Alyokhina prepared to hunger strike

Via RAPSI:

Sentenced Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina is prepared to go on a hunger strike if she is not allowed to present in person at a hearing appealing for her release on parole, her associate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said Thursday on Facebook.

The hearing is set for May 22 at the Berezniki City Court in the Perm Territory, which is trying to deprive Alyokhina of her right to present, the post reads. An application against the efforts to keep Alyokhina in prison that day has been filed with the judicial and penitentiary authorities.

Soviet Dissent - 4

Underlining the literary nature of the rights defending movement, in 1965-66 the authors Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) were tried and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment  for works of fiction - short stories and novellas - they had written and then published in the West. The charges related to "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda", though the prosecution had difficulty in proving intent to do harm, and after the trial additional clauses had to be added to the penal code. Alexeyeva points out that while the rights defending movement had hitherto been largely the concern of the young, this trial drew the attention of a much wider cross-section of Soviet society, including the middle-aged, middle-class technological sector.  

Another feature of the trial was the letter-writing campaign begun by Yuli Daniel's wife, Larisa Bogoraz. Initially the letters  to representatives of the authorities, in particular the public prosecutor, were private and signed by her alone, like the letters that had earlier been written by others in support of Pasternak and Brodsky. As time went on, however, more signatories joined her, until the public "open letter" was born. After the harsh sentences passed on dissidents like Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Vera Lashkova, Alexander Dobrovolsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Viktor Khaustov and others, such letters were signed by as many as 700 people, most of whom fell victim to repression of various kinds: exclusion from the Communist Party and expulsion from university followed by loss of employment.

The rights defenders began to adopt other methods of exerting pressure on the authorities, including the circulation of petitions. Alexeyeva comments that the petitions against re-Stalinization and repressive judicial decisions were an indication that the USSR was beginning a transition from a totalitarian state to an authoritarian one - the petition had been an instrument used by the pre-1917 opposition in Russia, and its reintroduction suggested a return to earlier methods of democratic resistance.

The protests against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 developed the rights movement even further - Alexeyeva likens it to the growth of mushrooms. In Andrei Amalrik the movement acquired its first "specialist" in making contacts with supporters in the West: the institution of tamizdat was born, not only bringing in previously unavailable foreign texts but also books by Russian-language authors: Alexeyeva lists works by Sakharov and Amalrik, Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony, Vasily Grossman's Forever Flowing, Lidiya Chukovskaya's Moscow to the End of the Line, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and The First Circle, and poetry by Iosif Brodsky, among others.  
 
Soviet Dissent - 1
Soviet Dissent - 2
Soviet Dissent - 3

Soviet Dissent - 3

In her discussion of the Soviet dissident movement Alexeyeva places an initial emphasis on two central points:

1) The movement is properly defined as a правозащитное движение - literally, "rights (or law) defending movement". This name was entirely new and original: Alexeyeva notes that it came neither from the Russian traditions of constitutional democracy as practiced by the pre-1917 KD (Kadets), nor from the international human rights movement - instead, it described the experience and aspirations of  people who had spent their lives in conditions of "lawless actions (беззаконий), cruelty and the trampling of the individual in the 'interests of the collective', or for the sake of 'the bright future of all mankind'." The situation and actions of the rights defenders were characterized by Andrei Amalrik as the expression of "something brilliantly simple: they began to behave as free people in  a country that was not free and by doing so to change the moral atmosphere and the tradition that governed the country." [my tr.] Thus, the rights defending movement was not a political movement, but a moral one. This enabled it to encompass national, ethnic, social, economic and religious borders and to reach out across them to the USSR as a whole and to the world beyond.

