“The USA is the archenemy.” This photo was taken by my friend M. on a recent walkabout in Petersburg.
I had a dream before finally waking up today.
My husband telephoned, saying that he had been working in Pushkin today (which never happened, but okay), and couldn’t come home. I asked why he couldn’t—it was just past six in the evening, according to the clock.
“Just you take a look at the sky,” he replied. “It’s as black as pitch. It’s impossible to travel, you can’t see a thing. It’s probably a shitstorm—a big one, the final one.”
I looked at the sky, and it actually was black. Incredibly low fluffy white clouds floated past, lit up from within by something. Right under these clouds a building was being built; it was already six floors tall. Little devils rode on the clouds, grimacing and pulling up people who were clinging to the edges. The entire scene seemed quite tiny to me.
I told my husband what I saw.
“What is that huge thing they’re building?” I asked. “And who are those people clinging to the clouds?”
My husband was quite surprised.
“They’re building a fence around our beautiful motherland, the tallest fence in the world. Those are people who didn’t leave in time. The little devils are having fun with them by picking them up, but no one knows where they’ll throw them off. They just hope it’s on the other side of the fence.”
“Retarget Washington. RS-28 Sarmat. Sarmatmobile. For a sovereign Russia.” The Sarmatmobile is, apparently, the work of NOD, the National Liberation Movement, who were profiled in this recent VICE News video.
CULTURAL “TRANSITIONS” THAT SHOULD BE DEEMED ILLEGAL.
Or: When is a club sandwich DECIDEDLY NOT a club sandwich? When it’s a клаб-сэндвич, that’s when!
I was wandering through our local Perekrestok supermarket today when I happened to notice the packaged sandwich below: a ham & cheese on white. Ho-hum; there probably isn’t anything more run-o’-the-mill in the sandwich world, and I would’ve walked peacefully on by if my eye hadn’t caught the sandwich’s package label — which proclaimed it a club sandwich (WTH?!?) — and a “DOUBLE” at that!!! (Клаб-сэндвич двойной с ветчиной и сыром. Шеф Перекресток, ₽149.00)
There’s a great deal of corruption in this country, as the whole world knows; but y’axe, it’s hard to think of anything corrupter than calling a measly ham & cheese on white a double club sandwich. Where’d the rest of the ingredients go?!? To the Kremlin Commissary?!?
If you’ve never had an actual club sandwich, see the standard example above. Whoa! Kinda makes you want to find a lawyer and sue whoever is responsible for “borrowing” such a time-honored and respectable name for the Russian version. That thing on the left is a legitimate club sandwich the same way Medieval Kleptocratic Thugocracy is a legitimate form of governance — and our diminutive President for Life is a legitimate head of state.
Hmm, there’s a thought: maybe somebody can start a movement tp rename this sandwich-poseur the Kлаб-сэндвич им. В.В. Путина — the Putin Club Sandwich (additional assembly required).
++++++++++++++++
Oh, and arrest the guy who made up this description for the item:
“Slices of ham and cheese, along with a slightly spicy sauce, on toast. A classic combination of ingredients and great taste! Ideal!”
“На пшеничных тостах расположились ломтики ветчины и сыра, а также слегка пикантный соус. Классическое сочетание ингредиентов и отличный вкус! Идеально!”
Call me a Menshivizing idealist (I’ve heard worse!), but the slapdash thing below and an ideal club sandwich are, in my sandwich-eatin’ view, utterly incompatible concepts. So idealize this, Perekrestok!
Thanks to Mark Teeter for permission to reprint this here and for keeping an eye on things in the Motherland for those of us who can’t be there at the moment. ||| TRR
Everything that the irresponsible Russian “Americanists” who have been producing prodigious amounts of utter verbal rubbish in their “analyses” of the events of January 6 on social networks have proven incapable of understanding is laid out in this nine-minute video.
Thanks to Mark Teeter for the link. || TRR
Wake up, Russian intelligentsia, before it’s too late!
Like the previous “look at us revolution” of 2011–2012, staged almost exclusively for social media and international media consumption, the implicit message has been, “W are smart white people and we deserve better. Marvel at our clever placards. Look deeply into our educated white faces. In every single way that matters, we are just like you Herrenvolk in Europe and the US. The fact we live under a vicious tyranny is an unhappy accident for which we bear almost no responsibility.”
