deeds of the prosecutor-general's office in putting kids in jail for five years because they acted like hooligans in a government office [the incident when National Bolshevik Party activists seized the lobby of the Health Ministry building - NI].
"Well-known attorney Boris Kuznetsov, who conducted an investigation of the sinking of the Kursk submarine independent of the prosecutors' investigation, agrees: "A prosecutor-general like this apparently suits the powers-that-be." "If I were a senator, I wouldn't confirm him under any circumstances, because on his watch the level of prosecutor's office employees has declined by an order of magnitude, and instead of enforcing the laws, they use non-judicial means to achieve the decisions which they seek," the attorney told "NI." [...] According to Mr. Kuznetsov... "If in the courts an the Ministry of Internal Affairs at least some minor reforms are being carried out, the prosecutor-general's office is in a state of utter stagnation. The atmosphere there is one of untruth, in which it is very difficult for young prosecutors to work."
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Ashcroft and Ustinov - top cops with soft spots for God
Former [somehow I missed his departure so this was wrong in the initial post] US Attorney General John Ashcroft's eccentric religiosity and proclivity toward prayer in the workplace is well known, but I was surprised to see that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Ustinov has similar tendencies. The following article (translated by me) provides details:
Everybody Get Down on Your Knees
Russia's Prosecutor-General Calls His Underlings to Prayer
Novye Izvestiia, April 14, 2005, By Shagen Ogandzhanian
Yesterday the senators in the Federation Council confirmed Vladimir Ustinov's nomination to a new 5-year term as prosecutor-general with 149 votes to confirm, one abstention, and none against, and gave him a bouquet of roses. And the man of the day himself once again made several statements which sound strange coming from a prosecutor, especially the nation's number-one prosecutor.
The fact that Vladimir Ustinov, whose term was to expire on May 17th, was confirmed for another term, was no surprise. Vladimir Putin nominated him, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov commended the prosecutor-general for his "civic position and professionalism," and the other senators are in general famous for their corporate solidarity and frequently, very frequently, vote along with Mr. Mironov. Nevertheless Mr. Ustinov was able to make a sweet news story ["informatsionnaia konfetka" in the original] out of the more or less routine procedure of his technical confirmation. In order to accomplish this, all he had to do was address the upper chamber.
Mr. Ustinov turned out to be very much inclined to self-criticism, and he told the senators, "We haven't been able at this time to stop crime once and for all. I don't mean in statistical representations, because you can do anything you want with statistics. I mean the feelings of our citizens about security issues. I think that if citizens are able to say in a survey whether they are safe or not, that represents a positive assessment of law enforcement agencies." The prosecutor-general considers other criteria to be "more deceptive," because he is sure that "behind numbers you can always find those who manipulate the numbers."
In addition to the battle for public opinion, Mr. Ustinov also touched on the topic of corruption within the prosecutorial system. "Within the prosecutor's office we are working on getting rid of negligent workers, and sometimes even traitors. On this point there can be no compromises," said the prosecutor-general menacingly, but he did not specify what he meant by "getting rid of." [...]
Some of the senators had practical questions for Mr. Ustinov. For example, Senator Gennadii Burbulis asked about the state of spirituality among prosecutor's office employees. Mr. Ustinov replied that significant attention is paid to the spirituality of employees, and that designating special rooms for conducting religious ceremonies in various prosecutor's office buildings is encouraged. And in general, Mr. Ustinov reported, he thinks that "religiosity should be of primary importance in the formation and cultivation of people's spirituality" and that "all religious trends which are being observed in our country are wonderful. They maintain the spirituality of people at a high level." This is not the first time that Mr. Ustinov has touched upon this lofty theme. Last winter at a prosecutor-general's office meeting he told his colleagues that "society has lost the concept of sin and shame."
After being confirmed, Mr. Ustinov promised to improve the work of the prosecutor-general's office. He refrained from troubling the senators with talk about Beslan, for example, although formally there was good reason to do so. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the tragedy in the North Ossetian city, Alexander Torshin, just announced that the terrorists had placed weapons in the school ahead of time, while the prosecutor-general's office in the Southern Federal District has stated on more than one occasion that there was no weapons cache in the school. On the other hand, this [omission] was understandable, after all Mr. Ustinov's remarks were not devoted to specific cases but to the system as a whole. And first and foremost, of course, to spirituality.
Monday, April 18, 2005
"Russian economy declining" - phone-in survey
Not that one should put any stock in these things (call-in surveys, after all, attract a self-selecting pool of respondents, and there is nothing to keep people from calling in multiple times), but here were the results of the survey on this evening's edition of TVC's nightly news program (they do a different "survey" every night:
In your opinion, is the Russian economy currently:
Response....................# of respondents....(percentage of total)
Growing and strengthening.......339...............(2.5%)
Standing still...............................634...............(4.8%)
Declining................................12,334.............(92.7%)
It's not social science by any stretch of the imagination, but I found these results to be surprising.
In your opinion, is the Russian economy currently:
Response....................# of respondents....(percentage of total)
Growing and strengthening.......339...............(2.5%)
Standing still...............................634...............(4.8%)
Declining................................12,334.............(92.7%)
It's not social science by any stretch of the imagination, but I found these results to be surprising.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
60 years ago
I encourage anyone who wants to be reminded of the true lessons of World War II - rather than just get caught up in the patriotic, militaristic hoopla that I'm sure is about to engulf Moscow as May 9th approaches - to view and listen to this slide show, courtesy of the BBC, about the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The exploitation of a tragedy?
One of the top stories on the Russian TV news (here are links to the coverage on NTV, ORT, and Rossiia) the past couple of nights has been the trial of Chicagoan Irma Pavlis in the death of her adopted son, who was born in Russia. It has been called a "sensational" story, and I suppose it is, but in my opinion it's been getting an inordinate amount of news coverage here.
