Where's the content?

Highly politicized map of Bessarabia, from the 1930 edition of the Malaya Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia.

[source: Wikipedia]

It's hard to believe I have neglected this space for three solid months now.  Things have been quite busy, and now we're about to enter another transitional period which might make it easier for me to devote more time to blogging but more likely will not.

Therefore, with the thought that this might be the "front-page" post for at least a few weeks, I thought I'd give a rundown of what I've been reading/watching/looking at online, with the assumption that of course if I've found it interesting, you will as well.

The interesting, insidery blog Diplopundit points out a recent blog post by U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle that made something of a splash, and Russian politicians (and their aides) are also capable of making news these days with nothing more than a click of the "post" button:

ADVISER TO RUSSIAN SPEAKER CALLS FOR RECOGNITION OF MOLDOVA'S BREAKAWAY REGION
Ren TV, privately-owned Russian television channel, Feb. 18, 2010

A statement that could cause a new large international scandal - in his blog today, an adviser to the chairman of the Federation Council of Russia, Aleksandr Chuyev, expressed the opinion that it is time for Russia to recognize the independence of the Dniester region, following Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Interestingly, this statement coincided with the statements by Igor Smirnov, leader of the Dniester republic, which broke away from Moldova, according to which they are prepared to accept Russian Iskander missiles and other armaments.

Other recent stories about Transnistria have ranged from disappointing to optimistic (and another), and from nutty to nuttier.

Some blogs to read while this one lies dormant:

- The Russia Monitor, which Jesse has turned into a must-read resource.
- Siberian Light - lots on there recently for you sports fans, or sport fans, as I guess they say here in the UK.
- Sean's Russia Blog - Sean's still got it, and now that he is in Russia the posts are even better.
- Robert Amsterdam - comprehensive as always.
- Window on Eurasia - just check it out (especially this post on fake NGOs).
- Poemless - opinionated, in a good, entertaining way.
- A Good Treaty - an interesting NKOTB, which came to my attention via Poemless.
- Morning in Moldova - for those interested in keeping current on developments there.

Other worthwhile reads - the long but engrossing Vanity Fair piece chronicling the rise and fall of the Exile, and (from the dead-tree realm) Keith Gessen's New Yorker piece on the Ukrainian elections and Yushchenko's failures (full text not available online w/o subscription), which captures Ukraine's dilemmas, from the profound to the ridiculous:

[Quoting Leonid Shvets:] 'But Ukraine was a historical actor, and how! I have a friend, one of his grandfathers was in the Galician S.S. and died fighting, and his other grandfather was in the Red Army and made it all the way to Berlin.  What do you do with that?  Politicians should stay away from it.  They should look to the future.' [...]

Yanukovych's people were taking no chances.  If there was an initiative to be seized by taking to the streets, they were going to be the ones to seize it.  The...square filled up with Yanukovych 'supporters.'  A television crew on the scene conducted interviews.  Many supporters were drunk, and men in Yanukovych jackets began cutting off interviews before they began.  But they didn't manage to reach one angry woman in time.  'We've been here since 5 a.m., and they still haven't paid us!' she said.  'It's outrageous!'  It was an interesting moment in post-Soviet life: a paid participant in a street action meant to fool the media was appealing to the media for justice, because she had not been paid.

Poking around online to check prices of antique maps, I happened upon Wikipedia's surprisingly content-rich "Atlas of Moldova" page (the source for the illustration above).

I also noticed a Moldovan connection while watching the Winter Olympics (well, not really, my sister clued me in) - apparently, one of the U.S. ice dancing pairs used a song for their routine that was identified as a "Moldavian Folk Dance."  NBC makes the video content from the Games somewhat challenging to access, but there are a couple of YouTube clips showing the duo using the routine in previous competitions.  Predictably, the comments on both YouTube clips are taken up in large part by arguments over whether this is a Romanian melody or a Moldovan one. 

On a more serious note, I've been spending some time remembering my father, who passed away ten years ago this weekend, thanks to some material that has appeared online recently about the work he was doing before I was in the picture (see also this recently posted four-part article - part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). 

And what could be a better soundtrack for such reminiscences than this classic song (an even more old-school video is here)?

"Information Direct from the Manufacturer": An interview with the guys behind Privesc.Eu

First off, apologies for the long absence from this space - things have been genuinely busy at work, and I just haven't had the time.  Fortunately, something I initiated back in early October, before I got busy, has finally born fruit.

I think I first wrote about Privesc.Eu back in July, on Moldova's second election day of 2009.  At the time, I described it as

a streaming video site called privesc.eu ("I watch," in Romanian), launched during the campaign, which has increased transparency by showing complete video of press conferences and public meetings of, for example, the Electoral Commission... rather than the carefully edited versions which appear on state-run TV.

And that evening, I watched on a laptop in my kitchen as the results came in and Privesc.Eu's live feed and open mic from the Central Electoral Commission picked up random conversations of journalists and election officials, including one where two people were discussing, in Russian, whether the country that had just voted should be called "Moldova" or "Moldavia." 

Anyway, I was familiar with Privesc.Eu founder Mihai Moscovici as one of the first Moldovan bloggers I saw on the interwebs, and more recently from his prolific Facebook updates, and decided to ask if he and his collaborators on this interesting project would mind answering a few questions about what it has been like to launch an online public-access channel in the midst of what has to have been one of the most politically tumultuous years in Moldova's history.

To put this in an American context, these guys have created something that is a cross between CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, and hip-hop (rap music being, in the immortal words of Public Enemy's Chuck D, "CNN for Black people"), all with a level of interactivity that makes full use of all the capabilities Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now?).  I don't think they were the first to do it in Moldova (Public TV and JurnalTV were first, I think, by a matter of months), but the team behind Privesc.Eu has done a great job working with hardly any resources other than what they have contributed from their own time and pockets.

Before (or after) you read the interview, please consider contributing some amount, however small (or large!) to support the work of these young Moldovans who are working to improve transparency and people's access to government in their country and for the many labor migrants who might otherwise be out of touch with political developments at home.  You can donate via PayPal (which takes all major credit cards) right here.

What motivated you to start this project?

On the way to democracy, Moldovan media find themselves forced to play the games of diverse political and economic interest groups, thus losing neutrality in presenting information to citizens. As a result, the Moldovan public is confused and is not discerning with respect to media coverage. Lately, international monitoring organizations have often criticized the Moldovan media for lack of objectivity, misleading reporting and one-sided presentations of information.

Since the Internet penetration rate in Moldova grows about 50% every year, online media coverage has long been a challenging journey for existing mainstream media, amateurs and new media projects. Still, there is a need for innovation and intense exploration to create new initiatives and progressively successful projects to satisfy the need of the Moldovan public for access to information online.

Information consumers, particularly youth, are looking to avoid media that only offer one-way information sharing and prefer to become participants in events and play their own role in the decision-making process.

We have started Privesc.Eu because there was a need for an innovative online platform which will give young people opportunities to share their opinions on real-time ongoing events, to instantly react and interact with each other, to ask questions, to be active and get involved in the country's daily life, to share and discuss their know-how, to organize and promote their own events, and, more than that, to share their activism by maintaining that platform.

Privesc.Eu is now an innovative online project, integrated with the latest social media elements and modern real-time data transmission technologies, that focuses on exposure of current events and on providing opportunities for social engagement for the Moldovan online youth community.

Did you start with a detailed business plan and specific goals, or just with a camera and a dream?

We started this project on July 5^th, 2009 in the central park in Chisinau. We had no business plan, but we had a dream, inspiration, and enthusiasm. In a few weeks, we realized that a business plan is necessary for the future of project, and eventually drafted one.

