Tag: anti-Americanism

Muddle

DSCN1049
“Our President” desktop calendar. Photo by the Russian Reader

Andrey Kalikh
Facebook
November 21, 2017

The mishmash in people’s heads also comes in a number of flavors. Sometimes, you come across thermonuclear mixtures.

In October, we took a former police investigator who had worked on Petersburg’s major case squad to a round table of European prosecutors in Sofia. The man knows everything about Putin, all the nitty-gritty, all the cases from the early 1990s, the ties with organized crime, the origins of the Ozero Dacha Co-op, and how nearly its entire membership later migrated to the board of Rossiya Bank.

The cop ran the investigation of the Twentieth Trust Corporation, unofficially dubbed the Putin case, until September 2000, meaning when the dude was already president. Subsequently, of course, the case was shut down, and the investigator was put out to pasture.

I can confidently say the former investigator still has the most complete and systematized knowledge of Putin’s background.

In Sofia, however, this same man suddenly went completely off topic and publicly babbled something to the effect Ukraine should have been punished long ago, we will show them all, Russian liberals take orders from the US State Department, and other splendid nonsense.

After the event, I asked him what he had been going on about. He knew perfectly well what a criminal Putin was, but he had apologized for his other crimes.

His response was that in terms of domestics politics Putin was a criminal, but he supported him to the hilt when it came to foreign policy. It was a good thing, he said, Putin was president, and not the investigator himself. Otherwise, something disastrous would have happened to the world long ago, whereas Putin had preserved the peace.

Now that, if I am not mistaken, is a total muddle.

You tell me about a cab driver you once met who watched pro-Putin TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov and Dmitry Kiselyov, but whose favorite politician was Vladimir Ryzhkov, a well-known member of the liberal opposition and former MP.

That is mere child’s play.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Astroturf on Ice

23316596_10155825317583908_4356074932732108074_n
Washington Capitals star player Alexei Ovechkin. Photo courtesy of A. Gordeyev/Vedomosti

Alexander Ovechkin’s Movement Could Be Part of Putin’s Election Campaign 
Svetlana Bocharova
Vedomosti
November 9, 2017

Putin Team, a movement launched last week by Washington Capitals hockey star Alexander Ovechkin, is meant to unite celebrities and could be part of the campaign of Vladimir Putin, who is expected to announce he will run for re-election in 2018. Vedomosti was given this information by a source close to the Kremlin, and it was corroborated by another source. The idea for the movement was not generated by the Kremlin, but nor did Ovechkin come up with the idea himself, our two sources claimed. According to them, the idea was conceived by IMA Consulting (a subsidiary of IMA Group). The Kremlin signed off on the idea after it was launched, one of our sources added.

Ovechkin announced he was establishing Putin Team on November 2.

“I am sure there are many of us who support Vladimir Putin. So let’s unite and show everyone a strong and united Russia!” Ovechkin wrote on Instagram, adding he had never hidden his attitude to the president and had always openly supported him.

Ovechkin’s appeal was supported by NHL Hall of Fame inductee Pavel Bure, Ilya Kovalchuk, a player with the Petersburg side SKA, and the governors of Tula and Moscow regions, Alexei Dyumin (Putin’s ex-aide and a Night Hockey League player) and Andrei Vorobyov. Ovechkin’s announcement has not been followed by any formal actions or explanations. Ovechkin’s agent Gleb Chistyakov told Vedomosti he had nothing to say about the movement for the time being, and he also refused to comment on who had come up with the idea.

When asked by Vedomosti whether it was IMA who had come up with the idea for Putin Team, Vartan Sarkisov, general director of IMA Consulting, said, “It’s not true.”

In August, IMA Consulting won a tender from the Central Election Commission to develop the concept for a campaign raising awareness of the presidential election. IMA will be one of the key players in everything the Kremlin has planned for the election, we were told by our source close to the presidential administration, and Ovechkin’s movement could become part of Putin’s campaign. The idea behind the undertaking is that “celebrities support Putin,” our other source close to the Kremlin told us.

Russian has been no stranger to such organizations. Thus, in December 2007, as Putin’s second term as president came to a close, the Movement for Putin emerged, advocating Putin retain power as the “national leader.” In 2009, a co-leader of For Putin, Pavel Astakhov, was named the national children’s rights ombudsman.