I hate to inform my Russian readers of this, but the story is not being covered by the national media in the US. It is being covered by the Chicago newpapers as a local story (here and here, for example), but that's about it. The reason for this is not that the United States is a nation of heartless child abusers, but simply that child abuse is a tragic fact of life in the US just as it is in Russia.
Obviously the Russian media should cover this, since it's clearly of interest to their viewers/readers. And I would like to believe that one of the purposes served by this coverage will be to increase scrutiny of the adoption agencies which make money by hooking Russian orphans up with foreign parents. The cynic in me, though, sees the story being covered in a way that paints all foreign adoptive parents - and by broader implication all foreigners - with a broad brush of suspicion and vilification.
What I object to is the tone of the coverage in the Russian media, which implies that Russian children adopted abroad are in mortal danger. The statistics often cited are 12 Russian adoptees (out of some 40,000 currently living in the US) who have died at the hands of their adoptive parents in the past 10 years or so. Certainly these are heinous crimes, and the perpetrators should be vigorously prosecuted, as has been the case with Irma Pavlis, but the implication in the reports I've seen is that the larger tragedy or outrage is not the 12 individual cases of horrible abuse resulting in children dying, but the fact that Russian children are being adopted by foreigners.
I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that in the current climate of growing xenophobia, this looks like more of the same from state-run news programs like Vesti - "our" children should stay in "our" orphanages, rather than being adopted by "them." I don't want to sound like a shill for the international adoption "business," but the fact is that if the Russian media want to do their part to cut down on the number of Russian children dying, they should focus on the dire situation which exists in many underfunded Russian orphanages. International organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross have reported on this in the past (links are to their reports), and while the situation has probably improved in the past couple of years, I would bet that on average a child still has a better chance at a happy, healthy childhood with a foreign adoptive family than in a Russian orphanage. But instead of any mentioning of these problems, on Thursday night Vesti showed rosy footage of the orphanage in Krasnodar Krai from which Alyosha "Alex" Pavlis was adopted.
Maybe I am seeing America-bashing where none exists - all these years of living in Russia may have made me as paranoid and cynical as the people currently running the country - but it galls me to think that the Kremlin media-meisters may be making political hay out of a child's tragic death.
Hopefully some good will come out of this, and the adoption agencies (incidentally, the Pavlises used a Russian-operated agency whose fees were substantially cheaper than those charged by foreign-operated agencies) will be subjected to more stringent regulation - and prospective adoptive parents to more careful screening.
I hate to inform my Russian readers of this, but the story is not being covered by the national media in the US. It is being covered by the Chicago newpapers as a local story (here and here, for example), but that's about it. The reason for this is not that the United States is a nation of heartless child abusers, but simply that child abuse is a tragic fact of life in the US just as it is in Russia.
Obviously the Russian media should cover this, since it's clearly of interest to their viewers/readers. And I would like to believe that one of the purposes served by this coverage will be to increase scrutiny of the adoption agencies which make money by hooking Russian orphans up with foreign parents. The cynic in me, though, sees the story being covered in a way that paints all foreign adoptive parents - and by broader implication all foreigners - with a broad brush of suspicion and vilification.
What I object to is the tone of the coverage in the Russian media, which implies that Russian children adopted abroad are in mortal danger. The statistics often cited are 12 Russian adoptees (out of some 40,000 currently living in the US) who have died at the hands of their adoptive parents in the past 10 years or so. Certainly these are heinous crimes, and the perpetrators should be vigorously prosecuted, as has been the case with Irma Pavlis, but the implication in the reports I've seen is that the larger tragedy or outrage is not the 12 individual cases of horrible abuse resulting in children dying, but the fact that Russian children are being adopted by foreigners.
I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that in the current climate of growing xenophobia, this looks like more of the same from state-run news programs like Vesti - "our" children should stay in "our" orphanages, rather than being adopted by "them." I don't want to sound like a shill for the international adoption "business," but the fact is that if the Russian media want to do their part to cut down on the number of Russian children dying, they should focus on the dire situation which exists in many underfunded Russian orphanages. International organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross have reported on this in the past (links are to their reports), and while the situation has probably improved in the past couple of years, I would bet that on average a child still has a better chance at a happy, healthy childhood with a foreign adoptive family than in a Russian orphanage. But instead of any mentioning of these problems, on Thursday night Vesti showed rosy footage of the orphanage in Krasnodar Krai from which Alyosha "Alex" Pavlis was adopted.
Maybe I am seeing America-bashing where none exists - all these years of living in Russia may have made me as paranoid and cynical as the people currently running the country - but it galls me to think that the Kremlin media-meisters may be making political hay out of a child's tragic death.
Hopefully some good will come out of this, and the adoption agencies (incidentally, the Pavlises used a Russian-operated agency whose fees were substantially cheaper than those charged by foreign-operated agencies) will be subjected to more stringent regulation - and prospective adoptive parents to more careful screening.
Friday, April 15, 2005
"Ukraine demands Russian respect"
The latest on Ukrainian PM Tymoshenko's on-again, off-again visit to Moscow...
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was supposed to visit Russia this week. Then, all of a sudden, she wasn't. As often happens in this part of the world, there were several theories advanced by various sources to explain the turn of events. Veronica at Neeka's Backlog covered these quite well, and I am not going to try to rehash the debate here.
Thanks to NTV's "Segodnia at 22:00" news show, though, I learned that Tymoshenko gave an interview to the BBC on Friday, and that she had some interesting things to say. NTV provided audio of the interview, by the way, and Yulia was speaking Russian (as opposed to Ukrainian). Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ukraine demands Russian respectThis additional nugget from the interview was highlighted in a sidebar to the article: "I know the Russian political elite has got used to the Ukraine suffering from an inferiority complex, but I want this to disappear from our relationship."
By Sarah Rainsford, BBC News, Kiev
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko says she cancelled her first official visit to Moscow because she wants Russia to respect her country.