It occurred to me that Privesc.eu's content and goals are sort of like those of the C-SPAN channel in the U.S.  Are you familiar with this channel, and if so, what do you think of the comparison?

One of our team members watched this TV channel while living in the US, but we didn’t know about it until we launched the project. We started Privesc.Eu following the needs of the Moldovan society. As for comparison, we look forward to establishing such a TV channel in Moldova :)

When did you begin broadcasting online, and how did you promote the site when you launched it?  How quickly did you develop an audience, and how large is that audience now?

We started our broadcast on July 5^th, 2009, in the central park in Chisinau. On that day we set up the domain name for the project: www.Privesc.Eu (translated from Romanian as www.Watch.I).

We established two main directions of activity: provide live video streaming from the major events in the country (politics, economy, social, civil society, etc.); and establish user interaction to enable them communicate with each other and with the event organizers.

Since launching www.Privesc.Eu in July 2009, the site has continuously grown in traffic and user participation. In the first four months, the project has already become well-known among Moldovan young people in the country and abroad. Now we have more than 30,000 viewers per month. Every live stream on www.Privesc.Eu is watched and commented in real-time by 200 to 2000 visitors, depending on the event.

In addition, Privesc.Eu has more than 1000 fans on Facebook.

If you could start the project over again, is there anything that you would do differently?

If we would start over again, perhaps we would think more about better promotional methods than we have used so far.

Do the people involved have journalism backgrounds or more IT backgrounds?  (Please feel free to discuss what the various members of the Privesc.eu team do professionally or not, and/or their educational backgrounds, as you prefer)

Privesc.Eu was developed and is maintained by an innovative and creative team of volunteer young professionals: two high-skilled web developers, a professional journalist, a marketing/PR specialist, and an inspired and dedicated project manager.

You and your partners have obviously spent a lot of your own time on this project - how have you found time for this in addition to doing whatever your "day jobs" are?  And how much of your own money have you had to spend on equipment and other expenses (hosting, etc.)?

Five people are involved in this project: Eugeniu Luchianiuc, Vitalie Eşanu, Mihai Moscovici, Radu Chivriga, Oleg Ciubotaru. Each of them is responsible for a specific department: Tehnical Department - Vitalie Eşanu and Oleg Ciubotaru; Promotion and Marketing Department - Mihai Moscovici; Journalism and LIVE Video Streaming Department - Radu Chivriga and Eugeniu Luchianiuc. Every one of us has a primary job, but Privesc.Eu is more than just a hobby, it is a way for changing our society for better. We use our own equipment: laptops, microphones, webcams and 3G mobile internet services. Privesc.Eu is grown on enthusiasm and we don't seek any financial benefits from this project.

Have your expenses been covered by advertising revenue?  Do you have any other sources of funding for the project (private donors, grants)?

On our web-site, we have a page where people can donate money through PayPal or to donate money to cover our mobile internet expenses through top-up terminals. Until now, we have 13 private donors who have donated a total of 400 USD.  Also, we applied for a Soros Foundation grant and are currently waiting for their decision.

Why do you think online broadcasting is important in Moldova?

Privesc.Eu helps Moldovan internet users to have open access to unbiased, democratic, interactive, objective, as-is coverage of important events in Moldova.  It helps citizens to form their own opinions based on pure and as-is information, avoiding journalistic comments and opinions.

Privesc.Eu fills the void of information about the situation and events in Moldova currently experienced by citizens working abroad, as well as by those living in the breakaway Transnistria region.

What do you think Privesc.eu provides viewers that they cannot get from TV or other mainstream media, or from already existing online sources such as YouTube?

Primarily, Privesc.Eu is a source of pure and as-is information about Moldova’s major events for citizens, as well as for international internet users, tourists, business people, potential investors, researchers and other people interested in Moldova.

Do you view your primary audience as being located in Chisinau?  Moldovans overseas?  Rural areas of the country?  Romanians sympathetic to Moldova?

According to Google Analytics, last month we had viewers from 58 countries . Most of them are from Moldova – 27,000, Romania – 1,500, United States - 540, France - 500, Italy - 455. Moldovan viewers came mainly from 5 cities: Chişinău, Rîbniţa, Bender, Tiraspol and Balti.

Many Moldovan websites have Romanian-language and Russian-language versions (and often English-language as well) - is there a reason that Privesc.eu has only a Romanian-language interface?

We don't think this is a problem for Russian-speakers. Any visitor can easily click on the video and watch it as it is. Sometimes we cover events where people speak Russian. Also, there are many comments in Russian language during our live broadcast.

What has been the most memorable or most significant event you were able to broadcast this year (in the opinion of you and/or your partners)?

The day when we had the most traffic and the highest number of viewers so far, was July 29^th, when we presented the results of the elections in Moldova.  On that day we had more than 6,000 live viewers. Also, some Romanian TV channels and national web-sites used our live video stream.

Have you had any difficulties with hackers attacking your site or with people spamming or acting as provocateurs in the comments section?

Yes, we have lots of provocateurs in the comments section, but didn’t have any hacker attacks.

 Do you have any advice for people who might want to start similar projects in countries with semi-closed media systems?  Why do you think it was possible for you to make a project like this happen in Moldova, and do you think it would be possible for people in places with more authoritarian governments, for example in Central Asia (or Transnistria)?

The main problem is with the quality of internet coverage in the country, and it depends also on the country's government. Live video streaming requires a good Internet connection, without it you can only do live blogging from the events. 

 What are your future plans for Privesc.eu?  Do you have any plans to generate original content (roundtable discussions or interviews which would be exclusive to Privesc.eu), or will you continue to focus on providing direct coverage of government-related events without commentary?

We have lots of ideas, but it takes time and resources to develop them all, so we take one idea at a time. We already have a talk show called "Fara cenzura" ("No Censorship") it's a show that seeks to present the facts without editing the video. Follow Privesc.Eu and you’ll see many great things in the coming months.

Moldova's repeat elections - the "Battle of the documentaries" and the online campaign

"Бес-при-дел", originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, May 25, 2009.
The word scrawled on the concrete, which should actually be
spelled "беспредел," means "lawlessness" or "chaos" in Russian

An earlier post of mine provided a few places to go for good analysis and updates on today's elections in Moldova. Additional sites to check are ADEPT's website, alegeri.md (also in English and Russian) and the website of the Moldovan Central Election Commission (showing a fairly high turnout as of 3:45pm local time). Before I head out to the Moldovan Embassy way out in Chiswick to provide moral support to my better half as she votes, I thought I would take a trip down memory lane through the campaign that was, to provide some basic background for those who have not been following it - while trying not to get too bogged down in the minutiae - as well as add a bit of detail about how the campaign has spilled over into the interwebs. I saw the lead-up to the repeat election campaign, as I was in Moldova from late May through June 21, but I had to follow the past five weeks online.

Sadly, only today did I re-discover Morning in Moldova, a wonderful (and unusual) English-language blog about Moldova, which I had seen briefly in the frenzy of link-hopping I engaged in while trying to keep up with the events that followed the April elections. The coverage at MiM is worth reading; I especially liked this attempt to map out Moldova's political scene.

The repeat elections, of course, were made necessary by the inability of the parliament chosen in the April 5 elections to choose a president to succeed Vladimir Voronin, who is term-limited out and has become a creaky dinosaur holding his country - and perhaps even his own party - back. Voronin managed the nifty trick of being both acting president and speaker of parliament (a post he will try to retain - a la Putin, or to use Voronin's own analogy, Deng Xiaoping - depending on how well his Communist Party, the PCRM, does today). The major reason there was no compromise in parliament was extreme societal polarization and outrage - and somewhat unexpected unity - on the part of the three opposition parties who made it into the legislature in the wake of demonstrations on April 7th which turned violent.

