Two Minutes Hate

Reaction, with Valery Tatarov
Saint Petersburg TV
September 29, 2014

The West’s Love

Since I was surprised myself, I intend to surprise you as well. Good evening, friends. Did you know that there are areas to which Europe’s sanctions against Russia do not apply? On the contrary, our western partners—who no longer conceal their dislike of Russia and [ethnic] Russians, who call the leader of our country a “führer,” who are pounding whole sectors of the economy and finance with sanctions, actually causing a rise in prices here—on certain issues these same people are ready at the drop of a hat to come here to Russia, to Petersburg, in particular, and send convoy after convoy with humanitarian missions.

And whom, do you think, the West continues to passionately love in Russia amid total sanctions? You’ll never guess. I myself was amazed by this fact, because the West, so I imagined, was now more than ever principled in its hatred of all things Russian. From Barak Obama to, dare I say this surname, [President of Lithuania Dalia] Grybauskaite, we hear insults directed towards Russia and [ethnic] Russians, and people have felt this on their skin. I mean the sanctions. A photo of men [with the slogan] “Sanctions against Russia are sanctions against me” [painted on their backs] has been making the rounds of the Internet.

So, just think, at the same time as hundreds of artists have been banned from traveling to Europe—in England, for example, the local “bodybuilders” have called for a boycott of Gergiev’s concerts—signs reading “No Russians allowed” are hung at cafes in Eastern Europe, Norway has left the “evil empire,” as it deems Russia, without the famous Norwegian salmon, Holland [has left Russia], without the famous Dutch cheese, and Sweden [has left Russia], without the ensemble ABBA, humanitarian assistance and close contacts continue in the area of . . . sexual partnership. And not traditional [sexual partnership] of some kind, but namely extremely perverted, gayropean [sexual partnership].

Miss Heidi Olufsen, the Norwegian consul general in Petersburg, personally greeted a recent Petersburg festival of sexual minorities or, more simply, perverts, with a heartfelt speech.

[Olufsen, in Russian:] “People should learn to respect and accept a person for who they are.”

Аs did Deputy Consul General of Sweden Björn Kavalkov-Halvarsson.

[Kavalkov-Halvarsson, in Russian:] “To eliminate prejudices what is needed are bold politicians who stand up for human rights and make laws that do not lead to the emergence of second-class citizens.”

A whole group of English-speaking western comrades decided to personally show solidarity and love for those they consider humiliated and subject to repression in Russia. Meaning—and this is important—officials who approve of repressions against Russia single out perverts as a special group of people who need special love and pity.

You remember the obscene anecdote about the sparrow that warmed itself in winter—I really apologize for this—in cow dung and was dragged out of the dung by a cat. [The moral of the story was that] the one who pulls you out of the shit is not your friend, and the one who covers you in it is not your foe. If there have to be three or four percent of the population with this abnormality of loving the same sex, then we will tolerate them and even feel sorry for them, but we will not let them into schools and kindergartens.

There used to be Doctors without Borders and Peace in Exchange for Food [sic], and now there is Sex instead of Food and Homosexualism [sic] without Borders. And most importantly, it is all so out of place, so ill timed. In the Ukraine, people are perishing. Everyone knows that at the forefront of the misanthropes are an outted faggot,* Supreme Rada deputy Oleg Lyashko, and a closet faggot, interior minister Arsen Avakov. Their sexual orientation really wouldn’t bother anyone if they hadn’t declared their fierce hatred of Russia and the friendship between Ukrainians and [ethnic] Russians. But it is just these “comrades” who are behaving heinously in Donbass.

And if one of those people who are sympathetic to the sexual “Mensheviks” would give them some good advice [and tell them that] at such a difficult time for the country not to show off in the company of Russia’s official enemies from Western Europe, but, on the contrary, protest against the actions of Lyashko and Avakov, which discredit the honest name of, so to speak, internationalist faggots. But no, instead they are also trying to convert them into fighters against the traditions of their own motherland.

In this context, the pass made to the faggots and lesbians by Petersburg [human rights] ombudsman Alexander Shishlov, who essentially greeted them in a special communiqué, appears completely dubious and politically mistaken. You know, back in the old days, the Soviet Communist Party general secretary would greet gatherings of student work teams in Siberia. So anyway, Mr. Shishlov—I quote BaltInfo—“sent greetings to the organizers of [Queerfest], a festival of gay culture taking place […] in Saint Petersburg.”

So, “among the stated objectives [of Queerfest] is the creation of an effective public space devoid of homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination, and the promotion of dialogue”—this is very important—“between members of different groups, organizations, minorities, and communities. These objectives are dear to all [‘of us,’ Tatarov adds] who consider human rights supreme values.”

Do you really want dialogue? Well, what kind of dialogue can there be here? Some get sanctions and hatred from the West, others—the ones in Donbass—get mass graves of civilians, and still others get touchy-feely. Will this actually make things better for the perverts? I am not worried about them: it’s a question. I don’t think it will make things better for them. So, friends, I will finish the anecdote about the sparrow eaten by the cat, which is obscene, like this whole topic of sexual perverts. The one who shits on you is not your foe, and the one who pulled you out of the manure is not your friend. But if you wind up in [shit], just sit there and don’t tweet!

Take care!

*Translator’s Note. Here and throughout, the word in the original Russian is pederast (педераст), which despite its obvious origins and appearance is simply an offensive term for “homosexual,” although perhaps it has, as friends have noted, a slightly “pseudo-scientific” or “old-fashioned” ring to it that its popular and commonly used derivatives pidoras and pedik do not. (They are wholly offensive and thus, apparently, “not fit for TV,” especially after passage of the new law on swearing.) But as one of my friends writes, “He [Tatarov] says pederast so that everyone will hear will pidoras. His intention is to insult, and everyone understands it that way. Otherwise, he would have said sodomit [sodomite] or muzhelozhets [ditto]. […] But when the linguistic expertise is conducted [in connection with a possible criminal investigation, see below], it will turn out that he did not offend anyone.” This is a long way of saying there is no one perfectly good way of translating the word, especially in this context.

