“‘The Arab world is not just beautiful ethnic costumes, exquisite dishes, and other One Thousand and One Nights-type stuff, but also brutal dictatorships, poverty, a high tolerance of violence, and sometimes outright racism and religious fanaticism. According to my observations, however, this second facet is almost always bracketed off by Europeans when describing the countries of the “global South” or is guiltily dished up as a consequence of the traumatic colonial past.’ Essayist Andrei Sapozhnikov (“Department of Culture”) connects the abnormally high support for Hamas’s invasion of Israel in the Western world with this peculiarity.”
Source: Email newsletter from the online Russian magazine Republic, 8 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
The State Duma has been drafting a ban on transgender transition in Russia since spring. Despite the fact that experts and doctors opposed it, the MPs have now passed the law in its second reading.
The original bill already prohibited all “medical interventions” for transgender transition and changing gender markers in passports and other documents. But the MPs also proposed new restrictions.
Now, according to the draft law, if one spouse changes their gender marker, their marriage will be annulled. In addition, those who have transitioned to another gender will be banned from serving as guardians and adopting children. Depriving them of parental rights is not on the table yet, but the Russian authorities have taken children from trans people in some cases in the past.
Moreover, MPs would ban not only “medical intervention” in the form of surgery, but also hormone therapy.
Finally, the Duma reworded the law on vital records. Previously, it was possible to amend a passport using a sex-change certificate issued by doctors. Official documents can now be amended if the individual provides a medical report “on the correspondence of [their] sexual characteristics with the characteristics of a particular sex.”
Although the bill has not yet been adopted into law, it is already causing trouble for transgender people. Robert Lebedev, a transgender man, toldBumaga, citing his own acquaintances, that civil registry offices in Moscow had been delaying issuing new documents to transgender people for longer than the month prescribed due to an “order from above.” And yet, the draft law does not even prescribe penalties for doctors or civil servants who violate the ban on assisting a person with transgender transition and gender marker change.
The bill’s co-sponsor, Pyotr Tolstoy, argues that “the western transgender industry is trying to infiltrate our country,” and Russia’s “cultural and family values” must be preserved.
Even before the adoption of the law, transgender people faced endless humiliation and persecution. The new law will give the security forces a free hand and effectively outlaw an entire group of citizens.
On this dark day, when we find ourselves at rock bottom, I want to scream with rage and impotence. While voicing emotions is vital, I’m also trying to find a foothold—in myself, in others, in my own experience….
I have nothing but a profound belief that this night of total obscurantism, injustice, and hatred will end one day, and hopefully sooner rather than later. I am overwhelmed with feelings of love and admiration for the trans activists to whom life has introduced me during my ten-plus years in activism. I didn’t always say these feelings out loud.
We started working hand in hand when I didn’t know a single open trans person in my own circle yet. Gradually, I was surrounded by more and more trans people, who did a lot of cool, useful and, sometimes, fantastic things.
I befriend trans people and even became romantically involved with them. Over the years, trans initiatives and trans people have truly accomplished a great deal. It’s no exaggeration to say that they have become the vanguard of the Russian LGBT+ movement.
I learned about the difficulties they face and about ways to help them. I still appreciate the patience, tact, determination, and dignity with which I was corrected when I made mistakes myself, or when mistakes were made in the communities I moderated.
Things became visible that I, a cisgender person, simply had not noticed before: sniggering and transphobic “jokes” at passport control at the airport, misgendering, violence, rejection at home, discrimination at work, sexual exploitation, increased risk of suicide, etc. Interacting with trans people also helped me to understand the narrowness of the binary gender framework and my own gender nonconformity, despite the fact that I consider myself a man.
Further immersion in the topic, collaborations, and a desire to contribute in this area led to the creation of the project Transformation on trans people in the Russian prison system. At the same time, we tried not to speak for trans people. Instead, we delivered their own stories about their prison experience and commentary by experts, among whom there were also trans people. We plan to continue, realizing that it is a long-term job, although the new law will make this work more complicated, apparently.
Again and again I listen to the song “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the movement for the rights of African Americans. In new, difficult circumstances, the importance of mutual support, assistance, unification, and finding non-standard channels increases.
I believe in the power of the LGBT+ community’s solidarity in the face of difficulties. Fear and feeling powerlessness are understandable emotions. But it’s important to move on and fight the consequences [of this law].
The song ends with these words:
We are not afraid,
We are not afraid,
We are not afraid today.
For deep in my heart
I do believe:
We shall overcome someday!
The photo, above, from his personal archive, shows the author during the campaign against transphobic legislation in St. Petersburg, with a view of Trinity Bridge in the background.