Beyond that, apparently, there is no plan, program or coordination, so it would be a mistake to imagine the detention of these protesters by the hundreds means the Putin regime is afraid of them. No, the regime is discouraging the protesters and potential protesters and, more importantly, it is gathering information on the detainees, information it can use in future crackdowns.
There will be a real revolution in Moscow when the super smart “white people” there not only learn how to get much larger numbers of people on the street, coordinate their movements, push back against the police’s attempts to detain them, and make real political demands but also discover the existence of the rest of the world and Moscow’s increasingly baleful effect on it.
If a hundred thousand people marched in the streets of Moscow demanding Putin immediately withdraw all Russian troops and mercenaries from Syria, this would not only signal the beginning of the end of Putin’s long reign but it would also mean anti-regime Russians had realized solidarity is a two-way street.
You cannot expect people in other parts of the world to empathize with your struggle for democracy and justice when your country’s armed forces, internet trolls, mercenaries, spies, and military proxies are fighting and fueling armed conflicts and political crises in dozens of other countries.
Russia might have more natural resources than any other country in the world, but the reserves of goodwill toward the country and its people will eventually dry up.
It has been said before by hundreds of activists and commentators, but if the US had allied itself with Assad to bomb the hell out of his opponents in Syria, the whole world, especially the leftist part, would be up in arms.
Russia has been bombing the hell out of Syria and doing lots of other nasty stuff elsewhere, including poisoning people in broad daylight and shooting down airliners, but it troubles almost no one, relatively speaking.
What is more, no one bothers to ask why it does not bother all the nice “white people” in Moscow, who would never think to demonstrate en masse against their country’s attacks on lesser folk in third-world countries. {TRR}
There could hardly be a place in Petersburg more dispiriting than the far west end of Savushkin Street (of troll factory fame), but the sheer dreadfulness of the post-Soviet new estates, business centers, and shopping malls that have sprung up there and all around the city’s outskirts is exacerbated by the tendency of their developers to burden them with impossibly escapist and chirpy monikers. So, I emerged from the new Begovaya subway station last Sunday to find myself (briefly) in Atlantic City. {TRR}
“While Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy speaker of the State Duma, battles the treacherous West and discusses labeling journalists ‘foreign agents,’ his daughter is on vacation in Crimea and Suzdal. (In fact, she is in Rome.)” Miracles of OSINT, July 5, 2018
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Russian Duma Committee OKs Legislation to Label Individual Journalists “Foreign Agents” Committee to Protect Journalists
July 3, 2018
The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Russian authorities to refrain from labeling individual bloggers and journalists as foreign agents. The State Duma’s information and communication committee today approved legislation that would allow authorities to label private persons as foreign agents if they work for organizations the Justice Ministry labels as foreign agents or receive funding for producing content for these organizations, according to media reports.
The proposed legislation would require individuals to go through annual audit, submit a bi-annual report on their work activities, and put a “foreign agent” label on all produced content, according to the reports.
“Labeling journalists, including bloggers, as foreign agents is the latest step in the Russian authorities’ systematic policy towards obstructing the free flow of news,” said CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia research associate, Gulnoza Said. “We call on Russian authorities to reverse course and allow its citizens to receive information and opinion from a wide range of sources.”
The Duma, the lower house of parliament, initially passed a related bill in January. The parliament’s upper house, the Federation Council, is yet to vote on the legislation, which also requires presidential approval before becoming law.
The information and communication committee’s chair, Leonid Levin, who co-authored the latest proposals, told the state news agency Interfax that the Foreign Ministry and State Prosecutor’s office, two separate entities, would be responsible for labeling private persons as foreign agents “for additional protection of individuals from accidental decisions” from the Justice Ministry. Those bloggers who “simply repost information of foreign agents” will not “suffer,” Levin said. The Justice Ministry will still determine which groups fall into the category of foreign agent.
The latest legislation also includes provisions that would prevent websites or other media being blocked without a court ruling, according to newsreports.
Today’s action came afterthe Kremlin-funded television station RT, formerly Russia Today, said in November that it had complied with a U.S. Justice Department order to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The Justice Ministry has already used the newly expanded laws to designate nine U.S.-funded news outlets, including the U.S. Congress-funded Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), as foreign agents, according to reports.