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Queerfest Demands Apology from TV Channel
October 29, 2014
comingoutspb.com

Organizers of the human rights LGBT festival Queerfest have demanded that Saint Petersburg TV publicly condemn statements containing hate speech and hostility towards gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders (LGBT). These statements were made in the program “Reaction,” presented by Valery Tatarov, which the channel broadcast on September 29, 2014. The program, which dealt with Queerfest 2014, is still available on the channel’s official web site: http://topspb.tv/programs/v10655.

According to the activists, the program contained utterances (“perverts,” “faggots,” “if you wind up in manure, sit there and don’t tweet”) that were not only humiliating but could also be deemed incitements of hatred and enmity against a social group (LGBT).

The organizers and participants of Queerfest sent Saint Petersburg TV’s editor-in-chief a written request to make an official comment containing the editorial staff’s position on the program aired on September 29.

If it transpires that the humiliation of LGBT people and instigation of hatred and enmity against them was done intentionally and with the knowledge of the channel’s editorial staff, the organizers and participants of Queerfest intend to request that the Investigative Committee open a criminal case under Article 282 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code, as well as contact the Press Complaints Board, which is the journalistic community’s body for reviewing complaints of ethical violations by journalists.

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Editor’s Note. Wholly owned and financed by the city administration of Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg TV, which began broadcasting in October 2010, is available on cable, satellite, and the Internet. In 2011, it was reported to have a potential audience of 1.7 million people, a figure that has probably risen considerably as the wholesale digitalization of TV broadcasting and reception in the city has continued.

In an August 2012 interview, Sergei Boyarsky, the channel’s then-new general manager, described Saint Petersburg TV’s editorial philosophy as follows:

I don’t agree that the only way to get ratings is by criticizing. I think all this talk about free media only benefits the poor [sic]. Our country is rife with freedom of speech. If you turn on Echo of Moscow [radio station], you can sometimes feel sick, so tactlessly and harshly do the guests and some of the presenters sound off about the political system, about the government, and personally about the country’s leader. If you think that is healthy, I don’t think so. We will present information objectively, but I won’t allow flagrant rudeness and showing favor to a particular side.

Boyarsky is the son of popular Soviet singer and movie actor Mikhail Boyarsky, who is well known for his demonstrative support of the current regime.

Curiously, in September 2013, the channel launched a section on its web site featuring selected news stories overdubbed in English, with accompanying English-language transcripts. The channel abruptly ceased posting these reports in August 2014.

Today’s One-Minute Russian Lesson

Рубль выходит из-под контроля.

[Rubl’ vykhodit iz-pod kontrolya.]

The ruble is getting out of control.

Пенсионер избил свою жену молотком и выбросился с восьмого этажа.

[Pensioner izbil svoyu zhenu molotkom i vybrosilsya s vos’mogo etazha.]

A pensioner beat his wife with a hammer and jumped from the eighth floor.

source: Petersburg Channel 100

Halluci Nation

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Maybe there is no direct connection, but soon after the first article, below, ran in The Moscow Times, the following message appeared on the newspaper’s web site: “Due to the increasing number of users engaging in personal attacks, spam, trolling and abusive comments, we are no longer able to host our forum as a site for constructive and intelligent debate. It is with regret, therefore, that we have found ourselves forced to suspend the commenting function on our articles. The Moscow Times remains committed to the principle of public debate and hopes to welcome you to a new, constructive, forum in the future.” When I glanced at the comments to this article, it did seem that a lively “debate” was underway, but I no longer read such things to preserve what is left of my mental well-being. The emphasis, below, is mine.

Russia’s Empire State of Mind
Pyotr Romanov
October 26, 2014
The Moscow Times

Following World War I, the Russian Empire bid farewell to Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia [in modern Moldova]. The Soviet Union later regained only some of that territory — and yet that did not prevent the world from continuing to view the Soviet Union as an empire. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia decreased in size even more than it had after World War I, and yet many today continue referring to it as an empire.

I recently read an impassioned plea on Facebook from several Ukrainians that God call down on Russia a host of biblical chastisements and hasten its demise. In their view, the only way to escape the claws of the Russian bear is to kill the animal. At the same time, they have no intention of fighting the beast themselves, convinced that Europe and the U.S. alone have the power and the responsibility to vanquish the foe.

In other words, they prefer that others break their bones in the bear’s den so they can mount the pelt over their fireplace. I somehow doubt that the rational West finds that prospect very attractive.

In fact, a number of historical figures dreamed of dismembering Russia. Peter the Great’s arch-rival King Charles XII of Sweden held that dream even before Russia formally declared itself an empire. The French ambassador in Stockholm at that time said, “The king will make peace with Russia only after he has arrived in Moscow, toppled the tsar from his throne, divided the state into small principalities and summoned the boyars to divvy up the kingdom into their personal provinces.”

In hindsight, knowing how the Swedes suffered defeat at the Battle of Poltava, it is tempting to assess such a claim as pompous bravado. However, that was a serious plan that the Swedish king and his allies had discussed on more than one occasion. Charles really did plan to install his own puppet ruler on the Russian throne. He dreamed of Pskov, Novgorod and all of northern Russia as Swedish possessions. He planned to allot all of Ukraine and the Smolensk region to Polish King Stanislaw Leszczynski. Charles agreed to give Russia’s southern lands to the Turks and Crimean Tatars. There are countless other similar stories in history — but where are all those dreamers today?

