Police in Nizhny Novgorod have arrested a man who shot dead two pet parrots after his wife refused to buy him beer, news agencies reported.When his wife refused to go to the shop, the man became enraged, seized an air pistol and opened fire on the two birds, which were inside a cage, Interfax reported, citing a regional police official. No humans were harmed in the incident.

-- Moscow Times, July 18 2008

Russia is an insane country where, as in the mafia, people really believe they can simply demand respect rather than earning it, killing anyone who fails to deliver, and the above news item perfectly encapsulates that insanity. Both Tsarist Russia and Communist Russia collapsed, in the space of just one century, because of this crazy, self-destructive obliviousness to reality. There are others, too many others to count.

Last week for instance there were dozens of news stories about a contest now underway on state-sponsored Russian TV to identify Russia's greatest historical figure. In internet voting, Russians were having great difficulty deciding who their #1 choice was -- the dictator Nicholas II or the mass-murdering dictator Josef Stalin. When voting was suspended "for technical reasons" on Wednesday, Nicholas II had received 275,065 votes and Stalin had 273,877 votes. In the third place was Vladimir Lenin with a paltry 188,372 votes. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Stalin took an early and large lead in the contest but was narrowly overtaken by Nicholas II on Monday as thousands of monarchists and anti-communists organized an anti-Stalin 'clickathon.' Nikolai Lukyanov, chairman of a large monarchist group, said a Stalin victory would shame Russia internationally. He said the 'clickathon' was organized to show that Russians 'are no lover of Stalin, disgrace and blood.'"

In effect, though, Lukhyanov was lying. The "clickathon" was organized to hide the fact that Russians love Stalin, disgrace and blood, not to alter that reality. Russia's leading opposition politician, the Communist Party's Gennady Zyuganov, stated proudly that if Stalin were back in charge of the country he could solve it's problems "in one day." Imagine Germany's main opposition leader saying that about Hitler.

We believe it's clear that the online voting dramatically understates Stalin's popularity in Russia, and not only because of Lukyanov's manipulation of the vote (a measure Stalin would have, ironically, heartily approved). Only about 10% of Russia's population has any access to the Internet, and those who can routinely utilize it are few and far between. Netherlands, a tiny country nearly 1/10 Russia's size, has almost as many Internet users. So in other words, no internet vote can accurately capture the true attitudes of the people of Russia.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, and as we have routinely done: "New textbooks hail Stalin as an effective manager, and TV documentaries stress his achievements and alleged selflessness." In the Russian people's defense, one might point out that they simply don't know that Stalin's "victory" in World War II, the main reason he receives such adulation, has a few dirty secrets:

• Stalin caused the war in the first place

• Though "defeated" the Nazi army obliterated huge swaths of Russia, hobbling it forever

• As bad as the Nazi army was, Stalin was far worse, murdering more Russians in his "gulag archipelago" than Hitler ever dreamed of doing. The Wall Street Journal reported: "Sergey Kovalyov, a former dissident who spent seven years in Soviet labor camps and three years in internal exile in Siberia, said the popularity of Stalin was "very sad. How many people did he take away?" said Mr. Kovalyov, his voice trailing off.
  

But in the end, the Russian people's jaw-droppingly barbaric ignorance of their own history is their own fault. They chose to look the other way at Stalin's atrocities while they were happening. They either watched passively as their neighbors were taken away or they collaborated and informed on them, rather than rising up to strike down Stalin as they had done with Hitler. They willingly allowed Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, to take and hold permanent dictatorial power even after watching that same organization break Russia's spine and drive it to its knees.

Indeed, given the Stalin vote it's not hard to understand why Putin himself remains so popular in Russia.

Reuters reports:

A Russian court has banned a book about Adolf Hitler by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, saying quotes attributed to the Nazi leader insult Russians and Jews, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Under anti-extremism laws the court banned the 1953 book "Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944", which records Hitler's sometimes racist ramblings on a wide range of topics.

Trevor-Roper, Regis professor of history at Oxford University between 1957 and 1980, wrote what is considered one of the classic accounts of the fall of Nazi Germany: "The Last Days of Hitler".

Russia's Prosecutor-General said in a statement that texts published in "Hitler's Table Talk" are of "an anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic character".

"A host of statements by A. Hitler in the book insult the dignity of Russian and Jewish peoples who are presented in quotes as inferior and primitive people because of their nationality."

The Prosecutor-General said certain Hitler quotes in the book -- such as "Russians are beasts," "Slavs are a mass of inborn slaves" -- had caused offence.

The book will now be put on a national list of extremist works that are banned and owning or distributing it would then be illegal.

Trevor-Roper, one of the leading scholars of his generation, became Lord Dacre after being made a life peer in 1987. He died in 2003.

Initially an expert on the 16th and 17th centuries, he drew on information gained while serving as an intelligence officer in World War Two to write "The Last Days of Hitler", considered a classic of Hitler scholarship.

His reputation took a knock in 1983 when he was briefly taken in by diaries purportedly written by Hitler that turned out to be forgeries.

The International Herald Tribune reports:

Nina Khrushcheva [shown above], the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who boasted that the Soviet Union would catch up with and overtake the United States, has a different model for post-Soviet Russians making their way in the Western world: the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov [the statute in the picture], the émigré writer who became a giant in the West decades before being acknowledged in Russia.

The Moscow publisher Vremya recently released her book, "V Gostiakh U Nabokova," or "Visiting Nabokov," first published in English in 2007 by Yale University Press as "Imagining Nabokov," a slightly different version. Khrushcheva was in Moscow in June, lecturing on individual freedom and national identity, which are at the heart of her book.

Freedom, as it was understood during the Putin era, was the antithesis of Nabokov's own understanding of the term, Khrushcheva said in an interview.

"I think Putin stops at Dostoyevsky," she said, musing on whether Vladimir Putin had read Nabokov. "I think Nabokov would be very threatening to his whole worldview. He doesn't really provide for any exceptionalism and sovereign democracy."

"The 'American' Nabokov of the second half of the twentieth century is the most important cultural and literary phenomenon for Russia in the first half of the twenty-first," writes Khrushcheva in the book.

Both editions deconstruct "Pnin," "Pale Fire," "Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle" and other works by Nabokov as breaking with the Russian literary tradition of suffering epitomized by Gogol and Dostoyevsky and nurtured by fatalistic, submissive Russian Orthodox culture.

Nabokov depicts characters who "take responsibility for their own lives," Khrushcheva writes.

"He is our textbook, and our road map for today's transitional period from a closed and communal terrain to its Western alternative, one open and competitive," she continues. "How to survive and succeed in this Western world, which Russia always deemed linear, cold and calculating: this is what the art of Vladimir Nabokov teaches us."

Khrushcheva dedicates "Imagining Nabokov" to Andrei Sinyavsky, the Soviet dissident author who wrote under the pen name Abram Tertz. His essay "Strolls With Pushkin," written in prison camp and shocking at the time, is an irreverent take on Russia's god of literary gods.

Likewise, "Imagining Nabokov" and its Russian counterpart, "Visiting Nabokov," are far from dry literary analyses. Khrushcheva converses with the statue of Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland. He comes alive and responds, citing passages from his works.

In June, Ex Libris, the literary supplement of the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, praised the "amazing lightness and sincerity" of "Visiting Nabokov." Khrushcheva has also been taken to task, on the basis of her ancestry, for daring to approach Nabokov.

Nabokov was forced out of Bolshevik Russia and fled Nazi Europe for America, where he realized his passion for butterflies as an entomologist at Harvard and taught literature at Cornell University. He then returned to Europe and settled in a hotel in Montreux.

"Nabokov showed others how to live now - in a world with open borders, among different people, different cultures," writes Khrushcheva. "He showed us how to live in the new solitude of multiple worlds."

She recalls her repellant introduction to Nabokov - a cardboard-bound, carbon copy, or samizdat, of "Lolita" that was furtively passed around - but then describes how she grew to identify with his writing.

In 1991, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Khrushcheva went to the United States, where she earned a degree in comparative literature at Princeton University. She now teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. At a 1999 exhibition at the New York Public Library, "Nabokov Under Glass," honoring the 100th anniversary of his birth, the writer's notebooks, with their constant, organic interchange between Russian and English, captivated Khrushcheva.

"Those who live in several languages know, and at times can almost sense, how their minds wander not between words but between worlds," she writes of the experience, so close to her own. "Nabokov is me!"