A court in Moscow has remanded the theater director Zhenya Berkovich to custody in a pretrial detention center and almost inevitably will render the same decision about the playwright Svetlana Petriichuk (whose pretrial restrictions hearing is still underway). This is the first criminal case in Russia against the authors of a work over its content. Both are accused of “condoning terrorism” in the play Finist the Brave Falcon, which recounts how Islamists recruited Russian women as wives. Last year, the production was awarded the state-sponsored Golden Mask theater prize in two nominations.
Before the court hearing, it transpired that the case was based on a forensic examination conducted by Roman Silantyev, head of Moscow State Linguistic University’s Destructology Laboratory, and his colleagues.
“Destructology” is a science invented by Silantyev himself. He claims that the new discipline “comprehensively examines extremist and terrorist organizations; psychotic cults and non-religious sects; totalitarian sects and the magical services sector; suicidal games and hobbies; deadly youth subcultures (Columbine, AUE, etc.) and medical dissidence.”
There are many experts in Russia whose findings are used by the security forces to imprison people for what they say and write. Often such experts are ignorant, their conclusions are unscientific, and their public statements are frankly obscurantist.
But Roman Silantyev stands out even in this crowd.
A former employee of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Ecclesiastical Relations (the church’s equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), at the outset of his expert career, Silantyev presented himself as a specialist in Islam. In 2005, the publication of his book “The Modern History of the Russian Islamic Community” triggered a scandal: Russia’s Council of Muftis wrote that the author’s stance was at odds “with the most elementary norms of universal ethics and morality.”
To understand the outrage of the muftis, we should take a look at Silantyev’s statements. For example, he said that in order to fight the Wahhabis, “physical force—destruction and gouging—is maximally effective” and dreamed that “law enforcement agencies would finally realize that in this case it is better to cross the line than to come up short.”
Over time, Silantyev felt that he had outgrown his narrow remit as a scholar specializing in Islam and since then he has been commenting on everything. He has opposed Star Wars (callingJediism an “anti-Christian multifunctional propaganda project”), claimed that Ukrainians profess the “religion of Ukrainianism,” and called for a legislative ban on Satanism in Russia, accusing Ukraine of spreading it.
In 2020, Silantyev traveled around Russia giving lectures on “extremism prevention.” He boasts that he has taught classes to officers and staffers at the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), and the Interior Ministry. And they seem to actually pay heed to him, or at least to successfully use him for their own purposes. It seems that Silantyev has already helped to send dozens (if not hundreds) of people to prison, including Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And now he has helped send artists to jail. In their expert report, Silantyev and his fellow destructologists write that Berkovich and Petriichuk’s play contains “traces of the ISIS ideology, as well as the subculture of Russian Muslim neophytes.” In addition, the experts detected the “ideology of radical feminism” in the play.
“The ideology of radical feminism, based on the idea of women’s immanent humiliation, is far from harmless. Destructological science has recorded cases in which adoption of this ideology led to the deliberate planning and execution of a terrorist act,” the self-styled experts teach us. And the court, by sending artists to jail, seems to share this opinion.
One day, I hope, someone will explain to me why “progressive” Russians find the English words speak, speaker, speech, etc., so sexy and exciting that they have to incorporate them needlessly into Russian every chance they get.
Do they know that, in English, these words are less evocative than three-day-old bread, duller than dishwater?
In this case, hilariously (and awkwardly, too: “speak” appears after chas, generating an awkward phrase that translates as “hour of speak” or “speak hour,” although it’s supposed to be a play on the idiomatic phrase chas pik, meaning “rush hour”), the word “speak” adorns Sergei Medvedev’s reflections on the “imperialist mindset.”
Indeed.
Thanks to TP for this gem of Rusglish.
Below, you can watch the actual interview (in Russian, not Rusglish — well, almost), which, if for no other reason, is interesting because it was posted almost three months before Russia invaded Ukraine. ||| TRR
Historian and writer Sergei Medvedev is the program’s guest.
In an interview with Nikita Rudakov, he explained:
Why the idea of Russia’s “civilizational superiority” is so popular
Why propaganda encourages the ideological complexes of Russians
How the elite of the 2000s is trying to turn back history.
