A Rainbow May Day in Petersburg vs. The Dead in Chechnya

Varya Mikhaylova
Facebook
May 1, 2017

I don’t know what else to do on May 1 when LGBT people in Chechnya are facing flagrant genocide, so today this was how it went down. Now we have been detained and taken to the 43rd police precinct. A man who came out bearing a placard that read, “Putin, go away. Putin is evil” was detained with us. It’s forbidden to say that now, too.

Chechen Mothers Mourned Their Bloodied Children on Nevsky

On May 1, 2017, activists staged a performance on Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main boulevard, during which Chechen mothers mourned and sprinkled their children with earth. Prone on the ground, the bodies of the LGBT people were covered with rainbow and Chechen flags. The performance was meant to express solidarity with the people of the Republic of Chechnya as well as draw attention to the horrifying events occurring there now.

Since the beginning of the year in Chechnya, which is part of Russia, there have been numerous illegal detentions, torture, and executions of homosexual men, including men deemed homosexual. We know of hundred of victims, dozens of them murdered. Even as they deny the occurrence of genocide, local officials have publicly justified these atrocities by citing medieval “ethnic traditions” and “Muslim values.”

The persecution of LGBT people in Chechnya and the North Caucasus is nothing new. The region has long been plagued by rampant corruption, violence, and murder, affecting everyone who lives there. However, targeted mass killings are a new phenomenon. Both local and federal authorities are to blame for the state terror. On the one hand, they have vigorously popularized “traditional religious values.” On the other, they have proved incapable of opposing the spread of radical Islam and ensuring the enforcement of the Russian Constitution and human rights. Impunity on the ground encourages terrorism and radicalization, leading to the deaths of civilians not only in Chechnya but outside its borders. Consequently, terrorists exploded a bomb in the Petersburg subway for the first time in the city’s history.*

“Cruelty is a severe infection that is prone to pandemic. It is not a one-off event. They started with the people of Chechnya and, although many imagined that would be the end of it, they continued with ‘their own kind,’ as is now the ‘patriotic’ expression,” wrote Anna Politkovskaya.

The escalation of terror is a vivid example of how the violation of human rights and violence against a particular group can quickly balloon into violence against everyone.

We demand the strict observance of Russian federal laws in Chechnya and preservation of the Russian state’s secular nature. We demand that religious fanatics who are calling for violence be punished according to the law. We demand an investigation of allegations of widespread torture and executions of gays in Chechnya and severe punishment for the guilty parties, including government officials.

#MayDay #Chechnya #MayDayLGBT #RainbowMayday #LGBT

Photographs by David Frenkel, Alexandra Polukeyeva, and Fontanka.ru. Translated by the Russian Reader

* NB. I have translated and posted the above out of a sense of solidarity and friendship with the people who staged this action during today’s May Day marches on the Nevsky in Petersburg.

However, I would be remiss not to note the striking Alexei Navalny-like anti-Caucasus/anti-Muslim rhetoric in the protesters’ communique, which, of course, is not unique to the otherwise admirable anti-corruption fighter, but is a commonplace in the non-thinking of many “ethnic” Russians. As thoroughly deplorable and despicable as the persecution of gay men in Chechnya and anywhere else is (what, are gay men not persecuted in “Russia proper”?), the activists quote the slain journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya while seemingly forgetting why she was assassinated: because she wrote truthfully about what Russian federal armed forces and police were doing in Chechnya. Moscow’s successive bloody invasions of Chechnya in the 1990s and the 2000s, involving the torture and rape of non-combatants, the wholesale slaughter of civilians, and mass displacement of the local populace might seem to be more appropriately described by the word “genocide” than what has been happening recently to the republic’s gay men, however horrifying. Not to put too fine a point on it, “Russians proper,” with the notable exception of Politkovskaya and a brave but tiny minority of others, have never been able to assign the responsibility for what happened in Chechnya where it belongs, and they have been aided and abetted by the other “world powers” (i.e., the “former” colonial and imperial powers), who were only too happy to turn a blind eye to what first Yeltsin and then Putin were up to in their own backyard, so to speak. If Chechnya is now an out-of-control autocracy, run by an “Islamist” strongman-cum-madman, Russians have only to look in the mirror to find out who is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs.

Nor, finally, is it a given that the recent bombing in the Petersburg subway (which wasn’t even the first such bombing, in fact) was the work of “radicalized Islamists.” Of course, that is one possibility. But there are other possibilities, as any “Russian proper” who hasn’t had his or her memory erased would realize.

When the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly passed its infamous homophobic law several years ago, there was no popular outcry against the law on the part of Petersburgers, the vast majority of whom are not Muslim and thus cannot be suspected of adhering to “medieval Muslim values.” Nobody but a handful of people “rioted” in the streets, and as far as I can tell, Petersburgers still, inexplicably, regard themselves proudly as “Europeans,” although they have this disgusting “medieval” law on the books, and many of the same local Petersburg riot cops (OMON) who wearily drag them into paddy wagons and kettle them when they occasionally want to exercise their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly were, as is well known, on active combat duty in Chechnya during the First and Second Chechen Wars and are, possibly, guilty of God knows what war crimes against the “uncivilized” Chechens, whose tiny, beautiful corner of the world has been ravaged at least three times in living memory by their Great Russian rulers. TRR

Instant Pariahs, or, Fontanka Declares Jihad on Everyone Who Looks Funny

Frightened Passengers Do Not Let Ilyas Nikitin Board Plane in Vnukovo
IslamNews
April 4, 2017

On Tuesday afternoon, passengers did not let Russian citizen Andrei (Ilyas) Nikitin, identified by the media as the alleged organizer of the terrorist attack in the Petersburg subway, on board a plan. The victim himself told IslamNews about the incident.