Who is ultimately to blame for the violence remains something of a mystery, although looking at qui prodest it should be noted that the burning of parliament and the presidential building arguably played into the hands of ruling Communists, at least in the short term, allowing them to characterize the opposition as would-be putschists who had attempted to overthrow the government. (An interesting timeline of foreign reactions to the post-election violence can be found here.) April 7th turned out to be the birthdate of a lot of myths - both in Moldova and among journalists and social media evangelists who were quick to seize on the overblown notion that the unrest in Chisinau could be characterized as a "Twitter Revolution" (this post puts a similar meme in its place in the context of Iran).

In Moldova, much of the June-July campaign centered around narratives of the events of April 7th, and the key difference between the campaign that ended on April 5th and campaign one ending today turned out to be the defection from the PCRM of Marian Lupu, the former parliamentary speaker whose name had been on the lips of many Western Moldova-watchers in March and early April as the best possible option to succeed Voronin. Lupu's role is yet to be determined - some from the opposition think he is part of a Communist plot to draw centrist votes (one of Lupu's campaign slogans has been "The political war must be stopped") and that upon making it into parliament, assuming his party and the Communists have enough votes to elect the president, he will make a deal with the PCRM and the three opposition parties who made it in in April will remain marginalized (in fact, one of them, Serafim Urechean's AMN, may not make it into parliament at all this time around).

Trash your TV, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
Chisinau, June 7, 2009

A major first salvo in the information battle which characterized Moldova's second election campaign was kicked off when the government aired a "documentary" titled "Attack on Moldova" (Atac Asupra Moldovei) on NIT. In the best traditions of Russian propaganda films of recent years, this one-sided narrative featured alleged recordings of phone conversations and hinted at shadowy threats from abroad as well as fingering internal enemies - namely, the leaders of the opposition parties as well as jailed (and later released) businessman Gabriel Stati. This masterpiece can be viewed on YouTube (naturally) here. It led to at least one opposition party leader threatening legal action. Moldovan analyst Oleg Cristal projected in June that the film would be the "quintessence of this campaign," and he wasn't far off the mark. As Cristal wrote in late June:

I understand that this film is currently being shown all over the country, and it aims to provoke a reaction that is both emotional (blood, fire, screaming, shooting, chanting, etc.) and sentimental (fear, personal and group security, hatred, patriotism, love of country, etc.): "we are being attacked by external enemies (Romania and transnational crime groups) and internal enemies (the liberal opposition)."... "Attack on Moldova" rallies society around a common threat: "We must defend our Fatherland," urges Voronin.

"Attack on Moldova" kicked off what one interesting commentary referred to as the "Battle of the documentaries." The opposition decided to present its own versions of the events of April 7th and get its message out by screening its own "documentaries," both on YouTube and in some cases by screening them in the country's smaller towns where many voters do not have access to internet (or fast enough internet) to enable them to watch these online, or would not be inclined to do so. The main examples of these films were "Black Box," "Whither Moldova?", "Who Loves Moldova?", and the party-sponsored "The Truth About April 7th" (PL), "Green Eyes" (PLDM - whose party color is green) and "In Defense of Moldova" (AMN - see JurnalTV's report on this film, with highlights, here). Later in the campaign, Romania's TVR1 aired yet another "documentary" (I use the scare quotes throughout because, while some of these films may be relatively more or less objective, none of them is really a documentary), "The Trap," about the events of April 7th (some discussion of the film is here). This untitled opposition film may also be of interest.

One could hardly call the "Battle of the documentaries" a battle of equals - the ruling party by all accounts made full use of its "administrative resource," including its ability to broadcast and rebroadcast its propaganda films on nationwide television. The national news programs are also used to cast opposition politicians in the worst possible light. While I was in Chisinau, I saw several days of intense coverage of the city's stray-dog problem, all of it concluding that the city's mayor, liberal Dorin Chirtoaca, was at fault. I knew I was going native when I out-conspiracy-theoried even my post-Soviet friends and theorized that the PCRM had perhaps imported stray dogs from the rest of the country to give their mud-slinging increased credibility. Then the nightly news started to highlight alleged rat infestation in Chisinau, alleging that "the 'most European mayor in the city's history' has brought Chisinau to the verge of an epidemic."

Progressive Moldovans have found ways to compete with or combat the government's domination of broadcast TV, but most of these are internet-based and therefore problematic in terms of reaching rural voters. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning the nascent online TV channel JurnalTV, as well as a streaming video site called privesc.eu ("I watch," in Romanian), launched during the campaign, which has increased transparency by showing complete video of press conferences and public meetings of, for example, the Electoral Commission (and is currently streaming Moldova's main opposition-oriented TV station, ProTV), rather than the carefully edited versions which appear on state-run TV.

Another way of using the internet to deal with biased broadcast media is to take on the most egregious excesses directly - by publishing monitoring reports highlighting the bias of state-run news programs or by showing side by side how careful editing is used by the state-run programs to distort the messages of opposition politicians or foreign critics. In general - not surprisingly - the authorities have found it harder to control online media (though not for lack of trying) than conventional media, but this is cold comfort to the opposition given the internet's relatively limited reach in Moldova.

Fighting Fist, originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, June 16, 2009.
You might assume the writing says "Fight with Communism," but in fact it says "Fight with Romanism"

YouTube provides a wealth of clips for those interested in how the campaign unfolded. While the major parties had video clips available on their websites, they all also had their video materials aggregated on YouTube:

PCRM
Partidul Liberal (PL)
Dorin Chirtoaca (separate from PL)
AMN (under the username scottgeorges for some reason)
Lupu (showing inter alia what seem to be dozens of clips of his meetings with voters in various cities throughout Moldova)

PLDM couldn't get their party's acronym as a username because it had already been nailed down by a YouTube channel called "Peace! Love! Deathmetal!" I couldn't find a one-stop source for their ads, but luckily the good people at ADEPT have set up a YouTube channel with campaign ads from all parties.

Online and traditional media which support the authorities also have made use of YouTube channels:

Moldnews, an online news portal which resembles Russian-funded efforts in Georgia
TV channel NIT

As have opposition-minded individuals and media:

Change Moldova
Unimedia
JurnalTV

For a somewhat more light-hearted YouTube clip, check out this animated spoof showing Voronin and several others (Greceanii, Turcan, Lupu, Rosca) conspiring to burn down the parliament. In general, the atmosphere of "permanent campaign" seemed to lead to fatigue and some silliness. A well-respected group of young, opposition-minded (though some used to work in the current gov't) economists called Clubul Idea started a something of a parody of the elections on its website - people create their own parties and then have the chance to vote for them.

Lupu, Chirtoaca and PLDM's Vlad Filat are on Facebook (note that Lupu is the only one of those three who has not tricked out his profile with a customized URL); Urechean is not, which makes sense given his target demo. They have been using the internet fairly extensively in general and their Facebook feeds in particular, as has Voronin adviser / PCRM parliamentarian / "grey cardinal" Mark Tkachuk, whose feed has reliably contained some of the black PR that is being pumped out by the PCRM campaign. Tkachuk (also spelled Tcaciuc) went all VVP with an "online news conference" on news portal Omega. Omega's unintentionally funny (to those familiar with Anglosphere netspeak) URL, OMG.md, stands for "Objective Media Group." They seem to be taking a page from Fox News' self-proclaimed "Fair & Balanced" stance, as this is an overtly pro-PCRM site.