However, this is not the main point. I see no reason to blame my ancestors for their imperialist actions. Russians have no more to feel ashamed of in this regard than do the British, Germans, Spaniards and French. All of their imperialist pasts were dictated by fate, God, geopolitical factors and their national character — that with which it is absolutely pointless to fight.

The collapse of the Russian Empire deeply troubled many of its citizens, and the later collapse of the Soviet Union gave them a disturbing sense of deja vu. Even today, millions of Russians wax nostalgic for the past — particularly for the Soviet Union — recalling much that was also good from that time.

This is the second time in a century that Russia has gone through such painful “withdrawal symptoms” while overcoming its imperialist mentality. Russians have nothing of which to feel ashamed: the same process was no less painful for other “imperial” nations.

Of course, modern Russia is not an empire, and it is unbecoming to act like a broken record, continually repeating the same old cliches. It is just that the process of adapting to the new realities is not moving as quickly as some in the West — and also in Russia, by the way — would like it to. But it is impossible to hurry it along.

It is decidedly easier for a tiny little ship of a state such as Monaco to make a sea change than it is for a massive ocean liner such as religiously diverse, multiethnic and multicultural Russia. A little patience is needed.

I understand that what seems fast by historical standards might appear painfully slow to people. History is measured in ages, but individuals measure time in terms of a single lifespan. Nonetheless, it takes nine months for a baby to come into this world, and no amount of impatient fingernail-biting will change that.

Making a baby come into the world any sooner is not the healthiest option either. In the same way, it does no good to keep impatiently tugging on Russia’s sleeve. Every fruit has its given period of maturation. When the time comes, Russia will let go of the last vestiges of its imperial past.

Until then, praying for God to curse Russia with a swarm of locusts or the 10 plagues of Egypt is not only unseemly, but also a bit archaic and completely meaningless.

Pyotr Romanov [sic] is a journalist and historian.

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Post-imperial melancholy has also got the unnamed editorial writer (the West’s most beloved Russian “leftist”?) at Russian “leftist” web site Rabkor.ru waxing poetical in the vozhdist mode in the run-up to November 4, National Unity Day.

The West intends to play hardball in its long negotiations with Moscow. Zeal and rigidity might betray it, and then events will not go as planned. That has already happened in Ukraine. However, the US and the EU understand that Russian liberals have increased their grip on power and will stubbornly seek a compromise. Dmitry Medvedev has already said that a “reset of relations” requires a return to the “zero position,” meaning normal trade without sanctions. The ruling class will do anything for its sake, particularly if its position is complicated by economic problems. If solving the problem with Western Europe and the US requires presenting Putin’s head on a platter, then that it is how the problem will be solved.

But Russia is not a banana republic or a tiny country in Eastern Europe, where you can just organize a color revolution by gathering several thousand “civil society” activists on a central square. And so only Putin himself can remove Putin’s head for the US, and not only through his own carelessness.

Patriots stubbornly dream of persuading the current president to become like Stalin or Ivan the Terrible. Members of the liberal intelligentsia scare each other and the gullible western public with this same prospect. However, with each passing day, our ruler [sic] becomes like a completely different predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was also, incidentally, a politician who banked on compromises.

The growing prospect of a “liberal putsch” becomes more apparent with each passing day. The final act has not started, but the play is already underway. Liberals are making ritual sacrifices. They are sacrificing the exchange rate of the ruble and social policies. They are sacrificing Novorussia [Novorossiya]. They are sacrificing the country’s dignity. They are destroying the possibility of Russian society’s development. They are even willing to sacrifice the one who protected the system for many years. Only none of this will bear fruit, because only a different course can save Russia from economic disaster.

And let no one be deceived: if the liberal coup becomes a reality, its authors will quickly discover how correct the thesis “Ukraine is not Russia” was. Unlike its neighboring country, Russia, with the exception of the capital, will turn into one solid Donbass.

The preceding was an excerpt from “Who Will Bring Them Putin’s Head?”, published on October 20, 2014, by Rabkor.ru. You can read the entire editorial in English here, as translated by other, less shaky hands.

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After a friend mailed me the following “news” item, he wrote, “This is how the whole ‘television—Levada—television’ scheme works.” As Kirill Rogov has argued, many people will tell pollsters what authoritarian state television has told them to think, especially when it comes to things that don’t really matter to them, like musician Andrei Makarevich’s alleged “treason.” It’s no wonder that one of the world’s leading offshore Putin apologists was worried, last year, when it seemed as if the state was cracking down on the Levada Center. He needn’t have worried. My friend titled his email to me, “Levada will receive the Stalin Prize posthumously.” That about sums it up.

Almost Half of Russians Consider Makarevich a Traitor to the Motherland
October 27, 2014 | Gazeta.ru

Almost half of Russians believe that when he performed in Slovyansk, which is occupied [sic] by the Ukrainian army, musician Andrei Makarevich betrayed the interests of the motherland, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Levada Center.

45% of those polled agreed with the statement “Makarevich betrayed the interests of Russia, and now the public does not want to go to his concerts.” However, among Muscovites there was a high percentage (32%) inclined to believe that Makarevich “acted in good conscience” and that he had been the target of a defamation campaign. 28% of respondents admit that Makarevich behaved unpatriotically, but that administrative resources have been used to disrupt his concerts in various Russian cities.

The percentage of those supporting Makarevich and condemning the defamation campaign was quite low—13%. Respondents with a higher education were generally more supportive of what the musician did than Russians with less than a secondary education.

The poll was conducted among 1,630 people aged eighteen years or older in 134 municipalities in forty-six regions of the country.

Earlier, Makarevich recorded a song about how he has been hounded. On October 27, news came of another cancellation of one of the musician’s concert, this time in Kurgan.