Ovechkin’s movement would mainly be useful to Kremlin as a means of shaking the western stereotype that Russia’s finest people [sic] do not support Putin, but back the opposition, political scientist Yevgeny Minchenko said. According to Minchenko, the emergence in Putin’s camp of a figure popular in the west, such as Ovechkin [sic], would increase the president’s legitimacy in the eyes of the west [sic]. Minchenko has seen with his own eyes how Ovechkin is regarded in Washington, DC, where he has a “quite large fan club.” In Russia, however, the movement will be considerably less effective and will not significantly increase the number of votes Putin wins in the election, argues Minchenko.

Such movements are always needed on the international stage, and not just in the run-up to elections, argues pro-Kremlin political scientist Andrei Kolyadin.

“A person who has found the courage to speak up for a national leader whom some American politicians regard as an incarnation of pure evil, and defend the interests of a country not liked in the US, can cause a wave of similar actions by people forced to hide their respect for Russia.”

The movement is also capable of producing extra votes for Putin in Russia, argues Kolyadin. Very many people regard Ovechkin as an opinion leader [sic], and finding opinion leaders who sincerely support you requires great talent on the part of spin doctors running any politician’s election campaign.

Translated by the Russian Reader

On the Warpath

21616160_10155926858106842_5598854945675305387_n

Andrey Kalikh
Facebook
September 19, 2017

They are f***ed in the head. They are flying in droves over our house. They are launching rockets at random. They are Soviet rockets and they might fall on somebody. The wife urgently wants us to insure the house and wonders whether insurance would cover a chopper crashing in the garden.

Rusty jet engines are now roaring at the long-mothballed airfield in Siversky.

The roar of explosions is audible forty kilometers from the Luga Firing Range.

The apotheosis happened on the afternoon of the fifteenth, when Pavel Antonov and I were having a round table on Skype with European prosecutors. (A little cheeky, of course.) Suddenly, the house shook with a roar, black shadows flashed on the ground, and a multi-gunned monster flew out of the Mshinsk Marshes. Our sons counted twenty-four fully-equipped battle helicopters.

You in the west are quite right to be tense. But hang on. This country will destroy itself. That is how it has always been.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Photos courtesy of the author

21752583_10155926858131842_1066546113740130728_o

Keep Calm and Just Step Sideways

754918613327889
Muscovites are pretenaturally calm and dressed unseasonably warmly as the world hurtless toward senseless nuclear conflagration. Photo courtesy of RBC

I am only sharing this news flash from RBC with you because of the fabulous photo that accompanied it on RBC’s Facebook news feed, and the way it illustrates the article’s point—sideways, as it were.

“‘It is necessary to remain calm,’ the Russian Foreign Ministry said after North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb. The ministry called for a return to dialogue as ‘the only possible way of comprehensively settling the Korean Peninsula’s problems.'”

That sounds great albeit weirdly kumbayaish from folks whose usual idea of a “comprehensive settlement” is invasion and occupation of a peaceful neighboring country, aiding and abetting a bloody Arab tyrant in crushing a popular revolution, sowing racist and Islamophobic mayhem throughout the world via fake news and bots, especially after the meltdown in Charlottesville, messing with elections in other countries, including plans to assassinate one of the candidates, the incumbent PM, ruthlessly and routinely crushing dissent and protest in their own country, and implicitly declaring anti-Americanism the official state ideology not because they thought it would go down well with the rank and file, or because they themselves hate America so much (it doesn’t, and they don’t), but because it was the only way they could think of keeping Putin in the Kremlin for another six years.

Remember, comrades: he’s already been in the Kremlin for eighteen years.

But the photo is terrific. The people in it are not calm. They could not care less about anything.

Or if they do care, they are not going to let on to it whilst walking down the street in the middle of Moscow.

In any case, RBC originally ran this photo in April of this year to accompany an article about how my friends at Mediazona were suing the Foreign Ministry for refusing to reply to its written request for information about contacts between Russian diplomats in the US and members of the Trump presidential campaign.

What goes around comes around, so just step sideways. TRR

_________________________________

 

 

The Scare (The Sequel)

“TNT. An American Spy at Gazprom. From February 6. The comedy serial ‘Adaptation.’ 8 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays.” Central Petersburg, 2 February 2017. Photo by TRR

Why look for a new whipping boy when the dead horse you’ve been beating mock-ferociously for the last seventeen years shows no signs of giving up the ghost? Especially when you can play your profound, self-induced inferiority complexity and sheer intellectual bankruptcy for laughs, as it were.