According to Nikilin, he had passed through passport control, but could not board the Rossiya Airlines plane due to protests from frightened passengers.

mm-e1491303803101 — Ilyas Nikitin at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Photo courtesy of IslamNews

Even airport security personnel could not resolve the situation. Ultimately, Nikitin was forced to miss the flight.

Nikitin said the reaction of the passengers was a surprise to him, because on Tuesday morning he had flown from St. Petersburg to Moscow witn no problems.

He noted that law enforcement officials helped him get a refund for his ticket.

“The airline said it would not be able to put me on this plane. I hope to fly out on another plane tomorrow morning,” said Nikitin.

In connection with the incident, IslamNews appeals to its colleagues to comply with journalistic ethics. In particular, you should not publish unconfirmed information that could damage people’s reputations and cause panic in society.

Nikitin gave St. Petersburg law enforcement agencies high marks for their work after the terrorist attack in the city’s subway.

As previously reported, on the day of the terrorist attack, Nikita himself went to the police and said he was not complicit in the tragedy. Before this, video and photos of Nikitin, shot by a CCTV camera, went viral in the media. Because of his outward appearance (the clothes and beard typical of Muslims), the man was christened [sic] the alleged bomber.

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The Search for Jihad in St. Petersburg*
Denis Korotkov
Fontanka.ru
April 3, 2017

The guise of the suspect in the explosion in the Petersburg subway, whose photo has been distributed to police, is unambiguous. If the assumptions are correct, this is a public show. The man in a skullcap with a typical Muslim beard stepped right out of a poster for Islamic State, an organization banned in Russia.

Until April 3, 2017, terrorists did not try and blow Petersburg up [sic].** Homegrown skinheads, who assembled small DIY bombs, do not count in the bigger scheme of things. The first explosion in the subway has been marked with a clear trace. If the man wanted by the Chekists [sic] and police is guilty, he has issued a challenge. He wore no disguise, was emphatically Muslim in appearance, and was calm.

The explosion in the fourth car of the train that had departed from Sennaya Ploshchad subway station was heard around 2:30 p.m., when the train approached Tekhnologichesky Institut station. The dead and wounded are being counted. At the moment, officials agree that “about ten” people have been killed, and the number of wounded is around fifty. According to our information, the number of dead is fourteen. Another explosive device has been discovered and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya station.

Ambulance crews, Emergency Ministry teams, and police units, sirens blazing. The subway closed, endless traffic jams. Petersburg has never seen the likes of this.***

The prosecutor’s office initially declared the incident a terrorist act, then changed its mind. By 6:40 p.m., the Investigative Committee of Russia had decided the case would be investigated as a terrorist attack, with the proviso that the “investigation intends to look into all other possible explanations of this incident.” Meanwhile, Petersburg police had already received the photo of the man who, presumably, could have placed the explosive device in the fourth car.

A tall, black skullcap, straight-cut black clothing, a typical beard with no mustache: for a considerable number of Petersburgers [sic], this is what a classic Wahhabi looks like [sic], the kind of person from whom the subway is closed by metal detectors and police units.

Subway explosions have been the “privilege” of the capital until now. On June 11, 1996, a blast between Tulskaya and Nagatinskaya stations in Moscow killed four people and injured sixteen. On January 1, 1998, an explosive device was discovered at Tretyakovskaya station; three subway workers were injured when it exploded. On August 8, 2000, a blast in the underground passage on Pushkin Square killed thirteen and injured sixty-one people. In 2004, an explosion in a train traveling between Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stations killed forty-one and injured two hundred and fifty people. On August 31, 2004, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at Rizhskaya station, leaving nine dead and injuring fifty. On March 29, 2010, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations, killing forty-one people and injuring more than a hundred.

The outcome of the investigations of the 2014 [sic] and 2010 explosions is well known: the female suicide bombers were radical Islamists who blew themselves up at the behest of their religious mentors.

It was calm in Petersburg until then.**** The bell sounded in August 2016, when an FSB Grad special forces team stormed a rented flat on the tenth floor of a sixteen-storey building on Leninsky Prospekt by breaking through the ceiling [sic]. The details of the operation are unknown even now. According to official reports, four Islamist militants shot back and were destroyed by return fire. Judging by the fact that the liquidated militants were part of an Islamic State-affiliated terrorist group, led by Timur Likhov, who had been killed several days earlier, they had not come to Petersburg for a holiday.***** The FSB’s press service did not say what exactly was contained in the canisters and bags that were taken from the ransacked flat and loaded into an official van.

In November 2016, FSB special forces again stormed a flat, this time on the first floor of a five-storey building on Sofia Kovalevskaya Street. The “peaceful taxi drivers” from Uzbekistan and Kirghizia [sic] who lived there had automatic weapons and explosives in their possession, which did not stop them from asking to go home with an infantile naïveté, right after embarrassed confessions of plans to set off bombs in the Galeriya shopping mall on Ligovsky Prospect or in the subway.

Given that immediately after the explosion on the approach to Tekhnologichesky Institut an explosive device was discovered on Ploshchad Vosstaniia, the Investigative Commission’s proviso about “other explanations,” except a terrorist attack, looks more like overcautiousness. Real explosives were discovered were almost simultaneously as the first explosion in the Petersburg subway happened. You can discuss how typical it is for Islamic terrorists to use a fire extinguisher as a casing for an explosive device or place a bomb under a seat in the subway instead of using suicide bombers, but the list of possible explanations is very short [sic].

Surveillance cameras recorded the man in black allegedly leaving a briefcase containing explosives in the fourth car, strolling across Sennaya Ploshchad without the briefcase, talking with someone on the phone, and then leaving [sic]. ****** He could not help but understand he was doing this in the crosshairs [sic] of video cameras. Then his skullcap and beard are not just a typical image, but a signal.

The signal has been received.

The Petersburg subway reopened at 8:40 p.m. For the time being, Petersburgers prefer not go to under ground.