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Image (above): Babi Badalov, Halluci Nation (Orna-mental poetry), 2014; ink on paper, 26.5 x 19 cm. Courtesy of La Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris, and the artist.

China Friendly

Hotels in Petersburg Say “Ni Hao!”
September 30, 2014
Fontanka.ru

Petersburg hoteliers have begun negotiations on joining the China Today program, which helps participants gain greater visibility among tour agents and tourists in China. They are doing this because they need to replace the falling number of tourists from Europe and the US. Fontanka found out what tourists from China want to see in cafes and restaurants.

In the light of this past summer’s political events, Russia’s economy has turned towards the countries of the East. The tourist business, which organizes leisure in Russia for foreigners, has not been fighting the general trend. After the imposition of sanctions, the flow of tourists from Europe has declined, as has been visible on the streets of Petersburg even taking the season into account. As Fontanka learned, several major Petersburg hotels have begun negotiations with the association World without Borders, which unites inbound tourism tour operators, about participating in the China Friendly program.

Participation in the program helps hotels obtain certification for compliance with the requirements of Chinese tourists, who are supposed to replace European guests in the new political and economic reality. Vetted hotels are eligible to use the China Friendly status in their ad campaigns. It helps them to attract the attention of both Chinese tour operators choosing Russian hotels to accommodate their own customers or a Russian operator for collaboration, and Chinese tourists who prefer to travel on their own. Mikhail Vislin, the association’s executive director, refused to name the Petersburg hoteliers ready to open their doors wide to the Chinese. (At present, no Petersburg hotels have this status, which is attractive to visitors from the Middle Kingdom.)

“Unlike tourists from Europe and America, tourists from China have significant cultural peculiarities. They have a quite particular mindset. Moreover, the language barrier is a much more acute problem for them. Despite the fact that the Russian tourist industry is gradually becoming more oriented towards the Chinese, to date only a few sites are comfortable for them to visit,” says the program’s official web site.

China Friendly’s compliance requirements for hotels are posted on the program’s information portal. Most of them concern duplication of information in Chinese. To obtain certification, a hotel must develop a Chinese-language version of its site, put location information in Chinese in its rooms, and hire employees who know Chinese. Rooms must also always have green tea with a tea set and electrical sockets with the standard plug used in the PRC. Guests’ breakfasts must be adapted to Chinese tradition.

“The buffet at the hotel restaurant must include some elements of Chinese cuisine. It should include boiled eggs, steamed vegetables cut into small pieces easy to grab with chopsticks, chicken, and baozi—small dumplings with different fillings. Chinese porridge, a watery, salty rice porridge similar in structure [sic] to broth, must also be cooked,” explained China Today project director Anna Sibirkina.

[…]

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Russia and China Boost Student Exchange Programs
Anna Dolgov
The St. Petersburg Times
October 8, 2014

Russia and China plan to increase the number of students studying under mutual exchange programs to 100,000 in five years, Russian media has reported, shortly after Russia canceled a popular exchange program with the U.S.

The announcement came ahead of a meeting between Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang in Moscow on Monday, when several dozen cooperation agreements on trade, investment, energy and cultural affairs were expected to be signed.

Currently, about 25,000 Chinese students are attending Russian colleges and universities, while 15,000 Russian students are studying in China. Moscow and Beijing plan to raise the total number to 100,000 by 2020, Interfax reported Monday, citing an unidentified source from the Russian Cabinet.

As part of the 2014-15 Russia-China Youth Friendly Exchange program — a bilateral year set up to strengthen cultural ties — more than 300 events in both countries were scheduled throughout the year, with more than 7,000 students having taken part so far, according to the spokesperson.

The spokesperson also announced that China had taken first place in the number of visits to Russia this year, with more than 500,000 Chinese citizens coming to Russia in the first six months of this year alone.

“Last year, China came in second by the number of tourists visiting Russia [with 370,000 visits]. But in the first six months of 2014 alone, China has already taken the leading position — more than 500,000 Chinese citizens have visited Russia so far, and 135,000 of them were on tourist trips,” the source was cited as saying by the TASS news agency.

The apparent surge in Russia’s popularity comes as the country pivots toward China amid deteriorating relations with the West.

[…]

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Locals: Chinese Are Massively Eating Domestic Cats in the Leningrad Region
Rosbalt.ru

SAINT PETERSBURG, October 12. Cats have been disappearing without a trace in the village of Divinsky, in Leningrad Region’s Gatchina District. Locals have conducted their own investigation and concluded that Chinese are destroying the animals. And that they are not just killing them, but using them for food.

As local resident Roza Vasilieva told Rosbalt, she has recently lost three healthy cats. The woman had a total of five four-pawed favorites, but two of them are quite old and stay at home. She has lost forever the other cats, which she let out to walk. Her neighbors have faced similar problems. Residents have tried to find the animals and posted notices, but all to no avail.

“You might think the foxes were to blame. But the foxes have long lived in the woods and don’t touch the cats,” says Roza Vasilieva.

“Yesterday, my husband went looking for the cats. He walked through all the fields, but didn’t find a single cat. But he did discover bait set out by the Chinese. They lured the cats with a wrapper soaked in some kind of narcotic. We let our cat sniff it: she just went crazy. Apparently, they drive around in a car throwing the bait, and then collect the cats. At first, we couldn’t believe that it was the Chinese, but then we concluded it was them. We are sure that they are eating the cats,” says Roza Vasilieva.

Residents were alarmed, went to the village council, and began telling other people about the problem. (“Conducting propaganda,” Vasilieva calls it.) What they fear most of all is an invasion of rats. Life in the village would be impossible without any four-pawed hunters.