Nabokov, who as a member of the well-educated Russian gentry was trilingual, wrote his first works in Russian, then switched to English and translated some of his own books, including "Lolita."

In a Nabokovian twist, Khrushcheva wrote her books in parallel - in English and Russian - with some variation based on cultural context. The conversations with the statue of Nabokov in the English-language version were jarring to her American editor and moved up closer to the beginning of the book, where they were explained, said Khrushcheva, while the Russian editor had no problem with the long passages quoting Nabokov in English.

In "Imagining Nabokov," her literary and political interests have converged. Khrushcheva lectured on the book last month in London at the Royal Society of Arts and Pushkin House.

Khrushcheva outlines the way responses to Nabokov changed under Vladimir Putin's presidency. In 2001, she taught a course called "Nabokov and Us" at Moscow State University and found that the "post-postcommunist new-century kids" in her class had wholeheartedly embraced Nabokov's worldview, calling him "our Pushkin."

By 2006, she writes, young listeners at her lecture at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg responded by downplaying Nabokov's social and political significance, saying that Russia was strong enough to find its own way.

But there are signs of a new openness to Nabokov. Elena Nemirovskaya, the founder and director of the Moscow School of Political Studies, which runs seminars about civil society, was impressed by Khrushcheva's book and invited her to lecture there on June 12, Russia's independence day.

"This book shows that through the wonderful language of Nabokov, the modern embodiment of genius of the Russian language, we can read how language forms identity," Nemirovskaya said.

Nabokov's transition from Russian to English marked a quest for personal responsibility, she added. "I make a choice and I want to realize my freedom and answer for it."

Nabokov, after years of writing in English, compared his Russian language to "frozen strawberries."

Sergei Sulimsky, a Moscow-born lawyer and Nabokov enthusiast who is based in London and commutes between the two cities, wrote by e-mail: "The taste of the frozen strawberry on the tip of my tongue still keeps me going as distinctively Russian through my English odyssey and helps me to feel not as conspicuous reading a Penguin paperback of 'Ada' on the Moscow underground.

"Nabokov taught us how to remain Russian without Russia."

The blogger at TakeYourCross refers us to Andrei Piontovosky, persecuted neo-Soviet dissident, Russian political scientist and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., writing in the New York Sun:

Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 such cycles since the reign of Tsar Ivan III.

In the past, however, Russia's sharp anti-Western turns were reversed — usually out of simple necessity — after relations reached rock bottom. Not this time. On the contrary, the deterioration of the relationship nowadays has developed a momentum of its own.

There are four reasons for this. First, the "loss" of the Cold War, and with it imperial and superpower status, has created a deep and so far unresolved crisis in the collective mentality of Russia's political class. Russian leaders continue to perceive the West as a phantom enemy in opposition to which all the traditional mythologies of Russian foreign policy are being resurrected.

Second, by the end of Vladimir Putin's second presidential term, Russia's modernizing dreams had been shattered. Modernization, indeed, simply turned out to be yet another redistribution of property to those on top, particularly those who came out of the St. Petersburg mayoral office and the Federal Security Bureau. The image of the West as an enemy has become the only ideological excuse for Mr. Putin's model of the corporate state.

Third, the soaring price of oil has made the Kremlin's inhabitants believe that they are all-powerful. Today's Russia, which thinks of itself as a "great energy state," laughs at its previous meager desire to catch up with little Portugal in terms of living standards.

Finally, a series of Western mistakes and misfortunes, a crisis in transatlantic relations, lack of leadership, and the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism — in both the Middle East and Europe — have led Russian leaders to believe that the West is a sinking ship, to be abandoned as soon as possible.

While this belief unfortunately does have some validity, it requires one very important caveat: Russia is part of that ship. Russia can make advances to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and it can remind the Arab world that the Soviet Union helped it develop and offered it protection in the United Nations Security Council.

But in the eyes of Islamic extremists, Russia is part of the West — indeed, its most vulnerable part. Thus, it is Russia, with a soaring birth rate among its Muslim citizens that is the most attractive for expansion and take-over.

But Russia's self-destructive confrontation with the West can be halted, and its centuries-old debate between Westernizers and the Slavophiles put to rest once and for all. This, however, will depend on Ukraine's success on the path of European development it chose in the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005.

Ukraine does, indeed, present a threat, but not to Russia's security, as Kremlin propagandists claim. The real threat is to the Putin model of a corporate, authoritarian state, unfriendly to the West. For the Kremlin's occupants, it is a matter of life and death that countries that were once part of the Soviet Union but chose a different model of development — Ukraine being the chief example — should never become attractive to ordinary Russians.

The example posed by the Baltic nations does not threaten the Kremlin much, because they are perceived as foreign to the Russian psyche. Indeed, in Soviet films, Baltic actors were usually cast in the roles of Nazi generals and American spies. Ukrainians, on the other hand, are close to us in their culture and mentality. If they made a different choice, why can't we do the same?

Ukraine's success will mark the political death of Putinism, that squalid philosophy of "KGB Capitalists." If Ukraine succeeds in its European choice, if it is able to make it work, it can settle the question that has bedeviled Russian culture for centuries — Russia or the West? So the best way to help Russia today is to support Ukraine's claim that it belongs to Europe and its institutions. This will influence Russia's political mentality more than anything else.

For if Russia's anti-Western paranoia continues and the Kremlin's Eurasian fantasy of allying with China lasts another 10-15 years, Russia will end up seeing China swallowing its Far East and Siberia. Indeed, the weakened Russia that will be Mr. Putin's legacy will then also lose the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region to their growing Muslim populations.

The remaining Russian lands would then have no other choice but to attach themselves to Ukraine, which should by then have become a successful member of the European Union.

After 1,000 years, Russia will have come full circle, returning to Kievan Rus after wandering on the roads of the Mongol hordes, empire, communism, and farcical Putinism.

So Russia now has a choice: Ukrainian plan A or Ukrainian plan B.

Proving once again that it is the world leader in covering the rise of the neo-Soviet state, the brilliant Washington Post published an op-ed on Sunday by the terrific and courageous Russian journalist Yulia Latynina, often featured on this blog. The successor to Anna Politkokvskaya, Latynina is one of the last free voice of dissent in the Russian media, and the Post pokes dictator Vladimir Putin right in the eye by publishing her (a short while ago it published another feature op-ed by dissident leader Oleg Kozlovsky).

On Nov. 9, 2007, during a special operation in the village of Chemulga, in the republic of Ingushetia, Russian special forces shot and killed an individual by the name of Rakhim Amriyev. Eyewitnesses said that they shot him in the head and placed an automatic rifle beside his body. Then, as dozens of villagers who had run out of their homes looked on, the troops used an armored personnel carrier to demolish a wall of the one-room house where Amriyev lived and announced that he had died in a shootout.

You may ask how I can be sure that things happened this way -- that Amriyev didn't fire back, that he wasn't a terrorist and that the automatic rifle was planted. I'm absolutely certain -- because Rakhim Amriyev was 6 years old.

The most striking thing about everyday life in the Russia of Vladimir Putin (and make no mistake, it is Putin's Russia, despite the election of a new president, hand-picked by the great man) is the incredible corruption of the courts, the police, the special forces -- all the institutions that are supposed to uphold law and order in a democracy and that in Russia today have been transformed into a cancer that's devouring the state. Consider these further examples:

On May 20, 2005, in Moscow, a car driven by the son of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov struck and killed 68-year-old Svetlana Beridze as she crossed the street. Beridze, who was in the crosswalk, was hit with such force that she was thrown high into the air and the keys in her handbag were crushed. No criminal charges were brought against the minister's son, who, his father publicly stated, had "experienced physical and emotional suffering" as a result of the accident. Instead, in what appeared to be an effort to intimidate the dead woman's family, authorities opened a criminal investigation against her son-in-law, for allegedly assaulting the minister's son.

Last Sept. 10, Muscovite Natalia Trufanova was driving to her dacha with her family in her old Zhiguli when a motorcade carrying Supreme Court President Vyacheslav Lebedev came speeding down the road toward them, driving in her lane. One of the vehicles in the motorcade tore through Trufanova's car. Eyewitnesses reported that the head of the Supreme Court kept going, leaving it to his underlings to comb through the bodies and the heap of twisted metal. Without batting an eye, the police declared that Trufanova had "driven into the oncoming lane," which meant that, if she survived, she could be brought to trial. When angry witnesses started posting video on the Web clearly showing that it was the motorcade that was driving in the wrong lane, the lead investigator looking into the accident said that he didn't have access to the Internet.

