A Step At A Time

Voldymyr Campaign has a post about a fan of President Putin's: the film director Francis Ford Coppola:

In Russia your works are well known and highly valued," Putin told Coppola, adding that he was not just referring to "The Godfather" but also to films "that so accurately tell of the horrors of war." "Apocalypse Now" was shown at a Moscow film festival in 1979.

(continued)

It was with something slightly less than optimism and confidence that we finally moved into Zone V, which was to be our permanent home. The Zone was a dimly lit world of scurrying feet and elevators: the air was fetid, with an all-pervasive odour of cooked cabbage and valerianka, or valerian extract, used as a panacea for most ills, but especially as a sedative. On each floor, long corridors of rooms were fronted by a large desk, opposite the elevator bank, where the dezhurnaya, or female concierge, sat, keeping a careful watch on those who came and went, and checking propuski now and then. The rooms varied in size. On this, my first visit, I got a single room on the ninth floor – I later discovered that it was really half of a regular room – at some point in the late 1950s a decision had been made to partition the rooms with hardboard, so as to make more of them. The resulting hardboard wall was extremely thin. There was a shared toilet, and a shower which lay behind an ancient, rubberised curtain. We had already been warned about the cockroaches in the shower basin – getting rid of them was a task that had to be undertaken each day. The room could be made partially secure by inserting the small brass block of the "cylinder blocking key", which first had to be wrapped in sellotape to make it fit, into the door's lock.

At the end of each corridor, there was a communal kitchen, with two large and ancient-looking electric stoves, a sink and a table. There was also the musornyi provod, or garbage chute, which seemed to lead directly to some indeterminate spot in the yard far below. A sign on the wall said: eto kukhnya, a ne khlev!, which translates as “This is a kitchen, not a pig-sty!”. Cleaning was done by roster, organized by the floor's Komsomol (Young Communist) brigade, and for the first four weeks we foreign students were exempt. The cleaning involved cleaning the kitchen and sweeping the floors of the corridor with a broom.

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kefir (a kind of yoghurt), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

On one day a week we were permitted to visit the British Embassy store, down in the yard of the embassy premises on Naberezhnaya Morisa Toreza (now Sofiyskaya Naberezhnaya), where with hard currency we could buy some of the goods available to diplomatic staff: breakfast cereals, instant coffee, toilet requisites, toothpaste, Cadbury’s chocolate, and so on. One had to be careful when carrying these items back on the bus or Metro not to let them be glimpsed by members of the Moscow public: if they were seen, an attempt was often made by druzhinniki (vigilante police volunteers) - whether genuine or not - to confiscate them. Without the extra conveniences supplied by the embassy store, day-to-day life would have been more difficult than it was. None the less, we pressed on with our new lives!

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III
Going Back-IV
Going Back-V
Going Back-VI

(continued)

In the morning, we all left the train with our luggage and were herded into another bus. Our mood was generally cheerful, though also somewhat apprehensive. To begin with, the group was housed at a university hostel (studencheskoye obshchezhitie) on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, with the promise that in a couple of weeks’ time we would be transferred to the main university building. The university district, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs, is a rather characterless and sprawling area of geometrically planned avenues, which also takes in Lenin Hills (Lenskie Gory, now Sparrow Hills, Vorobyevye Gory), and the university skyscraper. Our hostel was a five-storey building, indistinguishable from the other five-storey apartment blocks that stretched for kilometre after kilometre on either side. We were fortunate enough to each receive a room to ourselves, though we soon realized what a luxury this was – most of the Soviet students in the building had to share two, three or even four to a room. For the first day or two we restricted our outside forays to such activities as finding the nearest foodstore – something of a necessity, as the university stolovayas (dining-rooms) were situated some distance away. We got used to queuing for such items as bread, kolbasa (sausage), cheese, and so on, and then joining the second queue at the cashier’s desk, in order to pay. The whole process could take as long as an hour. Back at the hostel, we experimented with cans of pork and salted fish, which we prised open and devoured in the floor’s communal kitchen.

A few days later we were taken to the main university building (MGU) to begin the lengthy process of being issued with our propuski (passes) and were given a guided tour. The propusk was an essential item – without this identity document one couldn’t get into the building at all. It had one’s name and photograph displayed on a small, two-page folding card – and one had to walk through a special hut at the entrance gate of the “zone” (this was the name given to each respective wing of the immense building) to show it to the babushka who sat inside in her headscarf and coat, waiting to shout “gde u vas propusk?” (where is your pass?) if one was the least bit slow in presenting it. This ritual had to be gone through each and every time one entered the building.

The university building itself was – and, of course, still is – vast and labyrinthine. It was originally built between 1949 and 1953 by several thousand forced labourers drafted in and supervised by Stalin’s henchman, Lavrenty Beria. Sixty trains were used to ferry the steel used in the construction all the way from Dniepropetrovsk in Ukraine. The skyscraper has 36 storeys, which at the time of our visit, we were told by those who said they knew, were composed of teaching blocks and twelve floors of administrative offices, including two floors of KGB. These were flanked by four gigantic wings of student accommodation – the “zones” referred to earlier, marked A, B, V, and G (the first four letters of the Russian alphabet). The building is said to contain a total of 33 kilometres of corridor. A guidebook notes that its proportions “are deceptively vast and its spire, despite appearing small from the ground, is in fact 240 metres tall and the star on its top weighs an incredible 12 tons. The building's facades are ornamented with giant clocks, statues, carved wheat sheaves and Soviet crests and stand before a terrace featuring heroic statues of male and female students gazing optimistically and confidently into the future.”

(to be continued)


See also Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III
Going Back-IV
Going Back-V

(continued)

It’s hard now, in retrospect, to recreate or even re-invoke the atmosphere of those years. At home, in Britain, there was a sense of social change, the dropping of old certainties and taboos and also a degree of willingness to experiment with new lifestyles and patterns of living. This was accompanied by the burgeoning pop culture, the new cults of fashion, drugs and sex, the advent of rock music, the Beatles and the Stones, and the Wilson government with its slightly tongue-in-cheek, but none the less real commitment to the “white-hot technological revolution”. It all had an air of adventure, but at the same an innocence whose essence is hard to recapture or understand nowadays. In some ways, as students (our official designation was that of “scholars”) travelling on British Council stipends and the recipients of a Foreign Office briefing, we were, I guess, meant to be representatives of the New Britain, carrying the Western way of life into the heart of the Soviet monolith, in the hope – entertained by some – that some of it would rub off and act as diplomatic grease for the rather rusty state of British-Soviet relations at the time (strangely, perhaps, the installation of a Labour government at Westminster and Whitehall had led to more, not less tension between London and Moscow).

As we sailed in our Soviet ship across the North Sea towards Denmark, we began to take stock of our fellow passengers, who represented a fair cross-section of British society: businessmen, middle-aged couples, young tourists bound for the bars and nightclubs of Copenhagen, a large group of Nigerian students returning from vacation, somewhat unwillingly, for the continuation of their studies at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. And then there was us – a fairly homogeneous bunch of “intellectuals”, male and female, charged with our academic and diplomatic status as bearers and harbingers of free inquiry. Mostly on that sea-voyage I think the intellectual component got quite forgotten – my principal memories are of evenings – especially the last evening before we docked in Leningrad – when with energetic concentration most of the group, myself included, danced the Twist to deafeningly amplified music with the Nigerian students, while the ship’s purser Yevgeny wandered around keeping an eye on us all, a sad, contented smile on his face. Apart from the Russian crew, we saw no Russians: we were told that they were “below deck”. This had also been true during the voyage on the Mariya Ulyanova I’d made the year before.

At Leningrad we disembarked slowly. Getting through customs and passport controls took a very long time – suitcases were opened, books and papers removed and read, then replaced, sometimes confiscated. The students were divided into groups, depending on destination, the whole operation supervised by the assistant British cultural attaché, who had come up from Moscow. The Moscow group, to which I belonged, rode to Moskovsky Vokzal (Moscow Station) in a chartered bus. By now it was dark, and I remember the glimpses of St Isaac’s, floodlit, from the bus window. At Moskovsky Vokzal we boarded the Krasnaya Strela (Red Arrow) night sleeper to Moscow. The walls of the sleeping compartments were made of deep brown wood, and all the fittings were of good old-fashioned brass. There was a great deal of red plush everywhere.

(to be continued)

See also Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III
Going Back-IV

Putin's address at Auschwitz contained some decidedly tortuous arguments and apologies. It contained not much shame, but a great deal of old propaganda. And once again the Baltic States are being held hostage by s neighbour who is still in deep denial:

Judith Ingram at AP filed a report which contained among other things the following:

[passage omitted]

Putin used his speech at the [Auschwitz] ceremony to respond to calls by leaders in the Baltic states for Moscow to renounce the secret addendum to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which Nazi and Soviet leaders concluded in 1939 to divide up much of Eastern Europe, including Poland, in case war broke out.

Shortly after German troops entered Poland in September 1939, Soviet troops occupied the country's east. Soviet forces then occupied the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in June 1940 but were driven out by the Germans a year later. The Red Army retook the Baltics in 1944, and reincorporated them into the Soviet Union. The Baltic states gained independence only after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

If Russia were to renounce the secret pact, it would tacitly be acknowledging some responsibility for World War II -- a stance seen as sacrilege in a country that lost some 27 million people during the conflict.

"Standing on this tormented soil, we should firmly and unequivocally say that any attempts to rewrite history and put victims and their killers, liberators and occupiers on an equal footing are immoral and unacceptable for those people who consider themselves Europeans," Putin said, referring to the Baltic states' recent entry into the European Union.

[passage omitted]

(via Marius)

(continued)
The drive through northern Romania, Hungary and Austria, back through West Germany to Ostend and the United Kingdom, was fairly uneventful. We didn’t go down to Bucharest, but stayed in the foothills of the Carpathians, where we were treated almost like royalty by the staff of the local tourist office in Suceava, the first town over the border, which didn’t appear to have seen many British tourists in a long while. We tried on local national costumes, let the tourist office director’s twelve year-old cowherd son drive our right-hand drive Morris Minor round a field, much to the boy’s delight, experimented with speaking Romanian, had our photographs taken, drank fruit cordial, had our palms read by the local gypsies, ate in a really nice restaurant, and in general had a pleasant time. It all seemed light years away from the Soviet Union – more like being in France or Italy. Moving on westward the landscape soon become rather more industrial and sombre, and when we entered Hungary there was something of the Soviet ‘feel’ again, especially along the shore of Lake Balaton, with its organized groups of vacationers and their mostly Soviet-made cars. In Budapest I remember the blackness of the uncleaned buildings, and the bullet scars from 1956, which still lay everywhere on the street facades and masonry. Also the incredibly dense and tall barbed-wire fortifications on the Hungarian-Austrian border, just after Sopron. After a morning crossing of the border, which took almost until noon, we visited Eisenstadt, where I’d attended a Russian language course the year before. The Esterhazy Castle was closed, and so we just drove to Vienna, where we stayed in the University hostel. This also had a slightly odd feeling, as we were staying in the same place we’d stayed three years earlier, on a month’s German language course at the Summer University (Sommerhochschule). It became almost impossible to believe that we really had just driven all that way from Leningrad – the memory of the Soviet reality – or what little we’d just experienced of it – had already receded, and the feel of the “West” was all around us, familiar and comforting again, though also strangely bright and brash, in a way I’d never noticed before.

Back in Edinburgh, it was time to prepare for more changes. Having got my master’s degree, I was now to get started with my dissertation. My girlfriend had already started hers, in mathematics, and had also got the promise of a postgraduate fellowship to Cambridge, where she was going to move the following autumn. I’d applied for a British Council scholarship to visit Moscow in order to do some library and archive research. But this autumn we spent in Italy, at a cottage in Tuscany, and did some preliminary work on our dissertations. In the daytime we worked, sometimes taking walks along the shore near Portoferraio, in the evenings read, by the light of kerosene lamps (there was no electricity on the hillside), and made fires of pear and olive logs. Sometimes we’d go up the hill to visit our neighbour, who owned the land, a Polish artist who had emigrated to Scotland and now spent half of the year with his wife in his house and studio in Tuscany, on an olive farm he had bought. In addition to the poems of Annensky, I was also reading a lot of Russian symbolist poetry, prose and aesthetics, as well as philosophy (Solovyov, Rozanov, Shestov and Vyacheslav Ivanov) and fiction (Dostoyevsky). Our neighbour had also read some of these things, and occasionally we sat and discussed Russian modernism and the ways in which it differed from Polish modernism.

In January, I had an interview in London with the British Council, in connection with the Moscow visit I was planning to make. The British Council’s offices on Davies Street seemed quite unassuming, and very British, with cups of tea and copies of the Times. One was therefore slightly unprepared for the rather East European nature of the interviewing panel, which consisted of a row of dark-suited personnel, some academic but others very definitely from the Foreign Office, who fired questions at one about one’s plans, intentions and reasons for visiting the Soviet Union. Some weeks later, I received a letter telling me that I’d been accepted as a postgraduate exchange student. Later, there was a briefing session, where all the accepted candidates were gathered together in a room at Davies Street. We were given demonstrations of bugging devices that had been found in university, diplomatic and business premises in the Soviet Union, and then received an illustrated lecture on the workings of two-way mirrors, with a real “live” two-way mirror. We were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must not on any account divulge anything of what w'd seen and heard to the press, or in writing of any kind. Somewhat taken aback, and slightly amused, at the end of the session we emerged on to the street, wondering if this had been a rehearsal for some spy drama. Still later, we each received a cheque to cover the cost of a warm overcoat, and were given the address of a firm of specialist London locksmiths who provided the so-called “cylinder blocking key” (R. sobachka), to reinforce the security of our rooms in the Moscow, Leningrad, or other university hostels.

In early September, armed with what seemed like rather too much heavy luggage (it was mostly books and papers, plus the warm overcoat), I found myself at Tilbury Docks again, this time without my girlfriend – it was the first time we’d been separated for quite a while, and we both had mixed feelings about this. We were planning to be apart for six months, and would meet again in Cambridge, not Edinburgh. There were many unknowns ahead. That afternoon, with two other students from Edinburgh, I boarded the Soviet ship Baltika, and in the main saloon we found the whole British Council group, which consisted of some twenty students, and were soon making friends. That evening the ship sailed, and we were bound for Leningrad. It was September 5, 1967.

(to be continued)

see also:
Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III

STATEMENT OF THE SEVENTEETH NATIONAL BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE LITHUANIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY INC.

With regard to the President of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus going to the commemoration of the end of the Second World War in Moscow


On May 9th in Moscow, Russia is planning a celebration to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Russia’s President Putin has invited the President of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus to celebrate “USSR’s victory” over fascist Germany.

For Lithuania the Second World War did not end on May 9, 1945, but continued until the end of August, 1993, when Russia was finally forced to withdraw her occupation army from Lithuania.

The 50 year long resistance by the Lithuanian nation exacted huge
sacrifices. The Lithuanian nation lost one third of its inhabitants, tens of thousands of its young men died in the partisan resistance, occupiers slaughtered and tortured innocent Lithuanian people and deported them to distant Siberia.

For 50 years Lithuanian Americans led the fight for the non-recognition of the unlawful and forced incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union. In 1953 the United States Congress created the “Select Committee to Investigate the ‘Incorporation’ of the Baltic States into the U.S.S.R”, which determined that the Baltic nations were illegally occupied by force.

Russia has not condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, nor has it condemned the Soviet Union’s imperialistic goals. The “victory” over fascism helped to enable bolshevism and 50 more years of Lithuania’s suffering.

Russia refuses to acknowledge responsibility for Lithuania’s injuries and to compensate the Republic of Lithuania and its people for the damages caused by the USSR’s long occupation. During the 15 years of Lithuania’s re-established independence, Russia found no cause to begin negotiations or to apologize.

Instead, Russia is using the May 9, 2005 sixty year anniversary and “victory” against fascism for its own double meaning purposes.

The Lithuanian American Community, Inc. agrees that Lithuania should be a good neighbor to Russia and should develop a mutually beneficial relationship. However, under no circumstances can it agree that the President of the Republic of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, or any other high ranking official of the Lithuanian government should attend the events of May 9th in Moscow, as it would not only infer an assent to the Soviet occupation but an assent to the carried out soviet communist crimes.

Adopted by vote of the XVII National Board of Directors of the Lithuanian American Community, Inc. on January 15, 2005.


Regina F. Narusis, J.D.
President of the XVII National Board of
Directors of the Lithuanian American Community, Inc.

(via MAK)

The Moscow Times has a bleak warning from Timur Aliev, editor of Chechen Society, about the new bill, currently on its way through the Russian State Duma, amending the law about exit from and entrance into the Russian Federation:

The amendments give grounds for canceling visas and rejecting visa applications. While some are fairly reasonable, the new version of the law gives the government the ability to refuse visas to foreigners who "act in a disrespectful way toward federal organs and state symbols" or toward "generally accepted Russian values." In addition, visas can be canceled if a foreigner does something that "harms the international prestige" of Russia.

As Aliev points out,

the bill could easily be transformed into a means of censorship. Any foreign journalist or activist who writes or says something about Russia that contradicts the government's line could be kicked out of the country, never to return. In order to avoid something along these lines, foreigners will begin to watch what they say and censor themselves.

The law on exit and entrance in effect supplements the law on declaring a state of terrorist emergency passed by the Duma in December. Declaring a terrorism-related state of emergency would mean that journalists would be able to have access to and publish information about terrorist attacks only with permission from those directing counterterrorist operations. This will allow authorities to control the Russian media to the same extent that the visa law will allow it to control foreign journalists.

Aliev suggests that the amendments to the law, based on "anti-terrorist" measures, will be used to impose an information blockade, especially on Chechnya:

The information blockade around Chechnya is apparently the test run for this method. Starting July 1, foreign journalists will have to have permission from the Foreign Ministry to work in Chechnya, while Russian correspondents will need permission from the Interior Ministry. Naturally, the road will be closed to the disloyal. The Chechen media will be forced to engage in a large amount of self-censorship. Newspapers that push the envelope will be repressed. The authorities have already begun their campaign against media outlets deemed unacceptable to Moscow.

Chechen Society, of which I am the editor, is no exception. It has already received an official warning from the local branch of the Press and Culture Ministry in Chechnya. After the third warning, officials can legally shut down the paper. I have also been called into three different security organizations to answer for our paper's viewpoints. The local state prosecutor, the Directorate to Combat Organized Crime, and the FSB have all investigated our paper.

During one visit, the colonel told me directly that he had been given orders to close the paper. Pointing to one of our articles, he said, "Young people are taking up arms and going to fight because you write this kind of stuff." The article was about a young man who had been taken from his home during a cleanup operation and later died in custody after being beaten.

And, he concludes:

Of course, implementing these so-called anti-terrorist laws will not throw up a new iron curtain around Russia right away. Russian citizens can still leave the country. Yet all the necessary preconditions for isolating Russia from the rest of the world are there, waiting to be implemented.

(continued)

I visited the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1966, travelling with my girlfriend in a white Morris Minor convertible which we took aboard the Soviet ship Mariya Ulyanova (named after Lenin’s sister) from London’s Tilbury Docks, via Copenhagen and Helsinki, to Leningrad. I can still remember the contradictory feelings I had when the ship docked at Copenhagen, and we went off to visit some Danish friends whom in other summers we’d also visited, though in rather different circumstances. I was apprehensive about the forthcoming Russian visit – partly, I think, because I inwardly saw it some kind of test, or confirmation, of all the Russia-related material I’d absorbed in one way or the other over the past four years (I'd brought along a 2-volume Soviet edition of The Brothers Karamazov in Russian to read on the journey, though I only got through about a third of it). Yet I was also pleased to be going to Russia at last, and was impatient to get the “Western” part of the journey over with as soon as possible. At Helsinki we hardly left the ship, only making a brief tour of Kauppatori – I remember the prominent display of bananas on many of the stalls – and in the evening strolling up the deserted streets towards Senatintori.

As the ship sailed up the Eastern Baltic towards Leningrad, we gradually became aware that we were entering a different environment and a different thought-space. Watching the aggressive approach of the Soviet border patrol craft, which came right up to the ship at full speed, you realized that this wasn’t the rather sleepy world of Scandinavian navigation any more. After a while, most of the passengers retreated to the bar, or their cabins, and in the morning we awoke to see that we were almost inside Leningrad harbour.

