The Michigan Daily News reports:

When Russian sisters Christiana Muratova and Alyssia Nikitina lost their mother back in August 2002, their lives took a totally different direction.

That path has led them to Belding.

The girls’ mother was slain in a vicious attack by her boyfriend. They then went to live with Nikitina’s father. Times were not good at the household.

Muratova, now 16, never knew her father. The father of Nikitina, now 15, soon lost custody of the girls due to alcoholism, a common problem in Russia.

The girls were under state care for several years. Their bond of sisterhood was tested when a rich Russian family wanted to adopt Nikitina but not Muratova.

“I didn’t want to be without Christiana,” Nikitina said. “We had always been together through our whole life. She is my sister. You can’t go without your sister. Your heart won’t let you.”

The girls waited for almost year before hearing that an American family, the Andres in Belding, wanted to adopt them. Diane Andres said she had been “touched” when she found Nikitina’s profile online. It said nobody wanted her because she was older.

“I saw that they only adopted babies,” Andres said. “I know what it is like to have older kids. People might think of them as a problem but they need a home just like a baby needs a home.”

The Andres were all set to come to Russia to pick up the girls. But a telephone call in the middle of the night back in June 2005 changed all that.

The adoption would be delayed because the girls were having second thoughts.

“It was a really hard experience,” Andres said. “We were devastated.”

The sisters were scared. They had heard rumors from family members and their community that Americans only adopted Russian children to use their organs for transplants.

“Our director said the people who would adopt us are good,” Nikitina said. “You can trust them, she said. You can trust them.”

So the girls decided to move forward with the process and that trust paid off.

“See, I am still alive,” Muratova said, gesturing broadly. “I am.”

It was with that leap of faith that the sisters came to Belding in September 2005. The Andres family now has grown to include Dave Andres, 54, Diane, 47, 20-year-old Ashley, 17-year-old Matt and the two girls.

The sisters’ first stop after arriving in America was the Twilight Parade during Belding’s Labor Day Homecoming Celebration.

“It was all different,” Muratova said. “We got off the airplane and went to the parade. I thought it was cool. It was my first parade.”

Now, one year later, the girls still are adjusting to their new life. This includes a new language, new culture and new food, among other things.

“In Russia we had more freedom,” Muratova said. “When you don’t have a parent, you go outside all the time.”

“You don’t have to worry that your parents are worrying about you,” Nikitina added.

The Andres’ house has changed with the fresh air the girls have brought in.

“It’s a little more time to get ready in the morning or to go somewhere,” Diane said. “There are a few more expenses, like food. They eat like teenage boys, not girls. That’s good.”

La Russophobe has previously reported the takeover of Russia's leading independent newspaper Kommersant by the malevolent forces of the Kremlin. Now, the paper's editor has resigned in protest. Alexei Pankin reports and comments in his Moscow Times column, below. Note the classic Russian manner in which Pankin makes a joke out of this extremely serious situation, just the way Russians laughed off the racist fantasies of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his desires to take back Alaska from the U.S. Now, Zhirinovsky's fantasies are reality in Russia, and if Russians don't stand up to the Kremlin and stop these encroachments upon their last bastions of information, they'll soon be just as blind and ignorant as they were in Soviet times. This will leave them incapable of protecting their country from the ravages of a new dicatorship that will surely cleave Russia into shards that can never be rejoined.

As recently as last Saturday, some friends and I were discussing the escalating Russian-Georgian conflict. One of my friends was flipping through a copy of the day's Kommersant. On reaching the page containing a transcript of the talks between a Russian serviceman and a Georgian civilian that the Georgian authorities had published as proof of Russian spying activity, he asked: "I wonder if we'll find anything like this in the next edition?"

Saturday's edition of Kommersant was the last under editor Vladislav Borodulin. As many people, including myself, had predicted, the paper's new owner appointed a new editor.

Borodulin, widely seen as close to Leonid Nevzlin, a major shareholder in the now-bankrupt oil major Yukos, was replaced by Andrei Vasilyev, whose long collaboration with another fugitive oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, is well known. Whoever's men they are considered to be, both Borodulin and Vasilyev are steeped in the professional culture of the country's first independent business newspaper, which based its ethos on the idea that the secret of success was to depend not on political tendencies, but rather the provision of complete, reliable information. Therefore, regardless of who might have been behind the editor, Kommersant was not used as an information weapon in political warfare.