On a rainy September evening a week after Natalia Trufanova fell under the wheel of justice, I witnessed an accident on Moscow's government thoroughfare -- the famous Kutuzovsky Prospect. A silver Lexus, traveling at what looked to be about 90 miles an hour, flew out of the far left lane and crossed four lanes of oncoming traffic, crashing into several cars. As I drove past the scene of the accident, the wind blew bits of crushed metal, pieces of cloth and broken glass along the asphalt; bodies still sat in some of the cars. Within the hour, I learned that the driver of the Lexus was a 27-year-old woman with no known occupation; with her in the car was a deputy minister of economic development.

I learned this from a mutual friend (of mine and the deputy minister's) named Pavel, who had rushed to the scene. The minister was already dead; the young woman was in a daze, due to either pain or drugs. A police sergeant, cheerfully surveying the pile of bodies the girl had left in her wake, asked Pavel in the most businesslike fashion: "So, how are we going to solve this problem?" Apparently they "solved the problem" -- they didn't even bring charges against the woman.

Strange but true: It's not only ministers, their wives and their children -- as well as their lovers -- who are going unpunished, but also high-priced prostitutes, high on cocaine, with important addresses in their little black books.

Crime in Russia is hardly being investigated. In May of last year, the body of 4-year-old Nastia Mokryakova, her throat slit, was found in the woods outside Moscow. What do you think the police told the news media? "The child got lost and died of exposure." A month later, in the Moscow suburb of Tomilino, some maniac strangled 10-year-old Nastia Butenkova, and the first thing the police did was to say that the girl, who'd been found on a staircase with her pants pulled down around her ankles, may have caused her own suffocation. (A public outcry ultimately led to an investigation of both murders.)

It's not as though this unwillingness to investigate is limited to crimes whose victims are poor. On Dec. 6, 2007, Oleg Zhukovsky, a prominent banker who worked with major clients of the state-run bank VTB, was apparently killed in his suburban dacha. The killers reportedly tied the victim's hands behind his back, put a plastic bag over his head and threw him into the pool. Before killing him, they apparently forced him to write a suicide note. "Suicide!" the police promptly declared. It's hard to believe, but their unwillingness to investigate the death of a high-ranking banker had nothing to do with politics or the state. The police simply can't be bothered.

Of course, there are some crimes that the police do investigate. They accused an acquaintance of mine of giving $20 million to the leader of the Chechen terrorists. Another person I know was accused of trying to privatize the air space above the Arctic Ocean. Of a third, a prosecutor wrote that his bank was trying to foment a revolution and overthrow Putin. These three suspects all had something in common: They are on the Russian Forbes 100 list.

A fourth acquaintance of mine isn't on that list. He was simply building a highrise in the southern city of Makhachkala. The local prosecutor telephoned and asked him what discount he'd give him on an apartment in the building. "Twenty percent," my acquaintance replied. The prosecutor thereupon ordered an investigation that turned the man's company upside down, then called again and demanded a 50 percent discount.

Is this the legacy of the Soviet past? Not at all. In the Soviet Union, criminals were thrown into prison along with the dissidents. Is it the legacy of former president Boris Yeltsin? There was nothing like this under Yeltsin.

This is the distinctive nature of the Putin regime.

Under Putin, the Russian businessman has been transformed into game being hunted by people in epaulets. Who was the first victim of this hunt? Oil company executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for tax evasion in 2005, and his company, Yukos, which the government dismantled and sold off after his arrest. Who was the hunter? Then-president Putin.

The right to commit crime has become part of official privilege. If the victim doesn't raise a fuss, no one is punished. If the victim appeals to the public, he or she is harshly punished. The very fact of appealing to the public is perceived as a challenge to the regime. But who laid down these rules of the game? Who never punishes his friends? Putin.

In the republic of Ingushetia, death squads are executing people. They're being shot in front of witnesses, in crowded places, in market squares, at bus stops, and then weapons are being planted on them and they're being photographed as dead "terrorists." In some instances, the crowd has shielded the intended victims. In others, the local Ingush police have nearly beaten the Russian executioners to death. Who's being killed? Those on the so-called Wahhabi lists. These lists were compiled at the order of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) soon after the Moscow theater massacre of 2002, in which Chechen terrorists took an audience hostage and 130 people died when Russian special forces stormed the theater.

But who ordered these lists to be drawn up? Who would think, to stop the problem of terrorism in the northern Caucasus from spreading, of executing fundamentalist Muslims wholesale, simply for their convictions, not for any crimes that they may have committed? Such an order couldn't have been given without Putin's knowledge. In the 1970s, then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir had those who had taken part in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics annihilated. But since the Moscow theater incident, Putin has gone her one better -- he has even wiped out people who had nothing to do with it.

Each such execution, however, has created more terrorists than it has eliminated, and for all intents and purposes, Russia has lost control of Ingushetia -- the only republic where authorities have fully followed the execution order. Who will dare to inform the great Putin, the former KGB man, the courageous hero, who happily sits for photographs in the cockpit of a fighter plane and poses bare-chested on a fishing trip?

In the West, people read that Putin has restored Russia's power and strengthened the ruling hierarchy. This is the image that the PR agencies he has hired are trying to project. There may not be democracy in Putin's Russia, they say, but there is order.

Don't buy it. The Russian authorities aren't in control of the country -- unless we consider their ability to throw any businessman in prison and seize his company to be control. And yet these guys really think they're strong -- and that the measure of a ruler's strength is the amount of cash in his bank accounts.

The Economist reports:

FEW things symbolised the Soviet attitude to truth more than the Katyn massacre: having shot 20,000 Polish officers in cold blood, the Kremlin then blamed it on the Nazis. And few things symbolise better modern Russia's lingering clinch with the Soviet past than the failure by relatives of the victims to get justice from the Russian legal system.

Last month a court in Moscow rejected a request to hear a case on two issues: the declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial rehabilitation of the victims. That was shocking (imagine a German court telling Holocaust survivors that Auschwitz files were a military secret). But the Katyn relatives want to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and for that other legal avenues must be exhausted first.

Last week, however, an appeal court overturned the lower court's ruling and ordered it to hear the case. Other signals coming from the top, including an interview given to a Polish newspaper by an adviser to former President Vladimir Putin who called Katyn a “political crime”, suggest that the Russians are changing their attitude. One risk for them is a defeat at Strasbourg. Another is the effect on public opinion of a new film, “Katyn”, by Andrzej Wajda, Poland's best-known director, that is filling cinemas in the West and in Russia.

Yet the signals remain mixed. Plenty of Russians still argue that Katyn has been exaggerated by the Poles. Some mainstream media have resurrected Soviet-era falsifications. In Russia's ally, Belarus, the defence ministry's magazine says that the whole thing is a slanderous plot to defame the heroic anti-fascist struggle. Another Moscow court recently brushed aside an attempt by Memorial, a Russian human-rights group, to declassify the Katyn files.

The relatives pursuing cases over Katyn insist that they do not want financial compensation from the Russians. “It is about honour and justice,” says Ireneusz Kaminski, a Cracow law professor who has masterminded their campaign. If Russia's new leadership wants to distance itself from the revisionist Soviet nostalgia of recent times, coming clean about Katyn would be a good start.

Yesterday (Thursday June 12th) was a holiday in Russia. As Russian Boris Kagarlitsky explained in the Moscow Times: "First it was called Independence Day in 1991, then, in 1994, it was renamed the Day of the Declaration of the Sovereignty of the Russian Federation, and finally, in 2002, Putin again renamed it Russia Day. On this date in 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Russian Republic adopted a declaration of independence from the Soviet Union."

Kagarlitsky asks an excellent question: "Can you imagine if Britain were to celebrate its independence from India, as if Britain had finally freed itself from India's 200-year yoke?" Because, of course, it wasn't Russia that was the slave of the USSR it was the USSR, and all small constituent states that comprised it, that were the slaves of Russia. "Independence Day" is basically just a massive PR gambit to hide this fact from the prying eyes of anyone who might be interested, to try to sweep Russian oppression during Soviet times of places like Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus under the table, to suggest that Russia was as much victimized by the USSR as anyone.

That's the same outrageous lie that Russians tell about the Ukrainian holocaust that occurred under the rule of Josef Stalin, as we reported earlier this week. Russians pretend that they too perished by the millions from starvation inflicted willfully by Stalin, but they didn't.