“The Chinese have two bases here—in the Luga District—the village of Krasny Mayak [Red Lighthouse] and near the village of Kuznetsovo. They have about a hundred greenhouses there. Around three hundred people live there. It’s not enough that they are poisoning our water and land with their fertilizers, but now they’re also catching our cats,” the woman complains.

However, she admits that residents have not found the remains of the animals.

“They hide it all, of course,” says Roza Vasilieva.

Nevertheless, she has no doubt about what has happened to the animals.

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The Chinese Revolution in Migration
Gorod (812)
October 13, 2014

[…]

According to Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, a researcher at the Institute for National Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Central Asian labor supply will run out in fifteen years or so. Instead, Chinese will work in Russia. They have now already densely “occupied” the Russian Far East and Siberia.

“Life without the Chinese is no longer conceivable in these regions. A survey was conducted in which one of the questions was, What is more important to you, relations with Moscow or relations with China? China took first place,” says Zayonchkovskaya.

The Chinese are actively cultivating the Moscow market. They have not made it to Petersburg yet. According to Zayonchkovskaya, the Chinese are good workers. They are quite adaptable, not prone to conflict, and know at least a minimum amount of Russian. In some sense, our country’s future belongs to them.

In Petersburg, the authorities have been making attempts to replace foreign guest workers with internal migrants from the provinces. According to Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, this is a futile undertaking. The population of all the surrounding small towns has already been “licked clean,” and there is just no extra manpower in Russia.

[…]

This article was published only in the print edition of Gorod (812), on page 11. Photo, above, courtesy of The St. Petersburg Times.

Ilyushinites: “Leningrad’s builders are being made homeless”

“Ilyushinites” Move to Tents in Front of the Smolny to Protest Evictions
October 20, 2014
paperpaper.ru

Residents of Ilyushin Street, 15, which has been in the process of resettlement since 2007, will begin an indefinite hunger strike in front of city hall today. They plan to set up tents in Smolny Garden and stay there until Petersburg authorities solve the issue of their building.

Recently, four families have been evicted from the building. As Olga Baranova, a resident of Ilyushin Street, 15, recounts, bailiffs broke into the flats, made an inventory of the things in them, then changed the locks.

“We live in the corridor, which is not heated. We have nowhere to return. They threw out all our things: our sofa, our blankets and pillows, our clothes. Leningrad’s builders are being made homeless.”

An Ilyushinite picketing Nevsky Prospect in late May of this year. Her placard reads: “Leningrad’s builders are being made homeless. Ilyushin Street, 15, building 2.”

The house at Ilyushin, 15, was built as a dormitory for employees of Glavleningradstroy, a Soviet construction enterprise. In 1991, it was privatized by the firm Fourth Trust, of which the residents were unaware, but in the 2000s the company demanded that the residents buy back their flats or vacate them. City hall offered social housing to the “Ilyushinites.” Several families agreed to the offer, but some residents have refused to leave the building.

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The Ilyushinites went on hunger strike in the winter of 2013, as shown by the local affiliate of REN TV in the following report, which also makes it clear that the Ilyushinites refuse to vacate their building not on a whim, but because twenty years ago city hall bureaucrats had promised them title to their flats, and they now claim that the Smolny has offered them only temporary, not permanent housing, meaning they fear they could end up homeless again within a few years.

According to reports from other Petersburg grassroots activists, three Ilyushinites were detained by police yesterday as they tried to set up tents across the street from the Smolny, Petersburg city hall. They have been charged with disobeying police officers, a misdemeanor.

Before gubernatorial and district council elections in September, the Smolny had promised to solve the problems of the Ilyushinites. Now that the freest, fairest elections on planet Earth are successfully past, city hall has apparently forgotten its promises.

Photo, above, courtesy of BaltInfo

Cannibal Corpse: “A message to our Russian fans”

Cannibal Corpse addresses Russian tour issues

Cannibal Corpse recently completed their tour of Russia, a place they have played previously played many times with no issues. Unfortunately, as many Russian fans are already aware, this tour did not go as planned. Cannibal Corpse has released a statement, which can be read below.

“A message to our Russian fans:
“As you all are certainly aware by now, our concerts in Ufa, Moscow, and St. Petersburg were cancelled. We were present in these cities and ready to perform each of these shows but were not permitted to. In Ufa the power was turned off shortly before the show (we were told because the venue was late on rent), and in Moscow and St. Petersburg we were told that we did not have the correct visas and that if we attempted to perform the concert would be stopped by police and we would be detained and deported (prior to the tour we had been told that we did have the correct visas and that all of our paperwork was in order).

“Our show in Nizhny Novgorod also had problems. In that city we performed half of our set before being stopped by police. We were told the police needed to search the venue for drugs and that the show had to be terminated.

“These are the reasons for the cancellations as far as we have been told.

“On the brighter side, we had a fantastic time performing in Krasnodar, Samara, Chelyabinsk, and Yekaterinburg. We were able to play our full set in all four of those cities.

“We came to Russia excited and prepared to play all of the scheduled concerts, and we apologize that we were not able to do so. It was beyond our control. We are extremely disappointed. We have played in Russia many times and we love our Russian fans. Hopefully someday the situation for us in Russia will be different and we will be able to return.”

Photos: police raid photo from Nizhny Novgorod, paddy wagon in St. Petersburg

Cannibal Corpse’s European tour with Revocation and Aeon continues today in Finland. The dates are below, as well as on the newly re-launched cannibalcorpse.net.

[…]

Police in the venue at Nizhny Novgorod Russia.

source: Facebook

Thanks to Comrade SC for the heads-up.