Borodulin was sent packing by new owner Alisher Usmanov. The reason, according to Usmanov himself, was that he was unhappy at a front-page article about the move by the son of Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev from the security agency to state-owned oil firm Rosneft. Judging from this, Usmanov appears to be a typical oligarch with a very murky past. This leaves him open to pressure from the Kremlin, so it makes sense for him to strive to keep it happy, as he has already shown.

In the 19th century, Tsar Nicholas I took it upon himself to act as censor for Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin was lucky because the holders of supreme power in Russia were, as a rule, freer thinkers with broader outlooks than their subordinates, who feared upsetting their superiors more than anything on earth. So, direct access to the top was a positive thing.

People in the know say that Vasilyev is even more popular with Alexei Gromov, the head of the presidential administration press service, than with Berezovsky, and that Gromov approved the appointment. So even this early in Vasilyev's tenure we can expect that his main function will be to exploit his good relations with the administration in order to get some Kremlin protection to counter Usmanov's own attempts to keep the Kremlin happy.

There are various ways of looking at the Kremlin's battles against former Media-MOST chief Vladimir Gusinsky, former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky, but those at least were fights against powerful opponents who wielded enormous material and information resources. These battles could instill respect, fear, or hatred -- instead of derision -- in those who took part in and witnessed them. There the spoils, the NTV and ORT television stations, were also impressive.

But the Kremlin's role in editorial changes, first at Izvestia and now at Kommersant, newspapers with a combined circulation of just a few hundred thousand that neither intended to or really could be powerful opposition voices, even if they wanted to, is in the realm of the laughable.

The last thing Russia needs is to have its authorities be made into laughing stocks. But how can we help them if they make laughing stocks of themselves?

When the subject is Iran, Russia's position is that sanctions are "counterproductive" and the world must bring Iran to the bargaining table where it must be treated with respect.

However, when the subject is Georgia, Russia's position is that Georgia must be bludgeoned into submission by brute force.

Is it really possible that Russians can complain about American "unilateralism" in regard to Russia and yet adopt unilaterialism in regard to Ukraine and Georgia. Is it possible that Russians can't realize that Georgia and Ukraine see them exactly the way they claim to see the U.S.?

It's not only possible, it's reality.

As things go to from bad to worse in the Russo-Georgia dispute, Georgia makes a concession to Russia and in return Russia not only makes no concession but escalates. Reuters reports:

Russia threw up a blockade against Georgia on Monday after Tbilisi's release of four arrested Russian soldiers failed to defuse the worst crisis in years between the ex-Soviet neighbors.

Western mediators urged Russia to step back from confrontation when Georgia climbed down by releasing the soldiers. But Moscow ignored those pleas and said it would cut rail, air and postal links with Georgia.

The soldiers' arrest on spying charges was a flashpoint for deeper tensions. Georgia is pushing aggressively to join NATO and the European Union. That alarms Russia, which sees the country as part of its sphere of influence.

"Naturally, (Georgia's actions) will not be without consequences. We are able to put pressure on the current Georgian regime across the board," Andrei Kokoshin, a senior pro-Kremlin politician, told Russia's Channel One television.

After days of increasingly shrill exchanges between Moscow and Tbilisi, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said he had ordered that the four Russian soldiers be deported in what he called a gesture of goodwill.

"The message to Russia is: 'Enough is enough'," Saakashvili told reporters at a ceremony where the four were handed over to mediators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

"We want to have good relations. We want to have dialogue. But we cannot be treated as a second-rate backyard of some kind of emerging empire."If in force for an extended period, the Russian restrictions could cause deep damage to Georgia's economy. Russia is a key trading partner and many Georgians survive on money sent home by relatives working in Russia.

Georgia's stand-off with Moscow has sent ripples beyond the region. President Bush talked to Russian leader Vladimir Putin about Georgia in a telephone conversation on Monday, the Kremlin press service said.

It said Putin underlined that third parties should be careful about encouraging Georgia -- a clear reference to the U.S. support for Georgia's pro-Western leadership that irks many in Moscow.