That summer we didn’t stay in hotels, but slept in a tent we’d taken with us, striking camp at official State campsites whose locations were entered on our visas, together with the obligatory time of arrival at each site. We started with a week in Leningrad, then drove to Novgorod and Kalinin, followed by a week in Moscow, then to Kharkov and Kiev, and finally out of the USSR via Vinnitsa and Chernovitsy, into Romania – four weeks in the Soviet Union in all. In general, at first we were surprised at how “normal” everything seemed – the weather was warm and sunny, the streets and thoroughfares of Leningrad looked much like those of any European city, and it was only when we got out of the car and gazed at the actual texture of the place – the strangely rough, unmodernized surfaces of the roads and buildings, the dust that blew everywhere, the absence of commercial advertising, the old-fashioned look of people’s clothes – that we realized we were in another world from the one we were used to. Even so, during those first days I think we were so pleased to have reached our destination that we didn’t really notice much of this – my memories are mainly of visits to the Hermitage and other museums, to the Petergof Palace and park, of walks along the Neva embankment, and so on. For us, it was almost like being back in Vienna or Copenhagen – or even Edinburgh. We stayed at the campsite at Repino, about 40 km from the centre of Leningrad, on the Gulf of Finland – the pre-Soviet name of the place was Kuokkala, and the whole environment had a thoroughly Finnish atmosphere, with birch and fir trees. We travelled to Leningrad by electric train, and returned in the evenings to the campsite, with its two sections – an international one, for Western tourists, and a “Soviet” one, mainly for Russians and a few tourists from the Baltic states. We soon got used to this division, and the way in which towards evening it usually broke down, when the holidaymakers from the “Russian” side of the site – who slept not in tents of their own, but in large, communal marquees provided by the camp, would come and visit the “Western” side, bringing vodka and fruit which they exchanged for Western cigarettes and items of clothing, especially blue jeans. We also got acquainted with some of the other Western tourists – couples from Canada and Australia in large “dormobiles” and trucks, an intrepid American solo traveller in a VW Beetle, groups of French and Germans in cars, hardly any British at all.

The driving was the really arduous part of the trip, and as we had to stick to the timetable stamped on our visas, there was pressure at times. High-octane gas was in short supply, and we had to carry spare cans. Tanking usually took place at or near the campsite, with not much prospect of a refill until the next tourist point. At one point in the journey, somewhere in central Russia, we took the wrong fork and mistakenly left the official route that was prescribed for us, down a road that passed a militia checkpoint – the militiaman came running out with a pistol, waving it at us until we stopped and turned back. One afternoon, after leaving a site, we stopped to take a break from the driving, left the car near a bridge, and walked down to a riverside path. On our return we found a military truck with three soldiers in it, waiting for us. Parking of foreign cars near bridges was illegal, and the soldiers said we would all have to go back to the campsite, where they would contact the local militia. We made a pretence of knowing no Russian at all, with only partial success. Back at the campsite, however, the situation resolved itself in an unexpected fashion, when it was discovered that I did speak Russian after all – the soldiers seemed pleased about this, shook our hands and drove away in their truck. At another site, I was sternly reprimanded by a severe-looking man in plain clothes for having a “Beatles haircut” – chto vy, Bitls takoy? – only to receive an abject, though, I thought, rather sulky apology from him later in the day, in the camp canteen – Prostite, ya, konechno, ne znal (he hadn't known I was a Western tourist – I was wearing a red parka). Sometimes the campsites were located next to military camps, and in the evenings uniformed soldiers would visit, again with vodka and apples, asking for Marlboro cigarettes. On one occasion they brought musical instruments, and sang for us, under the stars.

Engaging as some of these encounters were, we were, I think, glad to leave Soviet territory. At Chernovitsy, after the car had been searched for nearly 2 hours by Soviet border guards, who extracted every single piece of paper from it, we crossed into Romania, where we underwent the ritual of having the car sprayed against foot-and-mouth disease, and washing our hands in disinfectant by the roadside. We were then told by the Romanian personnel that we could pitch our tent “wherever we liked”, as long as it wasn’t in a forestry zone. The year before, Nicolae Ceausescu had been chosen first secretary of the central committee of the Romanian Communist party…

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back and
Going Back - II

From the current issue of Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly:

On January 25, Russia's Foreign Ministry accused Novaya gazeta of spreading "disinformation" in an article published in the biweekly's January 24 issue and written by its award-winning Chechnya correspondent, Anna Politkovskaya. The article, headlined "The FSB Equipped Its Helsinki Group," claimed that Akhmad Zakaev, Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskahdov's London-based special representative, had planned to come to Helsinki at the invitation of Finnish parliamentarians for a seminar on the possibilities for a peaceful settlement of the Chechen conflict. The meeting, according to Politkovskaya, was to include both "representatives of Russian civil society and Chechen belligerents." Several hours before Zakaev was to leave for Helsinki, Finnish Justice Minister Johannes Koskinen informed Heidi Hautala, chairwoman of the Greens' parliamentary faction and human rights lawyer Matti Vuori, who were organizing Zakaev's visit, that, in Politkovskaya's words, "Zakaev's safety from Russia's special services on Finnish territory" could not be guaranteed. She added: "The minister could not give a guarantee that upon arriving in Helsinki, Zakaev would not be, there and then, right on the airfield, forcibly transferred by Russian special service officers to a Russian plane flown in specially for him, which would deliver him for interrogation at Lefortovo." Russia has accused Zakaev, who received political asylum in Britain, of involvement in terrorist activities – a charge he denies.

Politkovskaya wrote that Zakaev had planned to use the Helsinki meeting to prepare the groundwork for negotiations under the "observation" and "guarantee" of a group of deputies from the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), including Swiss parliamentarian Andreas Gross, who is PACE's rapporteur for the situation in Chechnya, and the Belgian European Parliamentary Deputy Bart Staes. However, according to Politkovskaya, there is a split between the European Parliament, which is for a negotiating process that includes Russian civic groups, and Council of Europe structures, which is "for dialogue, but under Kremlin control." Andreas Gross, she writes, announced in Helsinki that he has organized a round-table on the Chechen conflict, to be held in Moscow in March and to include people from both sides of the Chechen conflict.

However, according to Politkovskaya, the Chechen side at the planned round-table will be represented by pro-Moscow Chechen President Alu Alkhanov, Chechen State Council Chairman Taus Dzhabrailov, State Duma deputies Akhmar Zavgaev and Ruslan (Khalid) Yamadaev (both of whom are members of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party) and presidential adviser Aslanbek Aslakhanov, among others. "They not only in no way represent Chechen field commanders, but more generally [represent] no one other than Kadyrov Sr. in the past and Kadyrov Jr. now," Politkovskaya wrote. Meanwhile, the Russian side for the roundtable will include Rodina (Motherland) party leader Dmitri Rogozin and Aleksei Mitrofanov of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR).

In Politkovskaya's view, the planned roundtable is an example of the Kremlin's well-honed tactic of using "doubles" – "absolutely mirror-image but controlled movements, parties, ideas" – with the aim of confusing public opinion and discrediting opponents – in this case, the Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees. Late last year, the union's head, Valentina Melnikova, offered to conduct peace talks with envoys of Aslan Maskhadov. The rebel leader accepted the offer, but a planned meeting between a delegation headed by Melnikova and Akhmed Zakaev planned for Belgium was thwarted when the Belgian authorities failed to grant the soldiers' mothers visas.

Russia's Foreign Ministry charged in a statement posted on its website on January 24 that Politkovskaya's article "crudely distorts the real state of affairs and in essence impugns the capability and sovereignty of that country, at the least is insulting to the Finnish side and is regrettable." The Foreign Ministry claimed that Zakaev had "refrained from accepting the invitation" to the Helsinki seminar, adding that Finnish Justice Minister Koskinen, "to whom the organizers of the seminar unofficially appealed, did not guarantee [Zakaev] unhindered departure from the country in the event that Russia were to make an official request for his extradition. The minister made a special statement on this point, emphasizing that Russia has placed A. Zakaev on the international wanted list via Interpol and the Finnish side cannot fail to take this into consideration."

Vladimir Socor, writing about Russian reaction to President Yushchenko's address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg yesterday:

Although Yushchenko reiterated in his reply (as he had on the preceding day in Moscow), "Russia is a permanent strategic partner of Ukraine," this was far from sufficient for Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma's International Affairs Committee, also present. In a Russian media interview, Kosachev faulted Yushchenko for "never mentioning Russia in his [prepared] speech, while mentioning Europe and the EU in every other sentence of that speech. This rings an alarm bell." Kosachev complained that Ukraine's new leadership "does not regard cooperation with Russia as a goal in itself, but only as a factor that may or may not harm Ukraine's integration with Europe."

Kosachev went on to characterize Yushchenko's nomination (subject to parliamentary confirmation) of Yulia Tymoshenko for prime minister of Ukraine as "effrontery, a move unfriendly to Russia . . . an openly provocative step." Such inflammatory wording appears designed to fuel opposition to Yushchenko in the Ukrainian parliament, a cross-party delegation of which sits in the Strasbourg forum. Kosachev approved of just one step taken by Yushchenko thus far: the stated intention to withdraw Ukrainian troops from the American-led coalition in Iraq. "This shows that the new Ukrainian leadership can conduct an independent foreign policy, not one based on some notions of Euro-Atlantic solidarity" (Interfax, January 25).

And Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, commenting approvingly on Yushchenko's decision to visit Moscow first as president "in the interest of close and tranquil relations with Moscow,"

recalled that he had tried the same approach immediately after being elected president last year, but it did not bring the desired improvement in relations. On the contrary, Russia's behavior toward Georgia "changed in the last year and the last few months in ways that arouse indignation. Hopefully, this will not happen with Ukraine".

(continued)

I’d grown up in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from the complexities of East European politics, but had had at least some small experience of “physical compulsion” at the school I attended, which in itself in those distant days pf the 1950s was probably not unlike a totalitarian entity of some kind, with its cult of obedience, its prefects, its canings and beatings, and its assertion of a monolithic, corporate identity. None the less, at that school I’d learned some foreign languages, in particular German and Russian, and on entering Edinburgh University found after a couple of years that I would have to decide which course to follow – and opted for Russian. The reason for that was fairly simple, I think: the classes in the German department, like those in the French department, were over-attended and dogged by teaching that was old-fashioned and remote. The number of students in the Russian department, by contrast, was much smaller, and there was the opportunity of taking classes that were really more like tutorials or seminars, with young professors who were at home in their subjects – some of them were émigrés from the Soviet Union, and they had an inside knowledge of Russian literature, history and culture, which they made available to us. In my third of year of study I began to attend regular seminars and lectures on the history of Russian literature, all the way from the medieval byliny and the Slovo o polku Igoreve, through Baratynsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, up to the Silver Age, Futurism and the early Soviet period. The seminars, like the lectures, were almost exclusively conducted in the Russian language. Running concurrently with them was a two-year course in Russian and Soviet history, and a one-year series of lectures in Russian social thought. There was also instruction in Russian syntax and grammar, and a course in linguistics.

The Soviet Union itself featured in the coursework only from time to time, and mainly in the history and social thought components of the study – though there was also a special course in Soviet literature. Unlike the other modern language courses, French and German, for example, the Russian course did not include an obligatory third year spent in the country being studied – for this, one had to wait until one’s postgraduate work began. This was mainly because the Soviet authorities didn’t have an exchange program for humanities undergraduates – their focus was exclusively on postgraduate work in the natural sciences. The “cultural and scientific exchanges” between the Soviet Union and the West were in fact quite unequal, as while a large number of the Western students who visited the USSR were involved in the study of history, language or literature, practically all the Soviet students who visited Western Europe, Canada and the United States were science postgraduates. The reasons for this are obvious: the Soviet authorities feared that arts graduates would become influenced by Western ideas and thinking. Most Soviet arts graduates could not travel to the West.

Occasionally the Russian department received visits from Soviet writers and public figures, but these were nearly all rather obscure – no one had ever heard of the “poet “ who arrived one day, accompanied by two “minders”, with a slim volume of verse in written in the most austere and conventional social realist style. He was an engaging man, who had taken part in the defence of Moscow in 1941, and had later fought in tank battles – he told us that all the skin had been burnt from his body, and had had to be re-grown. As a military man, he was interested in the technical problem of how best to scale the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, and I remember that we students spent a long time discussing the logistical details of this with him, as it was good practice for our knowledge of Russian.

Our knowledge of dissident - i.e. contemporary, non-social realist - Soviet writing was rather limited, though we did get rather well acquainted with the writing of the Soviet emigration of the 1920s and 30s through the efforts of one senior staff member who had left the USSR in the mid-1950s. The emphasis in the modern literature teaching to be on the social realist Soviet novel – Leonov, Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Simonov, and so on, though the classical literature course, which ended at 1917, also included the early modernist poetry of Symbolism, Futurism and Acmeism.

Studying Russian and Soviet history and literature in early 1960s Britain was an odd experience. Students from other departments who didn’t know much about the subject were often rather jealous, and imagined that we were somehow helping to further the cultural revolution that was starting to break out in Western society then. When we tried to explain to them just how conservative and even reactionary much of the ideology that underpinned most post-war 20th century Soviet writing really was, they couldn’t understand, and I think it was then that I began to have some inkling of the divide that separated East and West. There was also, at the beginning of my studies, the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, and the theme of the “bomb”, and its possible consequences, persisted throughout the four years. And, as we never failed to remember, the actor who played James Bond on the cinema screen had been born just round the corner from our departmental lecture and seminar rooms.

At the end of my fourth year, I took the final examination, and got a 2:1 Honours degree in Russian with German. I could then proceed to the writing of a Ph.D. dissertation, which took another four years, and entailed several periods of research in the Soviet Union. It subject was the work of the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. I completed the dissertation in 1971, and received my doctorate in the same year.

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back

This Ukrainskaya Pravda interview from last December has Yulia Tymoshenko claiming Latvian ancestry on her father's side. The interesting paragraphs are these:

Во время пресс-конференции азербайджанская журналистка с ужасом спросила Тимошенко, правда ли, что у нее армянские корни (по слухам, девичья фамилия Тимошенко - Григян).

"У меня по линии отца все латыши до десятого колена, а по линии мамы - все украинцы", - указала Тимошенко.

До десятого колена? To the tenth generation, or ten times removed? Perhaps it's not important, anyway.

(via scb)

Veronica Khokhlova has a post about something that struck her as odd in the Taras Kuzio piece in EDM the other day. But it seems clear that there was a typo in his text - the URL he was referring to was

http://www.oligarh.net

It's amazing the difference that one misplaced letter can make!

In writing the entries about “Dissidents”, I’ve begun to realize that for me the issues in this subject go back a long way – probably to the beginning of my involvement with Russian studies in the early 1960s. In those days, such an involvement also inevitably entailed a prolonged encounter with the Soviet Union. Since for someone from a Western democracy it's almost impossible to understand cognitively the reality of the fabric of life in a totalitarian state, a Westerner’s memories of contact with that fabric are almost always bound to be selective, personal and subjective to an extent that may make them irrelevant in terms of historical truth. Yet I believe that since part of the legacy of the Cold War has been a consciousness of the old divide between East and West, and the barriers it created between human beings on either side of it, it’s perhaps important for those in the West who did have first-hand experience – however partial and “cushioned” – of life in the Soviet reality, to talk about it and discuss it. For it was a world that was not merely physical and geographic, but also extended far into realms of thought, morality, political awareness, aesthetics, and other regions, while at the same time functioning as a kind of reversing mirror of Western social and intellectual norms.

“A man cannot bear the thought of being crushed by a physical compulsion; therefore he deifies the force that rules over him, investing it with superhuman traits, with omniscient reason, with a special mission; and in this way he saves a bit of his own dignity. The Russian writer Belinsky, for instance, made use of Hegel during a certain phase of his life, to deify czardom.” This is how, towards the end of his autobiographical work Native Realm, the great Polish-Lithuanian author Czeslaw Milosz illustrates the choice between “madness” (the refusal to recognize necessity) and “servility” (the acknowledgment of one’s complete powerlessness),which he saw as a defining characteristic of life in a totalitarian society. I think it was a dawning consciousness of this choice – or rather, of the fact that in certain conditions of social and political development such a choice might have to be made – that eventually made clear to me, somewhere around the end of the second year of my studies in Russian literature and history, the essential difference between Russian culture and the culture of the West, and made me want to understand it further.

In future postings under this heading, I’ll try to describe how that process of discovery and understanding developed for me.

The New York Times has published an interesting article by Tina Rosenberg about the very difficult process now underway in Poland to determine who was a collaborator under the Communist regime. The mechanisms for deciding this seem to be nothing short of faulty, with the result that injustices occur. As the article makes clear, similar problems have dogged the process in the Czech Republic:

Poland will have to continue struggling to balance between fairness for those the archives unjustly accuse and the openness that's necessary to encourage debate about what constitutes true collaboration and how Communism managed to induce it in so many people. Simply publishing the names of everyone who had ever been listed as a collaborator - the strategy espoused by some right-wing politicians who want to manipulate the files for political ends - would be a disaster.

Poland needs only to look to the Czech Republic for a lesson in doing this the wrong way. There, after Communism fell, people holding important government jobs were checked by the Interior Ministry against an index of secret police officers, collaborators and candidates for collaboration. The screeners did not read the files to look for actual evidence of guilt; those named lost their jobs. Versions of the lists leaked to the press, and despite being widely denounced as inaccurate, they were treated as gospel by many Czechs. This process slandered thousands of innocent people and perpetuated the Communist mentality of the enemies list. The policy has been softened, but its essence remains.

Among the accused was none other than Vaclav Havel. We know the details of his case only because he happened to be president of the Czech Republic when his file was opened. In it, he was named as a candidate for collaboration. According to the file, on June 23, 1965, one secret police captain Cinka went to the apartment of one dissident absurdist playwright Havel. Cinka wrote in the file: "The interview with Havel was concluded with our suggestion that in case of need we will contact him again. He agreed and said that he himself was glad he had talked to us, as it was an inspiration for further literary endeavors." On the basis of that, Cinka evaluated Havel as suitable for recruitment and recommended maintaining contact.

Evidently Cinka had no further success. Six months later, Mr. Havel was moved from the category of Candidate to that of Enemy, and there he stayed, piling up prison terms for the next 24 years. He included a house call from the secret police in his play "Notification."

The article goes on to illustrate the slightly different nature of the difficulties in Poland:

In Poland, by contrast with the Czech Republic, the files are controlled by a nonpolitical organization. Government officials cannot be fired for being collaborators. Instead, high officials must state whether they informed, and can be fired only if a special court determines they are now lying. These courts can also declare that an individual was a collaborator who did harm, but only after a long investigation. The court releases a detailed public explanation.

With individual consideration of each case, Poles can find out if an alleged informer signed an agreement and received a salary. They can know if someone agreed to collaborate because he was being blackmailed, or to end a long jail term, understandable if not admirable choices. The public can see what kind of information the agent provided.

Read it all. Via Marius, who tells me that this article was of particular interest to him, as he is travelling to his old country Poland this summer, "to see what kind of documents the secret services had collected and put in my file."

Natan Sharansky, the Israeli cabinet minister responsible for the diaspora, has warned that violent attacks on Jews in Britain - which have increased by almost half during the past year - are being encouraged by a general climate of anti-Semitism in the British press. A Guardian report quotes Sharansky as saying that the violence has stemmed from "years of hostile reporting and commentary about Israel in the British press now spilling into the streets."

His officials singled out the Guardian and the BBC, accusing them of "likening Israel to a Nazi state". The Independent was also criticised.

David Weinberg, coordinator of the forum and an adviser to Mr Sharansky, said the report found that most acts of anti-semitism in Britain were carried out by Arabs or Muslims, but press coverage of Israel, and the actions of some politicians created a climate that encouraged such attacks.

"Among west European countries there is a red flag flying over Britain and it's particularly disturbing because Britain is a country friendly to Israel and the British government takes anti-semitism seriously."

He added: "Sharansky believes you have to look at the intellectual environment that has developed toward Israel in Britain and the effect that has on the broader public."