2) The movement had its roots in Russian and Soviet literature: the work of authors like Vladimir Dudintsev, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander Tvardovsky and Boris Pasternak created the moral and aesthetic context for much of the writing that appeared in the journal Novy Mir throughout 1960s, including the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Of primary importance, however, were the home-produced, clandestine publications of samizdat, which embraced not only civic texts but also many literary works, both Russian and foreign, that were banned from official circulation. The output of samizdat contained  a strong component of  poetry, which took its inspiration from an earlier twentieth century tradition of инакомыслие centering on poets who included Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva and Osip Mandelstam. While figures like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky dominated the official poetry scene, with occasional nods to the dissidents, the work of Iosif Brodsky was perhaps the best-known part of an enormous underground proliferation of  poems by many different and often anonymous authors. Because of the relative conciseness of the medium of poetry, these texts could easily be committed to memory, thus bypassing the need for typing and printing. The poems were also frequently set to music and sung to the accompaniment of a guitar, which extended their availability and popularity. This literary work was able to express and convey the ideals of the rights defenders in a form that was far more attractive than the texts of civic documents.

Soviet Dissent - 1
Soviet Dissent - 2

Soviet Dissent - 2

Alexeyeva's book is essentially divided into three equal parts, which deal with the Soviet national movements, the religious movements and the human rights movement, with the addition of chapters on the socialists, the social-economic protest and the Russian national movement. Of the three main parts, it is the section on the human rights movement which most closely corresponds to a history of what in the West has come to be known as the "Soviet dissident movement".

It's significant that the word  диссидентство (dissidence) doesn't figure in the book's title, which opts for the more general term инакомыслие (literally "heterodoxy"), rendered by the English translators as "dissent" (несогласие). This leaves the way open for discussion of movements which less related to human rights and more to freedom of thought and belief, such as the religious ones.

The methods of chronicling and historical analysis adopted in the book are for the most part strictly factual and statistical. The author's personal view of the events and crises that are described and listed, though present, is not prominent, and the principal focus is on accuracy and detail, with the inclusion of as many movements, groups, societies and individuals as possible, giving rise to an extensive work that runs to nearly 400 pages in the Russian edition, and more than 500 in the English one.

The first third of the book is devoted to a history of the ethnic-national protest movements in the republics of the USSR, including Ukraine, the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Crimea, the Jewish refuseniks, the ethnic Meskhetians, and the Soviet Germans. The section that follows deals with religious movements - Baptists, Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists and Russian Orthodox - and it is not until page 205 that we arrive at a historical account of the dissidents most familiar to Western readers: figures such as Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Gorbanevskaya, Amalrik, Bukovsky and so on.

Soviet Dissent -1

Soviet Dissent - 1

During a recent discussion of the Bolotnaya Square May 6 rally and the difficulty of determining the precise nature and composition of the various Russian opposition groups, I was reminded of similar debates about the Soviet dissident movement several decades ago. As many observers have pointed out, that movement, too, was not a coherent, united one, and could not be likened to a political party with a unifying ideology, program and strategy. The problems for historians trying to map out the structure and internal dynamics of the dissident movement are formidable, and it’s perhaps not surprising that Ludmila Alexeyeva’s История инакомыслия в СССP (published in English in 1985 as Soviet Dissent) still remains the only major study of the subject, though it stops at 1983, and the English edition is now out of print. The Russian text can be accessed online at several locations, including this one.

In future posts I'm going to discuss this book, and consider how its historical account of the dissident movement may be relevant to present-day conditions in the Russian Federation. 

Brzezinski on Syria

In a Time article headed Intervention Will Only Make It Worse, Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that

broader regional fighting could bring the U.S. and Iran into direct conflict, a potentially major military undertaking for the U.S. A U.S.-Iran confrontation linked to the Syrian crisis could spread the area of conflict even to Afghanistan. Russia would benefit from America’s being bogged down again in the Middle East. China would resent U.S. destabilization of the region because Beijing needs stable access to energy from the Middle East.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/syria-intervention-will-only-make-it-worse/#ixzz2T4nktvge

Links

Polit.ru: Александр Иличевский: Литература как искусство убеждать

VOA: Paul Goble: «Русские – самая подавляемая нация в стране, названной их именем»

