Day: March 11, 2018

Getting Out the Vote in Arkhangelsk

Archangel LifePhoto published March 10, 2018, on the Archangelsk Life community page on the VK social network. “Photo of the Day. ‘We’re Going to Vote.’ *The common law wife of regional MP Alexander Dyatlov, chair of the regional committee of United Russia Party supporters, is in the middle.”

Darya Goloschapova
Facebook
March 11, 2018

A good illustration. Society has left women without pants and, apparently, taken the shirts off their backs. It has reduced them to sexualized objects whose sexual function is emphaized even in the civic act of voting, as remote from the bedrom as could be. But it’s cool: they are going to vote. Why are they naked? Are they going straight from the shower to vote? Then where did those ridiculous high heels come from? Did they just come down from the pole in a strip club? Why is this generally routine and uninteresting act decked out in Russia like a wedding in an archaic society? Men show off their power (see the campaign ads of “rich and successful” men supporting Putin), while women show off their naked bodies, sexual desire, submissiveness, and vulnerability.

Thanks to Bella Rappoport for the heads up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Elena Zaharova: “Russia Out of Syria Now!”

“Syria. What are we killing them for?”

“Russian citizens! Your children will pay for your wars!”

“No to the bombing of Syria! No to the siege of Eastern Ghouta! No to the murders of children!”

“The Russian national idea is Cargo 200 for itself and others. Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Syria: who’s next?”

These pictures were posted yesterday on the Facebook page of Olgizza Vishenetskaya. The woman holding the placards is Elena Zaharova, who on her own Facebook page identifies herself as a former ballet accompanist at the Opera and Ballet Theater in Bishkek, now resident in Moscow.

The photos were taken yesterday. The setting is near the entrance to the Historical Museum in Moscow, which is located between Red Square and Manege Square.

If I am not mistaken, Ms. Zaharova and two or three other brave women held a similar picket against Russia’s disastrous intervention in Syria a year or two ago in the same place.

As far as I know, these lonely solo pickets have been the only public protests in Russia against that reckless and cruel military adventure since the Kremlin joined the conflict on the side of hereditary dictator and war criminal Bashar Assad in September 2015.

Since nearly all her compatriots have remained resolutely and eerily silent on the subject, it is hard to overestimate Ms. Zaharova’s bravery and determination. TRR