Lupu joined Facebook fairly late in the game and received some scorn early on for making the noobie mistake of posting many, many videos as individual status updates, thus flooding the home pages of his "friends" and leading some people to exclude his feed from their home page. Sorry, I said I wouldn't get bogged down in the minutiae... To Lupu's credit, he did hold a meeting with Moldovan bloggers, video of which of course made its way online (PL leader Mihai Ghimpu also had a well-documented "off-line" meeting with Moldovan bloggers, as did Urechean). Lupu also, tellingly, has a standalone website (i.e., not one associated with the party he is using as a vehicle for his campaign, PDM) and has put a bunch of photos up on Flickr, including (somewhat oddly) items apparently intended to show that he is an international playa, e.g. an invitation from the French President to attend Bastille Day celebrations.

Tricolor, originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, May 27, 2009.
Of course the pro-Romanian camp has its own cans of spray paint...

Another intriguing online innovation was the chance for voters in Chisinau to check their status on the election rolls online. Those lists which were the focal point of the fraud allegations which followed the April 5th balloting. Not sure how much it helped - Filat claimed (to the press and in a Facebook status update, naturally) to have found two extra people registered in his apartment when he went to vote this morning.

And what of the reverberations from the "Twitter Revolution"? Well, a few days before July 29th, I saw reports (initially on the Facebook feed of prolific Moldovan blogger and Twitterer extraordinaire Mihai Moscovici, later picked up by Unimedia) that fake Twitter accounts - nothing new, and apparently even non-celebrities are at risk - purporting to belong to Vlad Filat and Dorin Chirtoaca were calling for supporters to come protest on July 30th.

I can't think of an appropriate conclusion to this post and already have one foot out the door. I may come back later this evening with some more links and perhaps a report on whatever the scene is at the Moldovan Embassy in London. While I am not overly optimistic about what may follow this evening's vote-counting (which, as we all know, is much more important than the actual voting), permit me to conclude with a more uplifting - and probably apolitical - bit of street art:

Be United, originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, June 17, 2009

"Putin goes to Pikalyovo"

This is kind of funny. One thing missing from the Reuters report (below) is that the video was apparently put together by LJ blogger Oleg Kozyrev. Oh, and for those of you who missed Putin's Pikalyovo "I'm-a-badass (-especially-when-dealing-with-my-pocket-oligarchs)" show the first time around, of course there is video.

Putin's hard man image targeted by spoof Web song
July 27, 2009

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A spoof song which makes fun of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's hard man image as the savior of Russia's battered economy has been winning fans on the Internet.

Public satire of Putin, who stepped down as president in 2008 to become prime minister, is rare and state media present the former KGB spy as the main figure handling the crisis.

Putin last month publicly humiliated factory owners in the town of Pikalyovo and forced them to reopen their plants after workers protested against unpaid wages.

"Putin, Putin goes to Pikalyovo. Putin, Putin will make it cool for us," the Russian lyrics say as a bearded man in a suit gyrates. "Putin, Putin is quick to do justice. Putin, Putin is our Prime Minister."

The Russian song, set to a popular 1970s Czech tune Jozin z Bazin, has had tens of thousands of clicks on the www.youtube.com website in recent days.

Putin is Russia's most popular politician and his influence has fueled speculation that he could seek to return to the Kremlin in the future.

The spoof song says an election is just around the corner and that the result will be clear to everyone. But the song ends by saying the next Russian president will be the monster who gives his name to the original Czech song.

That very popular song tells the story of a village monster which ate tourists.

"Jozin z Bazin is the people's choice ... oligarchs, miners and even cops know that Jozin z Bazin will be our new president."

The song can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Ho1H3HmzM

Putvedev's faith-based initiatives

A couple of the hired guns at one of last weekend's pro-gov't counterprotests.
My favorite part is the unrealistically hard-looking image of Dimmovochka.
[image source]

The Russian government has published, on PM Putin's website, a list of "measures undertaken to combat the consequences of the global financial crisis" (the word "crisis" never appears in official pronouncements without the modifier "world" or "global," because as any good United Russia functionary knows, the global financial crisis is called 'global' because it's happening outside of Russia).

But United Russia's supporters - both the ones hired as crowd filler and the ambitious, plum-job-seeking core - seem to be running on faith (to use a phrase immortalized by Eric Clapton).

Witness this by now infamous speech by a United Russia activist at one of last weekend's rallies. The speaker, a young lady named Maria Sergeeva, whose blog identifies her as "The Mashka" and who seems to like to post photos of herself, has helpfully posted a transcript of her remarks here. Here's my translation of the most testifyin' part of her performance (she even identifies her holy trinity!):

It's no secret: in Russia today there are forces which are trying to blame Putin, Medvedev and United Russia for our temporary difficuties. These forces are like a dangerous virus - as soon as they sense a weakening of our immune system, they'll attack.

But let's be honest with ourselves. Take me, for instance, a student who pays full tuition. In 1998 I wouldn't have known what to do. And now I don't just believe. I know for certain that Putin, Medvedev and the United Russia party will protect me. They'll give me the chance to take out a student loan at a rate of five percent, not 55 percent. They'll give me a job. They won't allow me to be fired illegally.

That post drew over 4,000 comments, many of them critical, compelling Ms. Sergeeva to write a rambling rebuttal castigating the "two-legged cockroaches on LiveJournal" and "parasites," and even deploying against her critics United Russia's rhetorical WMD - a quotation from the ideological architect of "sovereign democracy" himself, Vladislav Surkov - but (in case we forgot it was all about her) taking the first two paragraphs to marvel at her newfound fame. She sort of has elements of a Russian Sarah Palin - spunky and down-to-earth, but also self-contradictory and determinedly dim-witted, and not really ready for prime time.

It turns out that Ms. Sergeeva is not only a YouTube celebrity of sorts - an irony-free and more heavily managed version of Obama Girl, except without, you know, the singing - she is also a member of the political council of the Young Guards (United Russia's youth wing, usually abbreviated as MGER) and a videoblogger on United Russia's website, where the section devoted to blogs is wittily titled "Berloga" (which means "bear's den," but also happens to be spelled by inserting the initials of United Russia - ER, in Russian - after the "B" in "blog" - how punny!).

Based on her apparent inability to memorize even a few sentences of her monologues, and assuming the MGERovtsy are supposed to be a breeding ground for future Russian political elites, there really will be problems finding qualified leadership among the younger generation. Youth wings of political parties - especially parties with no opposition - are of course populated by careerist hacks to some degree in all countries, but this young lady takes self-absorbed hackdom to another level.

Anyway, here is a rather more articulate analysis of why Putin remains popular even in the face of an economic situation that seems to get more calamitous every week. The English translation is from the JRL, the original article in Russian is here.

Putin's Stable Popular Support Based on Cultural Closeness, Not Results

Gazeta.ru
January 29, 2009
Commentary by Boris Tumanov: "People Like Putin"

Despite all the crises,tragedies, disasters, and disorders, the citizens of Russia are not disillusioned with Putin because he is a symbol and the personification of themselves.

The global economic crisis with its still unknown outcome has already caused a marked intellectual revival in that segment of Russian society that can tentatively be called the thinking part of our elite. The general catalyst of this process is the expectation of sociopolitical cataclysms.

Russian thinkers who belong to the "vertical hierarchy of power" consider this perspective as a threat to their own well-being and seriously hope to avert it with the help the non-existent middle class and the traditionally obedient "tin soldiers,"' who are already being pushed into manifestations of loyalty. And their freedom-loving opponents believe just as sincerely that the coming upheavals will be a factor in the inevitable liberal transformations in the sociopolitical life of Russia.



However, in the former case it is nothing more than a helpless simulation of their own professional suitability, while in the latter it is an equally nonsensical, equally pretentious attempt at Cartesian analysis of the inscrutable instincts of Russian society.