00:00 Chas Speak: Sergei Medvedev 01:40 The imperialist mindset and the idea of Russia’s greatness 06:10 Is there no place for nationalism in the imperialist mindset? 08:05 “Russia colonized itself” 14:03 The superiority of big ideas: why didn’t the USA become an empire? 21:02 The ideological complexes of Russians 25:41 “We rise from our knees via military achievements and parades on Red Square” 26:50 “Lukashenko does with us what he will”: Russia and Belarus 30:56 “Russia wants to live in the myth of 1945” 34:40 “We were unable to create a nation state”
So much for the idea of not giving a platform to out-and-out fascists like Alexander Dugin, whose “academic” credentials are borne out by serious-sounding nonsense like the following, as found in Last War of the World-Island and translated by John Bryant:
In all the principal parameters, the Russian Federation is the geopolitical heir to the preceding historical, political, and social forms that took shape around the territory of the Russian plain: Kievan Rus, the Golden Horde, the Muscovite Czardom, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. This continuity is not only territorial, but also historical, social, spiritual, political, and ethnic. From ancient times, the Russian government began to form in the Heartland, gradually expanding, until it occupied the entire Heartland and the zones adjoining it. The spatial expansion of Russian control over Eurasian territories was accompanied by a parallel sociological process: the strengthening in Russian society of “land-based” social arrangements, characteristic of a civilization of the continental type. The fundamental features of this civilization are:
• conservatism; • holism; • collective anthropology (the narod is more important than the individual);
• sacrifice; • an idealistic orientation; • the values of faithfulness, asceticism, honor, and loyalty.
Sociology, following Sombart, calls this a “heroic civilization.” According to the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, it is the ideal sociocultural system. This sociological trait was expressed in various political forms, which had a common denominator: the constant reproduction of civilizational constants and basic values, historically expressed in different ways. The political system of Kievan Rus differs qualitatively from the politics of the Horde, and that, in turn, from the Muscovite Czardom. After Peter I, the political system sharply changed again, and the October Revolution of 1917 also led to the emergence of a radically new type of statehood. After the collapse of the USSR there arose on the territory of the Heartland another government, again differing from the previous ones: today’s Russian Federation.
But throughout Russian political history, all these political forms, which have qualitative differences and are founded on different and sometimes directly contradictory ideological principles, had a set of common traits. Everywhere, we see the political expression of the social arrangements characteristic of a society of the continental, “land-based,” heroic type. These sociological peculiarities emerged in politics through the phenomenon that the philosopher-Eurasianists of the 1920s called “ideocracy.” The ideational model in the sociocultural sphere, as a general trait of Russian society throughout its history, was expressed in politics as ideocracy, which also had different ideological forms, but preserved a vertical, hierarchical, “messianic” structure of government.
“Russian angel carrier, Artillery Museum, Saint Petersburg.” Source: Pavel Pryanikov, Facebook, 6 November 2022
Alexander Kharichev, head of the Presidential Department for Supporting the Work of the State Council, and three other experts have published a scholarly article entitled “Perception of basic values, factors, and structures of Russia’s socio-historical development, as based on research and testing.” As part of the study, seventy people from the student bodies of Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics and the teaching staff of a conference in Sevastopol [sic] were interviewed. Among the metaphors of the future they proposed was the burnt second volume of Dead Souls; among the concepts of the modern state, “the Motherland with a laser sword”; among the concepts of the future, “Russia as the world’s ‘guardian of good” and “Pasty” [sic: “Pirozhok”]. The authors concluded that the dominant value for the Russian family is the people of Russia, which itself is a “family of families.”
Mr. Kharichev’s co-authors were Andrei Shutov, dean of the faculty of political science at Moscow State University; Andrei Polosin, doctor of political science and head of Rosatom’s regional interaction department; and Ekaterina Sokolova, deputy executive director for strategy and forecasting at the Expert Institute for Social Research. The article was published in October in the Journal of Political Studies.
The study was conducted by means of group discussions from March to May. The seventy participants answered questions about what Russian statehood is, what would happen to the country in ten years, what our future is, and a number of others.
Based on the discussions, the researchers formed a five-level “pentabasis”: person—family—society—state—country. Dominant values were formed for each level. For the country, [this dominant value] is patriotism; for the state, it is trust in the institutions of power; for the family, it is the people of Russia; for society, it is harmony; for the person, it is creativity. “The thesis was voiced that European society is individualistic, whereas our main value is family + family with friends, which leads to the emergence of the thesis ‘family as a level.’ The dominant value: the people of the Russian Federation as a family of families. Stimulating the birth rate and the concept of a ‘big family,’ the article says [just as incoherently in the original as in this translation].
Metaphors of Russia’s future. “The state as a novel” (written collectively by citizens, it has alternative endings); “the Russian future as the second part of Dead Souls, burned by Gogol,” “the state as the Firebird.”