He singled out the coverage of the Israeli army assault on Jenin refugee camp in 2002, in which 58 Palestinians were killed, mostly armed men.

The attack was characterised as a "massacre" by some of the media. He said this was demonisation of Israel and anti-semitism.

Tehila Nahalon, an adviser to Mr Sharansky on anti-semitism, said: "You can't brainwash people for four years that Israel is an illegitimate country and that Israelis are like the Nazis and that Israelis are monsters and expect that nothing will happen to Jews."

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

PROTESTS CONTINUE AROUND THE COUNTRY... Demonstrations against the social-benefits reform continued over the weekend throughout Russia, with the largest protests reported in Rostov-na-Donu, Krasnodar, Cherkessk, Kazan, and Murmansk, Russian media reported. More than 1,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Murmansk, while protesters in other cities numbered in the hundreds. About 2,000 people demonstrated in the Chavash Republic capital of Cheboksary on 22 January, ITAR-TASS reported. The same day, about 5,000 protestors demonstrated in the Bashkortostan capital of Ufa, demanding that the government resolve all conflicts associated with the reform by 26 February. In Krasnoyarsk, about 3,000 protesters took to the streets on 22 January to protest a proposed doubling of local electricity rates. Protestors, led by local Communist Party activists, attempted to block traffic on a bridge over the Yenisei River, but police prevented this, arresting five demonstration leaders. In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, drivers of the so-called marshrutki -- minivan taxis that traverse set routes -- went on strike on 24 January, demanding that local officials allow them to raise rates from seven rubles ($0.23) to 10 rubles per passenger and refusing to provide free transportation to those eligible for such benefits, Interfax reported. RC

...AS LOCAL AUTHORITIES CONTINUE GRANTING CONCESSIONS. Authorities in many regions continued the process of giving in to protestors' demands, as officials in Tambov Oblast and Tatarstan announced that the benefit of free public transportation will be restored for the rest of this year, Ekho Moskvy reported on 24 January. Similar measures are being implemented in Nizhnii Novgorod Oblast and Krasnodar Krai. RC

BENEFITS CRISIS TAKES ITS TOLL ON PUTIN'S POPULARITY... A poll by the Public Opinion Foundation conducted on 15-16 January found that support for President Putin has slipped by 5 percent since December, with 77 percent of respondents describing his work as "satisfactory," "good," or "excellent," Interfax reported on 22 January. Forty-three percent of respondents said they trust Putin, down from 47 percent in December. On 22 January, a demonstration in Moscow organized by the Communist Party called for Putin's resignation, Ekho Moskvy reported. Attendance at that protest was estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000 people. Interfax reported on 24 January that a poll conducted by the research arm of the Federation Council found that 80 percent of the officers in the Russian Army oppose the social-benefits reforms and sympathize with the demonstrators. Only 15 percent favor the reform. RC

...AS NEW POLICY AFFECTS RUSSIAN MILITARY. The Defense Ministry has reported that numerous military units have claimed that it is impossible for them to send military personnel to duty stations because they do not have the money to pay for transportation now that military personnel have lost the benefit of free public transport, "Nezavisimaya gazeta" reported 24 January. According to the daily, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov reported to President Putin in November that 34 percent of military personnel are living below the official poverty line. RC

Writing in EDM, the Ukrainian historian Taras Kuzio has some criticisms of the recent New York Times article by C.J. Chivers:

On January 17, the New York Times published a sensational expose alleging that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) had been key to preventing bloodshed during the Orange Revolution. The article was translated for Ukrayinska pravda the same day and has unleashed a debate as to whether the allegations are true or an attempt at whitewashing the SBU in time for Viktor Yushchenko's presidency.

The issue of whether bloodshed was contemplated is crucial to understanding the success of the Orange Revolution. In both the Serbian (November 2000) and Georgian (October-November 2003) democratic revolutions the security forces either stayed neutral or defected to the opposition. In October Russian political technologist Marat Gelman, who worked on Viktor Yanukovych's campaign, ruled out a Georgian scenario in Ukraine, predicting that the security forces would stay loyal to the authorities (Ukrayinska pravda, October 29, 2004). This prediction was wrong, and Eurasia Daily Monitor (December 1) was the first to identify the growing defection of security forces as likely to lead to a victory for the Orange Revolution.

Kuzio is, however, sceptical on four basic points relating to the New York Times article's attempt to "improve the image" of the actions and intentions of Ihor Smeshko, head of Ukraine's secret service (SBU). In particular, Kuzio notes,

the expose raises suspicions that Smeshko is seeking to distance himself from his former deputy chairman, Oleksandr Satsyuk. Yushchenko believes he was poisoned during a dinner at Satsyuk's home; Smeshko also attended that fateful dinner. Satsyuk resigned from the SBU and has returned to parliament, where he enjoys immunity.

Also:

under Smeshko the SBU began to return to KGB-style tactics against the opposition. Instructions were sent to SBU officers stationed in Ukrainian embassies to place opposition members and even parliamentary deputies under surveillance if they visited abroad.

And he concludes:

The New York Times expose brings together many different strands concerning the attitudes of the security forces to the Orange Revolution. But it fails to make a convincing case that Smeshko saved Ukraine from bloodshed. The credit for this should go to Yushchenko and Ukraine's Orange Revolution protestors who practiced non-violence.

See also this post.

Looking at the photos from central Kyiv, taken on the day of President Yushchenko's inauguration, I was struck, as in the context of the early 1990s, by the almost incredible nature of the events that led up to it and were manifested in it. Who in 1978, for example, could have predicted such upheavals and transformations of the East European political scene, and above all, of the Soviet political space? Probably not even most of the dissidents within the Soviet Union who, by their efforts and sacrifices, laid the groundwork for these enormous changes. would have been able to envisage the new order that is emerging now.

As I looked at those photographs, I found my mind going back once again to the periods I spent in Moscow in the 1960s and 70s - and I remembered Viktor (I've given him a pseudonym), the Canadian-Ukrainian historian who was my block neighbour in MGU, and wondered what his reaction would have been to yesterday's events in Kyiv, had he lived to witness them. I wrote something about him in an earlier post. After he was expelled from the Soviet Union, he moved to Helsinki, Finland, where he met and married a Finnish woman. He returned with her to Canada, then taught at Berkeley for a while, and finally ended up the late 1970s in England, teaching at an institute of higher education on the south coast. Such travels and changes of place were not unusual for him - he had been born of Ukrainian parents in Nationalist China, only arriving in Canada as a teenager. In Canada, and later in California, he had conceived the idea that it was his mission to try to help to change the social order in the eastern bloc, and especially in the Soviet Union, and as a post-graduate research student and assistant professor he managed to secure several fellowships which enabled him to visit Mocow. There he made numerous contacts with the dissident community - I can remember his joy on discovering the new book by Andrei Amalrik, published in 1969, and entitled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, which predicted the collapse of the USSR, some twenty years before this was thought to be a reasonable prospect - if it was ever considered likely at all. In England, Viktor did not fare very well. He succumbed to alcohol and depression, and died in 1981.

In many ways I felt that, though technically he was a "Westerner", Viktor's fate reflected that of many of the Soviet dissidents who either emigrated to the West or remained in the Soviet Union as inner exiles. His tremendous energy and commitment, coupled with a lively sense of humour, was offset by a tendency to melancholy and depression, and in southern England he felt almost totally isolated and cut off from this cultural and spiritual roots. His Finnish wife did her best to give him moral and material support, but Finland and Finnish culture also remained alien to him. I tried to talk to him and continue our friendship, which had evolved in Moscow, but at that time my own life was not yet very settled, I was travelling abroad a lot, and I found it hard to keep in contact with him. The news of his death struck me as abominably sad, but I could also see that the Cold War had claimed another victim.

I believe that this is something that's not always understood about the Cold War - that it was a real war, with deaths and casualties. Of course, America had its Korea and Vietnam - but there was another dimension to the war, one that was often hidden from people in the West. It existed in the horrible conditions of the Soviet Gulag, which was not only a vast and complex system of concentration camps, but also an inner system that infected people's minds with fear, suspicion and hatred. The purpose of the Cold War - conceived and instigated by the Soviet Union - was to divide humanity against itself, and by physical force, both conventional and nuclear, to silence dissent.

Now, 15 years after the fall of Communism and almost 60 years after the beginning of the Cold War, we are only just starting to witness the onset of a new process: the breaking of the silence and the ending of the division caused by the evil of the Soviet experiment. Because of the deep-seated nature of its origins, that process may be a long and arduous one.

I'm following the Ukrainian presidential inauguration day coverage at Neeka's Backlog - it's providing the most informative gathering of reports on this day that I've found so far.

According to an AP report of 22 January

The notorious 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided up much of eastern Europe is open only to historical re-evaluation, a Kremlin spokesman said Saturday, suggesting that Moscow isn't prepared to support a legally binding renouncement of the agreement.

"At present, only the historical evaluation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is possible," Dmitry Peskov, deputy press secretary to President Vladimir Putin, told reporters. "There is no possibility of its juridical evaluation due to current realities."

This seems like a familiar strategic ploy in the ongoing saga of Moscow's stalling and prevarication over border-related issues in the Baltics. The trick is to make a grand-sounding announcement ("Nazi-Soviet Pact to Be Revoked") and then follow it up with reservations about "historical re-evaluation". The Western public, which doesn't follow such issues very carefully, is left with an erroneous impression of Moscow's intentions. It seems unlikely that Moscow will ever recognize the truth about the pact - its denial will persist, and it will continue to tell the world that the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States never happened.

(Via scb)

See Rüütel in Moscow

Marco Masi at Chechnya-SL has provided a translation of a recent interview with Andrei Nekrasov about his film, Disbelief (Nedoverie):

Russia - 21.1.2005

The Russian Michael Moore

Interview with Andrei Nekrasov: "Democracy with us has no future"

How has your film, Disbelief, been received in Russia?

In two completely opposite ways: there were those who praised the courage to challenge the wall of silence that covers these arguments, and those who called me traitor, the friend of Chechen terrorists, the enemy of Russia, the servant of the oligarchs and of the United States. In summary, all the classical accusations that are raised against someone who dares to doubt the official truth of the Kremlin. There have been also threats.

Were you subjected to some form of censorship?

Well, formally not, but in fact yes. They allowed the projection of Disbelief only in a small theatre of Moscow, without any advertisement, and this already tells a lot. But above all, I have been prevented to transmit it on television: no Russian network wanted to transmit my documentary because in Russia there is no television that isn't under the control of the government.

Do you believe that your film will have some concrete effect on the Russian society?

I hope this very much. But I'm realistic: only the things that pass through television, and therefore reach all, succeed in influencing the public opinion. Having seen it only few, I doubt that my documentary will ever succeed in touching the certainties coming from the government propaganda.

What is the central thesis of your film?

Disbelief does not accuse the Russian government of being behind the attacks of '99. It accuses it however of not having done what every democratic government would have done in its place: to search for the truth about a tragedy that struck its people, to inquire to the last in a clear and transparent way. Instead, as the documentary tells, the authorities didn't make anything else than to put up obstacles against
the inquiry and hiding the proofs, shutting the mouth of everyone who dared to doubt the official truth.

And why should the government behave in such a manner?

In order to protect itself. Today in Russia the so-called 'siloviki' give orders, the men of the intelligence agencies and the army. They are the new ruling class which came to power with the arrival in the Kremlin of the former KGB official Putin. Today Russia is governed by the FSB, the former KGB. Therefore, if, like it is probable, the agents of the FSB have their responsibilities in the attacks of the '99, the government protects them to whatever cost. In Russia, since ever, the intelligence agencies resemble more a secret sect, with its rigid code of honor that does not contemplate the betrayal of a companion, for no reason in this world.

What do you think about Chechen terrorism and the Chechen issue?

I don't think, as some have accused me to say, that Chechen terrorism doesn't exist. It exists definitely, but perhaps it is comfortable to someone. Perhaps someone manipulates it in order to obtain political advantages, this yes. I think instead that the war in Chechnya is a horror, like every war. But this in particular has tremendous implications because the Russian army attacks civilians, considering
them all potential terrorist. In this way one can not fight terrorism: in this way one feeds it.

And what does the people in Russia typically think of it?

Unfortunately the propaganda of the government on the subject is very effective. Just in virtue of the attacks of '99, all think that the war is a just war of legitimate self-defense against people of dangerous criminals and terrorists. Those attacks have been ours 11 September: the Russians felt to be attacked in their own homeland, they had fear, and when Putin elevated himself to their defender declaring war on Chechens, all have supported him. And they continue to do so.

According to you, without those attacks, would he have been able to
reach the Kremlin?

No. Or at least not so quickly. It is undeniable: he was the one who could profit from these tragic events. I do not want to say with this that he orchestrated it, but for sure he knew well how to take an advantage from it. Let us say that for him it was a fortunate coincidence. To which many other followed in these years: every
election, every important poll at the Duma was preceded by attacks that led the frightened public opinion to gather around its head.

You have been defined the Russian Michael Moore: do you agree?

Well, in some sense its true: there are similarities between our works. But there is also an enormous difference: in the United States he is encircled and supported by a strong cultural and political environment, that of the democrats who oppose the war and the policy of Bush. I, in Russia, are practically alone, one of the few voices outside a chorus where all praise Putin. In todays Russia there is no opposition.

Which future do you see for a democratic turn in the Kremlin?

No future, unfortunately, at least in the short term. I'm very pessimistic. The only weak opposition forces against the government, let them be left or right, are all of an extremist and ultranationalist nature. The liberal-democratic forces were victims of the war that the Kremlin has triggered against the oligarchs of Yeltsin's era. Putin today remains the only one at the center of the Russian political scene, and he dominates it with such self-assurance of someone who knows to have no rivals. There is no political figure in todays Russia who can challenge him. We hope that this figure will come out before the elections of 2008.

Enrico Piovesana (PeaceReporter)

Cali Ruchala, the author of the article The Canvas Is A Crime - Yuri Galanskov and The Saints of the Lubyanka, part of which I quoted in an earlier post, tells me in an email that after completing the article, he had a copy sent to Aleksandr Ginzburg in Paris. Unfortunately, Ginzburg died less than a week later. Ruchala goes on:

Looking back on it, I think I was still in the haze of pessimism that came when Serbian and Croatian dissidents grew up and became scoundrels. I still have an old letter signed by Zoran Djindjic, Vojislav Kostunica and others demanding the release of Vojislav Seselj from prison.

As tragic as Galanskov's story is, I have to say that today, being a little older, I would make Ginzburg the focus of the article. It's no fault of Galanskov but I've come to understand that it's harder to live a long life and remain true to one's beliefs than it is to become a young martyr.

Ginzburg, like Galanskov, was one of the pioneers of the samizdat movement in the Soviet Union during the late 1950s and 1960s. Unlike Galanskov, however, Ginzburg lived on, eventually dying in political exile in Paris at the age of 65. Cali Ruchala has an account of Ginzburg's life and work at this URL. The dissident movement strove to provide a source of independent, non-state-controlled information in the extremely difficult conditions of totalitarian rule. Like other members of the movement, Ginzburg was repeatedly imprisoned for his activities and views. He edited a journal called Sintaksis, and it was here that the writing of some of the best-known figures of the dissident groupings appeared: the young Joseph Brodsky first saw his poems published in the journal.

As a British Council exchange student in Moscow during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had some experience of the Soviet dissident movement - the stazhory, as we were called, housed in Zona V of the Stalin-era MGU skyscraper on Lenin Hills (now Sparrow Hills), functioned in some sense as guinea pigs for the very active KGB wing of the student Komsomol brigade in the Zone, and my block neighbour happened to be a Canadian-Ukrainian activist and history scholar visiting from Berkeley, California, who was subsequently expelled from the Soviet Union after a press campaign against him. Through him, I gained a partial but first-hand knowledge of Soviet dissident life, and became acquainted not only with dissidents in person, but also with their publications and manifestos.

In the 1960s and early 1970s there existed an almost complete disparity, a dislocation, even, between the dissident movement in Soviet Russia and the radical movements in the West (those which gravitated around the Paris "revolution" of 1968, for example). While Western radicals sometimes paid lip service to Soviet dissidents - and there was a mild flurry of sympathy for them during the events that immediately followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - in general there was an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides. Western radicals could not understand the admiration felt by most Soviet dissidents for Western democracy and culture, while most Soviet dissidents were appalled by the the disdain and hatred felt by much of the Western radical left for Western society. Later, this dislocation crystallized out in the situation described by Sharansky in The Case for Democracy, where Western "ban-the-bomb" marchers walked side by side with KGB operatives who were bent on exploiting the radical left-wing and peace movements, while in the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters and peace activists languished in jails and prison camps.

Looking back on it now, it's hard to see how anyone could seriously have compared the two movements - the radical Western left and the Soviet dissidents. While the Western students and activists were free to utter their opinions, hold public demonstrations and even burn down buildings, in the Soviet Union those who resisted the established order were imprisoned, tortured and killed. "Who could turn away from themselves even under enormous strain, after seeing Ginzburg's tenacious refusal to compromise?" Cali Ruchala writes. Although the dissident movement was by no means homogeneous, and comprised different levels and qualities of disagreement with the power of authority, the example of fortitude, moral sanity and defiance, even under impossible conditions of repression, shown by Ginzburg and others like him was simply over the heads of most Western observers, even those who for their own political and ideological reasons wanted to sympathize with the Soviet outcasts.

Now many of those "outcasts" are dead and forgotten. After the fall of Communism, in the glow of victory it was all too easy for their memory to be put aside and neglected. Yet in Russia today there are still those who may be considered heirs to the dissident heritage, and whose input to the moral constitution of Russian society is a vital one. In the campaigns that are still being fought for justice within Russia - in connection with such issues as the war in Chechnya, the corruption of the law enforcement agencies, the increasing threat to free speech, and the resurgence of the KGB, people such as Elena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov's widow), Sergei Kovalyov, Andrei Babitsky, Anna Politkovskaya, Yevgenia Albats, and others are asserting the old and honourable Russian tradition.

Although there are still some voices in the West - and many in Russia itself - that seek to discredit this opposition by using the term "dissident" in a disparaging or condescending way (the same thing can more often now be encountered in relation to China and its internal political opposition, it seems likely that the example it sets will hold and be valid for some time to come. In the West, after all, the conditions of freedom exist. And, as Natan Sharansky points out, it's the duty of free nations to help and sustain the spreading of freedom throughout the globe:

The community of free nations will not emerge on its own. It will require both the clarity of the democratic world to see the profound moral difference between the world of freedom and the world of fear, and the courage to confront fear societies everywhere. I am convinced that a successful effort to expand freedom around the world must be inspired and led by the United States. In the twentieth century, America proved time and again that it possessed both the clarity and courage that is necessary to defeat evil. Following that example, the democracies of the world can defeat the enemy that threatens our world today and the tyrannies that would threaten it tomorrow. To do so, we must believe not only that all people are created equal but also that all peoples are created equal.

In the new world order, the struggle and sacrifices of the dissidents in the non-democratic nations of the world won't have been in vain.

See also in this blog: Fear and Freedom

posted by David McDuff  # 9:26 AM

Yesterday afternoon, both CNN and BBC Monitoring reported an Estonian radio broadcast from Moscow by Estonia's president, Arnold Rüütel, telling his country that Putin is ready to support an official Russian repudiation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.

Now EDM wonders: What did Putin actually tell Rüütel, and how did he phrase it?:

Even on January 20, the day of the Putin-Ruutel conversation, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs chief spokesman Alexander Yakovenko reaffirmed the standard position. Assailing Latvia 's President Vaira Vike-Freiberga for her recent proposal that Russia should condemn the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the annexation of the Baltic States, Yakovenko asserted, "There is no basis in history or international law for the view that the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states ." Terming that view, "the usual attempt at distorting history," Yakovenko portrayed Vike-Freiberga as unwilling to accept Russia 's friendship, and opined: "We are convinced that her view does not correspond with that of a majority of Latvians" (Interfax, January 20).

Apparently, either Putin's new line has not yet percolated to Russia 's chief diplomatic spokesman, or Putin's actual phrasing in that private meeting requires full clarification. In either case the subsequent Russian statements must be checked against Putin's private statement.