HANDOVER CEREMONY

At a ceremony in front of reporters and television cameras, the dazed-looking Russian soldiers were marched out of the prosecutor-general's office each flanked by two Georgian police officers.

Their handcuffs were removed and they were told one by one they were being deported on suspicion of spying. They were then driven to the airport in white OSCE jeeps and took off for Moscow in a Russian Emergencies Ministry aircraft.

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, welcomed the release. "I hope normal relations can now be re-established between Russia and Georgia," he said.

But the release did not appear to appease the Kremlin. Rail and air links are to be cut from Tuesday, officials said. They cited unpaid debts and safety concerns as the reasons. They did not say when the links would be re-opened.

Russia's parliament also said it planned to vote this week on a draft law allowing the government to ban money transfers abroad. That would hit remittances from Georgians working in Russia.Russia has already banned two of Georgia's biggest exports: wine and mineral water.

Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuasvili said the latest measures would not bring the country to its knees. "We will survive, as we .... survived for the last 2,000 years," he said.

Georgia is a small mountainous republic of five million people which for centuries was part of the Russian empire and later a Soviet republic.

The two have had uneasy relations since Georgia became independent from Moscow in 1991.

Ties deteriorated sharply after Saakashvili, a U.S.-educated lawyer, was swept to power in a 2003 "Rose Revolution" and began pushing hard for NATO and EU membership.

He is also trying to restore Tbilisi's control over the Moscow-backed separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, further adding to tensions.

Russia has over 140 million people and . . . wait for it . . . only two million licensed female drivers. According to Reuters, this is is actually an improvement on the prior situation: "Fifteen to 25 years ago, there were no female drivers in Russia. There was only one car in the family and that belonged to the husband, the brother or the father and they did all the driving. Now many more women can afford their own car." It's not that difficult to have "many more" than zero. Less than 2% of all Russian citizens are licensed female drivers. Since it used to be 0%, this seems like a feminist paradise to Russia's enslaved women.

Remember when you heard all those wonderful things about how liberated the Soviet Union was, treating women the same as men, no discrimination, no "dirty capitalist sexism." Turns out that was just as bogus as the idea that Russia was an economic juggernaut.

For months now, the Kremlin has been providing huge quanties of assault rifles and attack planes to Venezuela, and negotiating to provide even larger quantities, as if Russia could act with impunity, poking its finger in the eye of the United States, the world's most powerful country, by giving direct military support to one of its most hated enemies without retribution. But now, the worm has turned. Suddenly, Russia finds itself locked in as dispute with Georgia, and, lo and behold, finds that weapons are flowing to Georgia against its wishes. Only now, when it is too late, do Russians see the consequences of their crazily provocative behavior. The Associated Press reports:

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Friday accused Eastern European members of NATO of illegally supplying Soviet-made arms to Georgia. "These NATO members are violating international practice," Ivanov said after talks with NATO ministers. "This is a form of piracy."
He declined to name specific nations, but said they were from the "younger generation of NATO members" -- a reference to the 10 former communist nations that defied Russian opposition to join the Western alliance after the end of the Cold War.

Ivanov held tense talks with the NATO allies, who have irritated Moscow by agreeing to deepen ties with Georgia, a country Ivanov has denounced as a "bandit" state.He told reporters that Georgia's arrest of Russian soldiers Wednesday was an attempt to force his country's troops out of the country so the Georgian authorities could pursue a "military solution" to its conflicts with two pro-Russian breakaway provinces.NATO appealed to both countries to defuse the growing crisis over the arrested soldiers. "On my behalf, there was a call for moderation and de-escalation, and that goes for both parties," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said. He said NATO was contacting the Georgian government to pass on the message.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said allied ministers had urged calm in their meeting with Ivanov. "The thread of those discussions clearly was for there to be calm, and for those tensions to be eased down in a peaceful way," he told reporters. Rumsfeld stressed, however, that Georgia was free to seek NATO membership regardless of Russian concerns. "NATO membership really is a decision for individual countries, not for countries other than the individual country." Ivanov said Eastern European nations were providing arms to Georgia in violation of Soviet-era guarantees that they would not be sold on to other countries. New NATO members denied they had broken any rules.