And what do we see today? We see a relentless effort by Russia to reacquire domination over its former Soviet slaves states. Time after time, Russia meddles in local elections, and it is menacing Georgia with military provocation that could explode into war at any moment.

Besides that, as Kagarlitsky points out, Russians suddenly realized the implication of their holiday: "After all, the basic idea of the country's newfound independence implied that Russia, as one of the great European nations, had become a state only 20 years ago; this was something too denigrating to imagine for many Russians." And it gets worse: "For some people, June 12 signifies a tragedy because it marks the end of a glorious Soviet era."

The result? Kagarlitsky concludes: "This kind of ambiguity reflects the overall condition in which Russia finds itself today. Despite the current economic boom, the ruling elite cannot find a common national idea or set of values that are able to unite society. Worse, economic growth has actually increased the country's internal divisions and social stratification -- even more so than during the economic stagnation of the 1990s."

In other words, situation normal in Russia: All fouled up. Russia is supposedly a new country, yet it is run by a proud KGB spy who won't give up power, it's national anthem remains the same, and it won't even celebrate the demise of the USSR. In fact, it may weep over it, and it is doing all it can to whip up a new cold war with the West.

NOTE: The Moscow Times continues its deplorable custom of honoring these sham holidays by ceasing publication. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Dave Essel writes:

From de Custine onwards, writing about one's visit to Russia has been something of a little literary industry. Such books appear with extraordinary regularity. And they all have something in common: no one, to my knowledge, has ever returned from Russia and written a book with rave reviews expressing the opinion that one should move there pronto to enjoy a taste of heaven on earth or perhaps just a decent life. It doesn't even matter whether you you are right-wing or left: the great anarchist Emma Goldman, deported to Russia from America in December 1919 came by 1923 to write a book entitled My Disillusionment in Russia. The recent tradition, however, has been for such books to be written by supposed experts such as the Russia correspondents of heavyweight newspapers and so on. I see from the following review in the Economist that there is now a book (Russia, Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People) more along the lines of de Custine's, i.e., written by a non-specialist, this time by English general purpose broadcaster and commentator Jonathan Dimbleby. His conclusions are, of course, the same as all those who preceded him. It certainly joins my list of book to buy and read (time permitting).

Here is the review:

SPENDING time in Russia is a bit like taking the psychotropic anti-malarial drug Lariam: anyone with a propensity to anxiety should probably avoid it. Jonathan Dimbleby, an accomplished British broadcaster, was by his frank admission in a state of considerable emotional turmoil when he travelled from the Arctic city of Murmansk to Vladivostok. The overwhelming landscape and the people who were often so rude did not help his mood, but his responses—awe, horror and frustration—were perhaps more acute as a result.

The ugly authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and Russia's hydrocarbon-fuelled diplomatic bolshiness are now well documented. There are fewer worthwhile accounts of ordinary life across the vast, eccentric Russian continent in the Putin era. Mr Dimbleby's perceptive travelogue is one of them. He describes the spookiness of St Petersburg; the micro-cultures (and pointy shoes) of the Caucasus; the desolation of Beslan; the magic of Tolstoy's country estate; the ludicrously dangerous roads and dreadful hotels. He captures the way Russians are transformed by toasts, the romance of long-distance train rides and the squalor of train stations. He encounters a Karelian witch, a Siberian shaman and wild horses in the Altai mountains. He visits a plush Moscow banya. He drinks a lot of vodka.

Along the way he offers lively summaries of some of the key dramas of Russian history, including the exploration of Siberia, the tragic nobility of the Decembrists and the unspeakable siege of Leningrad. He meets the kind of near-saints that only places with so much bad history can produce: suicidally brave journalists in Samara; campaigning environmentalists in the Urals; a heroic AIDS worker in Irkutsk. They vary what might otherwise have become a dismal parade of villainy.

“We steal,” a Caspian sturgeon poacher says, “and we think nothing of stealing because everyone is stealing.” Mr Dimbleby notes the gangsterism of government at all levels, the brazen rackets and the cradle-to-grave corruption that Russians must negotiate to survive. He nicely portrays the fatal combination of savage indifference on the part of the country's rulers and the enraging fatalism of the ruled. He is perpetually baffled by what, to his Western ears, sound like contradictory attitudes: the Russians he meets are sophisticated, acquisitive and yet cynical to the point of hostility towards democracy. “Crypto-fascist” is his label for the system Mr Putin has built.

Mr Dimbleby loves Russian literature, and he hears Tolstoyan and Gogolian echoes as he travels. But he is not a Russia expert (he undertook the journey for a BBC television series), and makes some mistakes and simplifications, over Chechnya and the Yukos affair, for example. That, however, is also his book's main virtue. His novice's eye sees the moral outrage in everyday injustices—the use of malnourished teenaged conscripts as slave labour, say, or the routine persecution of migrant labourers—to which more practised Russia-watchers are too often desensitised. His disgust is mitigated by the fascination that Russia somehow inspires too, even in the most sceptical visitor.

The always brilliant, ferociously courageous Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

There were a number of noteworthy foreign policy events last week. Mayor Yury Luzhkov announced that Sevastopol is not Ukrainian but Russian territory, and the State Duma came to the defense of Arnold Meri, a former high-ranking official in Estonia's Communist Party who has been charged in Tallinn with genocide for his role in deporting civilians to Siberia following World War II.

We are truly living in a society that suffers from the Russian post-imperial syndrome. But what is most important is what is left after the empire falls.

Consider the Roman and British empires. The subjugated people hated their colonialists and revolted. But when those empires collapsed, it turned out that the vast Roman and British cultural heritage continued to dominate even after the local populations gained independence. The Latin language survived longer, and over a broader territory, than did the Roman Empire itself.

The empires of Genghis Khan and the Ottoman Turks also collapsed, but none of the people they conquered has a kind word for them today. You won't find a Bulgarian or a Serb eager to show you the ruins of Ottoman defensive fortifications on their territories.

True, the Mongols greatly influenced the the civilizations they defeated. For example, before falling to the Mongols, Afghanistan was a prosperous country with major cities and an extensive agricultural system. It was a highly prized territory, one that dozens of would-be conquerors had tried to seize, including Alexander the Great. But after the Mongols razed all the Afghan cities, decimated the population, and destroyed the country's complex irrigation system, Afghanistan was reduced to a country of mountains and barren deserts.

What can the Mongols take pride in today? Where are the gems of science and art that adorn the peoples that fell under their rule? Did the Mongols give them laws? A written language? New rights?

During tsarist times, the Russian Empire followed the example of the Roman and British empires. With all of its cruelty, it conquered the eastern territories and the Caucasus with valor and bravery. Like the Roman Empire, they gave more to their subjects than they managed to seize from them.

The Soviet Union, however, was built more along the lines of the Mongol empire. It ruthlessly destroyed everyone and everything, and the first to fall victim were the Russian nobility, peasantry, merchants and intelligentsia. The Soviet Union left the same legacy in Russia as the Mongols did in Afghanistan -- destruction. None of the former Soviet republics will ever put up monuments to Pavlik Morozov, the mythical 13-year-old Pioneer who was praised for turning in his own father to the authorities. The former Soviet colonies also do not sing the praises to the NKVD, nor have they adopted the Soviet legal code.

Yet the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union represented Russia's last historic opportunity. It could have become an attractive metropolis for surrounding countries, a reliable trade partner or a place where other countries' elite came to study -- just as people from Britain's former empire still come to Oxford and Cambridge. The Soviet Union of Josef Stalin and Lavrenty Beria suffered a crushing defeat, but the Russia of Pushkin and Dostoevsky still had a chance to fill the void. Gogol, though Ukrainian by birth, wrote his masterpieces in Russian. Chechen insurgents who die beneath Russian tanks write poems about the freedom of their people in the Russian language, much like Lermontov before them.

The former KGB thugs who now control the country are stomping Russia's last historical chance into the dirt. They are doing everything to show the world that Russia is led not by civilized, respected leaders, but by a street gang from Lubyanskaya Ploshchad.

After the parade, Medvedev hosted a champagne reception at the Kremlin for veterans. Medvedev has also sent out congratulatory telegrams to the leaders of other former Soviet republics. In his note to Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, Medvedev warned him against any attempt to justify the Nazi crimes and "question the liberating mission of the Soviet Army," the Kremlin said. Many in Ukraine sided with Nazi Germany during the war, and Ukrainian veterans who fought against the Soviets have been recognized and praised under Yushchenko. Putin, for his part, sent out congratulations to the prime ministers of the same countries, and in his telegram to Tbilisi he wished peace and well-being to the Georgian people. Relations with Georgia recently sank to a new low after Moscow increased the number of peacekeepers in Georgia's breakaway republic of Abkhazia, sparking fears of an armed conflict.