Rüütel is in Moscow on a private visit, to receive a Russian Orthodox Church award from Alexei II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. Socor notes:

Alexei II presented Ruutel with an award for "Distinguished Activity for Reinforcing the Unity of Orthodox Peoples." Ruutel belongs to the small minority of Orthodox Estonians whose church is canonically subordinated to the Patriarchy of Constantinople. By contrast, Orthodox Russians in Estonia are generally affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchy. Ruutel helped obtain legal registration of the Moscow-affiliated church in Estonia , thus earning Alexei's gratitude. Alexei, a native of Estonia who spent half of his pastoral career there, for his part had been instrumental in suppressing the Constantinople-affiliated church during the Soviet occupation.

Estonian oil transit tycoon Aadu Luukas accompanied Ruutel to Moscow and collected the same award. The other recipient of the Orthodox Unity award for 2004 is Yevgeny Primakov. He had crossed paths with Alexei during many years in an institution of a decidedly secular character -- the same institution that nurtured Putin.

Peter Byrne at Abdymok presents an article on Ukraine's SBU which suggests that the NY Times report by C. J. Chivers may not have been too far off the mark after all. But the whole affair seems to be shrouded in the usual murk:

In what appears to be an oddly connected story, the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 17 ran a 3,800-word feature about the allegedly heroic roles played by Smeshko, Galaka and Sarnatsky in preventing Interior Ministry troops from storming Independence Square during protests on Nov. 28.

Serhiy Popkov, the commander of troops from Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, dismissed the charge. He responded curtly in an interview with the national daily tabloid Segodnya on Jan. 18 saying he was "surprised" by the NYT’s interpretation of the events, insisting that the so-called deployment was merely as a drill.

According to SBU spokeswoman Marina Ostapenko, the version told to the NYT by her bosses was accurate, if not exaggerated.

“No big mistakes in the article, just a tad too melodramatic,” she said.

Recently on JRL the Serbian World Bank economist Branko Milanovic asked the question: "why are the American media, both liberal and conservative, so unanimously anti-Russian?" He followed this up with a clarification:

"By that I mean, why are the implicit assumptions apparently held by every major analyst and reporters of the most influential US papers, (1) that whatever problem at hand where there is some Russian involvement, it is the Russians who are guilty until proven the reverse, and (2) that the only Russian policy that is to be applauded is a policy that is supposed to serve the interests of other countries but Russia. In terms of (2) Russia is supposed to behave like no other country in the world: it simply must not follow its national interests whatever they are, or better­, according to the analysts, ­these interests must not exist.

Milanovic went on to present 6 points where he sees evidence of such bias and prejudice:

1) For seventy years, commentators have been anti-Soviet and since obviously some of Russia's foreign policy stances will coincide with those of the USSR, their knee-jerk reaction to argue against these positions in the past carried over to the present day.

(2) Russia is viewed as a defeated power, say like Germany and Japan in the late 1940 and the 1950's. Hence Americans are annoyed by Russia's truculence. In other words, Russia should accept that it lost the Cold War, behave like a defeated power and keep a very, very low profile. In other words, do not box out of your league.

(3) Russia is viewed as an ultimately conservative force. This may go back to the socialist pre-World War I view (shared, of course, by Marx and later by the Bolsheviks) that Russia is an anti-progressive and anti-socialist force ready to send its Kozaks in the defense of the capitalist capitals of Europe. Since "progressive" no longer means socialist but pro-market and "pro-democracy" and since the latter is identified with being "pro-US", then Russia is by definition on the other side of the divide.

(4) Similar to (3), Russia is viewed as an anti-progressive and anti-Semitic force, ­again harking back to the 19th century imagery. Although among the Bolsheviks, Jewish and minority representation was very strong, later reversion to grand-Russian policies by Stalin and then ultimately the fall of Communism, turned, as it were, the clock back to the 19th century perception of Russia.

(5) East European propaganda has been very effective perhaps because there was some truth in it (Communism was in most cases imposed by Soviet arms), or perhaps because it is a simple story (big guys oppress small guys), or perhaps because there is a lot of ignorance among the pundits. On the latter, I wonder how many journalists know that Rumanians and Hungarians in their thousands were fighting the Soviets together with the Nazi all the way to Stalingrad (and after); or that "the nice and helpless" East European countries often fought among themselves (Hungary and Poland each taking a slice of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938) so that territorial aggrandizement was hardly a Russian specialty.

(6) Analysts and pundits know better but they try to play to the popular prejudices which are anti-Russian (which of course begs the question, why are they anti-Russian?) or to play to the preferences of the US administration (which may perceive Russia as being irremediably anti-American). So, in order to curry favor with the administration officials, they have to express anti-Russian views which they know the administration (whether Democrat or Republican) to hold even if the officials cannot, for political reasons, express them openly.

This interesting but undeniably partisan and question-begging list at once drew a sharp reply from Yevgenia Albats, political journalist and Professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow University, who presented an alternative list to counter Milanovic's:

Dear Dr.Milanovic,

The only way for you to get an answer is to come to Russia.

Yet, please keep in mind couple of things.

1.If you have ever written something unfavorable to the current regime and/or Kremlin, Putin, Sechin, and etc. you may have trouble getting a visa to Russia.

The State Duma just last week passed a law that prohibits issuing visas to people who have expressed or made unfriendly stances about Russia ( specs are not provided). Couple of the US based academics, which I know personally, have already experienced problems with getting a visa even before the new law was passed. One can even guess, what experience they are to acquire from now on.

2. If you manage to get a visa, be aware that you have to register with the local authorities in a matter of three days: be prepared to hire someone capable of paying a bribe to a local militia, unless you are prepared to do it yourself;

3. You may want to arrange for a cable ($ 250 - installation, plus $ 25-30 monthly fee), so to get CNN or BBC. No news (unless you are for the Soviet style propaganda), domestic or international, is available on the state-owned TV channels. Non-state, which dares to cover news (except for the small one, the REN TV) is no longer in use.

4. Be aware of the expenses should you settle in Moscow: cost of decent groceries are 20-30 per cent higher than those in the US; car insurance is twice more than even in Massachusetts, forget about clothing - the prices are just unbearable; and yes, medical - well, you can get some coverage at about the same price as in the US, but be aware: in case you get shot on the street, as Paul Khlebnikov was, there would be no speedy ambulance available for you regardless how much you paid for the coverage.

5. If you are dark-haired make sure to die it blonde, otherwise you may incur couple of problems with skinheads in the subway (otherwise, Moscow metro is great), or with the police on a street. If you happen to be Jewish (that I hope, you are not), Asian, or G-d forbids, Chechen, Azeri, Armenian, Tadzhik - forget about coming at all. Likely than not, you get bitten by skins or searched by the local militia. True too, some survive.

6. If you do business, be prepared to hire someone who will get you a krysha, made out of the KGB guys; otherwise you are doomed.

7. If you an academic, interested in the Soviet affairs, forget about archives: those documents that were declassified back in early nineties, got re-classified, and no longer available. By the way, the guy, who is running the Federal Archive service is a KGB ( FSB) colonel.

True he is not the only one with the current or former experience with the KGB (FSB): the president, the prime minister, the ministers of defense and police, the first deputy of the Kremlin's chief of staff, the assistant to the President in charge of personal, the deputy minister of the foreign affairs , the deputy minister of justice, dozens or so deputies of the civilian agencies, dozen or so heads of the regional executive and legislative institutions, 13 federal inspectors, 6 senators, 19 members of the State Duma are of the same background with the USSR's notorious political police.

8. Be aware to bring a good supply of Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa along with you to Moscow. Trust me, you will need each and every of those drugs. I trust you, you are not going to go to Chechnya: no Prozac helps to see Groznyy turned into the ghost city, or to talk to mothers whose husbands disappeared in the concentration camps without a trace, or whose children got killed during zachostki by the Russian or local special forces.

9. Of course, having an American passport, a return ticket, and couple of credit cards with a bank account in the US helps a lot while surviving through the Russian realities. Yet, be aware of hearing a lot of unpleasantness about your fellow Americans, and the US in general. I know some expats , who get mad . Don't: it is all about Russia regaining its self-esteem.

On the final note - in case you don't dare to come. It always helps to write something lovely about the current Kremlin, and its politics while sitting in the nice and spacey New York apartment with the view overlooking the Central Park. It is a little bit harder if you happened to live and work in Moscow.

This exchange drew some further responses from JRL recipients, mostly of a rather defensive kind: for example, economist Dmitry Glinski argued that

1) cables are actually installed in most Moscow buildings where they may be looking to rent an apartment, and millions of Russians are able to watch CNN any time; 2) being dark-haired (and even dark-skinned, which is what she probably meant to say) is not an automatic invitation for violence in Moscow, at least not more so than being a pale-colored foreigner in certain parts of the Bronx; 3) explicit hostility toward Americans is, in fact, less likely to be experienced in Moscow than in Amsterdam or Seoul, let alone Arab countries; and even 4) that hoarding Prozac and its analogs in anticipation of the trip was unnecessary, as these essential products are widely available in almost all Moscow pharmacies, often at lower prices than in the US.

Russia was seen to be the victim of double standards:

the pull of economic interest that makes American media, and especially the liberal ones, as soft-spoken and circumspect vis-à-vis China as they are abusive towards Russia, is plain to see... just as the cautious treatment of China (and, by the way, of the Chinese immigrant community in the US) can be explained, at least in part, by the attraction of cheap and undemanding labor force, emotional assaults on Russia (as well as discrimination against individual Russians in visas' processing, academic funding, and employment, without regard to whether they are supportive or critical of the Kremlin, unless they agree not just to criticize their government but to vilify and hurt their country and people as well) seem at least partly related to the frustrations of the U.S. capital in Russia, starting with the default of 1998.

At length, as is customary on such occasions, the charge of "Russophobia" was brought against Professor Albats and what was perceived as her constituency in the West. presenter of the charge was ex-head of Moscow News and editor of Intelligent magazine, Sergei Roy:

Dr. Milanovic compiled a list of six possible sources of widespread, even "unanimous," anti-Russian sentiment in the American press, both liberal and conservative. His arguments are well-reasoned, often acute, but in my view they cover only a part of the general problem of Russophobia.

The problem is much wider in both its geographical and historical scope. US media are probably infected with a more virulent type of the Russia-hatred bacilli, but the phenomenon is ubiquitous, it crops up all over the world, Russia included (see below). One keeps stumbling across its manifestations all the time.

Russia is seen in the role of victim:

In terms of international relations and ethnic feelings, Russia fits the figure of external enemy quite nicely, sometimes through no fault of its own. For centuries, it was a vast terra incognita, for which ancient cartographers had a rule: Where you know nothing, place terrors say, two-headed monsters and the like where Scythia (later Southern Russia, still later the Ukraine) lay. Residually, this sort of attitude lives on even in the minds of quite advanced and civilized people.

Roy believes one major source of Russia's current problems to be what he calls "oligarchic capitalism", and "a new KGB", singling out three names in particular - Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and Berezovsky. But the real trouble lies abroad:

Smearing Russia with filth has always been a hot commodity in a global economy, even before there was a global economy. Where there is demand, there is sure to be supply. The supply coming from Russia is real plentiful these days, and its very provenance lends it added weight, for the stories come from "Russian sources." If I read on JRL something like "Russian radio slams Putin" or whoever for whatever, don't give me two guesses as to what radio that is: it's Ekho Moskvy, a "Russian source." Since it is there on the spot, whatever comes from that source must be true, and who cares where its owner is based.

The letter's author is almost in despair:

Sadly, there is very little likelihood of this unfortunate state of affairs coming to an end in the foreseeable future. After an initial ebbing away of that nasty mood in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, over perestroika, glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and other pleasant occasions, old, ingrained attitudes are returning, have returned, with a vengeance. I personally place my hopes on the generations to come, generations that will see Cold Wars, old and new, for what they are: a silly anachronism. But I am totally pessimistic about the present generation living to see that fine future; prejudices die hard, and sometimes not at all.

Coming away from this outpouring of resentment and bitterness, one doesn't quite know what to say. One thing seems clear, however: the "Russophobia" invoked by some of the participants, including Sergei Roy, is largely a projection of their own making. For the object of the "phobia", far from being an ethnic grouping or a culture, is rather what Natan Sharansky calls "the mechanics of tyranny": the workings, still so obviously in place within the Russian Federation, of government strategies and manipulations that are based on the instilling of fear and the denial of moral clarity - such processes can be seen today in the Russian government's handling of the long crisis in Chechnya, in its threatening statements to its neighbours in the Baltic states, in Georgia, and elsewhere, in its disregard for the rule of law and human rights. To be hostile, or "phobic" to such a government is not to be anti-Russian: rather, it's an assertion of what Sharansky means when he says in his latest book that "at a time when freedom and fear are at war, we must move beyond Left and Right and begin to think again about right and wrong."

posted by David McDuff  # 9:17 AM

There is a collection of contributions to a recent symposium about Chechnya here. The article by John Russell ("Basayev - The Beast of Beslan?") is of interest, even if it does appear to swallow more or less uncritically the KGB falshivka of the Basayev email "letter" received by IWPR on 27 August 2004.

The rather generous statement by Latvia's president Vaira Vike-Freiberga has met with a cold and negative response from the Kremlin, which accuses her of "trying to distort the history of the Second World War." The omens for May 9 do not look good.

From a LETA-ELTA report of January 17, quoting remarks by Viktor Kalyuzhny, Russian Ambassador to Latvia:

According to Kalyuzhny, the Soviet Union did not occupy Latvia. "I can say once again that, regarding the 1941-1945 period, yes, part of Europe and the Soviet Union were occupied. But as for the period 1945 to 1991, I believe that "occupation" is not the right term, it should be called something else," emphasizes the ambassador.

According to Gazeta.ru (17.04-17.20), Viktor Yushchenko's inauguration will take place on 23 January. On 24 January he will visit Moscow for a meeting with Putin. On 25 January he will speak at a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. On 26-27 January he will visit Oswiecim, Poland, for events marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On 27 January he will also make a short visit to Brussels, where he will speak to the European Parliament. On 28-29 January, Yushchenko will take part in the Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

I've been reading Miscanthus, a newly published survey-anthology of the post-1975 writings of the poet, publisher and musicologist Anthony Barnett. The 250-page selection - mostly of poetry - is published by Shearsman Books, and edited by the French literary critic and scholar Xavier Kalck.

As Kalck points out in his introduction, Barnett's poems are small-scale ventures, deliberately so in their intention of avoiding what Kalck calls "large verse" - which "might grow sententious and, for the poet, to versify is too often to falsify." Yet the space encompassed and travelled by the poems is a wide one, spanning not only the inner dimensions of private thoughts and dreams, but also the outer ones of relationships and history and time. A quoted paragraph in a recent poem 'And When I Sleep' talks of a stylistic aim of "trying to approach Basho's silences" with a sensibility that "seems closer to Issa's irony", and this could be taken as characteristic of Barnett's style as a whole. Some of the most fascinating poems in the volume are to be found in this later section, with its ghostly tribute to Nelly Sachs (after photographing her Stockholm apartment-museum, the poet's camera turned out to be empty of film), and its invocations of Samuel Beckett and the Holy Land. But many earlier collections are anthologized here, such as North, North, I Said, No, Wait A Minute, South, Oh, I Don't Know (148 Political Poems), which includes the enigmatic

  For
The bear
more than a century
passed in day
dreams and incubi

Barnett, who in addition to writing his own work has also translated and published a large selection of European and Scandinavian poetry, can in some ways only marginally be considered a "British" poet - in a way, the cover illustration of his narrative Lisa Lisa, with its upside-down satellite photo of the British Isles, sums up the approach to his homeland that this original yet in some sense exiled author has adopted. Miscanthus, representing three decades of his work, gives us a further chance of becoming acquainted with his curious, nomadic vision, which though sometimes opaque is always intently focused.

Anthony Barnett's website is here.

Gazeta.ru is reporting that a statue of Stalin may appear on Moscow's Poklonnaya Gora (the site of the "Great Patriotic War" museum) in time for the May 9 celebrations. While there are different versions of the story, it seems clear that someone in authority intends to create a monument that will commemorate the signatories of the 1945 Yalta Agreement - including the Great Leader. The source of the story is Oleg Tolkachev, Moscow senator of the Federation Council. According to gazeta.ru, statues of Stalin are also planned for Belgorod, and for Yalta itself.

Moscow authorities are now busily denying the truth of the story.

Veronica Khokhlova has an item about a recent Radio Liherty interview with Mykola Melnychenko, the SBU major who was also Kuchma's bodyguard, and who first came to prominence in 2000 following the disappearance of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze and the scandal of the Kuchma tapes. In the interview, Melnychenko casts doubt on the veracity of the recent New York Times report by C.J. Chivers, suggesting that it may have been the result of lobbying by Kuchma's people in the U.S.

On Tuesday, the Russian newspaper Russkiy Kuryer published an anonymous report which claimed that Russian Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky was in line to become Ukraine's new prime minister. An immediate denial of the story was issued by Yabloko's press secretary, Yevgenia Dillendorf.

(via Marius)

In his January 13 EDM article Baltic Dilemmas and the Moscow Summit, quoting Atis Lejins, head of the Latvian Foreign Policy Institute, Vladimir Socor pointed out that the issue of attendance or non-attendance is really something of a red herring: "the issue is not about going to or staying away from the Moscow summit, but rather about avoiding a trap, as well as about delivering the right kind of message ahead of and during the summit." The trap, of course, is the one set for the Baltic states by Moscow, presenting them with an almost impossible choice: on the one hand, by attending the summit, they lend legitimacy to Moscow by a pretence that Russia's behaviour towards them is "normal"; on the other, by non-attendance, they risk provoking not only a barrage of anti-Baltic propaganda from Moscow, but also a diminishing of support - on issues of military security, border arrangements, transit regulations, citizenship, language, citizenship, etc. - from European partners who are still anxious, mainly for reasons of economic interest, to bolster good relations with the Russian government. All of this has been thrown into the realm of public debate by the Latvian president's decision to attend the summit, while the other two presidents have still to make up their minds.

Now the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos rytas, picking up on Socor's analysis, has suggested a method by which the Baltic states could exert some pressure of their own: by following a policy of "naming and shaming" countries which bow to Moscow's demands, the three nations could bring the whole issue to the world's attention in a way that has not previously been possible in the postwar era. In particular, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi would need to be rather careful in their public statements. Indeed, the article suggests, in view of their support for Soviet actions in World War 2, they should be challenged to publicly declare that there was no Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

(via scb)

Some items from today's RFE/RL Newsline:

U.S. GRANTS ASYLUM TO 1999 APARTMENT-BUILDING EXPLOSION VICTIM. Alena Morozova, who survived a 1999 terrorist explosion in her Moscow apartment building, has been granted political asylum in the United States after claiming that her investigations into the possibility that the Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out the bombing had put her life in danger, Ekho Moskvy and other Russian media reported on 17 January. Morozova's lawyer, former FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment by a Moscow court in May (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 20 May 2004), in what many believe was a trumped-up case intended to punish him for attempting to implicate the FSB in the 1999 bombings. "I know the material collected by Trepashkin, for which he is being persecuted by the Russian government, would leave even the most skeptical bureaucrat in the [U.S.] immigration service in no doubt that the Russian authorities will stop at nothing to hide the truth about the apartment-building explosion," Morozova told Ekho Moskvy. She said that she intends to ask U.S. President George W. Bush to raise Trepashkin's case with President Putin at their 24 February summit in Slovakia. RC

RABBI IS LATEST VICTIM OF ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS IN MOSCOW. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia on 17 January called on Moscow authorities to do more to combat anti-Semitism in the wake of the severe beating on 14 January of Rabbi Aleksandr Lakshin, RIA-Novosti reported. Lakshin was reportedly assaulted while walking with a friend and two children by a group of teenagers shouting anti-Semitic insults. Lakshin was beaten, kicked, stabbed, and struck with bottles before the assailants fled. He was later hospitalized. The news agency quoted federation spokesman Borukh Gorin as saying that there have been five assaults on Jews in the same neighborhood, where the Moscow Jewish Community Center is located, in the last month. RC

RUSSIAN OFFICIALS CLAIM TO THWART HOSTAGE-TAKING... Russian security forces backed by a tank and an armored personnel carrier waged a 15-hour gun battle on 14-15 January against five Chechen fighters hiding in a building on the outskirts of Makhachkala, Russian media reported on 16 January. One Russian serviceman was killed in the battle, which ended only when the tank flattened the building. Three members of the Russian special forces were killed in a similar incident the same day in the Caspian Sea town of Kaspiisk when security forces tried to apprehend suspected Chechen fighter Magomedzagir Akaev. That suspect was killed and several others arrested. Daghestan Interior Ministry spokesman Ruslan Magometkadiev and FSB official Nikolai Gryaznov told "Nezavisimaya gazeta" that the two groups of Chechens were in contact and were preparing a "major terrorist act" in Daghestan comparable to the September hostage-taking at a school in North Ossetia. LF

...CLAIM CHECHEN LEADER PLANNING FURTHER 'TERRORIST ACTS.' Interfax and "Nezavisimaya gazeta" on 17 and 18 January, respectively, quoted Russian military officials as claiming that Aslan Maskhadov, who is Chechen president and resistance commander, and radical field commander Shamil Basaev are planning large-scale terrorist acts in regions bordering Chechnya. The 15 January police operations in Makhachkala and Kaspiisk, and the wave of arrests in Ingushetia that began on 11 January, were intended to thwart those plans, the officials said. Maskhadov has repeatedly forbidden the fighters under his command from targeting civilians or from engaging in military operations outside Chechnya (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 18 June 2003). LF

Photographs of Day 3 of the "anti-monetization of benefits" demonstrations in St Petersburg, at Fontanka.ru.