“Are We Still Alive?”: Olga Serebryanaya on Russia’s New Ideology

Are We Still Alive? Why the Thirty- and Forty-Something Generation Has Retreated into Political Oblivion
Olga Serebryanaya
October 2, 2014
Snob.ru

Ten years ago or so, the current thirty- and fortysomethings would often have to ask the question, Is he (or she) really still alive? Sometimes this led to amusing blitz investigations. I remember how my friends and I checked whether Soviet crooner Eduard Hill was still alive while sitting on the far terrace of a restaurant where a wedding was being celebrated with a live performance of Hill’s songs. After listening for an hour, we hazarded the guess that only Hill himself could perform Hill’s entire repertoire. The Internet was slow back then, and we three liberal arts people stared spellbound for a long time at the tiny screen of a mobile telephone to ascertain that Hill was indeed alive. It was a good learning experience: when “Trololo” rang out, we were no longer asking the embarrassing question. But it didn’t prevent me, some time later, from saying with genuine surprise to a regular contributor to the literary journal Novy Mir, “Novy Mir still comes out?!” People continue to recall journalist Oleg Kashin’s reaction to a news item about writer Vladimir Voinovich: “What, he’s still alive?”

That was an elegiac sketch about bygone days. Nowadays, one wouldn’t ask whether poet Yunna Moritz were alive, whether theater director Yuri Lyubimov* were well, whether children’s writer Eduard Uspensky were still with us, and whether writer and Literary Gazette editor Yuri Polyakov still walked the face of the earth, not to mention Voinovich. Nowadays, it is easier to doubt in one’s own existence than ask the reasonable question about the relevance of the political commentary given by all these mentioned and unmentioned elders. But since thirty- and forty-somethings have retreated into political oblivion at present, we can ask (from the viewpoint of eternity as it were) why this is so.

The answer is obvious: there is nothing genuine in current Russian reality. Only antiques are “genuine” in our country. People in Kharkov topple a statue of Lenin—and then people in Russia discuss Lenin’s role in Russian history for a week. Russia annexes Crimea, and anyone capable of writing in this country spends the following six months compiling a chronicle of various annexations. We know what all the cultural greats of the stagnation era think about Ukraine. If one of them hasn’t spoken out yet, it just means he or she has already died.

However, the lack of genuineness in the realm of public opinion, just like this realm’s spectral existence itself, does not mean that nothing happens or is accomplished in Russia. On the contrary, things happen and are accomplished, and quite quickly. Exactly one week passed between the news that Arkady Rotenberg’s villas in Italy had been seized by the authorities there and the Russian cabinet’s positive appraisal of the bill for the so-called Rotenberg law. The government’s decision did not even need to be discussed or simply justified; it was sufficient to refer to the urgency. “What seemed to be not so urgent only four months ago, now, given the increased risk of miscarriages of justice, appears differently,” Vedomosti quoted a source on the Russian White House staff as saying.

As soon as the question arises as to where in the budget the money will come from to compensate seized villas and loss of profits, solutions are found just like that: abolish the “maternity capital” program, make cuts here, here, and there, raise this and that. Justifications do not matter: one can safely say that the maternity capital program “does not increase the number of children, but merely shifts the calendars of births” without giving a thought to the fact that pensions, basically, merely shift the “calendar of deaths,” but do not abolish them. We are faced with a situation in which what really happens is successfully accomplished without being enunciated, whereas enunciation revolves around an unreal past. But how is this reality possible? Why does Rotenberg manage to break into reality, while this is such a daunting task for the public? There should be solid foundations for this, no?

And there are. For all their seeming lack of principle, the current Russian authorities have one firm principle, a symbol of faith, one might even say. It consists in the fact that they never abandon their own kind. The principle has even graced a billboard: “It is important to use every opportunity to help concrete people.” “Concrete people” really means concrete people, and we even know how many of these concrete people there are in Russia.

List of founders of the Ozera dacha cooperative

The fundamental difference between Putin and the public, which is choking on the fumes of the past, does not consist in the fact that he holds all the power, while the public is disempowered. The real difference is that the authorities firmly believe in their principle of protecting their own, whereas the public believes in nothing. For the public, civil liberties, democratic elections of public officials, and the equality of all before the law are phrases that have repeatedly figured in history, rather than basic principles of social organization with which reality should be brought into line.

Principles, objectives, and ideals have their own reality, which in some sense is more solid than what we usually denote with the term “current events.” It is principles, objectives, and ideals that pull history into a line directed towards the future. When they are absent, time coils into a loop, and the only point of national history is to preserve Rotenberg’s wealth. No one would ever think to ask about him, “What, he’s still alive?”

* Editor’s Note. Renowned Russian theater director Yuri Lyubimov died a few days after this column was published.

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“Helping Concrete People,” like Arkady Rotenberg
Olga Serebryanaya
October 9, 2014
online812.ru

In late September, the newspapers wrote about the seizure of real estate owned by Russian businessman and Putin ally Arkady Rotenberg: the sanctions imposed by the US and EU had started to work. The real estate in question included an apartment and three villas in Sardinia, and a hotel in Rome. (Good Lord, why did he need three villas? the Net groaned in unison.)

The topic would have been good only for a half a day’s worth of jokes along the lines of “soon he’ll be darning stockings” if the next day the Net had not learned about the rapid resuscitation in the State Duma of a bill from last year guaranteeing compensation from the federal budget for Russian citizens and companies who fall victim to “unjust decisions by foreign courts.”

As Georgy Alburov wrote, “Now the budget will pay for Rotenberg’s villas twice—when they are purchased and when compensation for them is paid out.” And when the cabinet announced its unconditional approval of the draft law, and the Economic Development Ministry hinted it would be inexpedient to continue the “maternity capital” program, everyone got it. “All the maternity capital will be paid out to Rotenberg’s mother as a reward for having such a wonderful son,” wrote Anton Semakin. (In fact, she has two such sons.)