*********

* This incendiary, Islamophobic article, which shows every sign of violating Russian Criminal Code Article 282 (stipulating incitement of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred as a criminal offense) was posted on Fontanka.ru‘s website on April 3 at 9:35 p.m. Since that time, the “terrorist” in the CCTV camera still photograph, above, has voluntarily visited the police, been identified as Ilyas Nikitin, and has told the police he had nothing to do with the bombing in the Petersburg subway on April 3. Apparently, the police believed his testimony, because they immediately released him. And yet, as of 9:30 a.m. on April 5, this article is still posted on Fontanka.ru without the slightest indication that there have been any developments in the case since then. Is this the way ethical journalists work?

** This claim is false, both in terms of Petersburg’s recent history and certainly in terms of its history more generally. What were the Nazi trying to do during the 900-day siege of the city, during WWII, if not “trying to blow [it] up”?

*** A city that went through three revolutions, a civil war, and a 900-day siege by the Nazis from 1905 to 1944 “has not seen the likes of this”?

**** Petersburg in the mid noughties was anything but “calm.” There were hundreds of assaults, perpretated by neo-Nazi skinheads, on Central Asian migrant workers, students and visitors from Africa and Asia, people from the North and South Caucasus, foreigners in general, and local anti-fascists, many of them fatal.

***** The reporter’s only sources here are articles previously published on Fontanka.ru. Given the website’s well-known connections with local law enforcement agencies, I see no reason to treat these stories as necessarily or wholly true. The Russian security forces would not be the first to exaggerate the terrorist threat by fabricating or embellishing the particulars of its counter-terrorist operations.

****** Where are these images? Where have they been published?

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Evgeny Shtorn
Facebook
April 5, 2017

Everything that happened on April 3 was awful, sad, and alarming. Today, at the entrance to the Vladimirskaya subway station, I was asked to step aside for an inspection. My backpack was checked, and I was asked to take everything out of my pockets. A man of “Slavic” appearance had been walking right in front of me, carrying a big backpack. No one stopped him. On the way back, at Narvskaya subway station, me and another comrade were asked to show our IDs. There was a young woman with us who, sensing the injustice, asked whether she also had to show her ID, but she was told no, she didn’t have to. Racism in action. Everyone has it hard right now, I realize, but some people have it harder. Everyone is scared to go into the subway, but the fear and humiliation is double for some. Skin color, the shape of one’s eyes, and place of birth do not make anyone second-class human beings. We must always remember this. We must remember it everyday.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Mr. Shtorn for his kind permission to translate and reproduce his remarks here.

Islamophobia Is Our Alpha and Omega

At times like this, it’s important to recall that the Russian Federation’s unofficial official ideology is Islamophobia.

The young people are complete zombies, and only adults between the ages of 40 and 60 attend protest demonstrations against the Muslim occupation. After one such protest rally in the town of Trelleborg, the sad activists gathered in the home of my friends Hans and Eva.”

Blue-eyed beauty Agnetta moved from the large city of Norrköping, where she lived next to a Muslim ghetto, to tiny Hammenhög for the sake of her fourteen-year-old daughter Nadja. But now Muslims have come to Hammenhög, too.

“Tehran Restaurant in Malmö’s Muslim Ghetto.” Photo courtesy of Darya Aslamova/Komsomolskaya Pravda

“Thank God, Nadia is like an Arab girl, with her black hair and eyes,” says Agnetta, “but I still take her to school every day and meet her afterwards, especially because Afghan men who claim they are sixteen years old are now studying at their school!”

Catholic Oskar Porath fled Helsingborg for the small town of Kivik because of his three daughters. But a huge refugee center is being built five kilometers from his house.

“The girls will grow up, and what should I do?!” Oskar sadly wonders. “When civil war begins, we will move. And it will inevitably begin. First, there will be economic collapse from the exorbitant burden Sweden has taken on itself. And they will stop giving food to the hundreds of thousands of aggressive young men going crazy from idleness in the refugee centers. Riots will start. We have decided to flee to Finland. It’s still safe there.”

—Darya Aslamova, “A Raped Sweden Suffers from Stockholm Syndrome,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1 April 2017

Of course, not all Russians by any measure are adherents of radical Islamophobia, but the passage, above, was a little morsel of the steady diet of hateful nothing that has been served to them in truckloads by national TV channels, large circulation broadsheets like Komsomolskaya Pravda, and internet trolls, working through social media, for the last several years.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade VA for the heads-up

Terrorism in Petersburg: Then and Now

St. Petersburg Gets a Taste of Terrorism
Vladimir Alexandrov
Kommersant Daily
December 20, 1996

A bomb exploded in the Petersburg subway in the early hours of December 19. By a lucky chance, there were no victims. This was the first terrorist attack in Petersburg [sic].* Until the incident, law enforcement had either received false bomb threats or had found the bombs in time. FSB officers, who have joined the investigation, have not yet put forward any more or less convincing explanations of what happened.

The hands on the clock in the driver’s cab showed 12:10 a.m. when he felt the train tremble violently. (It was then traveling between Ploshchad Lenina and Vyborgskaya stations, on the Kirovsky Zavod-Vyborgskaya Line).

“At first, I thought one of the junction boxes in the train’s pneumatic system had exploded, but several seconds later, I realized something unpredictable had happened,” he said.

The steering system was compromised. The emergency sensors lighted up. The driver immediately reported the incident to the duty officer at the station, and he contacted the police.

In fact, an explosive device had gone off in the train’s second car. There were two passengers in the car at the time, one of whom was deafened by the blast wave. His face and hands were injured by shards of glass.

Despite the fact the energy supply system was malfunctioning, the train rolled into Vyborgskaya station under its own momentum. The wounded man received first aid. Because he had trouble speaking and was quite disoriented, he was almost immediately taken to hospital. The second passenger, a woman, disappeared from the scene for reasons as yet unknown.