Minding Russia: We Live Without Feeling the Country Beneath Our Feet

WSJ:   US: Russia Withheld Intel On Boston Bomb Suspect

FP: How Kerry Got Played by Putin on Syria

Interpreter: Mikhail Shishkin: Why Educated Russian Criticize Russia

Parody and Propaganda

This Pravda article, which quotes an "expert" in the Russian security services as saying that the Tsarnaev brothers were probably enticed with money and then "set up" in an FBI plot to make the Boston bombings look like an al-Qaeda terrorist attack, gives the unmistakable impression of a not-so-subtle parody: the parodied text is a generic one - the reports in Russian opposition media and among Western sources that have in the past suggested the FSB's involvement in the 1999 apartment bombings. The piece's tit-for-tat approach is striking, to say the least.

Dissidence and Division

In her Minding Russia blog Catherine Fitzpatrick discusses the conflicted nature of the political opposition in Russia, and points out that it is indeed entirely natural:

Long ago I said to myself -- hey, it's their country, they are going to do what they want and I'm not required here except to show solidarity as appropriate to what is appropriate. I think the frenzy that people like [Kevin] Rothrock get into over the Russian opposition is in part driven by the notion that if only they can incite enough indignation and even hatred, they will actually shame or compel people into changing -- either the opposition themselves, or their default supporters. They likely truly believe that Putin needs protection.

So hey, I get it about the opposition.  They're no angels; they have some iffy pasts; they are not effective; they fight among themselves; blah blah blah. But you know something? So do people in the State Department, about what to do about Russia -- which strategy to use. And so do people in the European Union -- there are huge splits over the issue of whether you coddle or curb Russia, or whether you foster capitalism or socialism, and how, and the role of religion or the secular state. So it's not as if the rest of the world is in fact any better about the central problem at hand here, the figure of Putin, which is a construct of "the Kremlin," as in "that fortified place".

The post raises some basic issues about political and individual resistance in societies that are either totalitarian or are moving in the direction of totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the spectacle of Western indifference or hostility to opposition movements in Russia is not a new one: in a comment I noted that such lack of faith is frequently grounded in the often fragmented character of the opposition itself : after all,

there were similar divisions in the former Soviet dissident community - for example, between figures like Bukovsky, Brodsky, Venclova on the one hand and Etkind, Sinyavsky/Tertz, Medvedev, etc. on the other, though many other such splits existed. Some of the differences were probably personal, while others originated in issues of background, philosophy and outlook. Despite the superficial Western public perception of a unified Soviet dissident movement, the internal divisions were reflected in differences of approach among Western reporters, journalists and commentators, just as they are today where the Russian opposition is concerned. As Fitzpatrick makes clear in her post, however, now as then the divisions don't really matter: what matters is to "not break faith with people being sent to the GULAG".

U.S. - Russia Relations After Boston - 2

North Caucasus analyst Alexander Cherkasov, interviewed by Vladimir Kara-Murza on Radio Svoboda's Grani vremeni programme:

Of course, the fact that the main issue in Russian-American relations might be a topic that isn't Syria at all ... but rather the Boston attack – has somehow, in my opinion, made the subject of the situation of NGOs in Russia even more relevant. Above all, the organizations that undertake independent expert studies – either the monitoring of civil rights, in particular, civil rights in the areas where counter-terrorism operations are underway, or the work with refugees like that done by Svetlana Gannushkina. The Boston terrorist attack is an event that everyone is trying to duck responsibility for. The Chechen authorities say it’s nothing to do with them, the bombers lived mostly in Central Asia and then in the States, and the one who did come to Russia went to Dagestan. The Russian authorities are washing their hands of the whole affair. I would point out that this is the second time in the last half-century when there has been a need for close cooperation between the two countries. The last occasion was the Kennedy assassination, when the Soviet Union had to provide information about the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union… At a time when the powers that be on all sides have interests of their own, only independent expert organizations like Human Rights Watch or Memorial can say how far this terrorist attack may be linked to the North Caucasus underground, or the Chechen sector of the North Caucasus underground. Right now we are seeing that those organizations that are working in the region more intensively are either being called "foreign agents" or are having every square inch of their activities minutely examined.