The sad story of Zara Murtazaliyeva, the young Chechen woman who was accused by Russian authorities of being a "suicide bomber", has now reached a turning-point, with her being sentenced to nine years of imprisonment by a Moscow court. The BBC has a report:

Her lawyer said the evidence against her was fabricated by the police, and there was no proof she tried to recruit other suicide bombers, only conversations with two Muslim women she met in which it is claimed she criticised Russia's government and sympathised with Chechen groups.

An appeal is planned.

If you haven't already read it, the remarkable article by C.J. Chivers on how Ukraine's clandestine security service averted a Soviet-style crackdown on the Orange Revolution is online at the New York Times (free registration required).

In an interview published in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta on January 17, Yulia Tymoshenko discussed Ukraine’s prospects under the new presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. The interview was fairly wide-ranging, and took in such questions as Eastern Ukraine, Donetsk, Putin’s role in the pre-electoral campaign, Tymoshenko’s stated idea about the joint entry of Ukraine and Russia to NATO, the future of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, and so on. Then the interviewer turned to economics, asking how the new Ukrainian government was going to deal with the “clannishness” (klanovost) of the financial and administrative elites. Her reply was rather unambiguous:

We mustn’t let people whose career is business into the corridors of power. We must break the vicious circle where the government creates opportunities for shady earnings, and then those earnings are used to bring new politicians to power. Changes must be made to the Constitution which define the parliamentary opposition as the legitimate inspector of the doings of the country’s leadership. For example, I think it should be the opposition that appoints the heads of the National Audit Office. We need to create a new system for financing the political parties. They must cease to be lobbyists, we must remove the market from Parliament. And, finally, we must create the kind of conditions for business that make it unnecessary for it to use bribes.

But the clannishness has an international character. It’s well-known that the old ministerial connections from Soviet days continue to operate. When a renewed and purified Ukraine does deals with Russia, where everything has stayed the same, isn't there going to be a problem?

You're pulling yourselves together! (laughs) I think the Orange Revolution should be exported wherever possible, in a kindly fashion. [my tr.]

This last statement provoked a response from Russian State Duma member and head of the Moscow Institute of CIS Studies, Konstantin Zatulin, who saw it as a direct threat, Interfax reported:

This statement betrays an intention to undermine the authorities and provoke a crisis in Russia, which is doubtless the main target of all those orange, chestnut and rose revolutions," Zatulin told Interfax on Monday.

At the same time, he believes that there are "no grounds" for such scenarios to occur.

(Via Marius)

EDM now has a new website.

Pavel K. Baev at EDM, writing about the background to Moscow's missile deal with Syria:

All these technicalities cannot make the deal acceptable for Israel, where the memories of unpunished Iraqi Scud attacks in 1991 are still quite fresh. Quite possibly, the Kremlin wanted to keep the deal secret until Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad visits Moscow in late January -- and then present it as a fait accompli. Putin may think that he runs a leak-proof administration, but the corruption in his "inner circle" has acquired Middle Eastern proportions, and a secret of such an explosive nature has high selling value (Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 14). The Russian Foreign Ministry must now try to downplay the scandal as Israeli overreaction on a media hoax -- but this face-saving PR exercise conveniently ignores the fact that Ariel Sharon had acted before Haaretz broke the news.

Preparing for a summit with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin certainly does not need this extra irritant; Russia 's arms exports to Iran generate a quite sufficient amount of problems. Moscow could have also taken a clue from the bitter quarrel with Turkey provoked by its plan to sell the S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Cyprus . This lack of learning may appear puzzling, but the missile deal with Syria was probably driven by larger ambitions than just the desire to compensate for the lost profits from arms exports to Southeast Asia, where several contracts (estimated at $1.5 billion) were cancelled because of the tsunami disaster (Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 14). Putin feels that his international profile is shrinking despite Russia 's energy clout, and he wants to reassert the traditional Soviet role in the Middle East based on massive arms deliveries. Moscow is aware that the EU -- despite objections from Washington -- is preparing to lift its arms embargo against China , so the Syrian connection may look promising, at least until the international fallout is quantified.

From an online discussion of the Russian pensioners' protests, at Fontanka.ru:

To be honest, I feel ashamed, pained, and disgusted. No, I don't like the pensioners. They irritate me with their intransigence and malice, their rejection of all that's new. But if one reflects on the conditions that most of them live in!... We, the young people, often think: it was you who built this kind of state for us, so now you can reap the harvest! But we are being unfair: they fought a war, and then rebuilt the country... Most of them spent their whole lives working full time, in factories, or in responsible posts, and never got much relaxation or ever owned anything much. And these people have been given honour and respect on dates when the authorities are going to make long speeches and blow out their cheeks: the 62nd anniversary of the lifting of the blockade of Leningrad, and the 60th anniversary of Victory. But words are only words. And the deeds are these: a simultaneous abolition of free benefits and an increase in the price of fares. When the conductor tries by yelling to get the money from the passengers, and they tell him, yelling, that they heard on the radio that they didn't have to pay, and both are right, and both are extreme, though they're not to blame for any of it, I feel so ashamed for my GREAT COUNTRY! I want to just get the hell off that bus or trolleybus - or pay the damned 10 roubles for everyone... How degrading all of this is - for us, who are young and healthy!

- One Who Was Born In This City And Who Lives In It

http://www.mn.ru/issue.php?2004-48-47
http://tatar-bashkort.narod.ru/tb-86.htm

Some excerpts from a recent interview, published in the Russian daily newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, with Vil Mirzayanov, a Tatar chemist, formerly a top official in the Soviet Union's chemical warfare research center, who was imprisoned in 1993 after publishing articles that revealed illegal chemical weapons experimentation in Russia. He lost his job at the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, where he had worked for 26 years. He was released from prison in March 1994 after U.S. scientists initiated a major campaign on his behalf. Vil Mirzayanov currently lives in the United States.

The MN interviewer, Igor Naidenov, begins by asking Mirzayanov why it took the Austrian medical specialists so long to come up with an answer to the question of whether Yushchenko was poisoned or not. Mirzayanov speculates that "they didn't want to become the object of international politics". Asked whether the Austrian specialists had antidotes to the dioxin, he replies that they did not - he also confirms that Yushchenko's poisoners knew very well that the doctors would have no antidote. He goes on to give a picture of the poisoners' background:

In the USSR – and then in Russia – the study of dioxins and their manufacture was carried out by only two institutes: GSNIOKhT (Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology) and VNIISKhZR (Institute of Methods for the Chemical Protection of Plants).

On the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and on commission from the Ministry of Defence, in close contact with the KGB, they conducted research on the “Foliant” and “Foliant-T” projects. Their common aim was the manufacture of defoliants – chemical agents that destroy vegetation: the leaves on trees and large shrubs – “greenery”, you could call it. Soviet soldiers needed to be equipped with a poisonous substance for the effective conduct of armed actions against partisans – an analogy would be “agent orange”, as the Americans called it during the Vietnam War. Parallel with this, these institutes also studied dioxins.

To this day, the work on dioxins is carried out there in a restricted-access environment, marked “top secret”. In addition, I am more than certain that they have studied the effect of these substances not only on plants, but also on animals, and on human beings.

How can you be so certain?

In accordance with state directives, before highly toxic substances can be used, they must be subjected to clinical trials. Since the requisition order was received from Ministry of Defence, the troops also took part in the dioxin tests. It is not unusual for accidents to take place during military training. It’s likely that some military personnel were subjected to the effects of these poisonous substances. This may sound cynical, but accidents of this kind are a godsend for the doctors, as they can study the clinical consequences. I know that there were medical specialists from the Leningrad Institute of Labour Hygiene and Occupational Pathology working with the Moscow institutes that were studying dioxins.

What grounds have you for saying that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned? After all, it’s known that the organism of any human being contains small doses of dioxins.

His internal organs have been badly damaged. A natural case would not produce such results. The blood is also subject to purging, dioxins are not expelled from the liver, for example, for a long time. In general, it is even practically impossible to destroy a dioxin by chemical means. Dioxin is one of the most resistant poisonous substances.

How could the dioxin have entered his organism?

It was obviously put into food. In powder form this substance dissolves well in any liquid and also in liquid-type substances like mustard or gravy.

Are there any other methods?

Via the skin. But in Yushchenko’s case the dioxin definitely passed through the intestines. Actually, the KGB had a laboratory that was responsible for checking all food products that came to the table of the leadership of the USSR. Similar structures exist now – in the state security services of the countries of the CIS. Apparently Viktor Yushchenko was not one of the clients of the Ukraine laboratory.

……

Was this an attempt on the life of a Ukrainian politician?

If they had wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have used dioxin. It’s very difficult to kill a person with dioxin. For one thing, you need a very large quantity of the substance – you can’t just slip it into his food unnoticed. For another, there are a large number of other poisonous substances whose application would never be noticed by any doctor or detecting device. Ricin, for example.

I think the intention was not to kill Viktor Yushchenko, but just to disfigure him – so that he couldn’t appear in public in front of the voters.
…..

Can we conclude that the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko was the work of the heirs of the KGB?

Why the heirs? It's the KGB. I am convinced that the special services of Ukraine or Russia were involved in the poisoning. Kiev also had an Institute of Toxicology and Occupational Pathology. But as far as I know they never had anything to do with dioxins. So draw your own conclusions.

(my translation)

Via Marius.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia

Statement by the President of the Republic of Latvia Vaira Vike-Freiberga regarding 9 May 2005

Riga, 12 January 2005

On May the 9th of this year, Latvia will be celebrating Europe Day together with 24 other European democracies. We will be commemorating the 55th anniversary of the signing of the Schuman Declaration, which sought to establish a durable peace in war-torn Western Europe, and which paved the way for formation of what is now known as the European Union.

On May the 8th, Europe will also commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. This conflict was unparalleled in its savagery and brutality, and resulted in the largest loss of lives that humanity has ever experienced during wartime.

The end of this war had one undeniably welcome result. It led to the fall of the Nazi German regime, which had occupied and subjugated over a dozen European nations, and which has been responsible for the killing of millions of innocent civilians throughout Europe. In my own country of Latvia, the Nazi Germans and their local accomplices carried out the most heinous and large-scale crimes against humanity to have ever been committed on Latvian soil. They annihilated over 90 % of Latvia's prewar Jewish community, as well as tens of thousands of other Jews whom they transported into Latvia from other parts of Europe. The Nazis also drafted tens of
thousands of Latvian men into their army ranks to serve as live cannon fodder, in a shameless violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding the rules of warfare.

Latvia, together with the rest of Europe, rejoices at the defeat of Nazi Germany and its fascist regime in May of 1945. However, unlike the case in Western Europe, the fall of the hated Nazi German empire did not result in my country's liberation. Instead, the three Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were subject to another brutal occupation by another foreign, totalitarian empire, that of the Soviet Union.

For five long decades, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were erased from the map of Europe. Under the Soviet rule, the three Baltic countries experienced mass deportations and killings, the loss of their freedom, and the influx of millions of Russian-speaking settlers.

On May the 9th of this year, Europe's leaders will meet in Moscow. This is the date when Russia traditionally pays tribute to the millions of Russians who died during the Second World War, and celebrates its costly victory over Nazi Germany.

As the President of a country that subsequently suffered greatly under the Soviet rule, I feel obliged to remind the world at large that humanity's most devastating conflict might not have occurred, had the two totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union not agreed to secretly divide the territories of Eastern Europe amongst themselves. I am referring to the shameful agreement signed on August 23rd of 1939 by the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Vyatcheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

A week-and-a-half later, as a direct result of this disgraceful pact's secret supplementary protocols, Hitler invaded Poland and started the Second World War. The Soviet Union then occupied the eastern half of Poland, with Hitler's full compliance, and invaded Finland later that year.

Then, in June of 1940, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. These invasions and occupations had been foreseen and agreed to in advance by Hitler and Stalin.

It is precisely these two dictators who bear the brunt of the blame for the immense human loss and suffering that resulted during the war that ensued. In commemorating those who lost their lives during the Second World War, we must not fail to commemorate the crimes against humanity committed by both Hitler and Stalin. We must not fail to mention these two totalitarian tyrants by name, lest the world forget the responsibility that they bear for beginning that war.

For Latvia, the beginning of the end of the Second World War arrived many decades later, on May the 4th, 1990. This was the date when my country's parliament passed a declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. This May, Latvians will be celebrating the 15th anniversary of that historic declaration.

On May the 1st of this year, Latvia will be celebrating the first anniversary of its accession to the European Union. This is the date that truly marks the end of the Second World War for my country. It marks the end of artificially imposed spheres of influence. It marks the return of my country to an extended European family of free and democratic nations.

As a full member of the European Union and the NATO Alliance, Latvia is proud to be able to take part in the construction of a new and better Europe, a privilege that had been denied to my country for decades. For this reason, I, as President of my country, have decided to attend the summit of Europe's leaders in Moscow on May the 9th of this year. In doing so, I will be demonstrating Latvia's resolute desire to take part in all significant meetings that concern our continent's past history, as well as its future.

In commemorating Europe Day, I will be celebrating the fall of fascism and the resurgence of freedom and democracy in Western Europe. I will be celebrating the birth of what is now known as the European Union and I will be rejoicing at Latvia's membership in this significant international body. I will be paying tribute to those who lost their lives during the Second World War. But I will also be commemorating, with great sadness, the renewed Soviet occupation of my country, and the immense human loss and suffering that ensued as a result; not only in Latvia, but throughout the former captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

In attending the official events in Moscow, I will be extending a hand of friendship to Russia. Latvia invites Russia to display the same degree of conciliation to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and to condemn the crimes of the Second World War, regardless of who committed them. All leaders of democratic nations should encourage Russia to express its regret over the post-war subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe, which ensued as a direct result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In this, Russia would be following the same path that its Western neighbours have assumed: the path of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and the respect of human rights.

(via MAK)

Russian news sources are suggesting that the protests in St Petersburg do after all have a link to the Orange Revolution. Gazeta.ru, newsru.com and others are reporting that protestors have set up some orange children's tents at the intersection of Sadovaya Ulitsa and Nevsky Prospect. Update: Fontanka.ru now says that there are six tents - one large one and five children's ones. They are of various colours - not only orange - and have been moved off the tramlines on to the sidewalk.

There are photographs at Fontanka.ru, but these seem to indicate an increased presence of "NatsBol" (National Bolshevik) supporters, and a general decrease in numbers from yesterday.

There are also reports of demonstrations in Stavropol, where 5,000 protestors blocked the centre of the city, and in Samara.

Veronica Khokhlova has updates here, and here.

At Neeka's Backlog, some remarkable reporting and photographs from the pensioners' rallies in St Petersburg on Saturday. These protests are of a rather different order from those on Kyiv's Maidan, however:

The media say a few thousand people gathered at two locations, Nevskiy and Sadovaya intersection, and Moskovskiy Prospekt. I went to Nevskiy Prospekt and Sadovaya around 4 pm - never been able to calculate how big the crowds are but today it looked comparatively small - compared to Maidan, that is. One way in which Nevskiy resembled Khreshchatyk today was no traffic was allowed on it (unlike Khreshchatyk, Nevskiy is never pedestrian on weekends). Old people were blocking the street, letting neither cars, nor public buses, trolleybuses and trams pass. A hundred or so young people were represented by the National Bolshevik Party guys (their flags are remindful of both the Nazi and the Soviet ones, and here's a link to their posters), the Russian Young Communist League (Che Guevara flags) and the anarchists.

The slogans were anti-Putin ("Putina - v sortir!" - something like "Putin down the toilet!" - was the cutest one, an allusion to his famous quote about killing terrorists when they're taking a leak, a very approximate translation of "mochit' v sortirah"), anti-Matviyenko (St. Pete's governor, Putin's protege), anti-United Russia Party (pro-Putin majority in the Duma) and anti-government.

The reason they are protesting, in a nutshell, is because a new law has replaced certain benefits, such as free public transportation for pensioners, servicemen, people with disabilities and other groups, as well as discounts on housing and utilities costs, with monetary compensations (from $7 to $15 monthly as reimbursement for transportation fares, for example), which are not enough and the people feel robbed. (I'm not sure what an average pension here is but I doubt the majority is getting over $100 a month.)

Jamie Glazov, in conversation with Natan Sharansky about The Case For Democracy.

At FrontPage Magazine, an Israeli Arab woman talks with bravery in the face of intimidation about what really happened in 1948.

Ingushetia.ru has published a reply, written in the name of residents of Ingushetia, to the 8-part article Putins Ground Zero, which appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel at the end of last year. At Chechnya-SL, Marius Labentowicz has provided a quick translation of the ingushetia.ru article, which contains some interesting commentary and criticism, including the following:

in the material of German journalists there's a lot of of inaccuracies and errors. There's a tendentious approach to describe a number of events which took place there. We won't focus our attention on the frequent reference of the word of "village-derevnya", when the authors write about Malgobek, Nazran, Beslan and other towns in the Caucasus. The impressions of Germans - accustomed to order can be understood: they walked around our populated areas and saw in them not much of elements of contemporary civilization, they were astonished of absence of elementary urban infrastucture. The important thing is this. Already clearly the journalists attempted to divide the Caucasus into Muslims and non-Muslims. The ordinary western reader after reading this article can draw a conclusion: the whole evil proceeds from the Muslims of Chechnya and Ingushetia. "Unit of terrorists arrived from Ingushetia . "Khodov converted to Islam and became a terrorist". "The youth in Ingushetia departs to the the Wahhabi circles". These and other views have been presented as already established truth.

and also

Without defending terrorists here, it's necessary to say truthfully one more thing. The boyeviks weren't killing the children. They did not shoot at their backs, how it was written in Der Spiegel. A majority of hostages perished under the cross-fire from those, who came to storm the school, the so-called "peoples'militia-[opolchentsy]", who at that moment hardly cared about life of their children. They were blinded by vengeance and pursued only one purpose - to destroy the bandits. And they've done this that way the corpses of terrorists couldn't be even identified by their appearance. The children perished from explosions in the gymnasium, from fire [in the building]. They were shooting at the school from the rocket propelled grenade launchers, tanks' cannons. No one was concerned about lives of hostages. Some terrorists attempted to save the children, they were taking them into a safer place. Now it's forbidden to speak and to write about this. These actions do not
justify committed by them that bloody act of terror. But hostages talk about this among themselves and share this with their relatives, although they attempt to follow a rule - not to give any information to the press about this "honourable-[blagorodnom]" behavior of the bandits.

"Russia’s political institutions may have been flawed and dysfunctional when Putin came to power in 1999, but public debate of policy issues, one of the great achievements of glasnost and a basic element of any democracy, was vigorous. Political parties of different persuasions clashed regularly in parliament over issues ranging from foreign affairs to agricultural policy. The electronic and print media, though dominated by oligarchs who used them as tools to promote their own interests, presented a wide variety of different opinions. Regional governors were a force to be reckoned with, and the courts had gained a degree of real, though limited, independence from the executive. Finally, a sophisticated and expanding community of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had started playing a role in policy-making.