It should have been her first official trip since taking office in the wake of the victory of the Orange Revolution. But it was postponed after Russia's state prosecutor warned that she remains on a wanted list relating to claims of fraud in the 1990s.
Officially, the trip was delayed as the prime minister was "too busy". She is supposed to be tied up with urgent agricultural matters as it is spring sowing season in Ukraine.
But speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Ms Tymoshenko made it clear she was protesting against "an act of stupidity" by a bureaucrat, and one that she insists must be corrected.
"I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition, I think it is hard to drop old habits," she said. "I want to believe the statement is just the stupidity of one bureaucrat and that it is not the national politics of Russia. If that is the case, then that bureaucrat must correct his stupidity."
The incident has reignited tensions between Moscow and Kiev - already strained since the controversial elections that sparked the Orange Revolution here. Russia campaigned openly then for the candidate of power, Viktor Yanukovych. Now Ms Tymoshenko says it is time Russia stopped treating Ukraine as its inferior, and learned some respect. [...]
Ms Tymoshenko said she never doubted for one day that Mr Yushchenko would become president. "I watched as that faith was justified," she said. "The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage."
Ms Tymoshenko dismissed rumours of a growing divide between the two leaders of the revolution, Mr Yushchenko and herself, as groundless. She told the BBC she planned to work side-by-side with the president for decades and insisted the two had no serious disagreements.
Ms Tymoshenko also revealed she was aware of some of the other things people on the streets were saying about her. As well as the orange jumpers and outfits, her braided hair became a trademark feature during the days of protests - a style that has since been copied around the world. "I just heard the latest joke about my hair: 'Do you know what that is on her head? It's a steering wheel to drive the state'," she said.
"It's just comfy this way and I think it suits me. I'm honoured that models around the world are sporting the same style on catwalks these days, that means Ukraine is not only forming the fashion for politics and democracy but for hairdos too, and I am very proud of that."
The page also provides a link allowing you to listen to the interview - in English translation, presumably.
Site of the day - Playbomzh
Looking away from the political developments of the day for a minute, here is an internet project that is worth checking out: Playbomzh.
Astute readers will have figured out that this is a combination of "Playboy" with the Russian word "bomzh" (actually an abbreviation of Soviet-era origin which stands for "without a definite place of residence"), meaning "homeless person." This photo essay manages to be light-hearted but depressing at the same time. Photographer Zhenia Evgrafov clearly was able to get close to his subjects, Moscow's homeless. The site includes a poignant but still humorous section revealing the dreams of some of Evgrafov's subjects.
Hat tip to Jonas Luster, who was spot-on in describing Playbomzh as "strangely appealing and thought provoking at the same time."
Astute readers will have figured out that this is a combination of "Playboy" with the Russian word "bomzh" (actually an abbreviation of Soviet-era origin which stands for "without a definite place of residence"), meaning "homeless person." This photo essay manages to be light-hearted but depressing at the same time. Photographer Zhenia Evgrafov clearly was able to get close to his subjects, Moscow's homeless. The site includes a poignant but still humorous section revealing the dreams of some of Evgrafov's subjects.
Hat tip to Jonas Luster, who was spot-on in describing Playbomzh as "strangely appealing and thought provoking at the same time."
More on Nashi
NEWSru.com has an interesting article on the developing and increasingly violent conflict between newly formed Kremlin puppet movement "Nashi" and the only truly activist political opposition in Russia today, Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party (unlikely heroes, to be sure). I've translated it for all of y'all non-Russian-speakers who might be interested:
This article is suspiciously one-sided, but maybe that's just because Yakemenko couldn't be bothered to comment, what with the "Nashi" launch festivities today and all. The report is worth checking out even if you can't read the Russian, as it has a great photo of Yakemenko looking rather pathetic.
The NBP has asked the Prosecutor General's office to open a criminal case against the leader of "Walking Together" and "Nashi" Vasily Yakemenko
Published on 14 April 2005, 21:20
Members of the National Bolshevik Party have filed a formal request with the Prosecutor General's office demanding that a criminal case be opened against Vasily Yakemenko, leader of the "Walking Together" and "Nashi" movements. NBP leader Eduard Limonov made this statement to journalists on Thursday at a press conference at the Rosbalt news agency.
According to him, the reasons for this demand were Yakemenko's numerous statements in the press about the start of a battle with Limonov's National Bolsheviks and the subsequent аttacks on the NBP office in Moscow and on party members. "16 Nashisti [members of 'Nashi'] have already been arrested after these attacks, and we have succeeded in getting criminal charges filed," said Limonov.NBP lawyer Vitaliy Varivoda explained that the NBP is demanding that the Prosecutor General's office file charges under Article 282 of the Criminal Code (organization of an extremist society). "It is obvious to us that the attackers all used similar methods, that all of the attacks on the NBP were organized and used instruments such as hacksaws and gas," said Varivoda. According to the lawyer, if a court eventually declares "Nashi" to be extremists, that would lead to a ban on the organization.
In an interview with Echo of Moscow [radio station], Limonov admitted that he is more interested in the role of the Kremlin, which has created all of these movements, than in Mr. Yakemenko himself. That said, the National Bolsheviks are not planning to respond to "Nashi" in kind.
Meanwhile, 46 National Bolsheviks are currently in jail, according to Eduard Limonov. This includes the NatsBols who have been charged with seizing the Health Ministry and the reception area of the presidential administration.
NPB members suspect "Nashi" of organizing at least three large-scale attacks. On January 29 at 10:00 the NBP headquarters was attacked. There were roughly 40 attackers. They arrived in a minivan; in addition there were two automobiles with tinted windows near the building which had not been seen parking there previously and which vanished right after the attack took place.