"Bulgaria has been complying with European Union rules of conduct and, moreover, there are no sanctions in force against Georgia," Bulgarian Defense Minister Veselin Bliznakov told national radio from Portoroz. "As to the programs for modernization of Georgia's army and police force, we think they ... contribute to the efforts for Georgia's stabilization."

Today is La Russophobe's six-month anniversary! You go, girl!

In six months, La Russophobe has moved into the top 0.1% of all blogs in the world out of over 53 million tracked by Technorati (she's now ranked in the top 67,000). She has published 710 posts, received over 13,000 visits and over 1,200 profile views (passing the total visits and profile views received by the crazed Russophile blog Accidental Russophile, which has existed 30% longer than she has) . She's also registered over 20,000 Google hits.

And she's received a very special present to honor the occasion from the crazed Russophile propaganda screed Konstantin's "Russian Blog" -- which has existed for 21 months now, since January 2005, nearly four times longer than La Russophobe.

Konstantin doesn't have a counter on his blog. He seems to prefer secrecy to transparency, a pattern among the Neo-Soviet crowd.

La Russophobe does have a counter. It shows that this is the most heavily trafficked English-language Russia politics blog in the world, currently averaging more than 100 visits every day.

Konstantin also doesn't post a profile with a counter on his blog. La Russophobe does, as noted above.

According to Technorati, in 21 months Konstantin's blog has been linked to by other blogs 174 times. That works out to just over 8 links per month.

By contrast, Technorati says that La Russophobe has been linked to 247 times by other blogs. That works out to over 41 links per month, over five times more than Konstantin.

74 blogs in total have linked to Russian Blog, Technorati reveals. That's 4 new blogs linking per month.

In La Russophobe's case, 42 blogs have linked to her so far, or 7 new blogs linking per month, a rate nearly double that Konstantin's blog.

So, the data rather conclusively shows that LR is kicking wacko Russophile Konstantin's ass (which is not suprising given the puny amount of content he puts out, the total lack of sourcing or links to outside material of interest). And that's not the half of it, because LR has also repeatedly exposed Konstantin's mendacious propaganda for what it is.

Konstantin's response? The classic neo-Soviet one. Not once but twice now, Konstantin has accused LR of being mentally ill (note that the first time Konstantin couldn't even get her name right, calling her Kim F. instead of Kim Z). Just a Stalin used to send off his critics to mental institutions, Konstantin wants to do the same to poor La Russophobe. It's the only way Neo-Soviet slugs like him can deal with their critics, because their position is so otherwise untenable, and as the post below shows its becoming standard operating procedure in Russia today.

There is no greater gift La Russophobe could receive on her 6-month anniversary than to have a rabid, slobbering Russophile maniac like Konstantin diagnose her as insane (without of course ever having had so much as a single conversation with her). It's conclusive proof that this blog is a necessary antidote to the bacteria of Neo-Soviet propaganda now seeking to spread throughout the world.

So thanks for the present, Konstantin!

The Washington Post reports further developments to indicate that Neo-Soviet Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a means of dealing with opposition to rising autocracy (La Russophobe has already reported significant developments on this story). What more horrifying proof could anyone ask for that Russia has morphed back into the USSR? It is run by a proud KGB spy, it is seeking to reassert control over the Soviet empire (even being accused of recently backing a coup d'etat in Georgia), the Soviet anthem played at the last Olympics, it sent Mikhail Khodorkovsky to Siberia, it arrested a blogger who a called Putin a "phallic symbol" and now dissidents are once against being branded "insane."

On March 23, police and emergency medical personnel stormed Marina Trutko's home, breaking down her apartment door and quickly subduing her with an injection of haloperidol, a powerful tranquilizer. One policeman put her 78-year-old mother, Valentina, in a storage closet while Trutko, 42, was carried out to a waiting ambulance. It took her to the nearby Psychiatric Hospital No. 14.

The former nuclear scientist, a vocal activist and public defender for several years in this city 70 miles north of Moscow, spent the next six weeks undergoing a daily regimen of injections and drugs to treat what was diagnosed as a "paranoid personality disorder."

"She is also very rude," psychiatrists noted in her case file.

In person, Trutko presents a different profile, reserved and formal as she recounts her legal and psychiatric ordeal and invokes the minutiae of Russian law without having to refer to texts. An independent evaluation found that although she did not have an "ordinary personality," she was "very gifted and creative" and displayed no psychiatric symptoms.