As Solovyev's Khodzha Nasreddin would say in such circumstances, "Oh jinnis, you are searching where it is not hidden." For the main, if not the only, effective factor capable of determining the state of Russia in the foreseeable future is that almost symbiotic unity that exists between the largest part of Russian society and the person of the "national leader" known as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

This unity could not be shaken by the tragedies of the Kursk, Nord-Ost, and Beslan, the administrative tyranny of "sovereign democracy," "Basmannyy justice," or the rumors of the "national leader's" fabulous personal wealth just as it cannot be shaken by the current growth in unemployment, inflation, devaluation of the ruble, the disintegration of mortgages, or even the coming deprivations.

Here are figures that thoroughly illustrate this assertion. According to the findings of the Levada Center, in September of last year an overwhelming majority of Russian citizens polled --61% -- thought that things were moving in the right direction in Russia and only 21% of the respondents thought that the country was taking a wrong path. The short war in Georgia played a part here, of course, but even today a majority of Russia's citizens believe that things are going well in the country. In December 2008 and January of this year their number remained constant at 43% while the number of pessimists dropped from 40% to 34%.

Last September also marked the peak of positive assessments of the activities of the government headed by Vladimir Putin, 66% against 31%. But in December 2008 and January of this yeart hese figures were 60% and 36%, and 58% and 38% respectively.

But then the activities ofVladimir Putin personally in the job of premier are evaluated by Russian citizens using some different system of coordinates and criteria, if we judge by the fact that in December 2008 and January 2009 he was consistently approved by 83% of those polled, while the number who were dissatisfied with his activities declined from 15% in December to 14% in January. We will add that the peak of approval of Putin's activities, 88%, came in that same victorious September.

Remarking this phenomenon, both the liberals and the state-minded thinkers -- the one in vexation, the other with chauvinistic satisfaction -- explain it by essentially the same factor, which is indeed the main, although not the only, factor in "Putinomania." For some this factor is formulated as the patriarchal inertia of Russian society, the result of many centuries of slavery, while the others see it as a manifestation of sovereign Russian uniqueness expressed in communality, spirituality, and patriotic unity with the government. At the same time the most inquisitive opponents of Putin become lost guessing about what kind of mistakes and blunders he would have to make or what "Egyptian plagues" would have to overtake Russia under his leadership to disillusion the majority of Russian citizens who love him.

It would be simplest to answer this question by saying that Vladimir Vladimirovich can do anything he wants, practically without risk to his popularity rating. But such an answer, even if it corresponds to reality, demands convincing explanation, or rather a detailed investigation of the genesis of the "national leader's" unprecedented popularity. Russia's leaders and Vladimir Putin personally are absolutely right when they say that the main reason for the current crisis was their responsible consumption of the West, above all the United States. But afterall, it was this very mindless consumption that caused the manna from heaven that poured down on Russia in recent years in the form of incredibly fast-rising oil prices.

And if we take an unbiased look at the results of these "seven fat years," those who sincerely care for the real interests of Russia and its citizens could register serious charges against the Russian leadership and Vladimir Putin himself regarding how they managed the wealth that Russia enjoyed.

Instead of fighting corruption, instead of effective army reform, instead of development and diversification of domestic production, instead of building up still restless provincial Russia, they worked on strengthening the vertical hierarchy of power, which guarantees them practically lifetime terms of office. And after setting their intention as restoring Russia's stature on a global scale, the Russian ruling elite managed to quarrel with almost all of their Western partners; indeed they have found themselves in virtual isolation. Beginning with Vladimir Putin's Munich speech and up to the recent gas war with Ukraine, Russia has stubbornly destroyed its own international reputation and pushed away not just Europe and the United States, but also our neighbors in the CIS.

If Russian society were consciously striving to assume responsibility for the fate of the country or, at a minimum, if it were capable of an independent evaluation of the government's actions, its reaction to such behavior by the government would be much less equable. But civic responsibility presupposes a search for alternatives, which requires intellectual and psychological exertion, and the citizens of Russia will not be ready for that for a long time. Not just because the few opponents of the government are incapable of formulating an intelligible alternative to the current course, but above all because of the traditional and almost panicky fear that Russian society will be deprived of its paternalistic oversight by the state. That is why Russian citizens do not try to look carefully at the mechanisms of control over the state, the economy, and society, preferring to rely on the omniscience of the tsar, great leader, or national leader who by definition cannot answer for the mistakes of the ordinary mortals under him.

But in Putin's case there is one substantive aspect that prevents us from viewing the universal trust of him exclusively in the framework of the fatalistic formula: "Good tsar but his boyars are indifferent." For unlike the tsars who are "ordained from above" and the general secretaries, the citizens of Russia are convinced that Putin took charge of Russia as the result of their own will, not Divine Providence or a decision of the Politburo. And the fact that they chose him the way they choose the best fellow in the village (athlete, does not smoke, likeable, went into intelligence work) only emphasizes that from the beginning this choice did not presuppose any political responsibility of Putin to the voters. That is why, from the standpoint of the citizens of Russia, Putin does not have to answer for the activities of his own government, for the results of his own term in office.

They do not judge Putin because for society he is not functional. He is a symbol. He is the personification of the Russian citizens themselves; they identify themselves with him. And this is perhaps the first case in Russian history when the purely reflexive worship by the Russian masses of the latest domestic divinity is tinged with a sincere feeling of solid affection for him.

Affection that is linked not with his political and economic decisions, but rather with the fact that his worldview, hopes, and complexes are indistinguishable from those of the average Russian citizen.

It is the diehard fastidious intelligentsia who may be horrified at the vulgar language that Vladimir Putin uses with emphatic pleasure in his public statements, and especially in contacts with Western politicians and journalists. It is the numerous snobs who are amused at the former president's almost childish liking for dressing up as a submariner, a fighter pilot, or showing off his torso, and his way, plainly seen at Kennebunkport, of imposing the company of his Labrador Koni on his foreign guests. It is the liberal analysts, who are becoming extinct, who see in his aggressive megalomania in relation to the West echoes of the old humiliation felt by the future national leader when he discovered that Germany, even though it was socialist, was able, unlike the USSR, not only to produce an adequate amount of beer, but also to bottle it in three-liter bottles with a convenient spigot. And they are malicious skeptics who blasphemously mock the apocryphal tale that during his entire KGB career Vladimir Putin, surrounded by militant and vigilant atheists, never parted with the cross around his neck and his belief in the Almighty, risking exposure at the first physical training exercise.

On the other hand, a majority of Russian society is in complete solidarity with these behavior traits of the national leader because they fully coincide with the social culture of the Russian citizens themselves, with their ideas about the outside world and their complaints about the rest of the human race.

Well then, if we add to these feelings the easy material well-being that coincided with Vladimir Vladimirovich's term of office for a significant part of the society, which continues to believe furiously in the return of the "rivers of gas and banks of oil," we can say with certainty that Putin is going to last a long time.

And, incidentally, so is today's Russia.

Жертва Телевидения*

While the video below (titled "Attention: Lukashism is hazardous to your health" by the person who posted it to YouTube) shows an individual who is an extreme case, it nevertheless is instructive to anyone who wonders why political opposition is so unsuccessful at gaining traction in places like Russia and Belarus.

There are many reasons, of course: incompetence of the opposition overall, lack of an appealing platform or practical solutions, limited access to media or the "administrative resource," and opposition leaders who refuse to cooperate with each other. But one very important reason is the potency of government propaganda, which portrays any non-loyal opposition as externally funded and dedicated to the collapse of the state, and the susceptibility of certain segments of the population to that propaganda.

The interview subject here talks at various times about shooting, skinning alive, and gassing to death those who protest Lukashenko's rule, and makes repeated and irate references to their American funding, before completely losing it at the end and cursing out whoever is doing the interview. Apparently this was filmed in either early or late 2008 in Gomel', Belarus.

This comes via drugoi - where commenters pointed out that this clip did not actually appear on Belarusian TV and wondered whether the person shown might be mentally ill (watch the clip and you'll see that's not an outlandish question).

*With apologies to Vysotsky.

Synchronicity, intellectual goofiness and Google hits

The past couple of months' uprootings and putting down of roots will (perhaps) be explored in a later post. For now, Scraps returns to the virtual airwaves with a rather frivolous post in lieu of something more serious. After all, "a blog is...a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks."

Others who saw the video clip embedded below summed it up as follows:

In this awesome video for the song “Gorbachov” by Russian metal band ANJ, former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev is an axe-wielding barbarian, destroying zombies who attack the hard working big breasted women of Mother Russia. It really is a thing of beauty. Actually it’s more than that. It’s the best damn music video ever created.

Or, more succinctly:

Wow. Hot Russian women, Zombie Stalins, Gorbachov the barbarian, and erotic food innuendo. What else could you possibly need in a music video?

Indeed. Judge for yourselves (click here to see the HD version):

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

The video's director describes his opus as follows:

Suffice to say it's half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

This apparently made the rounds of RuNet a few months ago, and the link was emailed to me at that time by a fellow GVO Summit attendee. As I sifted through my neglected inbox today, I came upon this link and decided to check whether any of my fellow Russia bloggers have posted anything about this curious production. Apparently, no one did. Perhaps people found parts of it too tasteless, or the music accompanying the video too awful, to subject others to it; on the other hand, I would imagine that Sean could have a field day with some of the symbolism.

Imagine my surprise when, among the Technorati sightings of the video, I found an announcement that the band whose song inspired this crazy clip is performing tonight in my home town. Since we landed here in London exactly a month ago, this discovery tickled my homesickness bone and cemented my decision to post a video that would otherwise be out of character - not that there's anything NSFW, mind you, it's just rather... well, check it out yourself.


PS notwithstanding the potpourri of Google-friendly search terms appearing above, I should state quite clearly that this post was not authored with the intention of driving traffic...

"Today's Pioneers"

"Today's Pioneers"

Last month there was some talk about the revival of the Young Pioneer organization in Russia. Russia Today did a talk-show segment asking, "Do Children Need Ideology?" All the fuss coincided with the anniversary of the organization's founding in May, which was marked more widely a year ago on the 85th anniversary of the Pioneers' founding.

RIA Novosti ran a photoset last year to mark the occasion ("День рождения Пионерии") with images from the organization's history, including one from a 2006 Pioneer induction ceremony on Red Square that could have been from 1986 except for the prominent involvement of post-Soviet Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

День рождения Пионерии

www.rian.ru

смотреть всю фотоленту >

Here are a few more pictures of that day's ceremony by RIA Novosti's photographer which didn't make it into the photoset linked above.

In May, a friend emailed me this somewhat amazing video clip from a news broadcast by ProTV of Chisinau (which unfortunately can't be embedded), showing a bemused news anchor reporting on the Pioneers' induction ceremony in Moldova's capital last month. The ceremony was timed to mark the 86th anniversary of the Soviet Pioneer organization's founding and involved the induction of around 70 children.

ProTV asked a few of the kids what they were there to celebrate and got responses like "I don't know...Victory Day" and "our teacher told us to come." The TV station titled the report "Pioneers Help Their Elders," which is part of the Pioneer's oath but also no doubt a tongue-in-cheek reference to these children's utility to Moldova's ruling Communist Party.

I pulled a few screen-shots from the video of the ceremony (below), but it's worth watching the video. The ceremony was conducted in Russian, and many of the kids interviewed were not able to answer questions put to them in Romanian, which explains the subtitles in the screen-shots:

[part of the Pioneer's oath]
"...to conscientiously fulfill the duties of a Pioneer..."

"Be faithful to the Pioneer ideal!" says the
elderly man sporting a St. George's ribbon.

One enthusiastic young inductee tried to explain what exactly those ideals meant to her:
"It's very important to be a Pioneer, because [Pioneers]
defend...their city from different...well, how can I put it..."

"...from different enemies and those who damage the environment."

Perhaps she just couldn't think of anything else to say, or perhaps for at least one young member, the ideals of the Pioneer movement in its ninth decade are morphing from red to green.

Echoes of Victory Day and the Inauguration

I happened to catch a re-run of the Daily Show a week or two ago and saw Jon Stewart's hilarious and surprisingly on-point riff on the Victory Day parade and Medvedev's inauguration ceremony. Transcribing selected sound bites from the clip wouldn't do it justice - just watch it and laugh:

That - as well as the return of the outstanding Darkness at Noon, which is back on line and has posted an original video of the V-Day festivities in Moscow, inspired me to corral a few links to online material on the events in Moscow of four weeks or so ago.

CSIS's Sarah Mendelson wrote a "critical questions" brief about the significance of the re-militarization of the Victory Day celebrations, which included a brief digression down memory lane, as Mendelson recalled attending a Soviet military parade in late 1990.

Global Voices Online had roundups about both the inauguration and Victory Day. And the always interesting Wu Wei has an interesting account of what it was like to watch Medvedev's inauguration on Georgian TV.

[Update June 15: I wanted to direct readers as well to this link which fell through the cracks - Oleg Panfilov's brief comments stating that the question of who has the upper hand as between Putin and Medvedev will become clear when one of the two begins to enjoy an advantage in TV coverage.]

"Putin on the Ritz"

This is rather hilarious (the summary for this clip at the "Mini Movie" website reads, "Two lame duck leaders and one classic song can only add up to one thing: DANCING!"):

Via drugoi.

[update May 29 - I changed the embedded video to the version uploaded on YouTube, since the Mini Movie embed for some reason cannot be made not to play every time the front page of the blog is loaded. If anyone knows how to fix this for my future reference, please let me know.

Also, a couple of articles from years past which used "Putin on the Ritz" as their headline:

- Michael McFaul's review of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser's book, Kremlin Rising;
- an article by Nikolas Gvosdev about the 2006 G-8 summit in St. Petersburg.]

Colbert: One dead Russian journalist = $571.43

American comedian Stephen Colbert had this reaction to a viewer informing him that his picture is being used on a billboard in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:

“Russians, you may not use my image until you have paid my fee - $20,000.
Which, I believe, in Russian currency, is 35 dead journalists.”

Looks like the country's image may need a little more "burnishing."

More video clips from Colbert Reports past involving Russia.

It's funny because it's true...

This video has over half a million views on YouTube (is that a lot? I confess I don't know...but it seems like a lot, so I apologize if this post is the equivalent of an email forwarding you a joke you've seen five times already) and has been up since last month, but I first saw it today thanks to someone emailing me the link. It is by a KVN team from the city of Perm'.



So basically, a bunch of guys in Perm' got together and - using a comedy skit uploaded to YouTube - did a pretty good job of making the same basic point as Human Rights Watch did in its 2008 World Report about the problem of a "democracy charade" in many countries (see also here for a discussion putting Russia in the context of that report).

On to the next episode

It's always hard to come back from a hiatus of a few weeks, especially in such eventful times. One builds up so many things to say which have remained unsaid for so long...

But happily others have had much to say about last Sunday's Duma elections - SiberianLight has a few posts with pretty-colored graphics; Moscow Rules gave his impressions from ground zero; Wally Shedd weighed in; PutinWatcher has had some interesting posts on the elections, including this one; Jesse Heath at Russia Monitor put up a valiant effort in the face of law school finals; Robert Amsterdam's blog had wall-to-wall coverage as usual; Veronica at Global Voices Online wrote a couple of roundup posts and posted a link on her own blog to a fantastic article that I hope to have time to translate; TOL's dedicated elections blogs covered events in English and in Russian [UPD - engrossed in that orgy of link love, I somehow neglected to mention the kingpin of Russian election coverage, Mr. Guillory]; and of course the izbircom LJ community had lots and lots of reports about what went down last Sunday at the polls.

Speaking of the ties that IzbirCom (that's the Central Electoral Commission, or TsIK) has to the blogosphere, it looks like the powers-that-be at TsIK have realized the power of the internet. The LiveJournal community represents TsIK's first attempt at a blog, although they don't seem to have put a link to the community anywhere on the main TsIK website. Here's what one member of the electoral commission had to say about the effort in an interview:

This electoral cycle is the first time that TsIK has set up a blog. Is this a faddish thing or a real instrument to increase voter turnout and popularize the institution of elections?

Fashion and popularization are inextricably connected, but to be more specific, we understand perfectly well that the Internet is a very important instrument for communicating and broadcasting information. Therefore, Russia's TsIK cannot ignore this method of communicating with and receiving feedback from the citizens of our country. We are of course interested in ensuring that active Internet users (first and foremost, the younger generation) know about the elections and in giving them a chance to state their position and to ask us questions, and in having the chance to search together with them for answers which are important to everyone.

TsIK's effort at mastering the blogosphere is being trumpeted on the Vzglyad-, Kremlin- and Zaputina-affiliated "internet TV channel" parked at the posh "Russia.ru" domain, which has a very nicely produced video clip titled "Our Man in TsIK":

The clip (nestled in among other classic Russia.ru content - clips with titles like "Bondarchuk is for Putin," "30-year-olds are for Putin," "The Crisis ofLiberalism," "Day of the Jackal" (featuring Nemtsov) and "Nizhnii on the Rise") is shot in black-and-white, with one of the songs from the classic spy thriller "17 Moments of Spring" as part of the soundtrack.

Prominently featured in the nearly nine-minute video are two fairly widely read bloggers from the RuBlogosphere - Sholademi and Casualmente (who also has a friends-only journal here) - who are the "curators" or moderators of the electoral commission's LJ community. I can't help noticing, though perhaps it should be irrelevant, that neither of these bloggers is an ethnic Russian. The bloggers are shown helping TsIK Chairman Churov learn to surf the web, and it is suggested that they will have regular audiences with Churov and may have exclusive scoops for their readers.

The LJ community looks like a way for the authorities to demonstrate that they are attentive to potential complaints about the elections. On an LJ community, any blogger can sign up and post material (subject to the moderators' approval), and according to the izbircom community's profile, Churov and/or his colleagues read the postings there regularly.

And the nice publicity given to the bloggers involved looks like a kind way for the government to reward and encourage its helpers, sort of like the "Golden Hundred" rating of journalists on the Press-Ministry-sponsored Mediacratia website. I don't necessarily want to criticize the bloggers involved - after all, they really did provide a good vehicle for feedback - e.g., this open thread calling for reports of ballot-rigging - much of which was critical of the elections. However, it's another matter entirely whether the authorities cared to read that feedback, and it's certainly possible to see this foray onto the Internet as just another bit of legitimizing window-dressing for Putin's Plan.

I may have a few more retrospective posts about the Duma campaign when I get some more free time, although the issues may start to seem stale fairly quickly - lord knows I've stored up lots of interesting links over the past few weeks on issues like election observers, western-oriented "jackals," and the like.

The only thought I had when I saw the poll results - and I've read enough to know that it wasn't a unique reaction - was that the result for "Fair Russia" seemed awfully high for a party which had been hemorrhaging high-profile members for months before the elections.

For now, Russia is on to the next episode - the Presidential race (or whatever form of succession the next few months have in store) is already gathering steam, although even VVP expressed a sense of weariness about having to go through another round of elections.

Consolidating support for the President's course

Now that articles are appearing with titles like "You Must Not Leave Again. The Campaign for a Third Term Signifies That Both a 'Designated Successor' and a 'Caretaker Czar' Have Been Demonstrated to Be Excessively Risky Solutions to the '2008 Problem'" (Andrei Ryabov, Nov. 3, Gazeta.ru) - the 2008 problem looks like it really has become a problem, even for the people supposedly with their hands on all the levers.

Notwithstanding the elaborate versii (a post I had hoped to translate, but it's over a month old and thus may already be hopelessly stale by the standards of Russian politics - anyway, Google does an OK job of translating it here.) cooked up by professional political handicapper, blogger and anticompromat webmaster Vladimir Pribylovsky, it can be said rather simply that a lot of people - powerful and not-so-powerful alike, it would seem - want Putin to stick around in one Tsar-like guise or another. Others have been writing about how it would be the biggest mistake of his career for him to do so, and that if he really believed in or wanted to construct the institutions of democracy in Russia, he would step down.

Apparently, Putin is being "Driven to the Kremlin Wall" by his supporters - certainly those among the narod, but presumably more importantly, those among the elites, fretting in their Maybachs and Rublyovka mansions about what might become of their cash flow in a post-Putin Russia.

I ran across a crazy and somehow very disturbing website that seems to be part of the universal Putin love-in (last week, K-Vlast' got Russian politicians to respond to the question "Does the universal love [всенародная любовь] alarm you?" - another article I'd like to translate but haven't had time to; here's Google's best effort at a translation). The website is zaputina.ru, which launched last week and apparently is all set to become part of a nationwide "For Putin!" movement. I think I'll let the article from ostensibly objective business news portal RBC (an article which I found through a link on the zaputina website) speak for itself and also show how RBC seems to have been reduced to shilling for the regime on this story (my translation):

Virtual voting "For Putin!" is taking place on the Internet
[Nov. 8, 2007]

The internet campaign [Интернет-акция] "For Putin!" taking place on the Russian-language internet, has collected over 16 thousand votes in support of the President of Russia in a day and a half of existence. The creators of the project state that their goal is not to campaign for Vladimir Putin but to consolidate his supporters on the Internet.

As the organizers note, it is not only residents of Russian cities who are voting for Putin. Votes are coming in from London, New York, Kiev, Khar'kov and the other cities of the world.* "We don't want to convince anyone or encourage them to change their political views in favor of Putin's course," says one of the initiators of the project, political scientist Aleksei Zharich.** According to him, the goal of the project is to consolidate supporters of the president and his course.

Writer and former head of Boris Yeltsin's press service Marina Yudenich says that she decided to become involved in the project because she "watches the positive changes in the life of the country very closely." Lawyer [on TV, at least - trans.] Pavel Astakhov, another participant in the project, agrees with Marina Yudenich. "As a lawyer, I better than others understand and see the results of Vladimir Putin's work over the past eight years. These are lower taxes, social projects, and children's programs, and the development of the economy in such private-sector areas as consumer credits," says Astakhov.

The project's goal, in Pavel Astakhov's opinion, is "to show ourselves that we can choose our own leadership [власть] and can preserve those gains [завоевания] and successes which have already been achieved." Marina Yudenich thinks that the "For Putin!" project will show the part of society which is in doubt that the country's president really "possesses nationwide [всенародной] support."

The project allows internet users, aside from just voting, to publish their photo and leave a link to their web page. This personalization, according to Marina Yudenich, is very meaningful, since it "demonstrates that people are not just voting for the president, but they are doing this openly, showing their face and identifying themselves by name."***

* Here we see one of the more bizarre fixations of Putin's team (and often of Russians in general): a fixation on the support of foreigners, even those from countries perceived as enemies.
** Calling a campaign PR specialist or "polittekhnolog" a "political scientist" is such a very "virtual politics" thing to do. Or perhaps Zharich majored in politologiia at the MVD university (yes, that really is his alma mater, at least according to his LJ profile). Zharich's main contribution to the project appears to be that he had bought the zaputina.ru domain awhile back - I wonder if there is anything interesting lurking in the cached earlier pages from that domain?
*** I guess the secret ballot is no longer good enough. Ms. Yudenich neglects to mention how easy it is to manipulate such a website by posting fake photos and identities or filtering out ones the webmaster would rather not have appear; not to mention the comical idea of a "vote" on a website where there is only one choice.

It seems to me that Pribylovsky gets it just about right when he dubs this project "licking together" (a play on the name of the now-defunct, original pro-Putin youth movement, Walking Together).Strangely, there is also a za-putina project (the hyphen makes all the difference) which has been around longer and thus has more "votes"; according to Zharich, though, it's run by the same person who runs an anti-Putin site. Predictably housed at protiv-putina.ru, at least this website allows "voters" to leave comments. These sites could perhaps be seen as metaphors for the Russian political process - such polarization between a certain wing of the opposition and the mainstream that they can't even have their "voting" on the same website! And of course the more perfect way in which the official zaputina project simulates the Kremlin's view of the proper way for the people to interact with the authorities - the only form of acceptable feedback is a vote of approval; no comments, please.

Zharich is not particularly modest about the project he apparently manages. On his livejournal (his handle is brigadier - is that a coincidence?) he writes about what he sees as the main strengths of the zaputina.ru website:

1. Everything on one page!!! On one page.
2. Easy-to-use interface. The possibility of changing something around is excluded, but it's simple and maximally easy for a person to leave their vote.
3. Technologicity [Технологичность]: Video, audio, photo, entertainment [энтертеймент].* [...]
5. This is the real web two [point] zero.
(For those who want it to, their photo links to their web page, blog or online project, by the way. And that's the whole point. It's not a grey mass - but real people. You click and learn about the person, it's cool)
6. If Hillary, for example, had a project like this, the whole world would talk about it.**

* This sums up how Putin has managed to keep people watching TV even with all controversial or potentially controversial news programs dumbed down or removed. It is amusing that this guy seems to have forgotten that there are many perfectly good words in Russian for "entertainment."
** I wonder if this jackass savvy political operator knows anything about Moveon.org or other internet projects that made a splash in US campaigns. They weren't talked about by "the whole world" because they were domestic political phenomena. Why exactly should anyone (other than Russophiles/Russia-watchers like myself) outside of Russia care about this uncreative propaganda website?

For a guy who was born exactly a week before I was and cannot therefore pass as a callow youth, he has a strangely childlike glee about the whole thing.

Gazeta.ru covered the zaputina project and the affiliated (embedded, actually) russia.ru website, which is sort of like a unidirectional version of YouTube (you can watch what the webmasters have uploaded but cannot upload anything of your own or leave comments), in an article appropriately titled Путин-tube (here is a Google translation). The zaputina website is compared to a flash-mob ("where many people repeat the same, most often pointless, action") and it is suggested that these websites are efforts to attract some of the campaign funds which are no doubt flooding the country. You can follow what Russian blogs are saying about the zaputina website here.

So, is this a transparent, "democratic" feedback loop? Or a colossal, polittekhnolog-orchestrated circle jerk? Here at Scraps of Moscow, we report - and you decide.

Moving on to the partner site, Russia.ru calls itself a "Telechannel" (actually, the full text of the title that pops up in your browser window is "Telechannel Russia.ru: Glory to Russia!") and aspires to Internet TV status, although in the lower left-hand corner of the site is the logo and media license information of Kremlin-friendly news portal Vzglyad. As one commenter on a blog post about this story noted:

What do you think, will Russia ever have normal democracy? I think hope is dying out with each passing day...

Even Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru - which is back in operation, hooray! - had a vignette last Friday about the zaputina project, which I'm too tired to translate and which Google doesn't really do justice. And others are laughing about the whole effort to keep Putin in office as well:

The soundtrack to the above video (really a slideshow of entertaining Putin images) is a song narrating Putin's imagined interior monologue as he arrives at the conclusion that he must remain in charge of the country "for the people."

Meanwhile, from all indications, the runup to to Duma elections is less amusing for parties not enjoying the benefit of the "administrative resource" and is anything but democratic. SPS, for example, has had one of its regional offices vandalized (and was then not allowed to use its allotted campaigning time slot on the local state-run TV channel), its website hacked, and its campaign literature confiscated on a rather thin pretext:

News Friday, November 9, 2007. Issue 3782. Page 3. Police Seize SPS Election Booklets The Moscow Times Union of Right Forces said Thursday that police had seized 14 million copies of its officially approved campaign booklet in more than 20 regions this week. In an entry on his LiveJournal blog, party leader Nikita Belykh said police justified the confiscations by saying it was necessary to examine the campaign materials for content possibly violating extremism or anti-monopoly laws. The Neo-Print printing house in Moscow, which prints most of the campaign materials for Union of Right Forces, or SPS, was raided by police on Thursday and had its operations suspended pending inspections expected to last at least until Dec. 2, when State Duma elections will be held, he wrote. A woman who answered the phone Thursday at Neo-Print said the company was operating as usual and declined to confirm whether it was raided by police. An SPS spokeswoman could not specify which police department had conducted the raid. Meanwhile, Vadim Gologuzov, a senior police official in Krasnoyarsk, said his officers had seized 2 million copies of the party's booklet because it contained an advertisement in violation of election laws, Interfax reported. In Izhevsk, police official Nikolai Shvetsov said police had seized 800,000 copies after an anonymous caller reported a hostage-taking in a garage, Interfax reported. Police found no hostages in the garage, only the campaign materials, which were confiscated to establish their legality.

Things have gotten so bad for SPS (and this time, none of it appears to be the party's own doing, as is sometimes the case with the misfortunes of Russian liberals) that they have even appealed to the OSCE for help, complaining about a "wave of persecution." Good luck.

Update, Nov. 12, 11am: I see this website is a popular topic. Today's Moscow Times in a story titled "United Behind a Putin Third Term", rehashes Gazeta's coverage and provides some more denials and perspective:

[...] [S]ix days after it opened, 27,000 people have already voted on a web site, Zaputina.ru, calling for Putin to stay on despite the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms.

Zaputina.ru did not provide any information regarding its creators, while a United Russia spokesman denied any official party involvement Friday.

"If there is no party's logo on the web site, then it's not the party's project," he said on condition of anonymity, because only the party's chief spokesman was authorized to comment.

Gazeta.ru, however, has identified the site's creator as Konstantin Rykov, who is on the United Russia party list in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

"This could have been a personal initiative on Rykov's part," the party spokesman said.

Gazeta.ru identified Alexei Zharich as the web-site project manager, and the Nic.ru domain registration center said it was registered in his name in October 2004. Zharich is listed by the web site Vybory.ru as the general director of the Political Technologies company and a former Interior Ministry employee.

A secretary who answered the joint work telephone number for Rykov and Zharich said Friday that both were too busy to talk.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reached on his cell phone Friday, said the presidential administration had no relation to the site. [...]

"United Russia's traces can be found everywhere in one or another form," Alexei Mukhin of the Center for Political Information said Friday. "Because the party has put Putin on top of its federal list, everything done in support of Putin is done in support of United Russia."

Mukhin said the regional rallies and Za Putina, despite United Russia's denials of involvement, could be aimed at pushing United Russia's share of the vote on Dec. 2 to 80 percent and "not permitting any other party pass the 7 percent barrier" to get into the Duma.