The attackers shouted nazi slogans and were armed with wooden clubs - shovel handles which had been sawed in half, from which the price tags hadn't even been removed. Two NBP members were beaten, but the attackers were unable to gain access to the headquarters, thanks to a well-organized defense. The NatsBols were able to detain five of the attackers. The militia, which arrived a bit later, took all five to the Lomonosovskoe precinct. Charges were filed against those detained under Article 213 ("hooliganism").
On March 5, a group of unidentified young people using a saw broke into the NBP's heаdquarters on Maria Ul'ianova Street. The National Bolsheviks barricaded themselves in the building, and the attackers poisoned them with gas. According to the NBP, the attackers were accompanied on this occasion by a cameraman from [state-owned] Channel One. The militia was informed of the attack, however officers did not arrive at the scene until two hours after they were called.
According to NBP press secretary Aleksandr Averin, law enforcement detained nine of the participants in the attack on the NBP's bunker. The rest of the attackers were able to escape. Also seized were six baseball bats, two crowbars, and gas cannisters.
The NBP claims that the marauders were diligently videotaping a dozen syringes and twenty bottles of vodka that they brought with them. In addition, they beat the NatsBol who was guarding the bunker, Chechen War veteran Yakov Gorbunov, with a baseball bat. He suffered a broken jaw and an injury to one of his eyes.The NBP claims that members of the new pro-Kremlin movement "Nashi," created under the aegis of the presidential administration, were behind these incidents. Sources in the NBP told NEWSru.com that the attack itself was carried out by football hooligans from the Moscow "Gladiators" gang, hired with funds provided by "Nashi."
Recall that at one of his press conferences Vasily Yakemenko proclaimed that the main task pf "Nashi" would be to battle the "nazis," which according to him includes the NBP.
NBP member Yakov Gorbunov, a victim of the attempted storm of the NBP bunker on March 5, was attacked on April 10 in Moscow. Near Maria Ul'ianova Street, unknown persons jumped him from behind and beat him about the head with metal bars, after which they got into a nearby car
and drove off.
NBP sources believe that this was "Nashi" taking revenge for the fact that Chechen War veteran Yakov Gorbunov had testified against them regarding the recent attack on the NatsBols' bunker. As a result of his testimony, charges were filed against the participants in the March 5 attack.
This article is suspiciously one-sided, but maybe that's just because Yakemenko couldn't be bothered to comment, what with the "Nashi" launch festivities today and all. The report is worth checking out even if you can't read the Russian, as it has a great photo of Yakemenko looking rather pathetic.
Story of the day - Nashi are here
One of the top stories on Segodnia at 22:00 (NTV's nightly news show) tonight - right after the story about the secrecy-cloaked, large-scale special forces raid today in Grozny - was the official launch of the much-discussed "Nashi" ("Ours") youth movement. Recycled Kremlin toady Vasily Yakemenko - leader of the apparently mothballed "Idushchie Vmeste" ("Walking Together") movement - appeared on the presidium as one of the organization's five "komissars" (yes, that's the name they are using for the organization's leadership).
The festivities were disrupted when Olga Shanina, a member of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party, ran onstage and tried to douse the "Nashi" leadership with water . According to NTV's report, Yakemenko later, uh, tastefully joked that the protester had "already been shot." Charming.
Here is a somewhat stale but still relevant report on the early development of "Nashi":
Yakemenko, though, has some outrage of his own; talking about a brochure to be published shortly by "Nashi," he proclaimed, "Definitely, Khakamada, Ryzhkov, and Kasparov - that is to say, all those who consider it possible to march with fascists - all of them will definitely be named in the brochure." I can't wait.
The festivities were disrupted when Olga Shanina, a member of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party, ran onstage and tried to douse the "Nashi" leadership with water . According to NTV's report, Yakemenko later, uh, tastefully joked that the protester had "already been shot." Charming.
Here is a somewhat stale but still relevant report on the early development of "Nashi":
Hmmm. Cynical or paranoid. Take your pick. Either way, it's hard to see a positive side to the rise of this latest Kremlin-created movement. An excellent article by Masha Gessen on Nashi from last month is also worth reading:RFE/RL, March 2, 2005 Analysis: Walking With Putin By Julie A. Corwin
The pro-Putin youth movement Walking Together announced on 1 March that it has created a new youth movement called Nashi (Ours). According to a press release published on pravda.ru, which quotes Walking Together founder Vasilii Yakemenko, the goal of the new "anti-fascist" movement is to put an end to the "anti-Fatherland union of oligarchs, anti-Semites, Nazis, and liberals." Several Moscow-based newspapers reported the goal of the new group is actually a bit more specific: to eventually replace the party of power, Unified Russia.
The movement's rallying cry is preventing the introduction of foreign control in Russia. Moskovskii komsomolets" on 24 February reported that it obtained documents outlining a "grandiose plan for the creation of a new youth movement" whose goal is to save the motherland from colonization by the United States. The daily quotes Walking Together leader Yakemenko as saying that "organizations in Russia are growing, on the basis of which the U.S. will create groups analogous to Serbia's Otpor, Georgia's Kmara, or Ukraine's Pora. These groups are Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party and Avant Garde Red Youth."
Yakemenko, 33, initially denied in interviews with Ekho Moskvy and "Kommersant-Daily" on 21 February that a new youth movement was in the works. However, later reports detailed Yakemenko's speeches at meetings in cities across Russia, such as Kursk, Orel, and St. Petersburg. According to "Moskovskii komsomolets," Yakemenko told students in Kursk that "Europe long ago asked itself the question: Who will be working at European gas stations, Turks or Ukrainians? This question now has been decided in favor of the Ukrainians. In the final analysis, for practically its entire history, Ukraine has been a colony. It's just that previously it was a Russian colony and now it is an American colony."
[...]In an interview with "Vremya novostei" on 1 March, [leader of Yabloko's youth movement Ilya] Yashin suggested that "one of the tasks of the 'Nashisti' is to intimidate the opposition youth so that they are afraid to attend public meetings. He said that in the last couple of months there have been several clashes between the members of the political opposition and unaffiliated people. Yashin told gazeta.ru that former members of Walking Together along with skinheads in athletic clothing were the main attendees at the Nashi congress. [...]
