The BBC reports that yesterday Russians celebrated "Unity Day." The Beeb explains: "The Day of People's Unity was created last year after the parliament scrapped the 7 November public holiday marking the 1917 Bolshevik uprising. The new 4 November holiday marks the end of Polish occupation in 1612. Moscow's liberation from Polish invaders was achieved in 1612 by a volunteer army raised by a prince and a merchant from the city of Nizhny Novgorod." According to the Beeb, not only do "polls show only 8% could name the new holiday, while more than 60% opposed dropping Revolution Day" but the new holiday was seized upon last year by racist fanatics to launch public demonstrations against foreigners in Russia.

The BBC further reports that this year, an a classic manifestation of utter, fundamental failure, Moscow 's mayor banned all public demonstrations on Unity Day by the fascist groups (the classic, neo-Soviet way of achieving "unity" -- and when that doesn't work, you just shoot them) , and they marched anyway! And not only that but, led by crazed ultranationlist Alexander Belov, they drew four times as many people as supported the anti-fascist counterprotest led by liberal champion Svetlana Gannushkina.

The equally classically idiotic Russian blogger Russian Dilettante ignores all this, and castigates the Beeb for mischaracterizing the Russian holiday. He writes:

I was referring to this in the previous entry. Now, an aside. The BBC reports that "the new holiday [Nov. 4] marks the end of Polish occupation in 1612." I suppose some Russians think so along with the BBC. Yet "the end of Polish occupation" is too vague and inclusive to be acceptable.What ended on or about that day in 1612 was the occupation of Moscow (though not its Kremlin, yet) by a joint force of Polish irregulars and unruly Russian Cossacks. The force that recaptured Moscow was the so-called Second Militia led by prince Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin, a merchant from Nizhny Novgorod, together with Cossacks commanded by prince Trubetskoy. The Second Militia was not a regular army, non-existent in pre-Petrine Russia: it had been formed and financed by Russians desperately hoping to end the civil war and foreign invasion known as the Time of Troubles (1607-1613). Kuzma Minin had led the fundraising drive, donating all his possessions to the militia. That grassroot movement aimed to restore order and peace to Russian lands above all. A military victory over Poland and Sweden would only possible after that. (Indeed, the regular Polish army captured Smolensk in 1612 and held to it until 1654.) As the Moscow throne was vacant, the Russian mind put installing a legitimate tsar on the top of its priority list, and indeed, a new tsar (Mikhail, the first of the Romanovs) was elected in 1613.

Often, Russian incompetence, particularly when fueled by anything having to do with nationalism, is so extreme that its almost impossible to decide whether it is mere incompetence or actual malevolence and propaganda. The link given by RD is to the second BBC story mentioned above, not the first. Not only does the first include the November 4 date which RD puts in brackets and thus implies was omitted, but it also includes an explanation of the holiday as the result of volunteer action, which RD claims it omitted out of apparent igorance.

But that's only the beginning. The prior post to which RD was referring is a one-sentence wonder in which he states cryptically: "Let us pray that no blood be spilt tomorrow in and under the streets of Moscow." He then apparently realized that nobody had the slightest idea what he was talking about (including Russians, 92% of whom have no idea what the holiday is for), resulting in the post quoted above. So although he's praying for the absence of blood one minute, the next he's fueling the nationalism issue by ignoring the total lack of support for the anti-fascists reported by the BBC and focussing on some anal-retentive concept of Russian history that he needs to lecture us about, and ending up praising the celebration of something that happened 400 years ago and nobody cares about. Meanwhile, there is no national holiday for the victims of Soviet repression.

And so it goes in Russia.