And it does not matter that the law would not help the Rotenbergs, because their properties are registered with foreign companies. What matters are the openness and shamelessness with which the bill has been submitted for consideration.

Nobody doubted the federal budget would compensate the Rotenbergs even without such a law being passed, and that if necessary, the compensation would even be shipped to them in white Kamaz trucks with masked license plates. Openly discussed, the law compensating people who do not have it all that bad at the expense of the poorest people has been a kind of watershed. Even morons have realized that now Russian citizens are required not just to silently tolerate rampant theft but to loudly voice their approval of it.

The most active among them have already begun to do this. In a column on the web site Pravoslavie.ru entitled “In Defense of Crooks and Thieves,” Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich wrote, “You can award me second place in a moron contest, but I really do believe that an alliance of crooks, thieves, and our perpetually underrated technical intelligentsia is a force still capable of pulling Russia out of the hole in which we wound up twenty years ago. Yes, these people act slowly and clumsily, and they constantly try and exceed the bounds of legality, but act they do, and that is why I find them sympathetic.”

This is the voice, so to speak, of the new conscious Russian. Ivan Davydov has vividly described the methods of coercion that will be applied to everyone else.

“There is a crowd outside Christ the Punisher Cathedral, a flock of beggars. Or maybe they are not beggars. After all, you cannot tell nowadays who is a beggar, and who a victim of inhuman sanctions. There is a podium in front of the cathedral, and people are making the right speeches. […] And here is an old woman who really is a beggar. The poor thing is completely hunched over. She holds out her hand. ‘Dear, I am not asking for myself. Everything we collect today is for Little Arkady. That is what the capo from the cathedral said, you know, the one who confiscates our daily take. Today it’s all for darling Little Arkady. What a squeeze they’ve put on him over there! He is the one who is in real misery. We’ll muddle through, we will, but that little darling…’ The old woman is crying. I give her a ten-ruble coin.”

This only seems like a parody. The new Russian ideology, for which people searched in vain during the 1990s, has finally been found. Putin formulated it: “It is important to use every opportunity to help concrete people.” This phrase refers not only to Rotenberg; it is the indisputable principle of the new national mindset. Just as earlier everyone had to believe in communism’s inevitable triumph, now the entire politically trustworthy segment of the populace must sincerely believe in this principle’s inerrancy and omnipotence. True, the horizons of state ideology have narrowed markedly. But its totalizing nature remains the same.

Cannibal Corpse Fans Confront the Russian Orthodox Police State

Fans Confronted by Riot Police at Canceled Concert
Sergey Chernov
The St. Petersburg Times
Wednesday, October 15, 2014

OMON police standing outside the Kosmonavt club, the venue of the canceled concert by Cannibal Corpse, on Sunday night. Photo by Sergey Chernov for The St. Petersburg Times

Eighteen music fans were detained Sunday as hundreds protested against the last-minute cancellation of a Cannibal Corpse show outside the Kosmonavt music club in St. Petersburg. The organizer, the Moscow-based agency Motley Concerts, claimed the cancellation was caused by unspecified “technical reasons,” but the fans believed it was done under pressure from the authorities.

The American death metal band’s St. Petersburg concert was set to be the last in their eight-date Russian tour in support of their 13th studio album, “A Skeletal Domain.”

Although the band’s five previous Russian tours went ahead without any problems, this year’s tour was marred by controversy caused by a massive campaign of formal complaints from Orthodox activists about alleged “Satanism” and “extremism” in Cannibal Corpse’s lyrics. Out of the eight planned concerts, the band managed to play only four.

On Oct. 11, the band’s concert in Moscow was canceled when people were already in the venue. Before that, a concert in Ufa scheduled for Oct. 5 was canceled when the venue abruptly closed “for technical reasons.” On Oct. 10, Cannibal Corpse’s concert in Nizhny Novgorod was shut down by armed masked police officers 30 minutes after it had started. A number of fans were detained and taken for compulsory drug tests. In a petition to the head of administration of Nizhny Novgorod, fans wrote that the true reason for the anti-drug operation was to stop the concert, which they believe was an act of censorship, which is prohibited by the Russian constitution.

Neither the organizer nor the venues in the four cities admitted any pressure from authorities and the band did not make any statement about the cancellations.

On Sunday, fans were not let into the venue even though it was supposed to open at least an hour before the concert’s scheduled 8 p.m. start. When asked, the guard at the doors said both the public and guests would be allowed to enter “later.”

When several hundred stood around Kosmonavt 25 minutes before the scheduled start, a young man brought a notice from the organizers and read it aloud. It said the concert had been canceled for technical reasons but ticket holders were welcome to a signing session with the band and to spend an evening in the venue.

The notice then went from one person to another until a fan set it on fire to cheers from the crowd.

Despite the invitation, the doors were still closed, leading disappointed fans to crowd around near the entrance. Soon they were chanting the band’s name as well as profane insults toward Moscow Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov, also known as Enteo, and Legislative Assembly deputy Vitaly Milonov, whom they saw as responsible for the cancellation. The fans criticized the Kremlin’s current policies of isolation from the West and promotion of traditionalism.

One fan shouted an offensive anti-President Vladimir Putin slogan while another commented sarcastically about the official line of Russia “rising from its knees.”

“I would not love the Russian Orthodox Church more for this,” one fan said.

People discussed how they had been waiting for months for the concert and bought expensive tickets, while others had come from other cities and had to take days off from their jobs and find a place to stay in St. Petersburg.

Although there had only been one police vehicle parked near the venue initially, OMON riot police started to arrive at the site at 8:15 p.m. Bottles flew at the officers while people expressed their disappointment and outrage at the treatment. Cannibal Corpse’s music played loudly from one of the cars parked near the venue.