Andrei Richter, an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism of Moscow State University, responded in a letter to the editor as follows:

When I read this story, I was reminded of a recent trip to Kiev. While I was there, I picked up a copy of Kyiv This Month magazine only to be stunned by its column titled "History In Brief," which read: "1944 -- Soviet army occupies Ukraine again. In WWII, both German and Soviet armies were responsible for some 7 to 8 million deaths." When I wrote the editor of this magazine, I received a reply referring me to another web page from where this phrase was copied, almost word-for-word. To my surprise, the web page was taken from the official site of the CIA. I wonder what would happen if a Russian official web site wrote about, for example, French history something like this: "1944 -- U.S.-British army invaded Normandy. In WWII both German and Allied troops were responsible for some 600,000 French deaths." Wouldn't that cause uproar in the West? Why do our wartime allies believe they can twist history as they like?

Interestingly, Professor Richter had no interest in asking why Russians themselves believe they can twist their own history as they like. Last week, just for instance, we published Paul Goble's report on yet more evidence of the Kremlin's efforts to whitewash Russia's litany of outrages and glorify the Soviet past. Just click the "history" label at the bottom of this post to see a whole lot more such evidence.

Equally interesting, Professor Richter likewise didn't seem to notice the irony embodied in calling himself a "professor of journalism" in a country that simply doesn't know the meaning of the word. He works for a university that is run by the Kremlin that destroyed Anna Politkovskaya and a whole host of other journalists and has seized control of every major publishing forum in the country. Neither Russian history books nor Russian newspapers or television give Russians the remotest clue about the actual facts of history, either their own or anybody else's, and yet so many Russians, like this poor sap, arrogantly imagine they have the right to sit in judgment based on the ridiculous falsehoods they've been fed since birth.

But back to the point: Which is what, exactly? As we understand it, Professor Richter (who obviously finds expressly himself clearly in writing quite challenging) is saying that he once read in a Ukrainian magazine that Russians killed 7-8 million Ukrainians during the World War II period, roughly as many as the Germans killed when they invaded, and claims this is false. Apparently, that's not what Russian history books say, and according to him there's no chance they could be wrong. Russians, in other words, know the history of Ukraine better than Ukrainians do. Moreover, he believes that this magazine is engaged in some sort of conspiracy with the CIA to foist false information about Russia onto Ukrainians -- apparently, he thinks this is the reason that many Ukrainians hate Russians and want independence from them, something that he apparently thinks is totally unjustified.

But note well, dear reader, that Professor Richter makes no specific mention of the source of his information that these murders did not occur, though he has no problem citing with specificity the sources that outrage him with their alleged CIA propaganda. Is he suggesting that Russians would never murder their allies? Is it just a myth too, then, that after liberating Poland Russia murdered thousands of Polish military officers, in cold blood, in the dark corners of the Katyn forest? Is it also a rude foreign plot that Russians murder Russians, that the dictator Josef Stalin slaughtered at least 20 million of them in his gulag archipelago? Is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic text by that name in reality just a work of fiction?

Apparently, Professor Richter believes that the Ukrainian holocaust called Holodomor (known as the "man-made famine") is also just a frivolous fairytale. Apparently, it makes no difference what the Ukrainians say about it, because they're just dupes of the CIA; nobody in Russia, of course, has been duped by the KGB, and certainly not Professor Richter Moreover, reports that Russian soldiers murdered thousands of political prisoners in their jail cells are similarly based on nothing but CIA lies, as are any claims about political purges of the Ukrainian government by Stalin, such as this one:

Ukraine was among the worst-hit areas. Unlike the purges of 1933, during which opponents of collectivization and Ukrainizers had been purged, in 1937 Stalin decided to liquidate the entire leadership of the Ukrainian Soviet government and the CPU. […] By June 1938 the top seventeen ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet government were arrested and executed. The prime minister, Liubchenko, committed suicide. Almost the entire Central Committee and Politburo of Ukraine perished. An estimated 37% of the Communist party members in Ukraine - about 170,000 people - were purged. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow's new viceroy in Kiev, the Ukrainian party "had been purged spotless."

And reports of similar activity by Russian soldiers in other countries are just as bogus. If Canadian scholars make such allegations, they too are simply stooges of the CIA.

Professor Richter might like to actually go to Ukraine some day, and visit The Museum of the Soviet Occupation in Kiev. As an article in Izvestia pointed out, the net impact of the museum's exhibits is basically to show that Ukraine was better off under the horror of Nazi rule than under the domination of the Russians. The Russian reporter for Izvestia bristles when the Ukrainians dare to blame the atrocities on "Moscow" rather than "Communism" as if Russians were as much victims as Ukrainians -- but if that is so, where are Russia's memorials to the outrages committed by "Communism" in Ukraine? Look hard, you will find none. Apparently, it has never occurred to Professor Richter that Ukrainians might have exactly the same attitude of outrage towards Russia that he (and many other Russians) has towards the West because Russia treats Ukraine with just as rudely as he perceives Russia to be treated by the West.

For the record, though we may be hapless dupes of the CIA, we'd like to note our understanding, widely documented by Western scholarship, that there was active underground resistance to the Soviet occupation of Ukraine until the early 1950s when it was finally liquidated by the Stalin dictatorship. Things were so bad in Ukraine just before the Nazi's invaded, as we understand it, that many Ukrainians actually welcomed and assisted the Nazi invasion.

In conclusion, we can only say that that we believe Professor Richter's pathologically malignant and insane remarks are indicative of the neo-Soviet character of the Russian state today. The country is run by a KGB dictator and its leading institutions of higher education are dominated by apes like Richter. What can be expected from such a situation other that exactly the same kind of collapse that crippled the USSR?

Come to think of it, though, perhaps we went to far with that remark about apes. It's an unforgivable insult, and we feel we should apologize. To the apes.

In yet another horrifying attempt to rewrite and sanitize Russian history, the KGB is now seeking a do-over on the Hitler-Stalin pact that stabbed the West in the back. Soon, for Russians, no such thing will ever have occurred. Paul Goble reports:

The Federal Security Service (FSB) is working with Russian historians trained in Soviet times to rehabilitate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not only by selectively releasing hitherto classified documents but also by directly appealing to the Duma to overturn the denunciation of that pact by the Soviet Congress of Peoples’ Deputies in 1989.

On April 22, the FSB hosted a roundtable on “Problems of the Publication of Sources about the Great Fatherland War. Criticism of Attempts at the Falsification of History.” Immediately after the meeting, the FSB put out an anodyne press release about the session, but now more details about what took place are coming to light. Colonel Sergei Ignatenko, the head of the FSB’s Center for Public Affairs, told the meeting, which included archivists, historians and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, that the FSB wants to release any document it has “if this does not involve a state secret." The reason for that, he said, is the increasing tendency by Russian and foreign historians, novelists, and filmmakers to “falsify” the history of the second world war and the Soviet Union’s role in it. “That which we see on movie screens today,” he continued, “is to a great extent falsification in a pure form.”

“With rare exceptions,” there are no serious historical investigations of this subject. One reason for that is the efforts of “our Western opponents” who “distribute money” in order to denigrate Russia, its people and its history. But yet another is the impact of the market economy on domestic filmmakers and writers. Ignatenko said that when he asked Russian filmmakers why they were distorting the history of the war, he said that they responded by saying that they were doing so “in order to increase ratings.” They do not think, he said, how harmful this is, but only “about ratings and high pay.”

“We beyond any doubt must be responsible for what we bring to the masses,” the FSB colonel said.

Another speaker, Vasiliy Khristoforov, the chief of the registration administration and archives of the FSB, said that many have written that archives, after having been opened in the early 1990s, were now being closed, but “this is not so and any investigator has the opportunity to work in Russian archives.” But it was a third speaker at the meeting who provided the clearest indication of why the session occurred and what both Soviet-trained historians and the Russian security service hope to achieve in this area. Oleg Rzheshevskiy, a senior scholar at the Academy of Sciences Institute of General History and the president of the Russian Association of Historians of the Second World War, called for the Russian parliament to overturn the 1989 condemnation of the so-called “secret protocol” of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. “When this protocol was condemned,” he said, “did anyone think about the fact that this agreement was concluded in the interests of security? Because no one raised the question about the circumstances in which it was concluded,” circumstances which gave the USSR “no other way out.” Consequently, he continued, “if the parliament of Russia will reverse this decision,” that step alone will permit a more effective struggle with the falsifiers of history.” Because then it will be seen that Stalin’s decision in this case was “perhaps the only possible decision” that a responsible leader could have taken. (In an aside, Rzheshevskiy said that he “does not have official data, however it is precisely known that in Chechnya alone at the time [of the second world war] there were 18,000 armed fighters who struggled against the Red Army,” actions that would have led to “a Civil War” if they had not been deported as Stalin later did.)

Rzheshevskiy concluded his remarks to the FSB meeting by acknowledging that “our history is very complicated but at the same time we must always remember that the USSR defeated fascism,” a contribution that he suggested puts everything else that happened in those times in the proper perspective.

Now, in an essay posted on the Grani.ru portal, Moscow historian and commentator Irina Pavlova has put this meeting and Rzheshevskiy’s remarks in context. She argues that it constituted the long-awaited “revenge” of Soviet-era historians on those who spoke the truth about Stalin in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And tragically, in the current political climate, there is every reason for them to think that “victory will be theirs.” These historians “preserve all the posts in Russian historical science and they also control the preparation of new cadres” in history. Consequently, they are likely to cast their shadow far into the future. These historians have as their credo the programmatic document adopted at the time of a 1997 meeting of the association of historians that Rzheshevskiy heads. They argued then that “history is a political science” and that in writing it, historians must “always think about the interests of their state and be concerned about the healthy though of the [rising] generations.”

In her current article, Pavlova cites what she said at the time about that attitude: “The processes which are taking place in post-Soviet historical scholarship are connected with the general political processes in the country,” processes which are defeating efforts to tell the truth about the past. And what is especially unfortunate, she wrote at that time, is that Western historians are helping these survivals of the Soviet past. “Western historians not only formally continue to maintain ties with pro-communists historians but even support them conceptually,” leaving Russian historians “of the democratic direction” out in the cold. Some of them for reasons of career or otherwise are thus forced to make their peace with their earlier opponents, Pavlova writes today. One example of that is to be found in the evolution of perhaps the greatest Russian specialist on the history of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact itself, Tatyana Bushuyeva.

In the November 1994 issue of “Noviy mir,” Bushuyeva produced the first honest account in the Russian media of the pact and how it opened the way for World War II. Indeed, Pavlova writes, that article was for historians what the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962 was for the Russian intelligentsia more generally. But now, Bushuyeva not only appeared at this FSB meeting but said that “in the 1990s there appeared attempts at the falsification of history, including by means of the invention of facts, the fabrication of documents, and so on.” For herself, Pavlova said, “this sounded like the [notorious] repentance of Dmitry Dudko.” Nonetheless, the Grani.ru writer ended on a hopeful note. “The current powers that be,” she said, can give directions and the historians who serve them can write about the Second World War however they like. They can lie as much as they want, praising Stalin and his policies to the skies, and slandering again as much as possible those” who don’t agree. “But the truth about the war, which at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s began to emerge out from under the rubble, can’t be pushed back. It lives. And the greater the effort to impose the pro-Stalinist conception on society, the more people will be drawn [not to it but] to the truth.”

The University of Chicago Magazine reports:

Five centuries after Ivan the Great began consolidating the territories that would become the Russian state—first wresting away a swath of northern Novgorod, then absorbing parts of Vyatka, Yaroslavl, Rostov-Suzdal, and Tver, and recapturing land from Lithuania—Russia remains, despite its size and power, says historian Richard Hellie, a backward civilization. Its economy is primitive, its low-tech industry propped up by sales of hydrocarbons and “second-rate arms.” Farming machinery deteriorates faster than it can be replaced. And despite the Iron Curtain’s fall, censorship is still a fact of life. “Almost nothing in Russia works properly,” Hellie says, “other than bribery and extortion.”

A student of Russian history since he entered the College in 1954, Hellie, AB’58, AM’60, PhD’65, has become an expert on the country’s medieval and early-modern past. Now the Thomas E. Donnelley professor of history and, since 1988, the editor of the journal Russian History, Hellie has authored nearly a dozen books on Muscovite law, slavery and serfdom, economic history, and society and culture. His next project is The Structure of Modern Russian History, a sprawling analysis of events from Ivan the Great’s 15th- and 16th-century reign to Joseph Stalin’s 20th-century regime. Russia’s inveterate backwardness, he says, will make a prominent appearance.

The book is still a work-in-progress, but this past October Hellie debuted some of his thoughts on backwardness at a Humanities Day lecture that packed a Stuart Hall classroom. “The initial point I must start with,” Hellie told his audience, “is that the notion of Russian current and historical backwardness is not some politically incorrect slander invented by Richard Hellie, but a very old part of Russian civilizational discourse.” Some scholars trace the phenomenon to the 13th-century Mongolian invasion. Although Hellie warned that an “easy”—and flawed—“temptation would be to blame the Mongols,” he did allow that it is “hard to deny the Mongols had a considerable role in the fact that Russia missed the Renaissance.” Before 1240, he said, the country looked southward and westward for its cultural influences; afterward, it turned away from the rest of Europe and developed a “Latin allergy” that robbed it of access to Roman classical heritage.

More deeply disabling, in every sphere from technology to philosophy, Hellie argued, has been Russia’s tendency toward absolutism. Even as Ivan the Great amassed vast territories, he laid the foundations of an autocracy in which all resources—people and property alike—were at the ruler’s disposal. Even noblemen had no independent power; if they failed to show proper fealty, their lands could be seized and granted to more loyal subjects. In the early 1500s Joseph of Volokolamsk, a Russian Orthodox abbot (and later a saint) helped establish the country’s version of the divine right of kings: “In his person the ruler is a man, but in his authority he is like God,” Hellie intoned. “So this remained the fundamental dogma of Russian autocracy until 1917, when the autocrat was replaced by the Communist Party general secretary and God was replaced by ‘history.’”

Lower classes had it worse than the nobility. Lasting from 1450 to 1725, Russian slavery “differed from the institution elsewhere,” Hellie said, “in that it allowed the enslavement of fellow Russians.” Those who were not outright slaves were serfs, tied to their towns and farms. “Serfdom commenced in the 1450s, and it ended only in 1906” with land reform and the creation of private property. (Alexander II’s 1861 emancipation did not effect the freedom he envisioned.) “Russians have rarely had any rights,” Hellie said, and oppression sapped their initiative.

Distrust of foreigners also has held Russia back. More than 300 years before the Soviet Empire, the Ulozhenie, a law code adopted in 1649, forbade Russians from going abroad. Even when Russia brought in scholars, scientists, or military strategists from elsewhere, it kept them apart from the local populace. “So opportunities for Russians to rejoin Europe at the personal level,” Hellie said, “were prohibited.”

Add to that the lack of an independent judiciary, censorship that persisted through the Soviet era, and Russia’s habit of exiling or executing its most educated citizens. Russian society never encouraged free thought or ambition—“Soviet scholars were bound like serfs to their collectives’plans and found it difficult to go where their interests led them”—one reason for the country’s dearth of important inventors or philosophers.

Despite “brilliant exceptions”—Hellie noted Russia’s defeat of Napoleon; its 16 Nobel Prizes; chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s organization of the Periodic Table; and writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—he didn’t hold out optimism for Russia’s imminent emergence from backwardness. Property rights “no longer exist,” and censorship is on the rise. Graft has multiplied in the last few years, and Vladimir Putin, in the footsteps of other Russian rulers, replaced Yeltsin-era oligarchs with “Leningrad KGB cronies,” he said. “It does not appear that a middle class or civil society will develop. Backwardness will endure.”

Writing in the Moscow Times Richard Lourie, the author of A Hatred For Tulips and Sakharov: A Biography, says that the next time Russia collapses will be the last time Russia collapses. Having already crumbled twice in a century, one must question the rationality of Russians favoring Vladimir Putin with such overwhelming support. History shows that they simply can't be that sure he won't bring the whole country once again to its knees.

Though the Constitution does not say it in so many words, the main task of the Russian president is to keep the country from falling apart. In taking the oath of office, the president swears to protect "the security and integrity of the state."

Russia has collapsed twice in the less than a 100 years, in 1917 and again in 1991, and there is no assurance that it won't happen again. True, it has come back strong each time -- first as the Soviet Union and now as the Russian Federation -- but there are only so many times you can pull off that trick. The next collapse will surely be the last.

Though flush with cash and newfound power, Russia's leadership remains traumatized by the sinking of the Soviet Union. The real shock was how quick and easy it was. That shock and the fear of losing control explain much of the country's behavior both internationally and domestically -- for example, in the recent managed State Duma and presidential elections.

Speculation on who will be calling the shots after Dmitry Medvedev is sworn in is interesting, inevitable and irrelevant -- at least as far as the nature of the challenge facing the nation is concerned.

Structurally speaking, the problem the country faces today is much like that the one that tsarist and Soviet Russia faced. By refusing to share power and to adapt to changing conditions, the rulers create a crisis that, unaddressed, ultimately proves lethal. The interests of the nation's ruling class threaten the very existence of the nation itself.

How does the new Russia avoid the same fate? In a word -- diversify.

Economically, Russia can save itself from its overdependance on oil, gas and other commodities by doubling its bet on scientific projects like nanotechnology. Success will not be immediate, but the dividends could prove enormous in the fields of energy, medicine and defense. Success will also restore some of the scientific luster the country enjoyed during the early space age.

Russia has already begun diversifying economically. Russian companies own Getty, a U.S. chain of gasoline stations, and Evraz, Russia's largest steelmaker, has agreed to pay $4 billion for IPSCO's North American plate and pipe business. Pepsi recently bought a three-quarter share in Lebedyansky, the country's largest juice manufacturer, for $1.4 billion.

What's good about this kind of commercial interdependence is that it will eventually lead to problems and disputes, which will have to be settled by lawyers and in court. Gradually, a body of law and a habit of law will be built up. It can serve as a basis for civil and political law that has so far eluded Russia.

At some point in this process, Russian television will also need to diversify. In practice, this might mean placing blocks of air time outside state control, independent channels owned by oligarchs, or some form of national independent television, though that is harder to visualize. In any case, if the flow of information becomes more constricted, the country's prestige will suffer an even more precipitous decline. It will also mean that by depriving scientists, businessmen and citizens of information, the Kremlin will be repeating the self-destructive mistakes of the past.

Once business, law and communications have been diversified, genuine political opposition parties can be allowed. This need not be done because freedom is God's gift to humanity or because it is kinder and nobler to allow people genuine choice in all aspects of life. In the end, a measure of real accountability on the part of politicians, a real fear of losing office in unriggable elections and the heated exchange of ideas that is part of any real campaign debate will have the salutary effect of reducing social tensions and preventing destabilizing concentrations of power.

Democracy is the ultimate diversification. And Russia's survival will depend on it.

Below, in another original translation from the Russian press, we emphasize the growing revelations regarding the complicity of the Kremlin in the Moscow apartment bombings that were used as justification for Putin's war on Chechnya. We continue to be amazed at the extent to which the world in general, and the Russian people in particular, seem willing to stick their heads in the sand when confronted by the increasing horror represented by the neo-Soviet Kremlin. And yet, perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. After all, the world in general, and Russia in particular, have a long history of ignoring serious problems, allowing them to fester until they become life-threatening, and only then taking action.

In a book review for the Weekly Standard dealing with Russia's role in World War II, editor Robert Messenger states: "In four years of terrible slaughter, the Red Army did not just defeat Hitler and National Socialism, but also put an end to Prussian militarism. It was a Soviet victory over something that had menaced Europe for two centuries. Stalin was a barbarous man, and in the end, that is what it took to finally draw the curtain on the German Way of War."

What's left unsaid is that while doing this kindly favor for the people of Germany, Stalin forgot about the people of Russia.

It was a costly gift. As Messenger writes: "The numbers are difficult to digest. The German army left 4 million men on the battlefields of Eastern Europe, but they killed 27 million. The Red Army lost 11.5 million soldiers, and 15.5 million civilians died in the territories occupied by the German army. Nearly 10 Russians died each minute that the war lasted, 14,000 each day." It took three Russian soldiers to kill one German, and more than six Russian citizens. Whole Russian cities were literally razed to the ground, including most especially the one named after Stalin himself. Reflecting on numbers like these, it's actually rather difficult to conclude that what Russians achieved in this "Great Patriotic War" was "victory." Seems a lot more like defeat.

And for what? So that today Germany could have a population that may soon exceed Russia's? So that the USSR could be tossed into the dustbin of history, and Russian men could live less than 60 years on average, working for less than $4 per hour? So that Germany could be respected the world around as a player at the international table and an economic force to be reckoned with, selling a host of products famous for their quality, while Russians are famous for re-electing a proud KGB spy to rule them?

Do Russians really love Germans that much?

The Nazi soldiers may have murdered over 15 million Russian civilians, but how many did Stalin murder in his Gulag Archipelago? The figure is likely far in excess of 15 million, and yet Stalin is being rehabilitated by the Putin regime as all the unpleasant facts of Russian history are being sanitized.

Meanwhile, the country is going right into the toilet. Just look at the appalling litany of outrage set forth in the stories we report below in just one virtual issue, from torture to fraudulent official statistics to barbaric levels of corruption to human rights atrocities in Chechnya to blatant electoral fraud. Instead of attempting to address at least one of these terminal diseases, Russians instead applaud wildly as Putin launches a new cold war with the U.S., a country that has an economy twelve times larger than Russia's and many strategic allies, where Russia has none.

Is Russia committing suicide? Is the only real unhappiness in Russia that it hasn't yet managed to carry it out?

Recent Russian History 1945-2006

A.N. Filippov

Prosveshchenie Publishers, 2007

Review by Dave Essell

I was asked by LR if maybe I would select and translate some choicely odious pieces from A.N.Filippov’s Recent Russian History 1945-2006, the recently published and already notorious book of guidance for Soviet – oops!, I mean Russian neonazi – teachers. It turns out I was little overenthusiastic in agreeing to this due to a selection problem: the whole book is choicely odious. Open it at random anywhere (I’ve tried this with friends) and you will on any page find something or other to make you fulminate: tortuous logic and false comparisons in support of a lie, the usual whining attitudes, vile pseudo-intellectual phrasing, cheap tricks such as the insertion as fact of a dubious, to say the least, statement in a list of other wise normal things in the hope that it will pass unnoticed and be accepted, pages of pointless platitudes to deaden the reader’s mind – in short the usual panoply of Lenino-Goebbelsian tricks. The book is in fact a paradigm of Russia today. And Russia today is a combination of Soviet norms in a mixed state-capitalist/free-market environment – Nazi Germany mutatis mutandis…

The tone of the book is striking in its return to Soviet ways of expressing things: don’t read the text, read between the lines… There was always something strange and special about the way that Soviet journalists wrote. This was the result, I think, of that fact that all humans know what is a lie and what isn’t, what’s fair and what isn’t, and we can’t help showing it. Thus it was that when Soviet journalists wrote their crap, there was always an awkward undertone, a sort of complicitous subtext of “you know that this is bollocks, I know it too, and we both know that I’m intellectual quisling and lickspittle which is why I’m not even bothering to try to write well.”

Another extraordinary thing about this mockery of a history book is that, unlike most Soviet history books where the tradition is to have attributory footnotes on every page as way of having them but hindering the research process, it actually has an organised list of sources at the back of the book. However, it is the very first history book I have ever seen in my life that has NO foreign sources whatsoever! All the books in the list are Soviet and Russian. This obviously ensures that a proper balance is found and maintained.

This balance is further assisted by the frequent inclusion of opinion poll data at the end of chapters. The author seems to prefer a polling organisation called FOM (Public Opinion Fund) reminiscent of GnomePolls, the fictitious polling organisation favoured by Lord Gnome, himself the fictitious proprietor and editor-in-chief of the UK’s satirical magazine Private Eye, which operated under the slogan “You tell us the answers and we’ll find the questions!”

Question #1: Many in the West consider Mikhail Gorbachev one of the most outstanding politicians of the 20th century. Do you personally agree or disagree with this view?

The reply categories are (from top to bottom): Agree - Disagree - Don’t know, with three different time periods for each, 1995, 2001 and 2004 (again from top to bottom).

Question #2: In your view, did Mikhail Gorbachev on the whole bring our people more good or harm?

The reply categories are (from top to bottom): More Good - Good and Harm Equally - More Harm - Don’t Know. Two time periods are given for each 2001 and 2004.

Question #3: Generally speaking, in your view would you say Josef Stalin played a positive or negative role in the history of Russia?