Concepts of the modern state. “[The] Motherland with a laser sword” (a source of pride for the Russian spirit and a guide to the future), “the friendly service state.”
Messianic concepts of the future state. “Russia as a ‘prophet country’ (opposed to the Grand Inquisitor), “Russia as the world guardian, the ‘guardian of good.'”
Idealistic concepts of the future state. “Wondrous City” ([i.e., promoting] inclusivity, coexistence, acceptance of others as equals; “in no case to be confused with the term ‘tolerance'”), “Pasty” (harmoniously combines different things).
Mechanistic concepts of the future state. “Kaleidoscope” (a multifaceted future), “a medium-sized magnet state” (generates a field for a particular community).
The study participants concluded that the person in the “Russia of the Future” is “proud of his country, influential and highly employable, financially secure, [and] free within certain community rules.” According to the authors of the article, the ideas of self-realization in the Russian Federation are very different from those common in the Western world.
“In the Russian case, self-realization or mission means that an individual contributes to the country’s development. Capitalizing [on one’s] mission is an optional stage,” the authors write.
“Bosom buddies aren’t born overnight,” declares the label of North Coast Brewing’s Russian imperial stout, Old Rasputin. I don’t know whether that sentiment is true, but the beer is excellent. Scan of the carton by the Russian Reader
Fans of anti-thalassocrat and accomplished obscurantist Alexander Dugin will appreciate this portrait of the man by journalist Andrey Loshak, which I translated the other day for e-flux Notes. Here’s a sneak preview:
I remember accidentally attending a lecture by Dugin on “angelic entities” in the late nineties. It was an absolutely unbearable exercise in transcendental sophistry, dealing mainly with the image of Lucifer (the Fallen Angel) and featuring extensive quotations from Aleister Crowley. There were about twenty people of indeterminate age and gender in the auditorium. I thought at the time that perhaps they, too, were fallen angelic entities who had come to listen to a lecture about themselves. In the mid-noughties, I ran into Dugin at a Current 93 gig at the Ikra Club. He dearly loved English apocalyptic folk music for its commitment to Nazi Satanism.
The authorities say that Petersburg has achieved 100% herd immunity. Is it true?
The number of people who been vaccinated and people who have recovered from covid-19 in Petersburg speaks to the fact that the city has achieved 100% herd immunity, first deputy chair of the Health Committee Andrei Sarana said on the St. Petersburg TV channel.
Referring to the Health Ministry’s website, Sarana said that Petersburg had reached 100% collective immunity. According to the official, 3.14 million people, including more than 2,400 children, had been fully vaccinated in Petersburg.
According to Health Ministry’s guidelines, Petersburg has to vaccinate 80% of its entire population, excluding children and adults who cannot be vaccinated — this amounts to 3.5 million people. At the same time, it is not known how this approach works and whether it takes into account people who, for example, were vaccinated more than a year ago.
In fact, 2.9 million residents have undergone a full vaccination cycle in Petersburg, which is equal to only 55% of the total number of people officially residing in St. Petersburg (5.3 million people), according to city hall’s website. Only the covid crisis center reports that 3.5 million people in Petersburg have received at least one dose of a vaccine.
In mid-January, the authorities were already claiming that herd immunity in Petersburg, according to various calculation methods, was at either 88% or 100%. Bumaga discovered then that they were talking about a portion of the total number of the city’s residents. Read more here.
Dear compatriots! So as not to give my detractors cause for hysteria that I am exceeding my powers, I officially declare that this is my personal opinion, the humble opinion of Russian citizen Ramzan Kadyrov.
In my appeal there are two messages to two addressees — to the Ukrainian authorities and to the Ukrainian people.
Mr. Zelensky! The time for clowning has come to an end. The hour has come to fulfill one’s duty to one’s own people in order to avoid irreversible consequences. That is, today, more than ever, there is a need to implement the Minsk Accords, which were signed not only by the President of Russia, but also by the President of Ukraine. The strict implementation of the provisions spelled out in this document is the first important step in a political settlement of the growing confrontation not only between our countries, but also in reducing general tension in the global sense of the word. In this regard, you, as the guarantor of the Constitution and the security of your people and state, are simply obliged to do everything in your power to avoid bloodshed and establish peace. President Vladimir Putin and the peoples of Russia do not want war: we know firsthand the meaning of this terrible word. Be reasonable, Mr. Zelensky!