U.S.- Russia Relations After Boston

Udaltsov video

The Russian edition of Rolling Stone has posted a video that shows Sergei Udaltsov, the leftist opposition leader who now faces charges that could lead to life imprisonment, during the May 6 2012 demonstration on Bolotnaya Square. From the video it's clear that at this crucial point in the demonstration when the action began to get out of hand, far from urging the crowd on, Udaltsov is appealing to it to step back:

Links

- Alexey Navalny's reflections on Monday's rally, in English.

- Boris Akunin, on how his speech at the rally in which he warned Russia's celebrities not to collaborate with the "police state" was misinterpreted - he was describing a possible future, not the present: 

1. In my speech I repeated several times that I was talking about the situation when Russia will finally turn into a police state.
So far the judicial reprisals have been fragmentary, spasmodic: the Yukos case, Pussy Riot. But now we await a wave of convictions (in the cases of Alexey Navalny and Aksana Panova, and the "May 6" case). And then our authoritarian state will move from a relatively herbivorous phase into one of primary cannibalism People with a name, with a reputation will, as previously, find it impossible to live in such a situation. Otherwise their name will remain, but they will have to say goodbye to their reputation.
2. I am not calling for a boycott of the state and all its institutions, for a rejection of state subsidies, state grants or state salaries. That money is all yours and mine, Putin won't get it out of his own pocket. He has the power, but not the state, which is not equivalent to the presidential administration and the Investigative Committee. A boycott of the state is something else entirely. It's a campaign of civil disobedience, the direct prologue to a revolution. Perhaps one day the situation will come to something like that, but that wasn't what I was talking about. And I was addressing some quite specific people.

- The Times (UK) writes about Boris Berezovsky's will. In The Interpreter, Alexander Goldfarb looks at Berezovsky's death in terms of theatre:

The interrelations inside and among the triangle of Sasha-Volodya-Boris, which ended with the polonium murder of Litvinenko and Berezovsky’s suicide on the banks of the Thames rise to the level of a Shakespearean drama not only because the backdrop includes untold wealth, the fate of the throne and the relations of states but because of the clash of characters and the play of passions; here there are loyalty, and betrayal, and revenge.

-  RFE/RL's Berlin correspondent Yury Veksler on the continuing topicality of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda:

Nonetheless, Joseph Goebbels is probably the only one of the Nazi leaders whose legacy, alas, is still relevant today. Almost every authoritarian regime, in building up its propaganda system, voluntarily or involuntarily bases itself on the techniques and methods that were once developed and tested by Goebbels's ministry. It is fortunately true that since then the level of skill - and fanaticism - of most of the propagandists has clearly diminished. It is hard, for example, to imagine Joseph Goebbels saying the following: "I'm not really a liberal, but I don't know whether I'm a conservative either. I try not to attach myself anywhere: for the most part it doesn't matter, because I'm a member of the presidential administration, working for the head of state, and my convictions are my own business " These are the words of Vladislav Surkov, who enjoys the reputation of the main propagandist of the current Russian regime. Propaganda that is not much believed even by its own creators is unlikely to be truly effective. Here Dr. Goebbels might have a lot to tell.

Update: Surkov has been fired. Or did he resign of his own volition?

Bolotnaya - May 6

Among the events and speeches broadcast from the large and well-attended demonstration on Bolotnaya Square yesterday, the contributions by Alexei Navalny and Oleg Kashin stand out as particularly memorable. 