The reply categories clockwise from top left are: Negative (29%) - Don’t Know (24%) - Positive (47%).

So how about some examples? (This book could be fisked from page 1 to the end but this would be a teensy-weensy bit tiring on fisker and reader alike). In my translations, I will deliberately resist the temptation of making sense out of nonsense and also retain the verbosity that is essential for authors such as these in preventing the reader’s brain from getting into gear.

• Tortuous logic and ridiculously false comparisons, here about pre-WWII Stalin: “Politico-historical research shows that in similar situations where a serious threat exists even ‘soft’ and ‘pliable’ political systems as rule evolve in favour of a rapprochement with harsh forms of political organisation, in particular in the direction of limiting personal rights in favour of the state, as happened, for example, in the USA after the events of 11 September 2001.” – from Chapter 4: National Policies. The Situation in the USSR in the Later Years of Stalin’s Life (which due to the author’s butterfly-brain manner of exposition also takes some leaps back in time).

This is great. As usual the author takes no responsibility for what is stated (that undercurrent of shamefulness I mentioned?): what you are reading is the result of politico-historical research not by the author and thus absolute truth. Of course, no citations are given as a Russian who has got his mind right knows that politico-historical research just HAS to be right! Finally, it takes some chutzpah to reach for a parallel between the Soviet Union of 1937 and the relatively harmless (but very wrong nonetheless) inanities of US Homeland Security post 9/11.

• A few paragraphs below this, I found the following gem: “Of course, the Soviet period was given particular drama and tension by the character traits of Stalin. Contemporary witnesses and later research by political psychologists show that the determining factor of Stalin’s personality was a sort of black&white perception of reality (accompanied by a categorisation of the people around him into ‘friend’/’foe’), a feeling that his milieu was hostile, cruelty and a need to dominate. However, the influence of the psychological peculiarities of his character was probably secondary compared to the role of objective circumstances.”

Political psychologists, indeed! I suppose such people must be graduates of the Serbsky Institute’s renowned Department of Political Psychology. And in the midst of all this bollocks, note the number of disclaimers: ‘sort of’, ‘probably’, and those wonderful ‘objective circumstances’ that need no further description. I will charitably assume that the syntactical errors are the result of the extreme difficulty in writing many words while ideally conveying no information.

• Do we fancy a Goebbelsian lie, and not even about something very important? How about: “In a very short timescale, the Volga Automobile Factory (VAZ) mastered the production of its Model VAZ-2101, the famous ‘kopeika’, a Soviet analogue of the Fiat 124.” (TN: kopeika = 1 kopeck = model number 1. This is the first Lada).

In fact, the Lada factory and technology was licensed lock, stock and barrel from Fiat. ‘Mastering the production’ in Russia does not mean R&D then planning and building a factory, merely ensuring that Fiat fulfils its contract and then keeping workers sober long enough to get some vehicles off the far end of the production line. (As a personal note, my very first car was a red VAZ-2101, export model obtained in the 70’s from the Beryozka dollar shop in Moscow and highly prized since the export models were actually fitted with Weber carburetors since the Toliatti plant after a decade of operation was still in the process of ‘mastering’ the manufacture of decent carburetors). Of Ladas, Wikipedia says that they have “the distinction of being one of the most produced car models in automotive history […] known for its outdated technology, poor fuel economy and tank-like roadholding”.

• Sneak in some, to put it mildly, dubious, facts (these from Chapter 1: Choosing a Course): “It was no coincidence that the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was revived in 1948. Having been set up during the war, the JAC became an important social centre for Jews living in the USSR. Its popularity inside the Soviet Union, its fame abroad, and the fact that it had a certain autonomy from state organs gave rise to dubious feelings in Stalin. In the conditions of the Cold War, the JAC’s links with international Jewish organisations appeared suspicious and dangerous. The proposal by the JAC’s leadership that a Jewish autonomous region be established in the Crimea and the JAC’s role in the USSR’s support for Israel, which was later recognised to be an error, completed the case. In January 1948, agents of the MGB killed People’s Artist of the USSR S.M. Mikhoels in a faked car accident.”

What a wonderful use of the passive when affirming something that must surely at least be open to discussion. It’s worth comparing this wriggly, worm-ridden paragraph with Wikipedia’s short but fact-filled entry on the JAC:

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC, Russian language: Еврейский антифашистский комитет, ЕАК) was formed in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities. It was designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the West. […] The JAC broadcast pro-Soviet propaganda to foreign audiences, assuring them of the absence of anti-Semitism in the USSR. In 1943, Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer, the first official representatives of the Soviet Jewry allowed to visit the West, embarked on a seven-month tour to the USA, Mexico, Canada and Britain to drum up their support. In the US, they were welcomed by a National Reception Committee chaired by Albert Einstein and by B.Z. Goldberg, Sholom Aleichem's son-in-law, and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The largest pro-Soviet rally ever in the United States was held on July 8 at the Polo Grounds, where 50,000 people listened to Mikhoels, Fefer, Fiorello LaGuardia, Sholem Asch, and Chairman of World Jewish Congress Rabbi Stephen Wise. Among others, they met Chaim Weizmann, Charlie Chaplin, Marc Chagall, Paul Robeson and Lion Feuchtwanger.

In addition to the funds for the Russian war effort — 16 million dollars raised in the US, 15 million in England, ? in Canada, 1 million in Mexico, 750 thousand in the British Mandate of Palestine — other help was also contributed: machinery, medical equipment, medicine, ambulances, clothes. On July 16, 1943, Pravda reported: "Mikhoels and Feffer received a message from Chicago that a special conference of the Joint initiated a campaign to finance a thousand ambulances for the needs of the Red Army." The visit also evoked the American public to the necessity of entering the European war. […] Towards the end and immediately after the war, the JAC became involved in documenting the Holocaust. This ran contrary to the official Soviet policy to present it as atrocities against all Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the specific genocide of the Jews.

Some of the committee members were vocal supporters of the State of Israel, established in 1948, something that Stalin supported very briefly. Their international contacts especially to the USA at the outset of the Cold War would eventually make them vulnerable to charges that they had become politically incorrect.

The contacts with American Jewish organizations resulted in the plan to publish the Black Book simultaneously in the US and the Soviet Union, documenting the Holocaust and participation of Jews in the resistance movement. The Black Book was indeed published in New York in 1946, but no Russian edition appeared. The typeface galleys were broken up in 1948, when the political situation of Soviet Jewry deteriorated. In January 1948, Mikhoels was killed in a suspicious car accident in Minsk.

Filippov’s nasty little paragraph about the JAC is a good example of the need to read between the lines. What it really – but unintentionally – tells the discriminating Soviet reader is that there is more to the JAC than is being said here but you’ll have to go elsewhere to find it (else why mention the organisation for so little information of note?).

• Whining attitudes and filching in unproven assumptions (a fine example from Chapter 1 again): “The internal contradictions of the Soviet Union did not prevent its people uniting during the war years. A decisive role in the victory was played by the Soviet people unity of morale, reinforced by the whole economic and political might of the vast centralised state. The USSR, which sacrificed the most on the altar of the anti-Hitlerite coalition’s joint Victory, which made such a significant and dearly-paid contribution to the Victory, had reason to count on aid from the Western allies to restore its collapsed economy.”

Pseudo-intellectual claptrap in purple prose (from the Introduction): “For some time now our schoolchildren have been being presented with various points of view, different variants of answers to the questions: what is the world, humanity, the Universe? By what laws do they develop? What is the place of people in this world? How do human societies develop? […] The book you have now in your hands covers the history of Russia from the end of the Great Patriotic War to the present day, from the magnificent and historic triumph of the Soviet Union to its tragic collapse. […] The variety of answers to what are key questions for young people who are just beginning to independently comprehend the world about them is indubitably an indicator of the achievement of the modern Russian school. The variety of points of view, openness to new interpretations of what previously were considered long-known truths, discussivity as the basis of the didactic process – all these are becoming the main methodology in the teaching of humanitarian disciplines.

Hypocrisy was a defining characteristic of the Soviet Union with its ‘most democratic constitution in the world’, its ‘work correction camps’, and so on and to say that this book is a demonstration of “openness to new interpretations” is another prime example of the same. This book lays down the new party line and is a closed to reason and reasonableness as the Soviet Union ever was.

[NOTE: Following this post is a direct translation from the text itself, also by Dave Essel -- or click here to view the page if came direct to this one from the Internet]