Ukrainian political prisoner and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov has completed the forty-third day of his hunger strike. His only demand is that Russian authorities release the other Russian political prisoners they have imprisoned during their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
In the grand scheme of things, none of us deserve a celebration. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God, and we deserve to be crushed.
Viewing our fallen world more realistically, however, we probably do need to give ourselves a break, no matter how dire the circumstances, every once in a while, but only after we have done our work, especially the collective grassroots work that keeps our societies from slipping over the edge into the abyss of lawlessness, reaction, and fascism.
With few exceptions, Russia’s hyper-educated populace, however, checked out of hands-on politics long ago. They are literally the most holiday-prone bunch I have ever encountered in the world. Nearly everyone I know is endlessly on vacation, on the road, not at home, checked out, off the radar in internal exile, you name it.
This was my roundabout way of saying the truly heroic Mr. Sentsov’s chances do not look good. // TRR
This is not to mention the Kremlin’s escapades in Syria and Ukraine, the wretched treatment of migrant workers from Central Asia in Russia itself, or the fact Russia is basically off limits to the refugees and asylum seekers whom, in some cases, it has helped to generate, as in Syria.
Meanwhile, Russia has been witness a slow but noticeable exodus of its own asylum seekers and more quiet exiles, including dozens if not hundreds of political activists, and thousands of LGBT people, now that the country has been officially and virulently homophobic for several years.
None of this gets even so much as a look-in from most of my western leftist friends, who, at best, are happy to have me rattle on about these things ad nauseam, but probably think I have been lying or exaggerating these past ten years.
In any case, nothing the Kremlin ever does figures in either their political activism or political thinking (except in complaints about “anti-Russian hysteria” in their local mass media). They are loath to show solidarity with grassroots Russian activists, even Russians in serious trouble like the young antifascists implicated in the total frame-up known as The Network Case.
No, the wroth of western leftists is always and only reserved for the Great Satan, the cause of all evil in the world, the country that invented imperialism, racism, capitalism, nepotism, and daltonism, the United States of America.
Why they should be so implicitly sympathetic to the hyper-reactionary, neo-imperialist, homophobic, anti-working class, rampantly state capitalist, kleptocratic, illiberal, anti-intellectual, wildly corrupt nationalist and racist regime in Russia is beyond my powers to comprehend.
But their silence speaks louder than their words, as does their pointed failure, when it comes to people I know personally, to engage meaningfully with all the things I have written and translated over the last ten years.
This is especially palpable now the World Cup is underway. Even politically engaged liberals among my acquaintances have obviously given the Russian regime a free pass for the month.
Actually, they have been giving it a free pass since 1999, but I won’t mention discuss this long, ugly story now.
What I meant to say was that Ukrainian filmmaker and political prisoner Oleg Sentsov is dying, and the western left pointedly has nothing to say about why he is in “jail” (as the Moscow Timesquaintly puts it, although he is actually incarcerated in a maximum security penal colony north of the Arctic Circle) and why he was sent there for twenty years.
It is pathetic. It is also part of the reason why “the masses” generally trust the western left about as far as they can throw it. Because just like Donald Trump and Theresa May, there are species of despotism, tyranny, and even genocide the western left really quite fancies or, at least, can countenance in the name of “anti-imperialism.”
To put it bluntly, I am afraid the western left would rather Oleg Sentsov and his ilk just crawled under a rock and died. They only muddy what should be a crystal-clear view of “geopolitics.” // TRR
There are eleven Russian words in this poster for the April 29 St. Petersburg Craft Event at Art Play SPb, and twenty-one English words. Photo by the Russian Reader
Oh, how they hate the United States!
My boon companion was just chatting with a neighbor lady, a woman who has lived in our building her whole life and makes the best salt pickles I have ever tasted.
As it happens, our neighbor is friendly with a member of our municipal district council.
If you follow the news from Russia closely, you would know that the beleaguered united opposition, led by Dmitry Gudkov, made significant inroads in Moscow’s municipal district councils during the last elections to these entities. One of the people thus elected, the young, well-known liberal politician Ilya Yashin, has now announced plans to challenge the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin, during the next Moscow mayoral election.