Trutko is new evidence that Soviet-style forced psychiatry has reemerged in Russia as a weapon to intimidate or discredit citizens who tangle with the authorities, according to human rights activists and some mental health professionals. Despite major reforms in the early 1990s, some officials are again employing this form of repression.

"Abuse has begun to creep back in, and we're seeing more cases," said Lyubov Vinogradova, executive director of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, an advocacy group. "It's not on a mass scale like in Soviet times, but it's worrying."

In those years, tens of thousands of dissidents were wrongfully subjected to forced hospitalization, sometimes for years, based on trumped-up diagnoses of "schizophrenia." Dissidents were said to exhibit inflexibility of convictions and nervous exhaustion brought on by anti-government activities. "Reformist delusions," the Soviets called it. If you were against communism, in other words, you were insane.

Some of the new cases have been abetted by institutions or doctors involved in it in the Soviet period. Trutko, who is originally from Uzbekistan, was diagnosed at the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, one of the most infamous of the Soviet institutions that imprisoned dissidents. It remains a secretive institution that has never faced up to its repressive past, according to human rights groups.

As recently as 2001, the institute's director, Tatyana Dmitriyeva, denied that the Soviet Union engaged in any more psychiatric abuse than Western countries, according to the report "Human Rights and Psychiatry in the Russian Federation" by the Moscow Helsinki Group.

One of signatures on Trutko's official evaluation, which declared she had paranoid personality disorder, is that of Yakob Landau, a longtime Serbsky psychiatrist who headed the institute's notorious Unit No. 4 during Soviet days.

Officials at the institute, a walled and forbidding complex in central Moscow, said no one was available to comment for this article. Investigators in Trutko's case declined to comment.

The charge that psychiatry is again being abused is not universally accepted within the profession. "The problem of forced treatment or psychiatric persecution existed more than 20 years ago, but it was solved. And since then I haven't heard of any case of forced psychiatric examination or treatment," said Vladimir Rotstein, president of Public Initiative on Psychiatry, an advocacy group.

The Independent Psychiatric Association, however, says that the number of activists being wrongfully hospitalized in mental facilities totals dozens of cases in recent years and is increasing. Doctors and the courts are complicit with investigators who insist on a forced psychiatric evaluation or treatment, it says. Activists have also documented an increase of family or business disputes in which wrongful hospitalization provides an opening to seize a person's property, Vinogradova said.

Most of the targeted activists are not affiliated with major human rights groups. Rather, like Trutko, they are stubborn gadflies who are involved in long-running feuds with local authorities. Their sometimes intemperate complaints against authorities are used to open criminal investigations for slander. This allows authorities to seek hospitalization. Unlike Soviet dissidents, these activists are put away for relatively short periods of a week to several months,

Roman Lukin, a businessman in the Volga River city of Cheboksary, was hospitalized last year for "unexplainable behavior" after he held up a sign on a public square calling three judges "creeps." Seeking redress for a bad debt that ruined him, Lukin felt he had not received justice from the courts. He spent two weeks in the local psychiatric hospital, which recommended that he undergo further examination at a specialized clinic in Moscow for possible "paranoid personality disorder." Independent Psychiatric Association specialists evaluated Lukin and found no sign of mental illness.

Nikolai Skachkov, who protested police brutality and official corruption in the Omsk region of Siberia, was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation last year because investigators said they suspected he was suffering from "an acute sense of justice." He spent six months in a closed psychiatric facility where he was diagnosed as paranoid. The association, which conducted a separate evaluation earlier this year, found that he was healthy.

"Psychiatry in this country has always been a tool of the authorities, a tool for managing people and pressuring people. And it still is," said Boris Panteleyev, head of the St. Petersburg Committee for Human Rights.

In an interview in her apartment, Trutko recounted her own long run-in. "Now I have this stamp on my forehead that I am a psychiatric patient," she said. "I will always have this medical record now. That means I cannot go to court because judges say I'm a psycho and call for an ambulance."

Trutko is well known in the courts in this town, having argued dozens of court cases against the local authorities and police. She is studying to be a lawyer, and for several years has acted as a public defender, as advocates without law degrees are called here.

Her troubles with mental health authorities began four years ago in a courtroom in Dmitrov, about 35 miles from Dubna.

Trutko asserted that the judge displayed bias against her client in a property dispute, and she moved to have the judge withdrawn. She also complained that the judge was not wearing her robe as required and that the Russian flag was improperly displayed. The judge, who later left the bench and could not be reached for comment, alleged that Trutko said, "Look at that fat pig sitting up there," according to legal papers.

Prosecutors opened a criminal case against Trutko on charges of contempt of court. In July 2003, the court ordered Trutko to undergo an involuntary psychiatric evaluation. Psychiatrists at the hospital said she was uncooperative, illogical and displayed emotional reactions that were "not adequate" -- a common phrase here for mental illness.

The Independent Psychiatric Association questioned these conclusions. Its own evaluation of her, conducted by four psychiatrists, found that "she is not an ordinary personality, but a very gifted and creative person. . . . No psychiatric symptoms were observed. She shows high intellectual ability and good memory. She does not need any treatment."

Trutko continued to battle the criminal complaint in court. Before a hearing at the higher Moscow regional court, she filed a motion seeking the removal of a panel of judges from her case, again asserting bias. In this case there was no claim of verbal abuse, but prosecutors said her motion amounted to slander and contempt.

In April 2004, after leaving a hearing on her case in Moscow, Trutko was detained by investigators and taken to the Serbsky Institute. It was a Friday evening when she was admitted and there was no expert commission available to evaluate her, Trutko said. Human rights groups protested her detention and threatened legal action. Trutko said she was released the following Tuesday morning without having undergone any formal examination by psychiatrists.

But the institute issued a six-page evaluation that said she suffered from a "paranoid personality disorder." The condition manifested itself in her "subjectivity," her "tendencies to verbal aggression," her "suspicious" personality and her "inability to understand the peculiarities of interpersonal relations and communication," medical records show.

The report recommended that she undergo forced hospitalization and treatment.

In September 2004, a Moscow court approved that approach. But the authorities, for reasons that remain unclear, did not act on the order until they stormed Trutko's apartment earlier this year.

Despite her subsequent release, Trutko said, the court order remains in effect and she could be institutionalized again at any time. "My career is ruined," she said. "I just stay at home."

Who cares if Russia can't even get an entry place in the FIFA proceedings, or as much as lowly bronze medal in world championship ice hockey even if the event is staged in St. Petersburg? What do those defeats mean next to Russia's newfound ability to brag, as we learned over the weekend, that its homeless people are second-to-none when it comes to football. Coming on the heels of Russia's dominating performance at the Pig Olympics, as previously reported by La Russophobe, this is convincing evidence that true athletic glory will never be a stranger in Russia.

And there was also confirmation that Russia maintains its traditional dominance in the national pastime athletics: cheating. Scandal broke out in Elista when Russian chess champion Vladimir Kramnik was accused by his Bulgarian challenger of abusing his bathroom privileges during a match so that the could receive illegal advice. Kramnik used the accusations as an excuse to bail out of the tournament.

Here's the opening paragraph from a recent New York Times op-ed piece by quasi Russian Serge Schememann (his name isn't one Slavic Russians would accept as "Russian" and his parents fled to Estonia to escape Bolshevism):

Where in frozen Siberia did Russians learn how to swing a racket? Svetlana Kznetsova took the China Open. Dmitry Tursunov beat the best American player, Andy Roddick, to knock the United States out of the Davis Cup. The glamorously teenage Maria Sharapova swept past Belgium’s best, Justine Henin-Hardenne, to win the United States Open

Here's the third paragraph:

Two decades ago, there were no Russian names among the top 100 players, much less among the glitterati of the sport. Today, Maria Sharapova is a trademark, and behind her is a cascade of top-ranked Russians with jaw-challenging names. And these are not shy newcomers. They seem to have emerged as complete, prepackaged, beautifully turned out stars, complete with obsessed parent. Tursunov, like Sharapova, was exported by a relentless father to the United States at a precocious age, and it’s hard to tell whether they are more Russian or American. So what spawned these stars?