According to the Moscow-based newspapers, the real architect of Nashi is not Yakemenko but deputy presidential-administration head Vladislav Surkov. Surkov reportedly met with some 35-40 youths in St. Petersburg along with Yakemenko on 17 February to talk about setting up Nashi, according to "Kommersant-Daily" on 21 February. RosBalt confirmed that Surkov was indeed in St. Petersburg on 17 February; however, Yakemenko denied everything. Surkov was widely credited with masterminding Unified Russia's victory in the 2003 State Duma elections. He has now reportedly become disillusioned with his old creation as well as with Motherland [Rodina], which was originally created to take votes away from the Communist Party.
If Surkov is indeed seeking an alternative to Unified Russia, then that might explain the secrecy surrounding Nashi's creation. The presidential administration still needs obedience from Unified Russia members in the State Duma and elsewhere, which may be less forthcoming if they realize that their political careers are about to be cut short. In an interview with kreml.org on 1 March, Viktor Militarev, vice president of the National Strategy Institute, said that he thinks that Walking Together faltered as an organization because it was held together only by money and not by an ideology. Similarly, Unified Russia could have been a "powerful pro-presidential party that served as a repository of the people's hopes for the president and hostility for the thieves, oligarchs, and corrupt bureaucrats. Instead of this, we have a parody," he concluded.
However, with Nashi, Yakemenko has recently been taking a smarter approach, according to Militarev. "For example, Yakemenko has given lectures to youth activists in which he described the American authorities as our geopolitical opponent and said that Russia needs to defend itself." According to Militarev, this is a more effective doctrine than "Putin is our president and he is always right." Writing in politcom.ru on 22 February, Tatyana Stanovaya suggests that the Kremlin's presidential campaign in 2008 may assume the features of Yeltsin's 1996 race when Yeltsin managed to come from behind because of the "Red threat."
"In 2008, the Kremlin might also motivate citizens to vote not 'for' (an unpopular president) but 'against' (this time against the Orange threat) and the 'geopolitical appetites of the West' and 'the powerful subversive network within the country.'" However, if INDEM foundation analyst Yurii Korgunyuk is correct, then Nashi proponents are not pursuing a cynical election ploy. He told "The Moscow Times" on 25 February that the "Kremlin has a paranoid fear of what happened in Ukraine happening here."
Unfortunately, it today's Russia, we no longer have to imagine it. Except that the "outrage of all the righteous people" seems a bit muted - after all, they're not the ones in charge of the TV stations.Moscow Times, February 28, 2005
Kremlin Youth Encourage 'Us' to Get 'Them'
By Masha Gessen
Imagine for a minute that in some country other than Russia -- say, in the United States, or in Britain -- there appeared a political organization that called itself "Us." Not U.S. as in the United States, not Us as in Us Magazine, but Us as in "us vs. them." Imagine further that this is an organization that supports, and is evidently supported by, the country's current government.Now imagine the hue and cry, the outrage of all the righteous people who argue that an organization that openly divides its own country into those who are "us" and those who are "them" is despicable -- and a government that supports and even inspires the use of the rhetoric of war against its own citizens is criminal. [...]
Yakemenko, though, has some outrage of his own; talking about a brochure to be published shortly by "Nashi," he proclaimed, "Definitely, Khakamada, Ryzhkov, and Kasparov - that is to say, all those who consider it possible to march with fascists - all of them will definitely be named in the brochure." I can't wait.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Mexistan
An intriguing op-ed from yesterday's Washington Post:
That last paragraph is money. The portrayal in this column of the situation in Mexico is clearly one-sided, but it's not hard to convince me that the Bushies are being hypocritical. I have no problem with the US taking a pragmatic approach to deciding where you want to support democratic movements and where you would rather support "our S.O.B.", but unfortunately the current Administration seems to be trying to have it both ways. That doesn't always work when the world is watching.
Greetings From Mexistan
By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, Wednesday, April 13, 2005; Page A17
It may be just about the most inspiring sight imaginable: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the main square of some capital city, demanding democratic self-rule. "They're doing it in many different corners of the world," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week, "places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon, and rumblings in other parts of the world as well. And so this is a hopeful time."
It is a process in which the United States claims more than an observer's role. The business of America, says President Bush, is spreading democracy. "The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people, you must learn to trust them," Bush said in his inaugural address this January. "Start on this journey of progress and justice and America will walk at your side."
Unless, of course, you're Mexican.
Apparently, there are several kinds of capital city rallies. There are those in Kiev, where multitudes turned out to protest the subversion of a national election and the attempted murder of the opposition leader. There are those in Beirut, where people gathered to protest the murder of an opposition leader and to demand self-determination. These were outpourings that our government encouraged.
And there was the one last Thursday in Mexico City, where 300,000 protesters filled the Zocalo, the great plaza in the middle of the city, to show their outrage over the decision of their Chamber of Deputies to keep that nation's opposition leader from running for president next year.
The government had not murdered the opposition leader, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador; it merely proposed to imprison him -- and thereby disqualify him for the presidency -- because someone in his city government disregarded a court order to stop construction of a short access road leading to a hospital, over land that was acquired by Lopez Obrador's predecessor but whose ownership was still in dispute.
For this the congressional deputies from Mexico's two conservative parties -- President Vicente Fox's PAN and the PRI, which had governed Mexico for six decades before Fox was elected in 2000 -- voted almost unanimously last Thursday to strip Lopez Obrador of his official immunity, with the clear goal of imprisoning him and knocking him out of the 2006 presidential race.Not coincidentally, all polls show Lopez Obrador -- standard-bearer of the left-leaning PRD -- to be the front-runner in that contest.