In reality, municipal district councils are the lowest rung on the political totem poll in Russia. They have very little power and are perpetually too underfunded to do the work they are supposed to do.
However, since Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, is power hungry and paranoid, they try and stack the lowly municipal district councils with their own members.
God knows what could happen otherwise.
The municipal district council member with whom our neighbor is friendly is one such United Russia Party placeholder.
“And she’s a real louse,” my boon companion would add.
The councilwoman recently got back from a trip to the United States. It turns out her daughter and son-in-law have lived there for a long time. They have a big, beautiful house in Silicon Valley.
The councilwoman told all this to our neighbor lady, explaining how much she had enjoyed the trip and how much she liked the United States.
“Why did she have to tell ME this?” the neighbor lady asked my boon companion, “Why couldn’t she have told someone else?”
Remember this little story the next time you see Foreign Minister Lavrov or President Putin or the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations or Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova huffing and puffing and blowing America’s house down.
Everything they say is meant for domestic consumption only. They don’t really hate the United States. They just need a Big Enemy to occupy the minds of the Russian people, to distract them from their own more serious crimes and misdemeanors.
The con seems to be working so far. // TRR
Our humble municipal district newspaper, as published by our municipal district council. This is the one of two spots in our municipal where I know one can read it. Maybe there are more, but otherwise the newspaper is not distributed to the municipal districts’s residents, because the less they know about our municipal district’s business, the better, I guess. Photo by the Russian Reader
Putin is not genuinely popular. As in other pseudo-populist dictatorships and autocracies, the alleged popularity of Russia’s president for life is the product of a thoroughgoing war against all dissenters, dissidents, and free thinkers, and an ever-evolving personality cult, produced by carpet bombing the populace with TV, radio, social media, and print propaganda twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.
Nor is there any empirical evidence that “young educated Russians” are more critical of Putin than cranky old ladies in Petrozavodsk and Perm. My educated guess would be that, in fact, the opposite is true.
Finally, it is sheer insanity to argue that Putin’s departure is not an “inherently desirable outcome.” Every day Putin is in power is a decisive step backwards in the country’s political and social progress.
Not even the most milquetoast progressive reforms have been possible while Putin and his clique have been in power (i.e., the last eighteen years), and there is every sign that, during his next term, things will go from very bad to incomparably worse.
By the way, why is the writer so certain “Putin will eventually leave power”? If he means Putin is a mere mortal, like the rest of us, and will die sooner or later, this is a factually correct but politically vacuous claim. If the writer means Putin is planning to leave office in the foreseeable future, he must have psychic gifts that most of us do not have. There is no evidence whatsoever Putin is planning to go anywhere in the next twenty years.
But it is easy to engage in free verse exercises like this one when you live and work in Brooklyn. You just make up the facts as you go along, because you will never have to face the consequences of your irresponsible, shambolic analysis.
2. Blame the US government for everything that has gone sour or wrong in Russia, the world’s largest country, a land blessed with natural resources and human resources beyond measure, and thus certainly capable of making its own fortunes and forging its own destiny, which nothing whatsoever prevents from being democratic and progressive except the current regime and its mostly pliable satraps and timeservers. “Genuine popular support” for Putin would vanish in a second if his regime were ever challenged by a strong, broad-based, grassroots democratic movement determined to remove him from office and steer the country towards a different path.
What real evidence is there that civil society groups in Russia serve as “fronts for US intelligence”?
None.
Who has actually been working day and night to generate this “perception”?
The Putin regime and its media propaganda outlets.
Why has “Russia” become “increasingly hostile to such groups”?
Because the Kremlin perceives them as direct threats to its authoritarian rule. It has thus declared them “enemies,” “national traitors,” “foreign agents,” and “undesirables,” and gone to war against them. This blog has published numerous articles detailing this “cold civil war” between Moscow and Russian civil society.
What evidence is there that any US administration has “[tried] to bring Putin down”?
There is no such evidence.
What Russian opposition figures have US administrations “directly supported”?
None.
Aren’t civil society groups “private” by definition?
Yes.
Was Obama’s so-called reset the only or even the primary reason that tensions between the US and Russia increased?
No. Even before Putin went ballistic, invading Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, and Syria, shooting down passenger planes (e.g., Flight MH17) and gunning down opposition leaders right outside the Kremlin (i.e., Boris Nemtsov), his minions were harassing the then-US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, the co-author of the miserable “reset,” whose purpose was to decrease tensions with Russia, not stoke them. There was no chance of this happening, however, when the Kremlin had long ago made rabid anti-Americanism the centerpiece of its public foreign policy.
Why do I call it “public” foreign policy? Because nearly everyone in the Russian ruling elite has made numerous junkets and trips to the US and other western countries over the years and has lots of personal and business connections to their boon enemies. They have extensive real estate holdings in the west. They educate their children in the west. They park their ill-gotten lucre in the west. In some cases, their families live in the west permanently, while they shuttle between the west and Moscow like some less fortunate people commute between Gary, Indiana, and Chicago.
The Russian elite’s anti-Americanism and anti-westernism, therefore, is a put-on, a hypocritical pose mostly meant for public consumption.
Has the Putin regime done Russian civil society “any favors”?
No, it has done its utmost best to destroy independent Russian civil society and co-opt the remnants it has not killed off. If you want some of the particulars, read what I’ve been posting on this blog for the last six years and, before that, on Chtodelat News, for five years.
Why did the guy who wrote the passage quoted above write what he did?
It is hard to say. The article is a very clever whitewash job for the Putin regime, all of whose high crimes and misdemeanors against the Russian Constitution and the Russian people are passed off as understandable reactions to the alleged predations of the US government against the Putin regime.
Where was this article published?
In The Nation, of course. Who else would print such crypto-Putininst tripe with a straight face?
Why all the needless hyphens, e.g. “civil-society groups,” “human-rights abuse”?
Sheer snobbery, meant to intimate to the magazine’s hapless readers they are dealing with real smart cookies, not tiresome neo-Stalinist windbags.
3. Publish wholly misleading articles about Russia, like the one quoted above. If you cannot manage that (because your readership would notice), publish wholly misleading headlines. They are even more effective than longwinded articles in The Nation, a pro-Putin magazine no one in their right mind has read in the last ten years or so.
People scan headlines, however. It is much easier than reading the fine print.
This is exactly the headline Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would want to appear in the Moscow Times, because it places the onus for his government action’s and his own actions on the US government.
How could visa services not be drastically reduced if the Russian Foreign Ministry closed the US consulate in Petersburg and gutted the staff at the US embassy in Moscow once again?
But let us by all means imply, because this IS the message the Putinist tyranny wants its own people to hear, that the US did everything on its own as a way of punishing ordinary Russians. Sadly, a fair number of Russians will believe this.
4. Join a so-called leftist group in the west. Most of them behave as if the Comintern still existed and they were taking their orders from the Kremlin.
Most western so-called leftists these days are boring, uneducated morons. The most boring thing about them is their unshakeable reverence for the Soviet Union, a country about which they do not have the slightest clue, and for its woebegone “successor,” the Russian Federation, which has literally nothing in common with the long-dead Soviet Union.
The really hilarious thing is that most of them manage to maintain these cultish attitudes without ever having set foot in either country and without speaking a word of Russian. Star Wars fans have a more down-to-earth and coherent ideology than the post-Stalinists who pop up to crush you with their Anand Sheela-like rhetorical flourishes (i.e., truckloads of vehement slander and furious personal insults) if you so much as mention as their imaginary Motherland in a slightly untoward light.
I want to live long enough to see the influence of these dead-enders on progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist politics die off altogether. That would make me really happy, if not genuinely popular, like Vladimir Putin. ||| TRR
Poster at a rally in support of Idlib, 15 June 2019, Pariser Platz, Berlin. Photo by the Russian Reader
“While 
“The forty-fourth day of Sentsov’s hunger strike.” Post on filmmaker 
There are eleven Russian words in this poster for the April 29 St. Petersburg Craft Event at Art Play SPb, and twenty-one English words. Photo by the Russian Reader
Our humble municipal district newspaper, as published by our municipal district council. This is the one of two spots in our municipal where I know one can read it. Maybe there are more, but otherwise the newspaper is not distributed to the municipal districts’s residents, because the less they know about our municipal district’s business, the better, I guess. Photo by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 