A complete English translation of Navalny's speech (http://www.interpretermag.com/alexey-navalnys-speech-at-bolotnaya-square/) has been published by The Interpreter magazine. Excerpt:

I don’t have another country; I have nowhere to go. I don’t have another country. I don’t have another Moscow or another family or another people except you. And I don’t need anything else in fact except the support of my family, and your support, I am sure that like me, you won’t go away, and I congratulate you with the coming holiday of Victory [Day on May 9], a great victory.

I know, if our relatives and our ancestors at one time kicked out of the country those who wanted to enslave us with the force of arms, with tanks and planes, then our task is to free the country from those who want to enslave us, with the help of falsified ballots, with the help of sell-out journalists, and the help of crooks and thieves in police uniforms.

Oleg Kashin's rough and ready rendering of Yegor Letov's "Все идет по плану" was moving in its directness and passion, as was his concluding statement that

"Our leaders are not here and not under house arrest, our leaders are Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Letov".

May 6 Prisoners - Bolotnaya protest

Via Комитет 6 мая

6 may, Bolotnaya square

MAY 6 PRISONERS NEED YOUR HELP!

19 people are currently on trial with 12 of them being kept in Russian prisons, on charges of involvement in the “mass riots” on May 6, 2012. Ahead of them are unlawful trials which may result for them in many years of imprisonment.

So, what is, in fact, their crime?

On May 6, 2012, on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration, dozens of thousands of people took part in a peaceful demonstration of protest in Moscow. This was the 7^th mass manifestation of protest since the wave of political protest swept Russia in the aftermath of the December 2011 elections, which were marked by mass fraud. People went out into the streets to protest against the authoritarian political regime in their country, against corruption, arbitrariness of the authorities, and in defence of the fundamental human rights and freedoms. The protest rallies under democratic slogans were supported by a wide variety of political groups, yet the bulk of protesters were represented by politically unaffiliated rank-and file activists, ordinary citizens of Russia, young people.

On May 6 the police suddenly blocked the way to Bolotnaya square where the sanctioned rally was planned to take place, thus provoking a clash with the protesters. After that the police announced that the rally had been cancelled and immediately attacked the protesters, beginning to disperse them violently using truncheons and special equipment and weapons. As a result, approximately 600 people were illegitimately arrested, many had to spend the entire night in detention, several dozens were injured, with hundreds and thousands of other protesters leaving shocked and dazed by what had happened.

The criminal proceedings were, however, initiated neither against the police force, nor individual police officers, but against protesters who took part in the dispersed demonstration, with them facing charges of alleged involvement in “mass riots”. That blatant lies– recognising the culprits behind the violence as victims and declaring that their victims are criminals – became the response of the authorities to the peaceful protests against their own political fraud.

19 people were selected by the authorities at random from among the thousands of protesters, 12 of them were incarcerated for the duration of the inquiry. Their only guilt was their attempt to avail of their legitimate right to take part in a peaceful demonstration of protest and to defend people standing next to them from the brutal actions of the police.

The so-called “May 6 case” is a perfect proof of that the authoritarian ruling regime in Russia increasingly tends to resort to political repressions, resolved to stop at nothing, including forgery and election fraud, quite in the best traditions of the Stalinist era of terror.

If we want to stand up against the repressive onslaught of the authorities against civil society in Russia and to put an end to the lawless suppression of any manifestation of dissidence and opposition to the current Russian government, we first of all must struggle for an end to the May 6 repressions.

What we demand:

- release and complete legal rehabilitation of all those who are on trial in connection with the May 6 events, as well as compensation for both material and psychological injury sustained by them;

- just punishment for officials who were responsible for the crackdown on the peaceful demonstration, beatings and illegal arrests of some of the participants.

For this we will need the efforts of all concerned people not only in Russia, but all over the world. We ask you to disseminate information about what is happening in Russia, to address individual and collective letters of protest and appeals to the Russian authorities and diplomatic representatives, to organise protest actions and other actions of solidarity with the “May 6 prisoners”. People in other countries of the world can also help the victims of political repressions in Russia by demanding from their own governments and from international organizations to put pressure on the Russian authorities in order to prevent violations of the international human rights obligations on their part.