The OMON police retreated into their truck to put on helmets and take batons but did not immediately intervene, instead maneuvering in the street near the venue, blocking and unblocking it, as bottles kept coming and various fans protested in different ways. People flooded the street and passing cars had their tires pierced by broken glass.

The first arrests occurred at around 8:30 p.m., when a dozen officers rushed at two fans standing at a distance from Kosmonavt, beat them with batons and dragged them to the police vehicle. A video posted by a fan showed them apparently being beaten with a baton inside the vehicle as well. An hour later there were much fewer people in the street, with some heading home and others lining up for the signing session in the venue, which eventually started to let people enter, although very slowly after multiple checks.

According to the police, the 18 detained fans were charged either with “disorderly conduct” or with “being drunk in public,” offenses that are punishable by fines or up to 15 days in prison.

“Howard Zinn, a Leftist Intellectual of Jewish Descent”

In the mid-1990s, I used to remark, only partly in jest, that Russia was the greatest country in the world because there were more Nirvana albums for sale here than in any other country. The country’s kiosks and shops were then flooded with a dizzying number of bootlegs of recordings by many of my favorite bands. It often seemed then that the Russian bootleggers were having a ball reinventing and re-imagining their discographies.

In a similar but much less innocent vein, in more recent years some Russian publishers have repackaged and retitled translated works of nonfiction by non-Russian authors in response to perceived ideological demand.

You might not guess it from the cover and the description, below, but this is a new (authorized?) Russian edition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States:

American Empire: From 1492 to the Present Day
Howard Zinn

ISBN: 978-5-4438-0662-4
Year of Publication: 2014
Publisher: Algorithm
Series: Mankind’s Greatest Empires

Description
Howard Zinn, a leftist intellectual of Jewish descent, was along with Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag one of the most consistent critics of American foreign policy. The well-known American political scientist, author, and doctor of historical sciences, taught at Boston University, Paris, and Bologna. His book, reprinted several times in America and across the Atlantic, contains a view of the most important events in American history from colonial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century that largely differs from traditional American historical science.

It is packed with unusually vivid and interesting facts, enabling the Russian reader to better understand our potential enemy in the past [sic] and, quite possibly, in the near future.

This work will certainly attract the attention of not only professional historians, sociologists and political scientists but also anyone interested in the history of the United States.

For those over 16 years of age.

Further information about the publication:
Hardcover, 752 pages
Circulation: 1,200 copies
Format: 60 x 90 cm/16 (145 x 215 mm)

source

A big thanks to Comrade VT for the heads-up.

UPDATE. It might not be clear to readers outside of Russia or unfamiliar with Algorithm publishing house that this repackaging is something akin to Mormon baptisms for the dead, who against their already unknowable will are converted to Latter-Day Saints. In this case, Howard Zinn has been made after death to serve the Russian neo-imperialist/neo-Stalinist cause. That this is the prevailing tendency at Algorithm is apparent from their September 2014 catalogue, which features such titles as Russia’s Eurasian Revenge, by the now-ubiquitous fascist warmonger Alexander Dugin; The West versus Russia, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (who never published a book with this title in his lifetime), described as “a unique collection of incisive polemical texts about the standoff between western civilization and Russian civilization by Dostoevsky, one of the most widely read Russian classic authors”: Stalin’s Wolfhound: The True Story of Pavel Sudoplatov; and A Future without America, by Lyndon Larouche (this is another book whose title, at least, seems to exist only in the Algorithm universe).

“In the Breast of Mother Russia Speaks a Kind and Loving Heart”

Rich white Americans have so much fun. Here they are thrilling to the duo of Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner in Nantucket this past spring.

This is Russian soft-powerism of the highest order. It is strange (or is it?) that Pozner somehow thinks (or does he?) that he went from being a Soviet “propagandist” (as he admits in this conversation) to being a real “journalist” in the post-Soviet era.

And it is amazing that the otherwise skeptical and cranky Donahue has bought into this self-flattery. It is one thing to be more critical of the actions and policies of one’s own government: that is how it should be for any intelligent person anywhere, and especially for Americans, whose country bears more responsibility than most other countries for the world’s current saggy, miserable, often vicious shape. But here Donahue plays second fiddle to the virtuoso Pozner, who by the end of the talk seemingly has everyone in the tent convinced, especially his old TV buddy and the event’s moderator, that the US also bears sole responsibility for the current hyper-reactionary regime in Russia. Pozner accomplishes this with a spiel seamlessly woven from home truths, sentimental journeyings, and charmingly delivered lies or fudges: for example, about how everyone in the Soviet Union were true believers except for a miniscule and thus meaningless dissident movement or that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the West engaged only in relentless humiliation of the new “democractic” Russia under Yeltsin.

As Russia’s hook-line-and-sinker self-submersion into extreme right-wing nationalist hysteria continues, expect more of this kind of song and dance from certain Russian liberal and leftist intellectuals. The thought that Putinism 3.0 is entirely their own fault (if only because they have signally omitted to do almost anything about it) or that not all societies in the world today are equally bleak pits of the blackest political reaction, is nearly unbearable to them. Hence, their frantic need to revive the Cold War paradigm or, via Brahminical critiques of its alleged illicit and opportunistic resurgence on both sides of the old divide, their equally frantic attempts to imagine that the choice between the “free” West and the “internationalist” Soviet bloc back then, during the real Cold War, is somehow comparable to a choice nowadays between a bloody mess with occasional breaks in the clouds and a system that already long ago had no redeeming features whatsoever and seems hell-bent on getting much, much worse very quickly.

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The first “spacebridge” or “citizens summit,” between Leningrad and Seattle in 1985, moderated by Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donahue: