The Birthday Party

OVD Info
Facebook
October 8, 2020

On October 7, protests took place in various cities in honor [sic] of President Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Police reacted differently in each case.

📍 In Moscow, members of Pussy Riot held an anti-homophobic protest by hanging rainbow flags on various government buildings. Police detained a journalist during the protest, and two participants later that evening. They were charged the rules for holding a public event. Today, police continued visiting the homes of the activists.

Left Bloc activists left bottles of PVA glue and swimming fins outside the office of the presidential administration. [This was an allusion to the Russian prison slang expression “to glue the fins” (skleit’ lasty), meaning “to die.”] Police detained a journalist who wanted to see how officials reacted to the installation. He was charged with violating the rules for holding a public event and has his electronic devices confiscated.

📍 In Kurgan, supporters of Alexei Navalny held solo pickets, wishing the president a speedy retirement. Afterwards, Center “E” officers attempted to enter the local Navalny headquarters, but were not allowed to enter.

📍 In Novokuibyshevsk (Samara Region), opposition activists picketed on the city’s central square. Police officers took them to the police station, where they questioned them, scolded them for violating social distancing rules, and released them without charge.

📍 In Petersburg, several people in Putin masks staged a protest outside Gostiny Dvor. Six people were detained and taken to three different police stations. They were charged with violating the self-isolation regime.

Activists of the Vesna Movement arranged a birthday spread outside the house where Vladimir Putin lived as a young man. After drinking tea, they pretended to be dead. The police are looking for the people involved in the protest at their actual and registered places of residence.

Photos by David Frenkel. Courtesy of OVD Info and Vesna. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Novichok”

novichok baby The headline in Gazeta.Ru, once upon a time a thoroughly respectable, pioneering Russian online newspaper, reads, “Novice [novichok] in the royal family: Kate shows off newborn son.” Per his commentary, below, Crimean Tatar journalist Adyer Muzhdabaev is surely right that Gazeta.ru‘s headline writer was clearly referring to the Novichok nerve agent, recently used to poison Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, because newborn babies are not generally identified as “novices” [novichki] in Russian. Screen shoot from Gazeta.ru taken by the Russian Reader.

Ayder Muzhdabaev
Facebook
April 24, 2018

The killers are having a laugh. The inhabitants of the Russian Reich think like criminals. They are hardcore reprobates and utterly degraded. Reporters head this pack of Homo erectus. I stopped being surprised a long time ago, and this does not surprise me at all. It makes sense. The Reich must be impeccable. Nearly everyone in it ceases to be a human being sooner or later, and this process has almost been consummated in the Russian Reich.

Translated by the Russian Reader

While I would disagree vigorously with Mr. Muzhdabaev’s sweeping conclusions about the “inhabitants of the Russian Reich” (nearly the entirely purpose of this website is to reveal the existence of an anti-Putinist Russia and non-Putinist Russia to the outside world and prove these other Russias are far larger than the pro-regime Russian and western media would lead you think) and remind him that, under international law, there is no such thing as collective guilt (and, thus, collective punishment has been deemed illegal), it is quite true the Putin regime and its running dogs in the mainstream Russian media have been working overtime these past eighteen years to muddle, “nazify,” and render utterly cynical the minds of Russia’s media consumers, who are in no way seen as “citizens” with free wills and their own, perhaps dissenting viewpoints by the Kremlin and its media lackeys, but precisely as mindless consumers of disinformation, agitprop, and unfiltered hate speech who will believe anything you tell them, even if the thing you tell them today directly gainsays what you told them yesterday.

For example, anyone on the ground here in Russia would have been hard pressed not to notice the sheer amount of schoolyard racism directed at President Obama by the Russian press, certain Russian politicians, and grassroots enthusiasts of the regime and its methods for degrading the Russian mind.

Yet, during nearly his entire eight years in office, Obama and the country he led were invariably identified as “our partners” by President Putin, other leading Russian politicians, news presenters, and the emcees of political TV talk shows. It was another thing that this phrase, “our partners,” was almost always uttered with a knowing, cynical wink or slight, sinister smile, a signal to the home viewers that meant, “You and I, dear viewers, are not so stupid to really imagine they are really our partners. We know we hate them (or should hate them) with a burning passion, but we have to keep our cards hidden from those louts until it is too late for them to do anything about it.” // TRR

TV Party Tonight!

Nothing spices up a TV party in Moscow or Vladivostok like sukhariki (oven-toasted stale bread strips), bounteously lathered in Novichok cold-pressed, KGB-recommended “ecological” sunflower oil.

“Yakushev Ecofarm: Product for a Long Life. Limited series. Novichok cold-pressed sunflower oil. Special taste. Recommended by the USSR KGB.”

If stale bread laced with Novichok is not enough to push you over the edge of cynicism, you can watch NTV’s latest pack of lies, “Dangerous Network,” a thirty-minute legally actionable slander fest about our antifascist comrades from Penza and Petersburg who have been arrested and tortured by the FSB (the ex-KGB whose seal Novichok sunflower oil bears so proudly) for their non-involvement in a fictitious “terrorist network,” codenamed The Network, and about the lawyers and human rights activists who have been defending them.

If you had ever wondered what Nazi Germany would have been like it if had television, you need look no further than Russia’s NTV and its odious series of hit jobs on everything and anyone that sticks their head above the weeds in the Motherland.

https://www.ntv.ru/peredacha/proisschestvie/m4001/o494876

If I were you I’d just skip the NTV mockumentary and slug down a whole bottle of Novichok cold-pressed KGB-approved sunflower oil. It will wash out innards real good, and it might not even kill you in the process. // TRR

Thanks to Ben Neal, Mark Teeter et al., for the heads-up.