"Four years on, this picture is dramatically different. Public debate on key policy issues has all but disappeared. The pro-presidential United Russia party controls more than two-thirds of all seats in the State Duma, enough to adopt any law or even change the constitution. Opposition parties have been either decimated or eliminated altogether, partially a result of the deeply flawed elections of December 2003. During this election campaign and the presidential election that followed, television media shamelessly promoted United Russia and a few other Kremlin-favored parties while constantly vilifying the opposition.

"After a two-year long assault on the independent electronic media, all television stations are firmly under Kremlin control, as are most radio stations. Television news has become monotone, perpetually portraying the president in a positive light and avoiding criticism of his policies. Most programs featuring live debate on political issues have been cut. Only a small number of newspapers and internet publications provide some plurality of opinion, but their readership is marginal.

"After convincing regional governors to give up their seats in Russia’s senate as a concession to Putin early in his presidency, the Kremlin gradually destroyed them as an independent political force. Through intensive meddling in gubernatorial election campaigns, using its sway over television media and its enormous administrative resources, the Kremlin effectively made the gubernatorial candidates dependent on its support. By September 2004, the governors’ power had been reduced to such an extent that not one of them dared publicly to criticize Putin’s proposal to scrap gubernatorial elections."

"It is conventional wisdom that the executive has also sought to increase its influence over the judiciary. Opinion polls show that few Russians believe that the courts are independent. The Kremlin’s use of selective criminal prosecutions against perceived opponents, like Mikhail Khodorkovskii, and scientists working with foreigners on sensitive topics, has put considerable pressure on the courts. Indeed, in several of these cases, like that of arms researcher Igor Sutiagin, the courts have recently found defendants guilty on highly dubious charges. In another such case, the Supreme Court overturned scientist Valentin Danilov’s acquittal of espionage charges and ordered a retrial, at which he was found guilty. After Beslan, Putin proposed establishing executive control over the nomination of members of a key Supreme Court body that supervises the hiring and dismissal of judges—another erosion of the independence of the judiciary."

The January 2005 Human Rights Watch report on Russia can be read here

Seven poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski
translated by Adam Zdrodowski, Warsaw

Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. Since 1985 has lived in Copenhagen. He has published 6 volumes of poetry in Poland, 3 (translations) in Denmark, and selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar 2002). He is also the author of several plays. English translations of his poems have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Chicago Review, 3rd bed (USA) and in anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004).



1.

WHEN WE SUDDENLY FEEL THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH

First I outgrew my father. Then I put him hurriedly
into a coffin and myself began to shrink.
(What’s the use of today’s rainbow, the innocent daisies and this smiling
shepherd who claims that he saw an angel flying
over the meadows?)
We didn’t manage to plant an oak forest and we never
went to the river Brilthor.
We had great plans,
that never worked out.


KIEDY NAGLE ODCZUWAMY PIĘKNO ZIEMI

Najpierw przerosłem ojca. Potem włożyłem go z pośpiechem
do trumny i sam zacząłem się kurczyć.
(Cóż mi z dzisiejszej tęczy, niewinnych stokrotek i tego uśmiechniętego
pastucha, który twierdzi, że widział przelatującego ponad
łąkami anioła?)
Nie zdążyliśmy posadzić dębowego lasu i nigdy nie
wybraliśmy się nad rzekę Brilthor.
Mieliśmy wielkie plany,
z których nic nam nie wyszło.




2.

AN ARAB FRUIT SELLER AND OLD EULOGISTS OF DEATH

Though his whole family has been wiped out, he’s happy because of every
orange sold.
Look at him carefully and then
Pray to the Lord to make him change your martyred
characters...
While you’re here just for a while don’t pester me with death.
We’ll have enough of it when it asks for us.


ARABSKI SPRZEDAWCA OWOCÓW I STARZY PIEWCY ŚMIERCI

Mimo że wybili mu całą rodzinę, szczęśliwy z powodu każdej sprzedanej
pomarańczy.
Przyjrzyjcie mu się dokładnie, a potem
Pomódlcie się do Pana, żeby odmienił w końcu wasze cierpiętnicze
charaktery...
Będąc tutaj przez chwilę nie zawracajcie mi głowy śmiercią.
Dosyć jej będzie, gdy się o nas upomni.




3.

THE NORTHERN ROUTE

1.
Love is only an illusion. Nature makes us aware all the time.
A skeleton of a rather small mammal. Why did it have to be exactly
you? (It used to be a wonderful specimen one day.) I know you don’t like
stuffed animals. Vulpes? Trees are slowly vanishing.

2.
And it is love after all! To survive, one has to take care of it.
But you won’t leave me alone here, will you? Do you know that foxes have
vertical pupils? Eyes are an abyss of greatness and smallness. (Your
unceasing self-confidence...)

3.
I don’t mean survival, I mean loneliness.
He was a weaker specimen and that’s why he was eliminated.
But is it still love? Would you also make love to me
in different circumstances? Be realistic at last.

4.
Your summary view on the whole is out of place here.
And cover this awful skeleton with soil.




PÓŁNOCNY SZLAK

1.
Miłość jest tylko złudzeniem. Natura ciągle nas uświadamia.
Szkielet niedużego ssaka. Dlaczego musiało trafić właśnie
na ciebie? (To był kiedyś wspaniały okaz.) Wiem, że nie lubisz
wypchanych zwierząt. Vulpes? Powoli zanikają drzewa.

2.
A jednak miłość! Żeby przeżyć, trzeba ją pielęgnować.
Chyba mnie tu samej nie zostawisz? Czy słyszałaś, że lisy mają
pionową źrenicę? Oczy to otchłań wielkości i małości. (Twoja
nieustanna pewność siebie...)

3.
Nie chodzi mi o przetrwanie, chodzi mi o samotność.
Był słabszym osobnikiem i dlatego został wyeliminowany.
Ale czy to jeszcze miłość? Czy kochałabyś się ze mną także
w innych okolicznościach? Bądź w końcu realistą.

4.
Twój sumaryczny pogląd na całość jest tutaj nie na miejscu.
I przykryj ten paskudny szkielet ziemią.




4.

A BEGGAR

He raises his eyes to look at those who furtively
throw coins into his rusty
can.

Those who are wealthy never
stop beside him.

The poor support the poor. The rich pass away
in coffins
inlaid with white cloth.



ŻEBRAK

Podnosi wzrok tylko na tych, którzy ukradkiem
wrzucają monety do jego zardzewiałej
puszki.

Ci żyjący w dostatku, nigdy się obok niego
nie zatrzymują.

Biedni wspomagają biednych. Bogaci odchodzą
w trumnach
wyłożonych białym suknem.




5.

ONE OF THE LADIES

One of the ladies carefully glances at the sun
setting in the distance. Just before the dusk falls
she comes up to a festively dressed child and
delicately combs out the child’s long, faded
hair.

Then she erases the signs drawn on the ground
earlier. She checks whether she had not forgotten to hide
the water containers. She hugs the child
to her and they slowly walk away in the direction
of the wide open gate.

Their place is taken by the taciturn men from the wood.
They light a fire and help themselves to tobacco. Looking into
the starry sky, they notch hazel
sticks. Around them there sit tame
black birds.



JEDNA Z PAŃ

Jedna z pań uważnie spogląda na zachodzące
w oddali słońce. Tuż przed zapadnięciem zmroku
podchodzi do ubranego odświętnie dziecka i
delikatnie rozczesuje mu długie, wypłowiałe
włosy.

Potem niszczy narysowane wcześniej na ziemi
znaki. Sprawdza czy nie zapomniała ukryć
pojemników z wodą. Przytula do siebie
dziecko i powoli odchodzą w kierunku
otwartej na oścież bramy.

Ich miejsce zajmują małomówni mężczyźni z lasu.
Rozpalają ogień i częstują się tytoniem. Patrząc w
rozgwieżdżone niebo, nacinają leszczynowe
laski. Wokół nich siedzą oswojone
czarne ptaki.



6.

(WHERE ARE YOU COMING FROM)

Where are you coming from, old traveller attired
in a jute bag and tights full of holes? Why
are you dragging behind you a colourful serpentine
of children who are mocking you?

Wouldn’t you like to live permanently
in a house with a watertight roof?



(SKĄD NADCHODZISZ)

Skąd nadchodzisz stary podróżniku odziany
w jutowy worek i dziurawe rajstopy? Dlaczego
ciągniesz za sobą kolorową serpentynę
przedrzeźniających cię dzieci?

Czy nie chciałbyś zamieszkać na stałe
w domu ze szczelnym dachem?




7.

THE OTHER SIDE

First there will come your parents and old
friends
Joyful they will stand in a circle around you
asking you to tell them about everything
in detail

When you are finally ready
they will leave to take a well-deserved rest
You will take their place then and you will
patiently wait
You will be joined by several other
people well-known to you

And then?
Then you will see the one who is going to replace you in the end
Joyful you will stand in a circle around him
asking him to tell you about
everything in detail

When he is finally ready
you will go to take a well-deserved rest
With you several other
people well-known to you
And thus it will all happily
come to an end...





DRUGA STRONA

Pierwsi zjawią się twoi rodzice i starzy
przyjaciele
Uradowani otoczą cię kręgiem
prosząc żebyś im wszystko dokładnie
opowiedział

Gdy będziesz już gotów
odejdą na zasłużony odpoczynek
Zajmiesz wtedy ich miejsce i będziesz
cierpliwie czekał
Dołączy do ciebie jeszcze kilka innych
dobrze znanych ci osób

A potem?
Potem ujrzysz tego który cię w końcu zastąpi
Uradowani otoczycie go kręgiem
prosząc żeby wam wszystko
dokładnie opowiedział

Gdy będzie już gotów
udasz się na zasłużony odpoczynek
Wraz z tobą jeszcze kilka innych
dobrze znanych ci osób
I tak to się właśnie szczęśliwie
zakończy...

While looking around on the Web, I found a very readable account of the lives, work and activity of some of the best-known Soviet dissidents of the 1950s, 1960s and 70s. It's a personal account of a rediscovery of those individuals, for whom politics was a matter not of "interests" and constituencies, but of morality:

Writers who already possessed an international reputation, such as Pasternak, sent their work abroad to be published. Loyal Communards who gently pushed the envelope with their themes - writers such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky - walked the tightrope between constructive criticism and artistic heresy. They became a new kind of Soviet writer, the "legal outlaws", by definition rare and ambiguous, tottering on the ledge between a freefall into arrest on one side and an elevation as a sanctioned poet laureate - the first since Mayakovsky - on the other.

Then there were these "young" writers, those who came of age at the end of Stalin's reign or the beginning of Khrushchev's, graduates of the student circles which took advantage of the distraction of the secret pigs to circulate forbidden books by Kafka and Trotsky among themselves. They had no international reputation, and thus could not publish abroad, not least of all because Western audiences then were only interested in Russian literature to the extent that they are interested in Chinese and Iranian cinema today as fugitive works, talismans of persecution. This first generation to grow up since the introduction of "gulag" to humanity's vocabulary needed a place to practise their craft, sharpen their wit and experience something of the freedom - if only within the confines of the manuscript “which the creative mind requires.

And so they borrowed a page from the old political opposition of their fathers' time - the Trotskyists, whose ideas were still very much illegal - and began to publish their works in total freedom amongst themselves. Today, pimpled kids with costume jewelry in their noses protest the closed world of media and call the alternative samizdat. But far from being legal outlaws, these men and women - poets, mostly - who produced samizdat (the word means literally "self-publishers", but was also a pun on Gosizdat, "state publishers") were committing an act of crime the moment they touched pen to paper and the page to the daisy wheel.

The article's author, Cali Ruchala, takes a look at the fates of several dissident writers, including Alexander Ginzburg, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, and others. There is a particularly powerful discussion of Galanskov, who in 1967 was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp in Mordova:

For Yuri Galanskov, it was a question of life and death. It was no surprise that his years of activity and forced labour, threats against himself, his family and his friends, had caused him to develop a severe ulcer. Galanskov had in his first letter from prison described a certain guard who nostalgically recalled the good old days when a prisoner with a temperature of 104 degrees would be handed a shovel and put to work. No doubt anything beneath that threshold was still tolerable in Brezhnev's Russia.

Galanskov refused surgery for his ulcer and demanded to have the operation performed in a civilian or military hospital away from the labour camp. The operation was on-site anyway - by a doctor with no surgical experience. If it was not assassination, it is tantalizingly close. Death on the operating table accomplished the same end. Galanskov died after two weeks of agony from the botched surgery, on 4 November, 1972.

Ruchala continues:

I did not find out about Yuri Galanskov's death until twenty five years later, some years after I first discovered both issues of Phoenix and his poem "The Manifesto of Man". The life stories of Soviet dissidents are in some cases exceptionally depressing. The successful ones like Litvinov teach in foreign countries to a new generation that wasn't alive when the Red Republics swallowed up millions of workers and peasants, soldiers and intellectuals. Most who were exiled abroad have never returned.

Yuri Galanskov was only 33 years old when he died. Most of his adult life had been spent away from poetry and history, defending himself and his friends from a fury he knew awaited them. Thus, what work remains - which aside from the White Book and his letters from prison, consists entirely of his contributions to the two issues of Phoenix - shows more promise than mastery. It was the curse of his generation, the poets that which came of age in the late 1950s: but for Brodsky and Gorbanyevskaya, not a single one of them could claim to have lived up to their genius, or even had the opportunity to attain their considerable potential.

Looking back many years later - and himself writing from a foreign shore, in a language he adopted like his mother tongue - Joseph Brodsky said of his generation, the saints of Lubyanka: "Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought at least that the world was like themselves.

"Now they know that it is like others, except better dressed."

Could this be the beginning of some kind of social and political change in Russia?

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

PENSIONERS CONTINUE BENEFITS PROTESTS... On 13 January, pensioners staged protests for the fourth day in a row against the recent social-benefits reform. Retirees in the Krasnogorsk District of Moscow Oblast and in Samara gathered on 13 January in front of local administration buildings to register their objections to the replacement of in-kind benefits such as free public transportation with cash payments (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 11, 12, and 13 January 2005). Local authorities have started to bring legal cases against people whom they have identified as the organizers of the protests, gazeta.ru reported. Ten demonstrators from Khimki who managed to stop traffic along a major thoroughfare to the city of Moscow are facing charges, and Udmurtia's prosecutor has vowed to pursue proceedings against the organizers of a 5,000-strong meeting in Izhevsk. Four participants in a rally in Podolsk, who were described as the most active, have legal actions pending against them, according to lenta.ru. However, police did not make arrests in Samara or in Krasnogorsk on 13 January, according to gazeta.ru. Police are reportedly sympathetic to the protestors because the police themselves have also been deprived of free public transportation (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 13 January 2005). JAC

...AS PATRIARCH, TOP MILITARY OFFICIAL SUPPORT PROTESTORS...
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksii II appeared to give the protesting pensioners his verbal support in comments made on 13 January, Interfax reported. He said that reforms must not "deprive people of the possibility to use transportation and communication tools, keep their housing, and have access to medical care and
medicine." He continued: "If this is not the case, a tragedy is inevitable for millions of our citizens who have worked for the good of the country all their lives and now need protection and care." Air Force Commander Vladimir Mikhailov said on 13 January that the replacement of benefits with cash will negatively affect young
officers, explaining that public-transportation costs have become a real burden for them, Ekho Moskvy reported. JAC

A RIAN press report demonstrates the Kremlin's worries in the aftermath of the Ukraine election crisis. Though the report doesn't make it clear, it should be remembered that Vladimir Rushailo is also Secretary of the Russian Security Council. From the text:

Regime change by means of political manipulations poses a threat to all CIS nations, particularly Russia, CIS Executive Committee Chairman Vladimir Rushailo believes.

"The techniques aimed at toppling national authorities are fit to be on the list of challenges and threats of the 21st century," he told a news conference in Moscow on Thursday.

Overlooking and failing to react to this threat would be wrong, Rushailo said. He reminded that US political analyst Zbigniew Brzezinski believed that the situation in Ukraine would in the future influence those in Belarus, Moldova and the Trans-Caucasus nations.

"Does this mean that these countries face the events Kiev has experienced? We are analysing the developments throughout the CIS and are drawing conclusions," Rushailo said.

Rushailo's comments are particularly notable for their anti-Polish animus:

Rushailo said Polish monitors obstructed voting by standing right near ballot boxes.

"Polish monitors behaved glaringly in many Ukrainian regions during the election," Rushailo noted.

The harshness of the tone and content of the remarks tend to reinforce the impression of a general increase in anti-Western and anti-European statements and rhetoric now beginning to come from the Kremlin. Rushailo's comments also need to be seen in the light of Moscow's attitude towards the U.S. intervention in Iraq, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

(via Marius)

At Transitions Online, veteran political researcher and commentator Vitali Silitski asks the question Has the Age of Revolutions Ended?

After Ukraine's Orange Revolution, are there likely to be any more such unexpected flowerings of democracy in the former Soviet Union - particularly in Russia itself? The prospect is not rosy, according to Silitski. Having discovered that "Ukraine is really not Russia", and that attempts to export autocracy where the success of the venture is not guaranteed, as in Ukraine, are likely to backfire in an unpredictable and - for Russian hegemony - disastrous manner, the Kremlin is now likely to cut its losses and further cement its relations with the autocrats, such as Belarus's Lukashenka, whom it really understands and in some sense controls. A repeat of Orange-ness in Belarus is not very probable:

Just a few weeks before the Orange Revolution, Lukashenka pushed through constitutional changes that open the way for a lifelong presidency.

Independent accounts of that constitutional referendum suggest that, for the first time, he might just have lost had the count been fair. But there is no guarantee that he will get away with such sleights of hand endlessly and remain Belarus’ “more or less” fairly elected president. More preemption is therefore needed. Hence his appointment of Viktar Sheiman as his new chief of staff speaks for itself: Sheiman is suspected of arranging the abduction and murder of political opponents of Lukashenka in 1999 and 2000. But Lukashenka has himself also spoken clearly, declaring, “The events in Ukraine show that modern political techniques and a weakly managed country are pregnant with serious consequences.” Hence, he continued, his authority should be strengthened. In simple terms, even more parties and NGOs will be closed down, independent media outlets silenced, opposition activists fired from state jobs, and Western monitors, journalists, and civil-society activists and human rights campaigners banned from the country before presidential elections in 2006 (and who knows whether the opposition will even be allowed to compete in those elections). In the short run, a new law on combating extremism (read: virtually any kind of democratic activity) is under consideration.

What is more, Putin and the Kremlin are likely to take lessons from Lukashenka's experiment in anti-democracy, with the result that we can expect to see more, not less authoritarianism in Russia in the near future. The Kremlin has realized that its attempt to fool the West into accepting it as a partner in the "War on Terror" has failed, and so the ramparts are being sealed, and the drawbridges raised:

Like Lukashenka, surviving autocrats will defend their power. But the Ukrainian revolution will make them understand something else even more clearly: that they should defend themselves together. This self-defense can be seen in the behavior of election observers from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) who routinely anoint any elections within the region as free and democratic. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had been under attack from Russia well before Putin made harsh comments about its “interference” in the Ukrainian elections: the Russian leader had long made no effort to hide his desire to remove democracy from the OSCE’s agenda, and Russia is even trying to refuse to pay its dues in order to bring about such a change.

It's time for the West to assess the true situation:

...many in the West were caught by surprise by this very old-style Kremlin behavior. Since 11 September 2001, Russia had been meant to be an ally of the democratic West. In reality, Russia accepted the new partnership largely as a new way of dividing up zones of influence between the great powers. America’s acceptance of Putin as an ally and partner was dictated by somewhat cynical thinking taken from the “realist” school of international relations: that is, it does not matter how a country behaves domestically if it is on the right side on the world stage. The most hawkish elements in the Kremlin establishment quickly took advantage. Indeed, within Russia, depiction of Russia as a fortress besieged by Western treachery and domination was never halted, while on the world stage Putin played good-guy with Bush and, when necessary, with European leaders (moreover, the anti-Western, pro-authoritarian rhetoric reached new heights following the Beslan horror: Putin himself chose to speak about the plot against Russia and lament the breakup of the Soviet Union as a convenient explanation for the comprehensive failure of his “vertical of power”).