The Freeman

Many of the articles in early issues of the Foundation for Economic Education's journal The Freeman still have a relatively modern resonance. In spite of their deep entanglement in the Cold War espionage and un-American activities debates of the day,some of the discussions of U.S.-Soviet relations in the August 1952 edition were still relevant more than 30 years later. Fascinating items include an appeal for an end to Western appeasement of the USSR by the double defector Igor Bogolepov (alias Ivar Nyman), with his account of how passive resistance could bring the Soviet system down if only there was co-operation with the resisters on the part of the West, and his "confession" about his own duplicitous behavior:

Thus, during the years 1923 to 1942, I was personally connected with the Communist business of selling to the West a false picture of an innocent, peace-loving, arch-progressive and democratic Soviet regime. At first I was none too pleased to be associated with this "operation confusion" carried out by my boss, Maxim Litvinov. But since it was impossible to live in the Soviet Union without somehow serving the Communist cause, I said to myself: "I might as well remain where I am, because if a real Communist takes my place here at the Foreign Office, then who is going to throw monkey wrenches into this monkey business?"

So I began to sabotage in my own field as my fellow-countrymen all around me were sabotaging in theirs. Although it was not in my power to alter Soviet strategy, I could at least try to make its execution less effective. I always overemphasized the legal or factual difficulties in the way of carrying out political moves. Or I tried to soften their effect. And whenever I was charged with conveying Soviet propaganda to the West, I did my best to make it as unfit for the Western mentality as possible. This was not difficult, since the censors were mostly sharp, uneducated boys from the Secret Police who preferred to have articles from Pravda, and other propaganda for home consumption only, translated into foreign languages with very little alteration. 

U.S.- Russia Relations After Boston

In Novoye Vremya, three Russian political analysts are asked how the events surrounding the Tsarnaev brothers will affect Russia-U.S. relations [my tr.]:

Vyacheslav Nikonov, President of the "Politika" Foundation:

They will have a bad effect.  When I saw the reports  about Boston, I immediately thought that a "Chechen trace" would definitely be found.  It’s not for nothing that  Kadyrov was included on the "Magnitsky list" .

Igor Bunin, Director-General of the Center for Political Technologies:

The most significant thing is that  Russia immediately showed sympathy for the United States, and offered its moral support. I would draw  attention to the reaction of Putin, who immediately expressed his condolences and, having flown in [to Sochi] for a  U.S- Russia hockey tournament, organized a minute of silence. This was reminiscent of the situation on September 11  2001, when  Putin was one of the first [leaders] to support the United States in the fight against terrorism. And now, making use of the same theme, he  is trying to repair relations with the United States. Back then, however, the U.S. was able to provide real assistance in connection with  the Afghan "Northern Alliance"... with which our FSB had close ties ...

This time an offer of  assistance is more difficult, as it’s unclear how it should be expressed. Most probably, the suspects are linked to "Al-Qaeda". But the fact that they came from the Russian hinterland has almost no significance. For example. Osama bin Laden, the world’s biggest terrorist, came from Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. did not then sever relations with Saudi Arabia.

Dmitry Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center:

I don’t think relations between the U.S. and Russia will alter dramatically. In Russia there are very powerful circles that promote anti-Americanism. and in the United States there are those who deny the legitimacy of the current Russian government.

In America, the majority of public opinion doesn’t perceive what we call "Chechen and North Caucasus terrorism" as a problem of international terrorism. When people [in the West] talk about international terrorism, they’re referring to September 11, 2001 in New York, July 7, 2005 in London, March 11, 2004 in Madrid – they’re not talking about what has happened in Moscow and other Russian cities, such as the apartment bombings and subway terrorist attacks, they don’t see those as an international issue, but rather as a purely internal Russian one. The Russian leadership aims to see to it that that terrorists operating on Russian territory also qualify as international terrorists in the West.

Alexey Gaskarov

Today is a day of solidarity with Alexey Gaskarov, a Russian civic activist and member of the Opposition Coordinating Council.

On April 28 2013 Alexey Gaskarov was arrested in Moscow. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has charged him with taking part in a riot and using violence against a policeman on May 6 2012, when OMON (Russian riot police) attacked a peaceful demonstration.

On May 6 2012  Alexey was beaten up by police during an anti-Putin demonstration on Bolotnaya Square for intervening to help a demonstrator whom the police were dragging along the asphalt. Alexey filed a complaint with the Investigative Committee, but no criminal case against the officials responsible was opened.

Alexey Navalny writes:

But the Investigative Committee didn't forget about him. On April 28, 2013 he was seized on the street when he went out to the local pet store to buy food for his cat.

According to reports, Alexey is now being held in Moscow's SIZO-5 pretrial detention center.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130501/probe-anti-putin-rally-haunts-russia-one-year

Inside Out

In EDM, Mairbek Vatchagaev writes that "locating Tamerlan’s ideological trajectory in the North Caucasus may prove to be little more than a distraction." He points out that, with impaired links to Chechen culture, Tsarnaev appears to have been relatively isolated from the Chechen world, and probably picked up his Islamist views in Boston, from local Salafists. This would account for his hostility to U.S. Middle East policy, and his choice of the U.S., rather than Russia, as the target for a terrorist attack.

The article also draws attention to the fact that it was only some time after the Boston attack that the potential North Caucasus link began to be mentioned, giving the Moscow authorities an opportunity to become involved in the investigation:

In all this tragedy, Moscow seems to consider itself a winner. President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference that Russia had long sought cooperation from the US in the field of international terrorism (www.golos-ameriki.ru/content/putins-live-show/1648501.html). There was more of a reprimand of the US in Putin’s words than an admission of Russia’s own guilt for the attack in Boston. Moscow interprets terrorism in quite broad terms and includes everyone who is dissatisfied with the Russian political system and seeks to secede from Russia.

It has been observed that one point not addressed in the piece - though raised obliquely in one passage - is the question of whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev might have been a Russian agent.

Meanwhile, an RFE/RL report considers the role social media may have played in interactions between Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his Kazakh college friends Dias Kadyrbaev and Azamat Tazhayakov:

The vKontakte post by Kadyrbaev is striking mostly because of its timing. When it was posted there had already been reports of a shoot-out that had left one suspect dead and another on the run, but at the time, most of the world -- perhaps including police -- would still not have been able to connect a name to the grainy image of suspect no. 2 being shown on television screens. Kadyrbaev though, had allegedly already known for up to nine hours.

The Interpreter

From the About page of The Interpreter:

The Interpreter is a daily-updated online journal dedicated primarily to translating media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English.

Conceived as a kind of “Inopressa in reverse,” The Interpreter aspires to dismantle the language barrier that separates journalists, Russia analysts, policymakers, diplomats and interested laymen in the English-speaking world from the debates, scandals, intrigues and political developments taking place in the Russian Federation.

North Caucasus Situation - 2

In EDM, Valery Dzutsev has commentary on Kavkazskii Uzel's interview with Emil Pain:

As instability in the North Caucasus persists, experts are increasingly coming to the realization that Moscow’s present policies in the region can hardly address the pressing issues of the area. Even though Russian authorities appeared to be satisfied with a containment strategy in the North Caucasus for limiting violence to the region, this approach does not seem to work. A territorial dispute between Chechnya and Ingushetia, a revolt by ethnic Russians in Stavropol region, and the expanding conflict in Dagestan and elsewhere in the region indicate that instability is not simply simmering at a certain level, but is proliferating and emerging in unexpected forms and in new territories. Given the current dynamics of the security situation unfolding in the North Caucasus, chances are slim that the Olympics in Sochi in 2014 will not be affected in some adverse way by regional developments and blowback from the ongoing insurgencies in the North Caucasus.