Yep, no top-down, state-mandated anti-American hysteria round these parts. Just lots of good clean fun.

Meanwhile, back in the unreal world of Russian post-factual reality, it really is always more convenient to blame the mighty Americans for everything, especially total meltdowns within your hopelessly criminalized bureaucracy and security services, who operate like competing mafia gangs. TRR

Fun at the Foreign Ministry

“US diplomats dressed up as women to participate in [protest] rallies in Russia, claims [Russian Foreign Secretary] Sergei Lavrov. He related an incident in which a diplomat, dressed as a women, went into a building’s restroom, where he changed back into a ordinary outfit.”

This has been the daily fare of Russian TV viewers, radio listeners, newspaper readers, and Internet users for the last seventeen years: free-floating, nearly causeless, heavily fictionalized anti-Americanism.

But the left wing of the “Trump Is the Workingman’s Choice” movement only has time for the “red scare” that has been “sweeping” the US for all of two or three months. They have nothing to say about the nameless scare that has been warping minds in Russia for 17 years running.

By the way, this story, almost certainly made up, is an “inadvertent” admission, on Lavrov’s part, that the Kremlin really did intervene in the US presidential elections.

What did I write just yesterday?

The Scare

scary-2

In Putin’s Russia, the US has been the go-to scapegoat for years now for everything that goes wrong in the country, from crashes in the Moscow subway to, in this recent case, the fact that 15,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the mayor of Tomsk, a major Siberian city, to resign.

Let me repeat that. The shameless scapegoating of the US, usually in the demonic guise of the “Gosdep,” the US State Department, has been going on at all levels of Russian government, mainstream media, and society for many, many years.

It’s actually been going on in certain circles since the mid 1990s. I remember once watching a “documentary” on the local cable access channel back then outlining the CIA’s alleged plan to turn Russian youth onto hard drugs.

Putin, more pointedly, blamed the mighty Gosdep and Hillary Clinton personally for engineering the popular uprising against his regime during the elections of 2011–2012, although there was zero evidence this was the case.

So why haven’t we heard much of anything about this long-running, utterly baseless “red-white-and-blue scare” or “permanent scare”? (I don’t know what else to call it. If you have a better suggestion, let me know).

The scare has claimed lots of real victims, including dozens of Russian NGOs, most of them doing invaluable, irreplaceable work for their own people, not for the Gosdep, on shoestring budgets in terrible conditions, who have been branded “foreign agents” by the Russian Justice Ministry. Many of them have been forced to close up shop or go into exile because they weren’t able to deal with the heavy fines, court hearings, and endless inspections.

But we now have a US president-elect who took literally every opportunity he could during the campaign to gush over Putin and his “strong” leadership. Yet this fact alone—Trump’s flagrant, overt support for a war criminal, crook, and tyrant who has crushed civil society and political opposition in his own country—didn’t automatically disqualify Trump from consideration for the highest office in the land.

Let’s pretend that all the recent skullduggery around Trump isn’t true in the slightest. Would it make any difference?

Trump said time and again that Putin was his idol. Let’s take him at his word and oppose him, among the thousand other reasons we should oppose him, for that huge, steaming, glaring, stinking chunk of very bad, very telling judgment and, more important, not show him the slighest sympathy for the “hard” time he has recently been getting from the press, the White House, the intelligence community, and so on.

He deserves as good as he dishes outs, and what he has been dishing out for the last two years is pure, destructive fascist evil. That will remain true whether the Kremlin hacked anything or slapped together some kompromat on him or it didn’t do anything of the sort.

Trump doesn’t deserve a fair deal for the simple reason that he doesn’t want a fair deal for so many of his fellow Americans and lots of other people, starting with the Mexicans. Let’s treat him like the enemy he is instead of inadvertently defending him and Putinist tyranny to boot by conjuring up equally nonexistent “CIA coups” and God knows what else. TRR

________

Jerusalem

Waterspout on the Gulf of Finland, June 16, 2016. Photo courtesy of Nation News
Waterspout on the Gulf of Finland, June 16, 2016. Photo courtesy of Nation News

Novaya Gazeta reports the Russian government is planning to cut spending on health care by 33% in 2017.

This reemergent supah powah thing is going really, really well.

But as I was told by a Russian cabbie today, all of the country’s problems, including problems with housing maintenance, actually stem from the “fact” that the current constitution (adopted in 1993) was “dictated by the Americans.”

Whenever I hear something like this, I’m reminded of Mark E. Smith endlessly repeating, “It was the fault of the government. It was the fault of the government…” in the song “Jerusalem” on the glorious album I Am Kurious Oranj (1988).

But in Russia, it’s always the fault of someone else’s government, especially, in recent decades, the US government.

This is total infantilism, and there is no excuse for it anymore, especially with  Russian bombs raining down on Aleppo like there’s no tomorrow.

But isn’t that the point? Putinism has no future. Or rather, its continued existence postpones the future indefinitely. So why not go for the gusto and slash health care for your own citizens while bombing the crap out of people (I will never tire of repeating) who have never harmed a single hair on a single Russian’s head. Maybe something will come of it. Or maybe everything will go up in smoke. Whatever the case, like a two-year-old, you could give a flying fuck.

The Apocalypse According to Bastrykin

vilkin-red head

The Apocalypse According to Bastrykin
The Head of the Russian Federal Investigative Committee Describes a Russia on the Brink of Disaster Due to 16 Years of Putin’s Rule 
Fyodor Krasheninnikov
Vedomosti
April 20, 2016

One of the pillars of the current regime is not inclined to see Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a stable country with reputable authorities, and people who are united around them and ready to face any and all tests. This is the conclusion one draws from Alexander Bastrykin’s sensational article.

What is Bastrykin’s Russia like? First of all, it is a country standing on the brink of collapse. Things are so bad that only extraordinary measures, described at length at the end of the article, can save it. If you take the article at face value, you might imagine the enemy’s “hybrid” armies are literally camped outside of Moscow, while in the rear the “fifth column” is blowing up the last bridge, and only a miracle and Bastrykin can save the Fatherland.

However, none of this is surprising, for in the Russia described by Bastrykin, our intelligence services are practically dysfunctional, while their foreign counterparts, especially the Americans, are powerful and omnipresent.  Bastrykin literally howls,“It’s time to erect an effective barrier against the information war!” This appeal even serves as the article’s headline. It follows that, until April 18, 2016, there was no effective barrier against enemy propaganda and agitation whatsoever, and Russia’s foes could do literally anything they liked.

The vulnerability of Bastrykin’s Russia is quite easy to understand and not at all surprising, for, according to the article, the country has not been very lucky with its population. Bastrykin’s Russia is populated by two categories of people. The first are gullible and prone to react unreasonably to the most trivial things. The second are unprincipled scoundrels, ready to enlist in any intelligence service, extremist or terrorist organization for money.

The first category cause a lot of trouble. As soon as these excitable simpletons read something on the uncensored Internet, hear an unorthodox take on a story or find out someone does not recognize the outcome of a referendum, they immediately join forces with the second category, carefully recruited by foreign intelligence services, and commence destroying their own country. So the first category should be isolated from everything as much as possible, while the second, obviously, should be isolated physically and, preferrably, have their property confiscated as well.

Bastrykin’s Russia is a permanent victim and helpless puppet in the hands of the US. In Putin’s seventeenth year in power, Bastrykin unflatteringly reports on “the shaping of a pro-American and pro-western so-called non-systemic opposition in Russia, and the spread of inter-confessional and political extremism[.]” The author has nothing to say directly about the president, which is odd in itself, for it transpires that under Putin’s administration all kinds of extremism have flourished, and thousands of Russian citizens have traveled “to areas of heightened terrorist activity [through] Turkey and Egypt, where they travel both directly and through third countries[.]” They do this, obviously, because life is no bed of roses. The rest, as I have already said, are just waiting for someone to stir them up.

What about the president?

“Enough of playing at pseudo-democracy and following pseudo-liberal values,” Bastrykin tells him.

The trouble, it turns out, is he has flirted too long with pseudo-democracy.

Judging by Bastrykin’s article, the upper echelons of powers do not expect anything good from the future and Russia’s people, and are openly readying themselves for a merciless fight against any encroachments on their right to remain in power. The head of the Investigative Committee has issued an explicit warning. Whatever abysses the Russian economy plunges into, whatever misfortunes come crashing down on the heads of its people, any dissatisfaction with the authorities will be interpreted a priori as a consequence of the activity of western intelligence agencies, as extremism and terrorism, and will be decisively crushed. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe Bastrykin is alone in thinking this way.

Fyodor Krasheninnikov is president of the Institute for the Development and Modernization of Public Relations, Yekaterinburg. Translated by the Russian Reader. Image courtesy of Alexander Vilkin