In a follow-up article on the preparations for the gigantic propaganda festival that is to be held in Moscow this May, the Jamestown Foundation reports that Latvia's President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, has yielded to political pressure and has agreed to attend the VE-Day 60th anniversary "summit". Her decision is a temporary blow to Baltic solidarity, as the leaders of Estonia and Lithuania have yet to make up their minds on the issue of attendance, and a united front would have been useful. However, the deed is done:

In Latvia, leaders of all the four right-leaning parties in the coalition government expressed support in varying degrees for Vike-Freiberga's decision. They made clear that the dilemma had been a painful one for them and the country. Leaders of the three Russian parties in parliament expressed full and smug satisfaction. They have no intention to relax Moscow-encouraged pressure for legislative changes that would, in effect, turn Latvia into a bi-national country. Some Latvian politicians hope that attendance at the Moscow summit, to be followed by Latvia's ratification of the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities (a document designed for pre-1991 Western Europe) could induce Russia to step back from the more radical demands on this score.

See also, in this blog: The Old and the New and An Extraordinary Man

Information is only now beginning to emerge about a "preventive operation", similar to the "mopping-up operations" (zachistka) common in Chechnya, which was carried out on December 10 by Russian police in Blagoveshchensk, a town in the autonomous region of Bashkortostan. The BBC reports that during the operation, hundreds of young men were allegedly detained and beaten. According to the BBC

human rights activists say riot police swarmed the town and began arresting men aged between 15 and 30. More than 1,000 men, in a town with a population of 30,000, were reportedly taken to police stations, where many were beaten and humiliated.

The incident is apparently not an isolated one - other communities in the region have recently suffered similar assaults by police.

The report concludes:

But police abuses are widespread across the country. Human Rights Watch reported last year on the "massive and systematic" use of torture by police in Russia.

Travel guides warn tourists travelling to Russia that they are more likely to get mugged or beaten by policemen than by ordinary criminals.

Volodymyr Campaign has a call for a demonstration outside the Belarusian Embassy in London on Saturday 22 January. See the campaign blog for details.

I’ve now finished reading The Case for Democracy. The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer (Public Affairs, 2004, 303 pp.). I was struck, when I received it, by the book’s old-fashioned physical appearance – with its toned-down red, black and white dustjacket and Sabon typeface, it looks and feels like a volume from an earlier era: perhaps the late 1940s or early 1950s. Its content, however, is wholly modern and contemporary: though it traces the origins of our present predicament all the way from the end of the Second World War, it is the world of the present that is its real subject and focus.

While the book is the result of a joint project, and is co-authored by Sharansky with a young U.S. researcher and consultant, Ron Dermer, the ideas and arguments put forth in its pages are Sharansky’s own, with Dermer apparently only providing occasional notes and historical explanations.

Sharansky’s case for democracy is founded on two basic premises: a) that there are in the world two kinds of society: what he calls the “fear society” and the “free society”. And b) that not only are all people created equal, “but also that all peoples are created equal.” (p. 279)

In writing of the “fear society”, Sharansky certainly knows what he is talking about. As a political prisoner in the Soviet Union he spent nine years in labour camps. Along with such figures as Andrei Amalrik, Elena Bonner, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Marchenko, Yuri Orlov, and Andrei Sakharov (to whose memory the book is dedicated), he was one of those who bravely and single-mindedly faced down the apparatus of Soviet tyranny, appealing not only to stifled public opinion within the Soviet Union, but also to public opinion in the world at large. In order to achieve the breakthroughs that ultimately led, via the Helsinki Agreements, to the collapse and dismantling of the Soviet system, he had, like other dissidents, to overcome the fear that was an integral part of that system, built into it by a political leadership that relied on threats, informing, intimidation and violence to attain its ends.

As a Jewish dissident, Sharansky extended his political activity to include the cause of the so-called refuseniks – the many Soviet Jews who in the 1970s wished to emigrate to Israel, but were prevented from doing so by the Soviet authorities. And, on his release in 1986, as the first political prisoner to be freed by Mikhail Gorbachev, he went to Israel, where be quickly became involved in programs designed to assist the integration of the steadily increasing flow of Soviet Jews into Israeli society. To the nine years he spent as a political prisoner, he was able to add nine years as an Israeli politician, putting into practice the results of the lessons he had learned in captivity.

The Case for Democracy is in some ways addressed to a younger generation of readers: those for whom the Cold War may be something they have only read about it books and newspapers, a concept rather than a lived reality. It is also mainly addressed to a Western readership – to those who have no direct experience of life in a totalitarian state, and for whom the manipulations of an organization like the KGB must inevitably seem arcane and even remote in terms of real motivation. The book’s message is a wake-up call to a realization of something very simple: that the democracies of the West possess something unique and irreplaceable – their freedom. And that freedom is still denied to a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants. By showing, from his personal experience in the Soviet Union, how dictators and tyrants use fear in order to deprive people of their freedom, Sharansky points to the present-day world, where the same struggle persists in the Arab world, in China, North Korea, and beyond. As an Israeli, his concern is primarily with the situation in the Middle East, and in a very powerful chapter he shows how the lessons of Helsinki failed to be carried across to the so-called “peace process” begun in Oslo in 1993:

A cursory glance at the map of Europe shows the capitals of Finland and Norway only a few hundred miles apart. Yet despite their proximity, the accords reached at Helsinki and Oslo represent decidedly different approaches to international relations. In both of these Scandinavian cities, parties ostensibly seeking an end to a decades-old conflict entered into negotiations that culminated in a historic agreement. But unfortunately for the prospects of genuine Arab-Israeli reconciliation, the similarities end there. The process started at Helsinki helped end the Cold War and liberate hundreds of millions of people. The process started at Oslo unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror and left millions of Palestinians living under a tyrant. (p. 144)

Sharansky’s view of Oslo is informed, like his view of Helsinki and the events and processes that led to it, by the book’s other central concept: that of moral clarity. He points to the “doublethink” that characterized the attitudes not only of large sections of Soviet society, but also of considerable areas of Western public opinion during the Cold War – attitudes that led to “a world without moral clarity… a world in which , in the name of peace, pacifists in the West marched alongside emissaries of the KGB who, posing as peace activists, sought to undermine the efforts of a free world to defend itself against Soviet aggression.” A similar danger threatens the world today, he believes, and his prescription is for more of the educative and integrative action in which he took part during the Cold War:

…the unique partnership that once brought together the “human rights camp” and the “security hawks” must be reconstituted. In the Cold War, political leaders, religious leaders, human rights organizations, writers and journalists transcended partisan and ideological divisions to work together to confront tyranny and support those inside the Soviet Union who were fighting for freedom. To win the battle against today’s tyrants, we must once again turn political opponents into allies and unite the world’s democracies in a common purpose. We must recapture moral clarity by recognizing that the great divide between the world of fear and the world of freedom is far more important than the divisions within the free world. At a time when freedom and fear are at war, we must move beyond Left and Right and begin to think again about right and wrong. (pp. 274-275)

This is a book that needs to be studied and re-read constantly in the light of contemporary international developments. Its message is clear: freedom is a supreme value, which can only be divided or relativised at the cost of human life and dignity. The arguments of those who want to believe that “freedom is not for everyone”, that there are peoples and nations in the world for whom freedom is simply not suitable, are shown to be lacking in humanity and moral integrity. It’s notable that, with only one rather hesitant exception (pp. 28-29), throughout the book the author avoids discussing the state of contemporary, post-Soviet Russia. When he does turn his attention there, he remarks that obviously, the Russia of today cannot be compared to the fear-ridden totalitarian Soviet Union. And the sceptics - mostly on the political left of Western thinking – who like to argue that Russians, because of their history, are somehow incapable of true democracy, are simply wrong. Look, Sharansky, says, at the collapse of the Soviet Union: there was a triumph of democracy if ever there was one. Quoting a New Statesman article which claims that in today’s Russia “the memory a time in which the KGB was the backbone of order is precious”, the book’s authors upbraid the sceptics:

Only those who have no understanding of tyranny could take such nonsense seriously. Russians do not want to return to totalitarianism. To believe that the Russians long for a return to a totalitarian past because of the difficulties they have encountered in the present is like believing that African-Americans who suffer from unemployment and poverty long for a return to slavery. Even those Russians who claim to want to go back to the “Russia of old” do not want to return to a world where people are arbitrarily killed, where family members can be suddenly arrested or imprisoned, or where the government controls nearly every aspect of life. (p. 28)

As in some other sections of the book, it’s hard to know which of the co-authors is speaking here. One suspects that Sharansky’s own personal view might be rather less sanguine – and indeed, on the preceding page, there is a reference to “very troubling” “setbacks on the road to democracy in Russia today”. However, in the context of the book’s main argument – that freedom and democracy are for everyone, and not for a few “chosen” nations in the West, the point is fairly made.

It’s a point that has relevance, too, in the context of some of the contemporary world’s most pressing problems – the War on Terror, the crisis in the Middle East, and the American intervention in Iraq. Sharansky’s view is unequivocal: just as the Soviet leaders were made to realize that international acceptance was conditional on the implementation of human rights at home, so the leaders of the Arab dictatorships must be made to understand that “if they continue to repress their people and stifle dissent, they will lose the benefits the free world has to offer, from legitimacy and security guarantees to direct aid and trade privileges.” The West should not wait for dictatorial regimes to consent to reform, and should not wait, either, for the support of international organizations. Finally, for the resolution of the present conflicts, Sharansky has a new and novel proposal:

To protect and promote democracy around the world, I believe that a new international institution, one in which only those governments who give their people the right to be heard and counted will themselves have a right to be heard an counted can be an enormously important force for democratic change. Such a coalition of free nations could turn a government’s preservation of the right to dissent – the town square test [being able to express one’s views without fear on the “town square”] – into the standard of international legitimacy. Countries that fail to meet this standard would be shunned and sanctioned, and the people they repress would be embraced and supported. (p.278-279)

It’s an optimistic view of human nature and development – but one that is hard to counter, because its moral centre is grounded in a personal experience of tyranny and oppression that is not granted to many in the West. In one sense, the book is a message from another time and another place – but it's also a message from the rest of the world, and one that we will ignore at our peril.

I'm currently reading Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy (Public Affairs, New York, 2004,303 pp.) Posting may be light until I've finished it. Then I hope to write about it here.


Also in this blog: Sharansky

The Guardian has published one of Susan Sontag's last essays in literary criticism, a review of the Soviet Russian writer Leonid Tsypkin's novel Summer In Baden-Baden, which recounts, in a dreamlike, semi-autobiographical form, the travels of Dostoyevsky and his wife through the cities and spa resorts of western Europe in the late 1860s.

The reasons for the book's obscurity are not hard to fathom. To begin with, its author was not by profession a writer. Leonid Tsypkin was a doctor, a distinguished medical researcher, who published nearly 100 papers in scientific journals in the Soviet Union and abroad. But - discard any comparison with Chekhov and Bulgakov - this Russian doctor-writer never saw a single page of his literary work published during his lifetime.

Censorship and its intimidations are only part of the story. Tsypkin's fiction was, to be sure, a poor candidate for official publication. But it did not circulate in samizdat either, for Tsypkin remained - out of pride, intractable gloom, unwillingness to risk being rejected by the unofficial literary establishment - wholly outside the independent or underground literary circles that flourished in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, the era when he was writing "for the drawer". For literature itself.

In addition to giving the reader a behind-the-scenes view of Tsypkin's book, Sontag's essay is a powerful and intelligent drawing together of many of the thematic strands of classical Russian writing, and shows how deep was her experience and understanding of Russian literature. She is particularly interesting when addressing the question of Dostoyevsky's anti-semitism, and also when discussing the great Dostoyevsky scholar Leonid Grossman, with whose work Tsypkin was certainly acquainted.

The concluding paragraphs from a recent article by Aleksandr Dugin, published in Evraziya (my tr.)

Putin Needs a Revolution

Two problems combined together - the passive-destructive mood of the federal elites and the increasingly tough geopolitical challenge from America - are giving rise to a situation that has nothing to do with "stagnation" or "stability". Putin and Russia stand on the threshold of a fundamental crisis which can only be averted in one way - by some kind of unpredictable catastrophe which might take place with the only remaining "superpower". But if everything remains as it is today, America will continue to export its own crises and problems everywhere - to the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus. This is the tested strategy of imperialist powers. And, alas, it proves to be an effective one.

By pacifying internal politics, Putin has defeated his direct political antagonists. But the methods and instruments used to achieve that victory were rather dubious ones. They would only have been justified by a real and radical rotation of the elites and by a mobilization of geopolitical awareness. This has not happened and will not happen. It is a dangerous path. Especially in the face of the threat that hangs over the country.

An easy life and a comfortable "Soviet" drowsiness, enlivened by waves of a new redistribution of property, are not on the cards. At the first serious blow against the country, the whole dysfunctional construction of federal power will come toppling down - both in principle and in psychological type, these people are incapable of taking and implementing historical decisions. And in the conditions of a new wave of geopolitical confrontation, the passivity of inertia and, even more so, a conscious pro-Americanism, would be open sabotage.

The only option that remains to Putin is to prepare for war. The only option that remains to Putin is to bring about a revolution. A revolution from above. Only a readiness for war will guarantee us peace. Only a revolution from above will avert the sabotage of the elites and the alienated passivity of the masses at the critical moment. Which, alas, is coming closer and closer.

From RFE/RL's "Newsline" (January 6) The reports are by Victor Yassman, of the American Foreign Policy Council:

EURASIAN PARTY LEADER SAYS RUSSIAN CLASH WITH U.S. 'INEVITABLE'...
Writing in "Argumenty i fakty," No.1, Eurasia party leader Aleksandr Dugin said that in 2005 U.S.-Russian relations will become more tense because the two countries "have strictly opposing geopolitical interests." Dugin, who is known for his anti-American sentiments, said he believes that the United States is seeking global hegemony, while Russia is striving to restore its status as a world power. To
this end, Moscow is attempting to reinforce its influence in the CIS and actively cooperate with Asian states. "This [political course] cannot end any other way but in direct conflict with the United States," Dugin wrote. Because Russia is unable to solve its problems -- including economic ones -- alone, it will look for alliances with practically all countries, but especially with those that oppose the
United States, Dugin concluded. VY

...AS IT DEVELOPS RELATIONS WITH 'OLD EUROPE,' CHINA, AND JAPAN...
Russia will develop its relations with the countries of "old Europe," such as Germany, France, and Spain, "which will passively help Russia," Dugin wrote in "Argumenty i fakty," No.1. "Germany and France, which realize their vital dependence on Russian [natural] resources, will look to approach Russia behind the scenes," he added. Russia will also develop its ties with China, especially if it
manages to reach agreement on controlling the migration of Chinese to Eastern Siberia. As for Japan, it is very profitable for Tokyo to look for rapprochement with Moscow, regardless of a solution to the Kurile Islands problem, Dugin wrote. VY

...AND RAPPROCHEMENT WITH ISLAMIC COUNTRIES. Dugin also wrote in "Argumenty i fakty," No.1, that in 2005 Russia will begin a rapprochement with some Muslim states. Such countries as Syria, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia will resist the U.S. "Broader Middle East and North Africa" initiative and will seek support against it everywhere, but primarily in Russia, Dugin wrote. Finally, in 2005 Russia may revive its relations with old Soviet clients in Southeast Asia and Latin America, such as Vietnam and Cuba. "In 2005 there will be a new round of the 'Great Game' between Eurasia and the Atlantic region," Dugin concludes. Observers noted that although Dugin often expresses extremist views, his article in "Argumenty i fakty" is notable as it is a popular mainstream weekly with a circulation of 3 million. VY

On Wednesday, Poland's leading newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza printed excerpts from an extraordinary speech by Josep Borrell, President of the European Parliament, in which he criticized Poland and Lithuania for their mediation efforts in the resolution of the Ukrainian presidential election crisis. The position of Poland and Lithuania, he said, differed from that of the EU, "because they acted under U.S. influence", and the crisis had been resolved largely "despite" Poland and Lithuania.

At the Jamestown Foundation, Vladimir Socor analyses the background and reactions to Borrell's tirade, which laid bare once again the anti-Americanism that continues to characterize much of "old Europe's" political thinking. All of this has serious implications in the run-up to the VE-Day 60th anniversary summit to be held in Moscow in May.

Socor illustrates the persisting West European ignorance of and insensitivity to Eastern Europe's experience of World War II:

Indifference toward unresolved Soviet-bequeathed, Moscow-suppressed problems is sometimes still palpable in the European Parliament. On December 24, the deadline expired on the collection of members' signatures on a draft declaration of remembrance of the 1939 entry of Soviet forces into Poland and the three Baltic states following the Nazi-Soviet pact. Only 88 European Parliament members, out of 732, endorsed the draft declaration during the three-month period reserved for signature collection. The document required the endorsement of 50% plus one member in order to be published as a declaration of the European Parliament (BNS, January 4).

Initiated by Bronislaw Geremek from Poland, Toomas Ilves from Estonia, Valdis Dombrovskis from Latvia, and Vytautas Landsbergis from Lithuania, the document was phrased for universal consensus. It called on "the institutions of the European Union and its member states to preserve a place for those tragic facts in Europe's collective memory," and declared on the European Parliament's behalf that "a permanent European bond founded on reconciliation among nations and respect for freedom can only be based on the truth of what occurred in the history of Europe in the twentieth century" (europarl.eu.int/declaration).

Because it was never properly addressed in Europe or by Russia, this historic issue now figures high on the political agenda ahead of the VE-Day 60th anniversary summit to be held in May in Moscow. To the Baltic states, May 1945 symbolizes an almost half-century of Soviet-Russian captivity. For its part, Moscow wants the Baltic states to attend the summit in a manner that would implicitly exonerate Russia of historic responsibility, even as the Russian government continually asserts that the occupation had been legal and freely consented. Many in the EU are informally indicating a preference that the Baltic states attend the Moscow summit and not spoil the show.

See also, in this blog: An Extraordinary Man

At RFE/RL, Julie A. Corwin reflects on how, with so much financial backing from Russian businesses and political support from the Russian president, Yanukovych lost all the same:

In an interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service on 9 December, former leader of the Union of Rightist Forces (SPS) Boris Nemtsov suggested that the stories of excessive Western influence in Ukraine might be more than just a yarn by Russian spin doctors to avoid taking responsibility for losing a key election. According to Nemtsov, it might be a device that the Russian authorities are using to avoid telling the truth about what really happened in Ukraine. He said Russian authorities "treat their own people cynically and invent such arguments of the type that the West influenced [events], or the campaign consultants worked poorly -- anything but the truth that the people were tired of Kuchma's regime, that people were living in despair and lawlessness and their last drop of patience went when the election was falsified."

(via Marius)

An article on the Ukrainian elections by political commentator Vadim Dubnov, in the Russian periodical New Times, written and published back in November 2004, contains the following revealing passage:

It must be recognized that Russia has played an historic part in the Ukrainian election: two visits of Putin to back Yanukovich were a greater contribution to the Ukrainian independence than all the efforts of many years by the independence minded West Ukrainians. It was the second case (after Abkhazia) of successful experiment to consolidate sovereignty, evidently a new foreign policy trend. If it is so, then this genre was a copy of a special forces' operation: its logic being incomprehensible it must have been top secret. Now the president's reasons to go to Kiev before the first round are not of so much interest. Another point is interesting: why, after the ludicrousness of the visit and of all the Russian backing became evident to every one, and after Yushchenko won the first round and it was clear even to political science freshmen that Yanukovich had no honest chance to win the second one, why was it necessary to go to the Crimea again?

Actually, that second visit turned out to be almost a secret one: nobody in Ukraine seemed to notice it. Moscow's wish to have at any price a man of its own blood group as the president of the neighbouring country (here, too, against the Abkhazian background, one sees the outline of a foreign policy doctrine taking shape) is so overpowering that one no longer considers as fabricated the reports of the Russian special task forces' readiness to undertake a mission in Kiev. Practically all political explanations of this passion smell of metaphysics: is the Kremlin willing, indeed, to sacrifice few remnants of its reputation only for the sake of preserving a mythical geopolitical front?