And now I want to address Ukrainians. My dear ones! I love Ukraine and its kind people. From the Soviet history class that I took at school, I know that Kievan Rus is the cradle of Russian statehood and Orthodoxy. Russians and Ukrainians are a single Slavic people with a common history, culture and religion. I will never believe that Ukrainians consider themselves part of the so-called Western world with all its degenerate “values” and Russophobic hysteria. Yes, that’s right, despite the fact that the current anti-national regime and its propaganda are doing everything to erase this sense of community. Somewhere in the depths of my soul I have a glimmer of hope that this historical justice [sic] will be restored by the Ukrainian people themselves without anyone’s help from outside. It cannot be that the spiritual and historical heirs of the great Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the brilliant writer Nikolai Gogol would not want eternal peace with fraternal Russia!
I fully support the decision of the State Duma to ask the President of the Russian Federation to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
I believe that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief will grant the request and our country will recognize the independent status of both republics. Vladimir Vladimirovich is a far-sighted and wise politician. I think he will definitely take such an important step for the advent of peace.
I am sure that this is not only my opinion, but also that of the majority of Russians. Residents of the DPR and LPR have been living under the yoke of lawlessness for many years, their right to self-determination ignored. In this situation, it is recognition of independence that will determine their status in the international arena and put an end to many years of confrontation and bloodshed.
The Chechen people perfectly remember what mayhem, violence and continuous fighting can lead to. We clearly remember the unenviable feeling of hopelessness and believe that only such a logical endpoint will save the inhabitants of these two republics.
A large-scale information campaign has been launched against Russia and the two republics. Every day, fakes [sic] are disseminated about a new date for the crossing of the Ukrainian border by Russian troops and the declaration of war. But everyone has forgotten that Ukraine has been waging such a war with its neighbors for eight years. The foreign media prefer to keep quiet about this.
If officials in Kiev are not going to implement the Minsk Accords, are not attempting to settle the issue peacefully, issue, are heating up the situation, and not looking for ways to solve the crisis, then it is more than logical that our President Vladimir Putin should take over the peacekeeping mission in this difficult political situation.
Peace will come to Donetsk and Lugansk after you say your WORD, Vladimir Vladimirovich!
Russia will not abandon the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics alone in the event of an invasion of their territory by the Ukrainian army — the response will be commensurate with the scale of aggression, Federation Council Chair Valentina Matviyenko said.
Valentina Matviyenko called even the idea of a war with Ukraine wild, noting that Russia would do everything on its part to prevent such a development of events.
“Our position has been clearly set out by the head of the Russian state: for our part, we will do everything so that there is no war with Ukraine. Not today, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, never!” said the speaker of the Federation Council in an interview with Parlamentskaya Gazeta.
Petersburg, February 2, 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
_____________
Just “for practice,” the Russian media, backed by Russian-language social media, has been lying for years about how Russian children and parents are treated by child welfare services in Finland. In most of these instances, their sole witness has been Finnish “human rights activist” Johan Bäckman, who has fed the baseless horror stories to the Russian media, many of them “reputable” outlets (e.g., Echo of Moscow).
The Russian media has published and broadcast them as was with absolutely no corroboration and without making any attempt to double-check Bäckman’s “facts.”
From time to time, to make it seem as if there really were something going on in nefarious Finland, the absurd Russian federal children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov (who played the judge on the first Russian court show) has fulminated against the Finnish authorities or made some demands or gone on a “fact-finding mission” there.
A few years ago, when Bäckman pushed too many people’s buttons at the same time, there was a brief period when a couple of Russian media outlets (including, unbelievably, Izvestia) ran pieces exposing Bäckman as a dangerous fraud. Then “polite people” brought Crimea back into the fold, and all was forgotten and forgiven when it came to Bäckman.
We now see that this was all a dry run for the full-scale Russian media attack now being waged on Germany in the name of Islamophobia and racism.
What puzzles me is why both the generals and the foot soldiers think there is not going to be any blowback from their hateful little escapade. Do they really think everyone but them is such a gullible pushover? ||| TRR, February 2, 2016
Rowan Williams’ fascination with Russia began when, as a boy, he watched Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible on television. After that he became a born again Russophile, learned the language, and even completed a doctorate on Russian Christianity. But no Russian figure has held his fascination more than Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky is still considered among the greatest novelists the world has ever produced. But his talent for writing complex, often contradictory characters is rooted in a single traumatic moment when, as a young man, he found himself before a firing squad. The event changed his life, his writing, and his views on Russia’s place in the world.
Now that tensions between Russia and the West are once again running high, Rowan considers what the author’s life and thought can tell us about the country today.
Ultimately, Rowan finds, what makes Dostoevsky such a wonderful novelist is his humanity. At a time of deep divides, this is a writer with something to offer us all.
The Russian Reader 