And what was the response of our government? Did we invoke the president's mighty line that leaders of government with long habits of control must learn to trust their people? Did we tell the crowds gathered in the Zocalo that America walks at their side?
Not quite. While Condi Rice waxes eloquent about our concern for democratic rights in Central Asia and the Middle East, the most the Bush administration has managed to say about democracy in the unimaginably faraway land of Mexico has been the comment of a State Department spokesman that this is an internal Mexican affair.
Democracy may be all well and good, but Lopez Obrador is just not Bush's kind of guy. As mayor of Mexico City, he's increased public pensions to the elderly and spent heavily on public works and the accompanying job creation. [...] He's opposed to Fox's plan to privatize Mexico's state-owned oil and gas industry -- a stance that probably doesn't endear him to the Texas oilmen currently employed as president and vice president of the United States.
Worse yet, Lopez Obrador's populist politics and smarts have made him the most popular political leader in Mexico today. The much touted "free-market" economics of President Fox have done nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Mexicans. Lopez Obrador's victory in next year's election would mark a decisive repudiation of that neo-liberal model. Coming after the elections of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Hugo Chavez (repeatedly) in Venezuela, it would be one more indication, a huge one, that Latin America has rejected an economics of corporate autonomy, public austerity and no worker rights.
So, democracy in Ukraine? We'll be there. Lebanon? Count on us. Kyrgyzstan? With bells on. Mexico? Where's that? Maybe they should move to Central Asia, change their name to Mexistan and promise to privatize the oil. That's the kind of democracy the Bush guys really like.
That last paragraph is money. The portrayal in this column of the situation in Mexico is clearly one-sided, but it's not hard to convince me that the Bushies are being hypocritical. I have no problem with the US taking a pragmatic approach to deciding where you want to support democratic movements and where you would rather support "our S.O.B.", but unfortunately the current Administration seems to be trying to have it both ways. That doesn't always work when the world is watching.
Diversity
Following is a list of the last six search engine referrals to this site:
13 Apr, Wed, 13:24:38 Google: Politkovskaya grant
13 Apr, Wed, 15:57:44 Yahoo: moldova call girls
13 Apr, Wed, 19:31:32 Google: "Chechenization"
13 Apr, Wed, 20:30:44 Google: vekselberg philanthropy
13 Apr, Wed, 21:23:36 Google: Alla Pugachyova
13 Apr, Wed, 22:34:13 Google: Kyrgyzstan
Here at Scraps of Moscow, we pride ourselves on covering a wide range of topics, and this list would seem to confirm that this goal is being fulfilled. Looking back at some search terms that led people to this site earlier in the week shows that our visitors' diversity was not just a 13th-of-the-month kind of thing:
11 Apr, Mon, 21:34:19 Yahoo: metallica in moscow images
12 Apr, Tue, 06:30:43 Google: bliny
12 Apr, Tue, 11:52:04 Google: "US Foreign Aid Policy" PDF
12 Apr, Tue, 21:44:39 Google: Chorny Bumer
12 Apr, Tue, 21:56:28 Yahoo: "starbucks" and "moscow"
Yes, I know this is a sad excuse for a post - whenever weblogs resort to navel-gazing like this, I usually roll my eyes and navigate away. But I hope that my regular readers - all 5 of them - will indulge me just this once. Plus, I'm providing you with the chance to see the Yahoo search results for "moldova call girls" without having to key those words into your computer - just click on the link above. Incidentally, the high-class individual who found us using those search terms was searching from Georgia - the country, not the state. This Extreme Tracker thingy is amazing.
13 Apr, Wed, 13:24:38 Google: Politkovskaya grant
13 Apr, Wed, 15:57:44 Yahoo: moldova call girls
13 Apr, Wed, 19:31:32 Google: "Chechenization"
13 Apr, Wed, 20:30:44 Google: vekselberg philanthropy
13 Apr, Wed, 21:23:36 Google: Alla Pugachyova
13 Apr, Wed, 22:34:13 Google: Kyrgyzstan
Here at Scraps of Moscow, we pride ourselves on covering a wide range of topics, and this list would seem to confirm that this goal is being fulfilled. Looking back at some search terms that led people to this site earlier in the week shows that our visitors' diversity was not just a 13th-of-the-month kind of thing:
11 Apr, Mon, 21:34:19 Yahoo: metallica in moscow images
12 Apr, Tue, 06:30:43 Google: bliny
12 Apr, Tue, 11:52:04 Google: "US Foreign Aid Policy" PDF
12 Apr, Tue, 21:44:39 Google: Chorny Bumer
12 Apr, Tue, 21:56:28 Yahoo: "starbucks" and "moscow"
Yes, I know this is a sad excuse for a post - whenever weblogs resort to navel-gazing like this, I usually roll my eyes and navigate away. But I hope that my regular readers - all 5 of them - will indulge me just this once. Plus, I'm providing you with the chance to see the Yahoo search results for "moldova call girls" without having to key those words into your computer - just click on the link above. Incidentally, the high-class individual who found us using those search terms was searching from Georgia - the country, not the state. This Extreme Tracker thingy is amazing.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Change for the better
We landed in Moscow last night, and it wasn't like we were returning at all. It felt like we were arriving in a different city, one without below-freezing temperatures and several feet of snow on the ground. Amazingly, in the 6 days we were gone, most of the winter's snow melted clean away.
Hong Kong was a very interesting place to visit and might be a pretty enjoyable place to live. My main impressions were of the cleanliness and verticality of the city on the Hong Kong island side, where we spent most of our time. Clean does not mean 100% graffiti-free, so check out Moscow Graffiti in the next couple of days for some pictures of Hong Kong street art. As for the verticality, until we arrived I hadn't realized how mountainous the islands are that make up Hong Kong - this makes for lots of narrow, switchback roads. Since space is at a premium, everything on Hong Kong island seems to be trying to make the most of its footprint: I have never seen so many tall and skinny buildings, double-decker buses are in service, and, more uniquely, double-decker streetcars. In all, an interesting trip.