An FSB investigative team soon arrived. They inspected the car. It was an awful sight. The bomb had torn apart the car’s insides. The windows had been knocked out, the doors torn from their grooves, and the seats and upholstery ripped apart. The windows had been blown out in adjacent cars as well.

The damaged train was moved onto a storage track, near the Ploshchad Lenina subway station, where there used to be a depot.

The outcome of the forensic investigation was made public only yesterday. Judging by the blast pattern, an explosive device with no casing was placed in the subway car. It contained approximately 400 grams of TNT. The mechanism used to ignite the explosives has not yet been identified.

“It was our good fortune that there were few people on the train at the time of the attack [according to some sources, there were sixteen — Kommersant]. Otherwise, the consequences of the explosion would have been difficult to foresee,” said an FSB spokesman.

The motives and the people who carried out the attack are also still unknown. According to a few witnesses, when the train was stopped at Ploshchad Lenina, several young men dashed out of the car where the explosion would later occur, but no has yet linked the subsequent events with these men. Nevertheless, they are being actively sought by police.

Traffic on the stretch of track between Ploshchad Lenina and Vyborgskaya was restored by early morning on December 19 because the tunnel had suffered almost no damage. Diagnostic work on the tracks and cable conduits will continue tonight, however.

Nearly all police units in St. Petersburg have been on alert since the attack. Security at all subway stations, on public transport, and at other vital sites in the city has been increased. The FSB has established a special task force to investigate the crime.

Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev was informed about the incident half an hour after the explosion. According to him, it was hardly connected with events in Chechnya. Mentioning recent similar events in different countries, the governor suggested that “terrorism has, apparently, simply become a profitable business.”

This is the first terrorist attack in St. Petersburg in the last three months, although the police constantly receive anonymous bomb threats. (The callers usually claim the bombs have been planted in schools.) The last time police received an anonymous message about a bomb in the subway was in early October of this years. Traffic on the Moskovskaya-Petrogradskaya Line was halted for ten minutes due to the threat.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Norsu for the invaluable heads-up and having a good memory.

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wanted the alleged bomber — Social network users were quick to join the exciting hunt for the “alleged bomber,” especially because the screenshot image disseminated by local media evoked every radicalized Islamophobe’s wet dream of a “Muslim terrorist.”

Man Named as Suspect in Subway Explosion Turns Himself over to Police
Inna Sidorkova and Vladimir Gordeev
RBC
April 3, 2017

A man resembling the man in a photograph whom the media had identified as a suspect in the terrorist attack in the subway has produced himself at a Petersburg police precinct.

“He saw himself on TV, got scared, and came to the police himself,” said RBC’s source in law enforcement. According to him, the man had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.

Earlier, REN TV and online newspaper Fontanka.ru had published a screenshot of a recording made by a CCTV camera. The image showed a man who, allegedly, had carried out the terrorist attack. The still showed a tall, bearded man dressed in black.

Later, Channel Five published the photograph of a second suspect in the terrorist attack.

alleged suspect — The “alleged terrorist” looks very much like a Russian Orthodox priest or seminary student. Photo courtesy of RBC and their sources in law enforcement**

** UPDATE (5 April 2017). His real name is Andrei (Ilyas) Nikitin, and here is the touching story of how this totally innocent man got booted off a plane in Moscow because Islamophobic, panick-mongering Russian media and social media users had already dragged him through the mud and labeled him a “terrorist.”

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Execution of the five Pervomartovtsy, April 13, 1881. Source: Wikipedia

*Pervomartovtsy (Russian: Первома́ртовцы; a compound term literally meaning those of March 1) were the Russian revolutionaries, members of Narodnaya Volya [The People’s Will] who planned and carried out the assassination of Alexander II (March 1, 1881), and attempted to assassinate Alexander III (March 1, 1887, also known as “The Second First of March”).

The 1881 assassination was planned by Narodnaya Volya’s Executive Committee. Andrei Zhelyabov was the main organizer. After his arrest on February 27, he was replaced by Sofia Perovskaya.

Alexander II was killed on March 1, 1881, by a bomb thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki. Hryniewiecki wounded himself fatally in the assassination; Nikolai Sablin committed suicide. The conspirators—Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Nikolai Kibalchich, Gesya Gelfman, Timofei Mikhailov, and Nikolai Rysakov—were tried by a Special Tribunal of the Ruling Senate on March 26–29 and sentenced to death by hanging. On April 3, 1881, five Pervomartovtsy were hanged, except for Gelfman, whose execution was postponed due to her pregnancy. Her execution was later commuted to indefinite penal servitude. She nevertheless died in prison of post-natal complications.

The second “First of March” was planned by members of the so-called Terrorist Faction of Narodnaya Volya, including [Vladimir Lenin’s older brother] Alexander Ulyanov. On March 1, 1887, they went to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect with bombs and waited for the Tsar’s carriage to pass by. However, they were arrested on the spot before his arrival. All fifteen conspirators, including Alexander Ulyanov and Pyotr Shevyryov (the main organizers), Pakhomy Andreyushkin, Vasily Generalov and Vasily Osipanov (the bombthrowers), and ten other people were tried by a Special Senate Committee on April 15–19 and sentenced. The first five men were hanged on May 8, 1887, while the rest were sentenced to prison, exile or penal servitude.

Source: Wikipedia. The article has been edited lightly to make it more readable. TRR

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A 1988 map of downtown Leningrad, showing Zhelyabova and Perovskya Streets (inside the red oval). The streets were renamed in memory of the People’s Will terrorists in October 1918. The streets reverted to their pre-Revolutionary names (Bolshaya and Malaya Konyushennaya Streets) only in October 1991. (Image courtesy of retromap.ru.)

Yet streets named in memory of their fellow People’s Will terrorists Alexander Ulanov and Nikolai Kibalchich are still firmly in place on the grid of post-Soviet Petersburg to this day.

Alexander Ulyanov Street, in Petersburg’s Okhta neighborhood

Kibalchich Street, in Petersburg’s southern Frunze District

“Hysterical Russophobia”

Yet another victim of the “hysterical Russophobia” sweeping the US and Europe has been identified.

“The subjects of the new issue of RBC Magazine aren’t afraid of risks: they conceive their own projects and invest in unusual sectors of business. Nikolai Davydov, RBC’s Investor of the Year, left for the US with $100 in his pocket, but now he lives in a house on the California coastline.”

If “hysterical Russophobia” were a real thing, instead of a talking point for crypto-Putinists and just plain Russians who don’t know how to explain to their non-Russian neighbors why their homeland has become so “odd” in the past several years, you would have heard about Russian immigrants to the EU and US suffering the same main violence and putrid discrimination that Muslim, Asian, and African immigrants and asylum seekers suffer there, not to mention the relentless violence and staggering discrimination suffered by such absolutely 100% native Americans as Aboriginal Americans (i.e., Native Americans), African Americans, and Hispanic Americans in a land their peoples have been inhabiting from several centuries to several thousands of years.

But no, you never hear of such violence and discrimination against Russian immigrants, and the fact there is no such violence and discrimination against Russians (at least, not enough to show up on anyone’s radars) is a good thing, of course.

It does, however make you wonder what exactly this “hysterical Russophobia” is that has so many tongues wagging, but has absolutely no negative effect on the ability of actual, individual Russians to lead happy, productive, and violence- and discrimination-free lives in the countries where they have chosen to settle.

That’s an easy riddle to solve, however. “Hysterical Russophobia” is a non-phenomenon invented by a motley coalition of people with various political axes to grind, including sections of the mostly hilarious current western left, who for some reason have not heard the news about what has been happening in the Socialist Motherland the last twenty-five years or so or feign not to have heard it. They’re still defending Russia long after it became the world center of the blackest social and political reaction. That is, they’re defending a corrupt, oligarchic capitalist tyranny.

Why actual Russian immigrants might feel defensive about the old homeland is understandable, but they should figure out what’s worth defending and what’s not. The Putin regime, for example, literally has no redeeming features whatsoever, as a perusal of this blog, for example, and its predecessor, Chtodelat News, should persuade you, although there are thousands and millions of more credible sources of information out there that are even more persuasive than my occasional, half-baked efforts to knock some sense into your heads.

People who nevertheless hotly defend the Putin regime, wherever they’re from, immediately strike me as suspicious or hopelessly naive. And I’m not alone.

“10,000 articles in the left press about anti-Russian hysteria. They would have more impact if they ever acknowledged that this fucking bastard Putin is building a worldwide ultraright movement. Diana Johnstone told Counterpunch readers that Marine Le Pen was on the left, so you can understand how this sort of Red-Brown thing has been gestating for quite some time.” (Louis Proyect, as quoted by Raiko Aasa yesterday on Facebook)

And here is “hysterical Russophobia” at its most sinister!

‘Delfinov and Vrubel are part of a growing community of Russian artists, poets, writers and intellectuals who have turned Berlin into one of the most vibrant outposts of Slavic culture, a kind of Moscow-on-Spree that is light years away from the repressive world of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Delfinov, who moved to Berlin in 2001, says the influx has accelerated in the past five years, a period when Russians’ hopes of democratic change evaporated. Many of them quit the country after Putin returned in 2012 for a third term as president and veered sharply to the right, espousing a new nationalist rhetoric, clamping down on dissent and annexing Crimea. Official figures show there are now 22,000 Russian expats living in Berlin, up 6 per cent on 2015. “They are people who saw no future for themselves in Russia,” says Delfinov. “Middle-class people who just wanted to breathe.”’

Well, you’ve probably guessed I’m just being facetious.

I think it’s great that Russians can go anywhere and make new, happy, productive lives for themselves. It should be that way for everyone, of course. No one is illegal, and all that.

Yet, simultaneously, the Russian government has been working overtime over the last year to exacerbate the Syrian refugee crisis. But you’d be hard pressed to hear any of the nattily dressed émigrés, described in the Financial Times article, quoted above, or their countrymen saying anything whatsoever about that nasty business and their country’s role in it. Mum’s the word, I’ve got my life to live, and all that.

However, a fair number of Russians, in my experience (and not only mine), have had lots to say, paradoxically, about Germany and other European countries being “overrun” by refugees from Syria and other war zones. It turns out these “black” unfortunates, who come from completely other galaxies, apparently, don’t have the same right so seek a safe place to live and work in Berlin, Paris, London et al., as the now-“white” (as opposed to White) Russians do.

Isn’t that funny? TRR

Viha Tekee Vihaa, or, The Finnish Class

Khadar Ahmed on the set. Photo courtesy of MTV3 Finland

“In NTV’s report you can by the way suddenly see a Finnish police car driving past, even though it’s about Sweden.”

That’s okay. The home audience just wants to hate on “Europe” and “Muslim terrorists” even if they have been edited, remixed, and totally fabricated out of thin air. The important thing in Putinlandia is to have something and someone to hate intensely all the livelong day.

And if you think this hatred is restricted to the “yobs” and other “uneducated” types, you’d be dead wrong. Over the last glorious seventeen years, I’ve been hearing this free-floating hatred spilling out in increasing quantities from the educated, from professionals, from the so-called intelligentsia.

In fact, I heard it again last night during my Finnish class (not the first time there, either). The remarks were “triggered” by the fact that I had had our group read a Helsingin Sanomat interview with the up-and-coming Somali-Finnish screenwriter and filmmaker Khadar Ahmed, who spoke with an utter lack of bittnerness (and in a totally fluent Finnish that none of us “Aryans” have yet achieved) about the total alienation and discrimination he had experienced as an immigrant to Finland. He’s now relocated to Paris.

My classmates were totally unimpressed that a road movie based on Ahmed’s screenplay, Saattokeikka, would be hitting screens in Finland in the coming days, or that a previous screenplay of his (Kaupunkilaisia) had been filmed by country’s hottest young filmmaker, Juho Kuosmanen, whose luminous and completely perfect film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes festival and was submitted by Finland to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

My classmates had never heard of Kuosmanen or the film, either, although Olli Mäki was screened right down the street from where we were sitting. That was a few months ago during the annual Finnish film festival, paid for by the Finnish government, who have been trying so hard to be besties with the “neighbor to the east,” which just wants to puff out its chest and hate on everybody as a matter of state policy and mundane practice.

We also read another Helsingin Sanomat piece, about the state of the Finnish nation and the state of “Finnishness,” in which well-known Finns were asked to respond to a set of ten questions that pollsters had posed as well to a larger sampling of ordinary Finns. One of the respondents was the Finnish rapper Prinssi Jusuf (aka Iyouseyas Bekele Belayneh), whose family moved from Ethiopia to Finland when Jusuf was two.

Yet my classmates were convinced, for some reason, that Prinssi Jusuf must rap in English, not Finnish, as if Finnish were too complicated for black people to learn.

One of my classmates was also on the verge of making a comment about who Prinssi Jusuf resembled. As an amateur psychic, I could imagine what she was about to say (Barack Obama, although they don’t look a thing alike), but a well-timed glare shut her up.

This is the lovely world that Putinism has built over the last seventeen years, although everyone answers for the garbage in their own heads, ultimately.

By the way, here’s a video of Prinssi Jusuf rapping in what sounds to me like perfectly fluent Finnish. ||TRR

Thanks to Robert Coalson for the heads-up on the Rinkeby story.

Facebook Is Fun! (Islamophobia in Russia)

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas, 491 cm x 716 cm. Louvre Museum, Paris. Image courtesy of Wikipedia — Théodore Géricault, *The Raft of the Medusa*, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas, 491 cm x 716 cm. Louvre Museum, Paris. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

My memories of kindergarten are fairly fuzzy by now, but I do seem to recall we did a lot of sharing. This, I think, explains why the dark satanic mill known as Facebook has become so indispensable and popular in our modern world. Like kindergarten, it’s all about sharing.

For instance, this morning I was feeling fairly glum about the ongoing slaughter in Aleppo, the apparently total indifference my Russian friends (and “friends”) feel about the role their armed forces have been playing in this massacre, and my inability to do anything about any of this, much less changing anyone’s mind.

Apparently, Facebook even has algorithms for detecting when you’re feeling blue, and like a cheery kindergarten minder in such circumstances, it gets you involved in some fun sharing to buck you up.

This was what Facebook decided to share with woebegone me this morning.

“At Venice Film Festival, Sokurov Says European and Muslim Aesthetics Incompatible,” reads the headline on Newsru.com, an alarmist Russophone news website based in Israel.

When I clicked on it, the item turned out to be old news, an article, dated September 8, 2015, quoting controversial statements made at last year’s Venice Film Festival by the Petersburg auteur Alexander Sokurov, who was in Venice to debut his latest indisputable masterpiece, Francofonia.

Presenting his film Francofonia at the Venice Film Festival, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov said the European and Muslim aesthetics were incompatible. Calling for an end to “the endless and pointless incursions,” to immigration by an alien culture, Sokurov thus polemicized with the chair of the festival jury, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, who earlier had suggested solving Europe’s rampant immigration crisis by organizing entry for the immigrants. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported on Francofonia and Sokurov’s statements.

Presenting what the newspaper called “a brilliant allegorical tale about the Old Continent through its museum symbol, the Louvre,” Sokurov said, “History teaches us nothing. Prudence and compassion are alien to history.”

“Europe, which has attained supreme achievements in art and philosophy, keeps making one mistake after another,” said the Russian maître, as quoted by InoPressa.

“What is happening, these endless and pointless incursions [or, invasions], seem like an indescribable nightmare, a humanitarian catastrophe in the face of which ordinary people are powerless, and politicians do nothing. And no one thinks to protect our culture, which will cease to exist quite soon,” the filmmaker continued.

[…]

The Italian periodical described the action of the film as follows: a ship that must bring European culture to a safe haven sails into a storm. If it sinks, its precious cargo will be irrevocably lost to all Europeans.

“Europe finds itself on The Raft of the Medusa, as in the famous painting by Théodore Géricault, exhibited in the Louvre. Just like the frightening boats, crowded with desperate people making their way to our shores.”

The article here refers to the numerous cases of the illegal delivery [sic] by sea (sometimes ending in tremendous loss of life) of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

During the presentation of his film, Sokurov called for “a stop to these migrations.”

“To really help these people, it is necessary to intervene in the countries from which they are escaping and try to solve the problems there. Instead, we pile them up together here, where they have no prospects, and try and impose our TV lifestyle on them,” he argued.

“The outcome will be catastrophic for both parties,” the filmmaker warned.

Sokurov was certain that “our aesthetic and the Muslim aesthetic are incompatible.”

“With all due respect, we must maintain a distance and protect our culture from the iconoclastic fury that is destroying it,” said the filmmaker.

He reminded the audience of the total destruction of unique landmarks in the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria, by militants from the terrorist group Islamic State, which is banned in the Russian Federation.

Recently, the extremists blew up three tombs of local patricians in the captured city. Earlier, they demolished the Temple of Baalshamin (2nd century BC) and the Temple of Bel, consecrated to the supreme Semitic deity [sic].

“Even the Nazis would have not dared to do what has happened in Palmyra,” said Sokurov.

I have quoted at length the day brightener Facebook chose for me, because it amply demonstrates a sad but irrefutable fact. Islamophobia is a perfectly common attitude and a perfectly respectable political “stance” in Russia, adopted and bruited loudly and publicly by well-read, highly educated members of the “liberal” Russian intelligentsia, as evinced here by one of their darlings, Alexander Sokurov.

This, in turn, explains the near-total silence of “liberal” and even “leftist” Russians on the destruction of Aleppo.

Let me put it as crudely as possible. Despite the court judgement handed down on popular blogger Anton Nosik the other day, a really large number of educated “white” Russians think Muslims are subhumans whom, if push comes to shove or your “civilizational project” has got bogged down and you cannot think of anything better to do, can be slaughtered with impunity and without blinking. In fact, it is better for one’s digestion, state of mind, and personal pursuit of high culture (per Sokurov) to put a mental wall between yourself and whatever is happening to the Muslims in your midst, or to the Muslim Crimean Tatars in Crimea, or to the Muslims in Grozny (back in the first years of Putin’s perpetual reign), or to the Muslims in Aleppo.

If you think I am exaggerating, I invite you to come to the Motherland and have heart-to-heart chats with a sampling of members of the so-called intelligentsia. In some cases (but not, happily, all cases) you will come away thinking you’ve just spent time with Trump supporters, UKIP cacklers, BNP bruisers or clowns from the KKK.

But the funny thing about Facebook is that it is not the only satanic mill on the oppressively vast World Wide Web. Nowadays, you can also ask something called Google whatever question your wicked heart can conceive—for example, how many Muslims are there in Russia?

“In Europe overall, however, Russia’s population of 14 million Muslims (10%) is the largest on the continent.”

Yikes!

Where did all those Russian Muslims come from? Did they immigrate to the Motherland from Syria and other majority Muslim countries?

No, despite the recent heavy influx of migrant workers from the Muslim Central Asian republics (once also part of Russia, in its guise as the Soviet Union), which has even more recently been waning due to the bad economy, among other factors, most of Russia’s Muslims were born and bred in the Russian Federation. Thus, to the outside world, they are “Russians,” if not to many of their fellow Russian citizens, who probably cannot get their heavily bookish heads around such funny facts as Moscow’s being the largest Muslim city in Europe.

You would think that, with so many Russian Muslims and post-Soviet Muslims sharing (there is our keyword again!) your cities, towns, and villages with you, you would not want to go out of your way to antagonize Muslims for no reason at all.

(Not because they are touchier than your average bear, but just because no one in this world enjoys being kicked around for years on end just because they’re different.)

But that is what the Russian government has been doing in Syria, and that is what significant numbers of Russia’s best and brightest have been doing for a long time now, if only rhetorically, if only at the Venice Film Festival, on Facebook or in their kitchens.

The consequences, both now and in the future, could not be more miserable, especially for the alleged “European” culture that only Russian intelligenty and European neo-Nazis seem to get so exercised about.

Thanks, Facebook, for cheering me up! I knew I could count on you. TRR

Archangel Michael Named Investigative Committee’s Patron Saint

Archangel Michael Becomes Investigative Committee Patron Saint
RBC
August 16, 2016

Patriarch Kirill has “blessed” the naming of the archangel Michael as the Russian Investigative Committee’s spiritual patron. A patron was named at the behest of Investigative Committee chair Alexander Bastrykin, as reported by the agency’s spokesman Vladimir Markin in a press release on its website.

The patron was named “in the interests of strengthening the spiritual and moral foundations of Russian Investigative Committee personnel,” Markin said.

The choice of the Investigative Committee’s patron saint fell on the archangel Michael “since in the Scriptures he is portrayed as the principal crusader against all iniquity among people,” and in Revelations, he “appears as the warrior of light.”

In addition, the archangel Michael “is often portrayed holding scales in which one of the pans is heavier than the other, which helps the guardian of the heavenly gates [sic] tell the righteous from the wicked.”

This “allows one to draw an analogy” with criminal justice, which “is the Investigative Committee’s main job,” Markin underscored.

Bastrykin has ordered the drafting of an agreement between the Investigative Committee and the Russian Orthodox Church. As part of the agreement between them, “cooperation aimed at reviving and strengthening spirituality” and “counteracting terrorism, extremism, corruption, and immorality” is planned.

In addition, Markin noted that the archangel Michael is present in the majority of the religions represented in Russia (Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism). The archangel Michael will thus be venerated by the Investigative Committee’s offices in the North Caucasus Federal District.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Image courtesy of the Investigative Committee

The Life of Evgeny

Evgeny Lebedev, publisher of The Independent

While having a gander this morning at how Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s premier liberal newspaper, has been covering the Syrian conflict in recent months, I stumbled across this op-ed piece, essentially an open letter to the British establishment, dated November 6, 2015. Published in the (mostly nonexistent) “English version” of the paper’s website and headlined “Britain must make Vladimir Putin an ally in the disaster that is Syria,” the piece is attributed to “Eygeny [sic] Lebedev, Publisher, The Independent, London.”

To cut to the chase, Evgeny Lebedev (his actual name) who has dual UK-Russian citizenship, it transpires in the piece, wants Britain to make common cause with Russia against the Islamic threat, to wit:

“There may be up to 7,000 Russian nationals who are in Syria as a result of being radicalized. Moscow, not a multicultural city in the way that London is, and run by an administration that is much more militarily decisive because it doesn’t put all big decisions to Parliament [sic], is clear: these terrorists must be killed, before they return to Russia to wreak havoc.

“On that point, Britain and Russia should be of like mind. We, too, know that there are many British citizens who have been radicalised and, for unfathomable reasons, decided to flee to this anarchic region and fight against all the things readers of this newspaper take for granted: democracy, peace, civilization.

“We have common cause with the Russians [sic], a common enemy. The biggest threat to humanity today is cancerous, Islamist ideology that is growing fast right across the world—one that claims, with what truth we don’t yet know, to be behind the weekend’s tragic plane crash in Egypt’s Sinai desert.

“Not for nothing did the head of our [sic] security services say last week that the terror threat in Britain is the highest it has been in his 32-year career.

“Destroying this cancer, or plague, at source could hardly be more worthwhile or urgent; and yet, rather than work with the Russians [sic] to do this, we seem intent on cutting ties instead.

“Britain should not be leaving it to the French to mediate between Russia and the West. For all the greatness of this island nation, for all its hard and soft power, there is a laxity in our [sic] approach to the Syrian crisis.”

If you want to find out more about the exciting life of the fine fellow who penned this, avail yourself of Wikipedia’s bio of the man.

I think your eyes should pop out of your head when you realize that the son of a KGB First Chief Directorate spy and Russian oligarch is nowadays a respectable man about town and media mogul in London, the exact same place where his wealthy dad used to do his spying back in the bad old days. But then again, neither you nor I are as worldly as publisher Lebedev and his dad, so what do we know?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

“The Australian Prime Minister Has Done It Again!”

I hate to get down and dirty with you all, but this is what the current prime minister of Australia actually looks like.

2588176-3x2-940x627-640x427 — Malcom Turnbull, the actual prime minister of Australia. Photo courtesy of newskaada.com

His name is Malcolm Turnbull, and he is the new leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, which currently governs Australia in coalition with the National Party of Australia.

Mr. Turnbull is new at his job, because he ousted the rather wretched Tony Abbott in what the Australians quaintly call a “leadership spill” less than a week ago.

While I don’t like Mr. Turnbull’s politics for the most part, he will be a real improvement over Mr. Abbott, if only because he is less prone to saying and doing blatantly stupid and awful things. Mr. Turnbull comes across as an intelligent, affable and well-spoken fellow.

But that is beside the point.

I wonder whether events like this ever make the news in Russia, because frighteningly large numbers of Russians think that Kevin Rudd (of the Australian Labor Party) is still the prime minister of Australia.

Or, alternately, they think that John Howard (Liberals) or Julia Gillard (Labor) is the prime minister of Australia.

Basically, for the Russian “grassroots” imaginary, it doesn’t really matter who the prime minister of Austrialia is, because whoever she or he is (or isn’t), the “prime minister of Australia” is a folklore character with a penchant for making outrageously Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, and, now, in a new twist, rabidly pro-Zionist statements such as this:

В отношениях евреев и арабов Израиля, да и всей Палестины в границах мандата Лиги Наций. хозяин страны и земли в этой стране НЕ ТОТ, КТО ПРОЛИЛ БОЛЬШЕ ЧУЖОЙ КРОВИ, А ТОТ, КТО ЕЁ СТРОИЛ, ЗАЩИЩАЛ И ТРУДИЛСЯ ДЛЯ ЕЁ ПРОЦВЕТАНИЯ. Из этого следует что мировой порядок не может определяться голосованием в ООН, созданной коалицией , организовавшей массовое истребление евреев в 1933-1945 годах и пытавшейся завершить это истребление в 1953 году – коалицией из Британии, СССР, США, Германии и Франции Эти государства своими тайными и открытыми действиями на протяжении 1933-1945 годов активно участвовали в истреблении еврейского народа и сумели в лагерях и поездах, в расстрельных рвах сожженных сооружениях методично и организовано уничтожить не менее 12 миллионов беззащитных жертв, избранных по национально-расовому признаку. И они же создали организацию ООН и при ней – UNWRA – НЕ ТОЛЬКО ПРОДОЛЖИТЬ ПОЛИТИКУ ДИСКРИМИНАЦИИ ЕВРЕЙСКОГО НАРОДА, НО И СОЗДАЛИ НОВЫЙ “НАРОД” с единственной задачей – не допустить выполнения решений Лиги Наций о СОЗДАНИИ В ПАЛЕСТИНЕ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОГО ДОМА для еврейского народа,

Историческое тайное решение о ликвидации еврейского народа принимали правительства перечисленных выше государств на конференции в Эвиане и неких тайных совещаниях. . И сегодня, когда над миром, над всей Западной цивилизацией нависла исламская угроза Третьей Мировой войны для Европы и Америки, пора опомниться и присоединиться к Австралии и Японии и остановить самоубийство человечества.

[Source: NewRezume.org]

I won’t even bother to translate this fake crap into English. If you are curious, go to Google Translate and let the smart robots there do the hard work for you.

The forger of the above libel goes on to express his and “the Russian world’s” delight in the “Australian prime minister’s” continuing campaign against Islam:

Премьер-министр Австралии снова сделал это!! Этого человека следует назначить королем мира..[sic] Более правдивых слов никогда не говорили..[sic]

The Australian prime minister has done it again! This man should be appointed king of the world… Truer words were never spoken.

God knows that real Australian prime ministers have done and said a lot of really awful things in their time, although, if actual truth be told, besides being remembered for being a fairly goofy customer himself, Mr. Rudd is also remembered for his apology, in parliament, to Australia’s Indigenous people for the so-called Stolen Generations.

Again, that is not the point. The point is that there are rather vigorous forces in Russian society, both at the top and the grassroots, who are keen on putting the most dire spin on current events while also fostering the illusion that their bleak outlook or their own aggressive, imperialist policy has lots of fans in the outside world.

If you are wondering why Kevin Rudd (or, rather, the “prime minister of Australia”) is such a folk hero on the Russian internets, the simple answer is that not enough Russians speak or read English well enough to be able to sort out hoaxes like this.

In more vegetarian times, this would not have mattered as much, but now the Kremlin has been actively priming the pump with fake news and commentary via its “active operations” on social media.

I hope to be describing another such recent hoax, involving a non-existent Finn named Veikko Kerhonen from Oulu, in the next day or so. Here is a sample of the imperialist Russian screeds this non-existent Finn is into posting, exclusively in Russian!

In the meantime, you can reread my recent, obviously futile attempt to expose the “Australian prime minister” canard.