Hardly so. Things may be simpler and spiteful critics are right in explaining so much zeal just as a business. Really, costs of Moscow's bigger political support are not so large an investment for the gold-bearing Donbass.

But now that what's done is done, when, unlike a Russian or a Belarus style, all of Ukraine is willing to go on strike and to resort to other, none too ingenious but effective forms of disobedience, when the forms of the election race leave no illusions of Yanukovich's methods of rule once he is installed, it seems that there emerges, in a most principal way, quite a realistic political motivation.
Yanukovich's victory and a manifestation of the possibility to ignore any protest to become the president of a country willing rather to go to pieces than to recognize him, are becoming a matter of honour for Moscow and a form of an historic proof that the chosen line is correct.

Moscow would not like at all to lose in Kiev.

Yet, anyway, should Yushchenko still win, Moscow will congratulate him though grudgingly. It will turn out that Chernomyrdin was right and there is nothing awful. We will still have brothers for a time close by, in Minsk. Not to mention that, regretfully, we will still be able to live on as we do, alone. Without a sound, biting the pillow, and envying the Ukrainians that they at least made a try at it (at the time this issue went to the printers).

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Marius

A recent article by Paul Goble, from the Latvian newspaper Diena:

The Return of an Old Argument

In western and US newspapers over the last few weeks we have seen the return of old arguments, which would be comical if they weren't so threatening.

Scholars, analysts and politicians - past and present - all urged western nations not to criticize Russia's recent actions; particularly its actions in Ukraine, in order to prevent a return to a "new Cold War".

In the entirely real period of conflict between 1945 to 1991, many who desired closer ties with the Soviet Union typically trotted out this same argument, particularly when Moscow did something exceptionally outrageous such as the invasion of Afghanistan, when imprisoning its political dissidents in psychiatric institutions, or using deadly force against the Baltic nations when their only 'crime' was their claim to freedom.

During the entire Cold War period, those who urged that Moscow not be called to accountability for its actions, typically advanced a tripartite argument. Firstly, they said, the West must understand that Moscow evaluates its actions differently then we do, and it is therefore necessary for us in considering Russia's actions to always take into consideration Russian thinking on these issues.

Secondly, those who promoted this line of thinking promised that any Western criticism of Moscow's policy would encumber Soviet leaders' cooperation with the West and would lead to their replacement by even worse individuals.

And thirdly, they stated that arms control (reduction) was of such paramount importance in any relationship with Moscow that absolutely no one could be allowed to hinder cooperation with Moscow - no matter what Moscow did elsewhere.

Each of these arguments, of course, had a certain tempting credibility, especially the last one - because of course it was a reflection of 'realpolitik' - even as all of these arguments, individually and together, always delivered negative consequences.

On one side these arguments deflected awareness of what Moscow was actually doing and actually made the West to be responsible for consequential Moscow actions. From another side this signified that it was Moscow - and not the West - that determined the standards by which it could be judged. This consequently allowed Moscow to behave even more badly, even though supporters of these conciliatory approaches would certainly condemn the results.

As Latvians already well know, such Western arguments were often utilized against them not only in the initial Baltic nations' move to freedom, but also most recently when we have seen some Western authors attempting to justify any sort of demands that Moscow might raise, or actions that it might take.

In the years since the collapse of of the Soviet Union this argumentation has been used to justify Russia's actions in Chechnya, the suppression of free media and other freedoms, and has now begun appearing in discussions regarding those areas that Russia has termed its 'near abroad'.

Even though the utilization of this argument has been, until now, advanced in a guarded or even self-embarrassed manner, things have changed since the Ukrainian elections, and now their voices have been turned to full volume. Just last week in the largest newspapers in Paris, Washington, and New York we have seen the re-emergence of these old outworn and disproven arguments.

We are urged to "understand" Russia's actions in Ukraine; actions which attempted to control the election process - and even worse. We are told that any critisism against these Russian actions could result in another "New Cold War". And we are told; 'Even though we don't like Vladimir Putin's actions, there are others standing in line behind him, who could be worse.'

In essence we are told that we must accept what Russia has done, and, further, that we are responsible for whatever worsening in relations might occur - should we dare to criticize what has been done by Russia.

In conjunction with this line of thinking, Russia becomes guiltless for any actions that it has taken and for any worsening of relations with the West. Invoking the "new Cold War" slogan - something that no one wants, and also something that isn't even possible in the current global situation or in Russian capabilities - this argument is being advanced in the obvious hope of deflecting western critics who might be opposed to whatever Moscow wishes to attempt in the future.

It is rare to see any of the promoters of this argument, acknowledge that in allowing Moscow to bear no responsibility for its aggressive actions - and not to take a stance against them - is like allowing a spoiled child the freedom of doing anything while expecting no responsible action from him.

It is rare to see the promoters of this argument acknowledge that resistance against unnacceptable actions and the defence of democratic principles is not a failure - but is a mandatory responsibility - if we wish to see an improvement in international relations.

And it is for this reason that the promoters of this accommodation argument should recall those words which were first stated years ago by the Russian memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam: "Lucky is the nation where the contemptible are held in contempt."

(translation: scb)

December 21 2004 saw the 125th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. In the Russian Federation, it was marked by public and widely reported statements from prominent politicians advocating a more positive assessment of Stalin's historical role. Boris Gryzlov, Speaker of the Russian State Duma, proposed that the anniversary now be observed as the birthday of "an extraordinary man and politician". At the ceremony at Stalin's grave, KPRF officials spoke of the dictator as "one of the most outstanding personalities of the 20th century," who "dedicated his entire life to struggle", a RIA Novosti report commented. The report went on: "...according to public opinion polls, the views expressed by politicians reflect the attitudes of the voters. Recent polls clearly showed that such favorable statements about Stalin are welcomed by Russian citizens. Almost a third of the respondents believe that Stalin's role in the defeat of Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic war eclipses all his 'mistakes and vices.'"

It's no accident, perhaps, that these statements and poll results come as Russia prepares to mark, in May 2005, the 60th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. Vladimir Putin's New Year message contained, among other things, this paragraph:

The incoming year, 2005, is a special one for all of us. It is the year of the 60th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War. This is a great occasion for us, for all the peoples with whom we share a common fate, I would say, as a historical fraternity.

In the context of the new Europe, and Russia's position in relation to it, the significance of the phrase "peoples with whom we share a common fate" needs to be savoured. The invitees to the May celebrations will include Germany and the Baltic States. Germany is being invited essentially because, as one perceptive commentator recently put it: "they lost, everybody knows they lost, and nobody wanted them to win." The invitation to the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, on the other hand, has a rather more intricate background: they are essentially being given an offer they cannot refuse*. Moscow's strategy here amounts more or less to a plot: if the Baltic States want Moscow to sign the border agreements on which it has stalled and prevaricated ever since the collapse of communism in 1989-91, they must attend the Moscow celebrations, and by doing so acknowledge that they were "liberated" by the USSR/Russia.

Thus, an important part of Stalin's political legacy lives on in Russia's current foreign policy. Indeed, in one sense it's possible to say that Stalin himself is not really dead yet. It looks as though in the twenty-first century the "New World Order" still has some way to go in establishing itself.

_____________________________________

*A measure of the routinely Soviet-style tone of Russian MFA pronouncements on Baltics-related issues can be taken from a reading of recent statements such as this.

At the Jamestown Foundation, Taras Kuzio writes about Russia's involvement in a second terrorist attack in Ukraine, a bombing aimed at President elect Yushchenko. As Kuzio says, such involvement makes "a mockery of Putin's alleged commitment to work alongside the United States in the international war on terrorism."

Love thy neighbour as thyself. The rest is commentary.

-Rabbi Hillel

Le Sabot Post-Moderne has a link to an article by Jake Rudnitsky in the eXile about the unlikely alliance of Western leftists and Pat Buchananite right-wingers that has worked during the past few months to try to discredit the Ukrainian opposition and its leader, Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yushchenko. In addition to discussing the Kremlin-sponsored "Russia Club", the article's author also provides a telling dissection of the so-called "British Helsinki Human Rights Group" (BHHRG), whose efforts over the past decade have been mainly devoted to supporting dictators like Milosevic and Lukashenka, and which has played an important part in the anti-Yushchenko campaign in the West - and there are also pointers further afield:

The real issue BHHRG has is with what they call the New World Order, a name that far right libertarians, Pat Buchananites and Lyndon LaRouchians give to what they see as the dawning of a world government run by men in black helicopters. These guys' paranoia makes Ames seem downright rational. Almond explicitly refers to this worldwide conspiracy in his piece, while it lurks in the shadows of Laughland's.

It's the same libertarian position that informs Chad Nagle's article for left-wing counterpunch.org, titled, "In Ukraine's "Redneck" Regions, People Like Yanukovich." Nagle is one of the main contributors to the right-libertarian antiwar.com (along with Pat Buchanan), a site which Wikipedia also links with the BHHRG.

It's as well to be aware of these alliances and pairings, as they have an influence on the way the news about Eastern Europe and Russia gets reported in the West. In particular, the issue of Chechnya is likely to be next on the agenda of these aspiring opinion-formers.

From RFE/RL, a report that concludes that 2004 was the most dangerous year for journalists since 1994 (scroll down). Iraq was the deadliest place, with most of the murdered journalists being Iraqi citizens "who were targeted by insurgents, caught in crossfire, or killed by the U.S. forces' fire."

In an interview with RFE/RL in November, Kajsa Tornroth, press-freedom director for the World Association of Newspapers, said she thinks the world is becoming inured to violence in general and to attacks on journalists in particular. In addition, she said too many autocratic governments contribute to extending this climate of violence -- especially to journalists.

Especially with regard to the culture of impunity, I think that many, many governments are sending out very worrying signals to people in not trying to punish the murderers of journalists," Tornroth said. She said this growing callousness translates into an unspoken acceptance of attacks on journalists.

The report also includes an account of the recent murder of a journalist in Belarus:

One of the most recent journalists to be killed this year was Veranika Charkasava, a Belarusian journalist who was stabbed to death just outside her home in Minsk on 20 October. Charkasava, 44, worked for the trade-union newspaper "Solidarnost" and had previously worked for the independent newspapers "Belorusskaya delovaya gazeta" and "Belarusskaya gazeta." According to the Moscow-based "Gazeta" on 22 October, not just her colleagues but a broader community in Belarus believe that her death was connected to her professional activities, in particular to a recent series of articles on the Belarusian KGB. Her articles, published under the rubric "The KGB Is Following You," explored the special service's activities in recent years, detailing the facts of the arrests of foreign citizens accused of espionage.

Charkasava started her journalistic career in television after finishing journalism school at Belarus State University, according to gazeta.ru on 21 October. With the rise of Alyaksandr Lukashenka to power in 1994, she joined the opposition weekly "Imya" and after that worked only for independent publications, "Gazeta" reported. According to gazeta.ru, Charkasava was considered one of the most professional journalists writing on social problems.

Investigators believe that Charkasava opened the door to her killer around 11 a.m. on 20 October. The killer stabbed her 20 times -- allegedly with her own kitchen knife -- as she tried to defend herself. According to Interfax, the local police believe that a personal quarrel was the most likely cause. An unidentified high-ranking Belarusian Interior Ministry source told the agency that "somebody who is planning a murder usually has the weapon with them."

However, colleagues at "Solidarnost," who wished to remain anonymous, told "Gazeta" that all of her friends and acquaintance were well known to them and she did not consort with drunks, bums, drug addicts, or criminals. "She was a very open, honest, decent person without any conflicts with anyone," according to "Gazeta." One unidentified colleague speculated that the series of "exposes" on the KGB could have been a reason for retaliation. Speaking on the record to gazeta.ru, "Solidarnost" deputy editor Maryna Zahorskaya seemed to dismiss this possibility, saying that the articles "did not unearth new pieces of information that nobody knew but were simply an analysis based on known facts." She also described Charkasava as closed person who kept to herself and a select group of friends. In the meantime, international groups such as Reporters Without Borders and PEN Canada have asked for an independent investigation of Charkasava's killing. But such an investigation is not likely to be forthcoming, perhaps further reinforcing the "culture of impunity" that Tornroth identified.

Another report from Masha Gessen in Kiev:

Rap is the music of revolutions, or it ought to be. It can be angry enough to mobilize people in the early stages, rhythmic enough to keep them marching on, and uplifting enough to celebrate to when it's all over. The song of the Ukrainian revolution goes like this:

Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!

No to falsifications!
No to machinations!
No to deals! No to lies!
Yushchenko—yes! Yushchenko—yes!
That's our president!

Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!

We are not trash!
We are not asses!
We are the sons and daughters of Ukraine!
Now or never! We have waited years!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!

Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!
Together we are many, we will not be defeated!

In the past few weeks, this has become the unofficial anthem of Ukraine and the song of all righteous protest. At one of the schools, children started to chant "Together we are many …" when a teacher tried to make a schedule change that wasn't to their liking (she quickly relented). Last night in Independence Square, it was a song of celebration: The revolutionaries had already proved that they were not trash, had turned back falsifications, and had gotten their president; they had won, and now they could stress the word together over all others. We danced. There were more than 100,000 of us, possibly as many as half a million: It was the kind of gathering where even the trained eye can no longer estimate how many people there are.

Read it all.

A man standing next to me trained his videophone on the fireworks display. The picture on his little screen reminded me of Soviet-era postcards of fireworks at the Kremlin and Red Square. This was when I finally felt what I'd expected would hit me sooner or later: an acute pang of jealousy. A display like this in Moscow would inevitably occur against the backdrop of symbols of the Soviet past. Same with the language of revolution: In Russian, it's the discredited language of Soviet ideology; in Ukrainian, it is the rhetoric of liberation. "We have rehabilitated the word we," says Oksana Zabuzhko, a best-selling Ukrainian-language author and one of Kiev's most prominent intellectuals. And I think the reason Ukrainians were able to do that is that their revolution spoke Ukrainian, a language that was, in a sense, lucky to have been suppressed rather than hijacked during the Soviet period. So now Yushchenko and his coalition partners can say words like we, the people, or our future—and sound like they are talking about the Ukrainian people and their future rather than recycling the long-discredited symbols and promises of the past.

Masha Gessen, reporting from Kiev on New Year's in the New Ukraine (via Marius)

Grani.ru reports:

In an interview broadcast on the 5th Channel of Ukrainian TV on Wednesday evening, elected President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko announced that he knows the names of the people who were involved in his poisoning, Russian news agency REGNUM reports. Yushcehnko said that he knew three or four people who were involved in this matter, reports Gazeta.ru. "When I hear from the representatives of the law enforcement agencies [siloviki], the Public Prosecutor's Office, which persons figure in this matter... [it turns out that] the issue deals with 3-4 people involved with this," said Yushchenko.

In response to a question from a journalist who asked whether after this episode there are "people whom he cannot forgive", Yushchenko said: "The torments I have endured during the last 100 days have not brought a new feeling of anger. Whether it has boiled itself out, or whether it has just gone -- I have no desire for revenge, but there is a wish that these people shall answer before the law."
30.12.2004 09:21

Hat tip: Marius

Masha Gessen, writing in the Boston Globe about being muzzled in Moscow.

Earlier this year, I reported a story that I found both ridiculous and very, very sad. The Russian edition of GQ, the men's magazine, had run its traditional "Man of the Year" contest. Some 26,000 readers had voted, and the winner was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon, philanthropist, and political activist whose Yukos oil empire has been expropriated and who has been in jail for over a year on charges of tax evasion that are widely seen as politically driven. His well-publicized trial has sent a message to all Russian entrepreneurs, warning them that they will suffer gravely if they ever happen to displease the Kremlin. The publisher of Russian GQ banned the publication of Khodorkovsky's name in connection with the contest, forcing his editorial staff to falsify the results. According to staff members, someone actually had to fly to Italy, where the magazine is prepared for printing, to replace the offending page.

One remarkable aspect of this story is that the magazine's publisher, Bernd Runge, is a German national who has little to fear personally from the authorities: He doesn't even spend much time in Russia, since his turf includes other Conde Nast publications in Germany and Africa as well. But Runge has an intimate understanding of how the new Russia works. He hails from East Germany, and he went to college in the Soviet Union. Earlier this year, two major German magazines published multi-part exposes showing that Runge served as a Stasi (the East German secret police) agent during the Soviet period. Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast International, issued a statement affirming his confidence in Runge and calling the revelations "irrelevant" to today's realities.

As it turns out, though, the instincts of a former Stasi agent are very relevant indeed in today's Russia. I am not yet sure how we will solve the problem of covering the two verdicts (we have until mid-January, when our next issue goes to press, to make up our minds). I do, however, know that just a few months ago I would have considered the very question of a story's potential risks, whether to myself or the publication I work for, a deeply offensive one. But I have a personal stake in the decision: If I lose my job because I write or assign a story that gets the magazine shut down, I may never work in this country again.

Read the whole thing.

...one critical fact is clear: Democratization is at last transforming the former Soviet system. What is distinctive about the Ukrainian phenomenon, like the Georgian one, is that democracy has become the genuine aspiration of once Soviet-dominated societies that were not just satellite states but an integral part of the Soviet Union. This process can't be stopped in Georgia or the Ukraine. It will inevitably spread to Russia itself.

.......................

If the Ukrainians want to join Europe, that is their right. If they join Europe, it increases the probability that, one day, Russia will join Europe. And that is a good thing. On the other hand, if Russia succeeds in preventing the Ukraine from joining Europe, Russia again becomes an empire that rules by coercion. It cannot be a democracy. Inevitably, it will be a threat then to its neighbors.

.......................

There is a cooling, certainly, but I don't think a new Cold War. The Cold War was waged between superpowers armed with nuclear weapons. Russia is no longer a superpower. Presidents Bush and Putin will certainly try to maintain correct relations, but there are the strains you mentioned. If Russia persists with its neo-imperialist policies, it will isolate itself not only from the U.S., but from the rest of the world. It will lose even the tenuous standing it has had recently as a country at least considering the democratic option. Already, Freedom House has downgraded Russia from its list of "free nations" to a "non-free nation."

.........................

Above all, the West should support democracy. So, when President Bush meets President Putin in February, it is imperative that he also show support for democracy by meeting Viktor Yushchenko (if he is in fact elected president of Ukraine on Dec. 26).

Remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a recent interview.

Hat tip: Marius

Сколько раз на школьном табурете:
Что за горы там? Какие реки?
Хороши ландшафты без туристов?
Не ошиблась, Райнер — рай — гористый,
Грозовой? Не притязаний вдовьих —
Не один ведь рай, над ним другой ведь
Рай? Террасами? Сужу по Татрам —
Рай не может не амфитеатром
Быть. (А занавес над кем-то спущен...)
Не ошиблась, Райнер, Бог — растущий
Баобаб? Не Золотой Людовик —
Не один ведь Бог? Над ним другой ведь
Бог?
Как пишется на новом месте?
Впрочем, есть ты — есть стих: сам и есть ты —
Стих! Как пишется в хорошей жисти
Без стола для локтя, лба для кисти
(Горсти)?
— Весточку, привычным шрифтом!
Райнер, радуешься новым рифмам?
Ибо правильно толкуя слово
Рифма — что' — как не' — целый ряд новых
Рифм — Смерть?
Не'куда: язык изучен.


How often on the schoolroom chair:
What are the mountains like? The rivers, there?
Are they pretty, those landscapes without tourists?
Is it true, then, Rainer - heaven's mountainous,
With thunder? Not just the heaven in widows' prayers,
It's not the only one, above it there's
Another? With terraces? The Tatras make it clear
That heaven can't be other than an amphitheatre
(The curtain's lowered over someone, too...)
That God's a Baobab, Rainer, is it true,
A growing tree? And not a Louis d'Or -
God's not alone - but over him's one more
God?
How's your writing going in your new place?
If you're there, so is verse, in any case.
You're verse yourself. How's writing in the life to come
With no desk for your elbow, for your palm
No brow -
In your usual script, send some lines!
Rainer, are you pleased with these new rhymes?
For - to interpret rhyme in its truest sense,
What's death if not a whole new range, expanse
Of rhymes?
Impasse. The language's studied through.


(from: Marina Tsvetayeva, Novogodnee, 1927)