But we're back in Moscow now, where spring mercifully appears to have sprung us from winter's prison - the sun is shining, and 16 degrees (60 F) is the forecast high for today - so it's time for me to go out and enjoy the weather.
Hong Kong was a very interesting place to visit and might be a pretty enjoyable place to live. My main impressions were of the cleanliness and verticality of the city on the Hong Kong island side, where we spent most of our time. Clean does not mean 100% graffiti-free, so check out Moscow Graffiti in the next couple of days for some pictures of Hong Kong street art. As for the verticality, until we arrived I hadn't realized how mountainous the islands are that make up Hong Kong - this makes for lots of narrow, switchback roads. Since space is at a premium, everything on Hong Kong island seems to be trying to make the most of its footprint: I have never seen so many tall and skinny buildings, double-decker buses are in service, and, more uniquely, double-decker streetcars. In all, an interesting trip.
But we're back in Moscow now, where spring mercifully appears to have sprung us from winter's prison - the sun is shining, and 16 degrees (60 F) is the forecast high for today - so it's time for me to go out and enjoy the weather.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
"Did you just photograph that building?"
Conversation between me and a traffic cop, April 23, on Lubyanka Square:
Cop: “Did you just photograph that building?”
Me: “Well...yes.”
Cop: “Delete your picture of the building and let me see you do it. You can't photograph that building.”
Me: “Why not?”
Cop: “It's not allowed.”
The conversation continued - I pointed out that the building is a landmark and a tourist attraction, but he just kept telling me that it was forbidden to photograph THAT BUILDING. He wasn't getting too hostile, though, because he saw that I really was moving to delete the photos I had taken of the building.
Who knows if there's really an official ban on photographing the Lubyanka (the former headquarters of the KGB and current headquarers of its successor organization, the FSB); the point is that this cop was willing to zealously go after an imagined threat - someone photographing Lubyanka - something which he imagined or had been told would displease his superiors.
Of course, it's easy to imagine something like this happening in the US these days, but then I am no big fan of the paranoia stirred up by the Bush administration, either.
What makes the whole story even more amusing is that I had really been photographing a guy selling pirated software and all kinds of law enforcement databases right in the shadow of Lubyanka. Here's a photo of some of what was available:
Note the presence, among relatively innocuous and unsurprising pirated Microsoft products, of government databases of registered drug addicts (“Narkomany”), felons ("Sudimosti"), and residential registration records ("Propiska"), as well as mobile phone subscriber databases, including addresses, and driver license records.
The availability of such databases is probably inevitable in a country with underpaid law enforcement officials and bureaucrats, extraordinary hackers, and lots of people who like to resolve problems without the involvement of the government and need this information to do so. But it never ceases to amaze me that such confidential information is sold so freely and openly. What I'm not putting up here - no need to antagonize law enforcement - are the photos I took of the same cop who harrassed me and his partner chatting with the guy selling the pirated disks. They were either asking him to pack it in or working out a deal with him to allow him to stay - my money's on the latter.
Cop: “Did you just photograph that building?”
Me: “Well...yes.”
Cop: “Delete your picture of the building and let me see you do it. You can't photograph that building.”
Me: “Why not?”
Cop: “It's not allowed.”
The conversation continued - I pointed out that the building is a landmark and a tourist attraction, but he just kept telling me that it was forbidden to photograph THAT BUILDING. He wasn't getting too hostile, though, because he saw that I really was moving to delete the photos I had taken of the building.
Who knows if there's really an official ban on photographing the Lubyanka (the former headquarters of the KGB and current headquarers of its successor organization, the FSB); the point is that this cop was willing to zealously go after an imagined threat - someone photographing Lubyanka - something which he imagined or had been told would displease his superiors.
Of course, it's easy to imagine something like this happening in the US these days, but then I am no big fan of the paranoia stirred up by the Bush administration, either.
What makes the whole story even more amusing is that I had really been photographing a guy selling pirated software and all kinds of law enforcement databases right in the shadow of Lubyanka. Here's a photo of some of what was available:
Note the presence, among relatively innocuous and unsurprising pirated Microsoft products, of government databases of registered drug addicts (“Narkomany”), felons ("Sudimosti"), and residential registration records ("Propiska"), as well as mobile phone subscriber databases, including addresses, and driver license records.
The availability of such databases is probably inevitable in a country with underpaid law enforcement officials and bureaucrats, extraordinary hackers, and lots of people who like to resolve problems without the involvement of the government and need this information to do so. But it never ceases to amaze me that such confidential information is sold so freely and openly. What I'm not putting up here - no need to antagonize law enforcement - are the photos I took of the same cop who harrassed me and his partner chatting with the guy selling the pirated disks. They were either asking him to pack it in or working out a deal with him to allow him to stay - my money's on the latter.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Greetings from Hong Kong
I can't resist the chance to post directly from atop Victoria Peak, an opportunity provided by the good people at Pacific Coffee Company. Hong Kong is as interesting as we expected, it's looking like 5 days here will not be nearly enough. My Blackberry tells me it's 8:30am on a Monday morning in Moscow - and weather.com tells me it's just below freezing there - I'm glad we're here, where it's sunny and 20-25C, on vacation and not there going to work.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Russia's first political blog - www.demokrat.ru
I thought the text of Thursday morning's EchoNet radio program was worth translating:
Politicians of a liberal and democratic bent are well-disposed toward the internet and began to master it long before their conservative, as they've come to be known, opponents. The first websites maintained by politicians and parties, as well as political discussion clubs, appeared seven years ago, and internet denizens treated the liberals similarly: in every virtual election and internet survey, parties of this stripe were victorious, before later shocking their supporters by not making it into the Duma. [ad break]
Nowadays, the appearance of a democratically oriented website on the internet is a rare occurrence, but from time to time it does happen. Demokrat.ru, a site which states as its goal the unification of the extremely divided democratic movement, appeared relatively recently. Of course, the site does absolutely nothing to further this goal, and in general the only thing democratic about it is its name, but in this case that's not so important. The site is interesting for a different reason. What we have here is, in essence, the first political blog on the Russian-language internet [Runet, or рунет in Russian].
