Annals of "Pacified" Chechnya: Exploding Buses
The Beeb reports:
At least seven people have been killed in an explosion on a bus in the southern Russian city of Togliatti. More than 20 others were injured by the blast. The governor of the Samara region said the attack was being treated as a "terrorist" act. Security officials say an explosive device may have been fixed to the vehicle, or carried on board. It was the second blast on a bus in Russia in just over a week, following an explosion in Dagestan province
The Associated Press says:
A bomb exploded in a passenger bus Wednesday morning in central Russia, killing eight people and injuring 48, officials said. Investigators were trying to determine whether the explosive device was carried by a passenger or had been planted somewhere inside or beneath the bus, according to Russian news agencies. The explosion occurred at a busy intersection near a bus stop in the center of town as people were going to work. Valery Matkovsky, a local emergency official, said that eight people were killed and 48 injured. It was not clear whether the injured included people who had not been on the bus. Andrei Derbenev, a spokesman for the Togliatti rescue service, told the ITAR-Tass agency that the blast was so powerful that windows on nearby residential buildings shattered. Togliatti is a city on the Volga River known as the headquarters of AvtoVAZ, Russia's largest carmaker.
Given the shameless cowardice displayed by the people of Russia as these events continue yet they favor Putin with 70% plus approval ratings, Putin may be delighted with the attacks. They don't harm his popularity, and provide a perfect excuse for still more draconian crackdowns on Russian civil rights and liberties. The people of Russia have made their bloody bed.
4 comments:
Dear Ma'am,
I can't quite understand your words about "shameless cowardice displayed by the people of Russia". Do you really mean that they fear Putin more than possible death as a result of acts of terror?
That's one aspect of Russian cowardice. Just as in Stalin's time, the people of Russia are afraid to challenge Putin's obviously failed government, preferring instead to take the consequences (Stalin made a secret deal with Hitler, stabbing Russia's allies in the back, and then Russia was invaded by Hitler; Stalin himself murdered more Russians than Hitler ever dreamed of doing).
But Russians have shown cowardice in many other ways, for instance failing to demand justice for Anna Politikovskaya.
and just as in stalins time, the leadership (putin) is bribing the leaders with special treatments. does anyone think that these people dont have
most dont realize that it wasnt as easy as 'prefering consequences", when the consequences so dire were right in frong of you.
most, even those who want to, have a hard time understanding soviet byt.
go back and remember the wives of the people we are talking about, for they (as utley points out) are the ones that drove the men! that often the men who were sent to the gulag were forced to confess becvause they would say that they would go after the wife. and the wifes were just as social concious and desirous ofthings as any woman in the west. ask an older person about the women boasting as to the "distributor" they have.
does anyone doubt that they still exist? maybe not as much in the open, but that such freebies and perks outside of salaries are not being offered?
[on the hitler stalin thing most dont rememer the works then, or have read them. lennin envisioned a revolution that would sweep the world, but it never came. and their actions were such that they were banking on the revolition in an industrial country, specifically germany, to make avaliable the tools and expertise of industry. down side was that stalin was at odds with himself. he would get equipment, but the technical people were killed or removed... so the equipment would fail. it was that kind of thing that brought much misery)
look up Kremlovsky - they were the tops... they were what we or rather the russian people refer to as siloviki.
below them back then were the shops for the obpu... i would suspect that similar still exist in some form...
then came Gort A, and Gort B..
i would guess that these are whats missing now...
when you read the old stories of the dissillusioned that left the west to live there, you learn an aweful lot of what was really going on at the grainy level.
from their you can then see that the forces are the same..
in this case, the priveledges and the distance between them are key. in the west perks are nice, but they are not generally the choices between luxury without remuneration or concern, and starvation with its hyperconcern.
its very hard, at least for me, to sweepingly say they are cowards, as the extreme levels that the game is being played at are not at all like the west. most westerners who get up and join some small protest even spontaneously, do not worry about the context of it spanning their whole life (asking what if things change again).
in the west, a person can go to school in soviet russia, and end up a black woman high in the government (condolezza rice).
in the east, even the association with someone, or a comment made in youth, can come back to haunt one. they will not change that, till they haev some deep idea that things are going to be ok, and that what they say now, will not result in them being deemed enemies of the state 20 years later.
in fact, this lack is more a testimony to their sense of whats really happening than to their cowardice. while russian and pedro and other confidentlhy act EXACTLY like the westerners visiting stalin in the 1920s and early 30s... the people living in the fish bowl are acting not as one would expect if things are as they say, but as one would expect if they were different and a false front was being put up...
as it was in the past.
What "Russia's allies" Stalin stabbed in the back by signing a nonagression pact with Germany? N.Chamberlain's Britain and Daladier's France who had just betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Munich? Maybe Stalin was a tyrant but he was not a fool to repeat the tragic experience of the Entente which, as Lloyd-George said, "abandoned Russia to her fate" during the World War I. It is no secret that Chamberlain and Co. wanted to direct Hitler's aggression to the East (against the USSR), but Stalin and Molotov managed to direct it to the West against Britain and France) and to gain a bridgehead against Germany (the Baltic territories, West Ukraine, West Byelorussia and Moldavia) which helped to absorb Hitler's blow in 1941. By all standards, it is a spectacular diplomatic success that predetermined the victory of the USSR in World War II.
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