The site is maintained by one Vladimir Shmelev, the 25-year-old leader of a not-so-mass movement called "New Rightists." Politics is the only topic here, and not in the theoretical sense, but drawing on simple and comprehensible examples from political life. Shmelev relates an event, then asks himself a question, provides several possible answers and comments on them. Any visitor to the site who takes the time to register can leave responses or comments. [...]
Taking into account the increasing reach of the internet, and its correspondingly increasing role in political life, as well as the fashionability of blogs, it doesn't seem out of the question that we might soon see on-line journals by other, better known Russian politicians.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Spam on books
Of all the topics I'd rather be writing about, Andy has saddled me with the task of responding to some questions about books. Don't get me wrong, I love books. But we are leaving for a week's vacation in Hong Kong tomorrow morning, and I'm not even packed yet! So this will be quick:
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Any volume in the Collected Works of Lenin, because then I wouldn't feel bad about burning - no one would be reading me nowadays anyway.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Not on any fictional character from a book, unless you count books that were made into movies.
The last book you bought is:
Don Quixote in Russian - the Academia publishing house edition from 1932 in 2 volumes - which I bought not to read but because I collect books published by Academia and could not resist buying this one when I saw it. 2000 rubles (about $70) for the 2-volume set with dust jackets intact - I just saw a similar set selling on-line for $450. That is why I prefer to shop at the Bukinist store at 53 Ostozhenka.
What are you currently reading?
I finished Sixpence House by Paul Collins a couple of weeks ago; since then I've been reading relatively recent issues of the New Yorker magazine thoughtfully mailed to me by my mother. I'm optimistically planning to try to tackle Techenie Vremeni (The Flow of Time), a collection of prose by Andrei Platonov, on the plane tomorrow, but I can't honestly say I'm reading it yet.
Five books you would take to a desert island.
1) The Bible (is a link really necessary?) - I've always said I want to read it someday.
2) Any collection of Pushkin's works (in one volume, of course) that included Eugene Onegin and the Tales of Belkin, preferably also some other poetry and short prose - plenty of time on the island to memorize Evgenii Onegin; for the time being all I've got down by rote is the first stanza and the "pedal digression."
3) A family photoalbum.
4) The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter Edition) - from Bradford's Plymouth Plantation to Fitzgerald & Hemingway (though not enough of the latter two), this book has it all. Plus, at 2800 pages, in a pinch it would provide a good supply of paper.
5) A blank journal - this isn't a way of getting around picking a 5th book, it's something I would definitely want to have (unless the island had broadband and I could blog instead).
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
This is the most difficult question of all. 3 people and they all have to be bloggers, otherwise it's no fun, right?
1) Bram of U Fanni Kaplan, because I think I know what some of his picks will be, and I want to see how predictable he is;
2) Veronica of Neeka's Backlog; and
3) Chris of Cyber-generation.
I was going to fob this off on Nathan of Registan.net, but he already did it.
I'm dumping this on Veronica and Chris because they seem like the sort of people who will enjoy the challenge and won't be too irritated - but if they are irritated by this, I encourage them to just blow it off. After all, there's no specific chain-letter-type threat. Now I need to go about emailing my victims...
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Any volume in the Collected Works of Lenin, because then I wouldn't feel bad about burning - no one would be reading me nowadays anyway.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Not on any fictional character from a book, unless you count books that were made into movies.
The last book you bought is:
Don Quixote in Russian - the Academia publishing house edition from 1932 in 2 volumes - which I bought not to read but because I collect books published by Academia and could not resist buying this one when I saw it. 2000 rubles (about $70) for the 2-volume set with dust jackets intact - I just saw a similar set selling on-line for $450. That is why I prefer to shop at the Bukinist store at 53 Ostozhenka.
What are you currently reading?
I finished Sixpence House by Paul Collins a couple of weeks ago; since then I've been reading relatively recent issues of the New Yorker magazine thoughtfully mailed to me by my mother. I'm optimistically planning to try to tackle Techenie Vremeni (The Flow of Time), a collection of prose by Andrei Platonov, on the plane tomorrow, but I can't honestly say I'm reading it yet.
Five books you would take to a desert island.
1) The Bible (is a link really necessary?) - I've always said I want to read it someday.
2) Any collection of Pushkin's works (in one volume, of course) that included Eugene Onegin and the Tales of Belkin, preferably also some other poetry and short prose - plenty of time on the island to memorize Evgenii Onegin; for the time being all I've got down by rote is the first stanza and the "pedal digression."
3) A family photoalbum.
4) The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter Edition) - from Bradford's Plymouth Plantation to Fitzgerald & Hemingway (though not enough of the latter two), this book has it all. Plus, at 2800 pages, in a pinch it would provide a good supply of paper.
5) A blank journal - this isn't a way of getting around picking a 5th book, it's something I would definitely want to have (unless the island had broadband and I could blog instead).
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
This is the most difficult question of all. 3 people and they all have to be bloggers, otherwise it's no fun, right?
1) Bram of U Fanni Kaplan, because I think I know what some of his picks will be, and I want to see how predictable he is;
2) Veronica of Neeka's Backlog; and
3) Chris of Cyber-generation.
I was going to fob this off on Nathan of Registan.net, but he already did it.
I'm dumping this on Veronica and Chris because they seem like the sort of people who will enjoy the challenge and won't be too irritated - but if they are irritated by this, I encourage them to just blow it off. After all, there's no specific chain-letter-type threat. Now I need to go about emailing my victims...
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