In other words, two out of the three players mentioned by the author didn't learn to play tennis in Russia, they learned to play in the United States, where they spend most of their time and own real estate. Sharapova has never once played for the Russian national team. Schememann's reconciliation? How did Russia influence them? It's this: "I’ve always had a soft spot for the swaddling theory, wherein the practice of binding babies like mummies between feedings formed a nation given to lurching between passivity and anarchy. Isn’t tennis all about lurching between passivity and furious activity?"

Meanwhile, the author ignores the fact that apart from the victories he mentions all three of these players have had abysmal seasons this year and all draw nothing but enormous yawns from fans. The only one who creates any interest is Sharapova, and she does so off the court by marketing her looks just like Anna Kournikova, who never won a singles tournament in her whole career. The author writes of AK: "After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the game got a further lift from Boris Yeltsin, who was often photographed wrestling with a racket. That was when most of the current stars got their first rackets. Anna Kournikova gave further inspiration when she became the first Russian tennis player to become a marketing star." Classic Russian gibberish. Russians hate Yeltsin and accuse him of genocide, but they get motivated to play tennis because he says so just like they voted like lemmings for his chosen successor Vladimir Putin.

The author asks: "Are these young stars a post-Soviet reaction to the collective ethic? Are they another version of the trillionaire oligarchs, people who frantically grasp for all the riches and glory denied them for 70 years?" In classic Russian style, he gets quite close to landing the Trout of Truth before he lets its wriggle free. Russian tennis players are just like Russian oligarchs: they use illusion and fakery to create the pretension of success, while beneath the surface their lack of substance eats away until the inevitable collapse. And the Kremlin is no different. Celeste Hollander's Football Fabel, below, brilliantly exposes this truth that the Russian author, even so far removed from Russia, simply cannot manage to see.

Three Russian prison inmates were locked in the same cell; they soon began talking. "What are you here for?" asked one inmate of another. "They put me in for beating up some old Jew named Khaimovich," snarled one man. "And why are you here?" asked the second of the first. "For having defended some old Jew named Khaimovich in a fight," he replied. "And what were you arrested for?" the third inmate was asked. "For being Khaimovich," he sighed.

An American physician asked his Russian collegue: "Is it true that there are cases in your country where a patient was treated for one disease, only to have the autopsy reveal another cause of death." The Russian answered: "Absolutely not. All our patients die from the diseases we treat them for."

A Russian and an American are talking. "When I'm in a good mood I drive a car painted a light color," says the American. "When I'm busy or have a lot of troubles, I drive a darker colored car. When I go for vacation overseas, I pick a brightly colored car." The Russian responds: "Things are much easier in Russia. If you are in a good mood, they will give you a ride in yellow car with a blue stripe. If you feel bad, the car will be white and the stripe red. I was abroad only once, and there I drove a tank."

An OVIR officer asks a man:
- Why are you going to Israel?
- My wife has no peace. Every moment she pleas: "Lets go, lets go!"
- Well, let her go.
- You know, my daughters insist also.
- So what?
- And my mother-in-law and father-in-law want to leave as well...
- Are you a man or not? Let all of them go and stay here.
- I wish I could. But I'm the only Jew in our family.

Here is a hilarious photo from EnglishRussia. Can you decide which lucky, happy man is the groom, the one on the left or the one on the right?

Here is a classic Russian situation, from the pages of English Russia: Foreign mail order firms refuse to deliver to Russia because of pandemic corruption, so rather than reform that corruption Russians decide instead to INCREASE the corruption by figuring out a way to fool the companies into mailing a parcel to Russia by intentionally sending it first to a different country. Meanwhile, their society continues to degenerate until it is no more.

Writing in the Moscow Times, Celeste A. Wallander, visiting associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers the following fable on Russian corruption and its ill effects. Will Russia ever learn that they can't get anywhere by cheating and creating the illusion of success? Don't hold your breath.

Once upon a time, there was a bright but slight young schoolboy named Vladislav who, like most young boys, had a strong desire to fit in and, well, be one of the guys. He did well in school and used his brains to good effect by doing homework for some of the tough boys on the playground. This won him their tolerance, but it didn't quite make him one of the guys.

Slava noticed that three of the toughest boys -- Vladimir, Sergei and Igor -- always talked about someday playing in the big leagues. Knowing that the global big league is football, Slava got the brilliant idea that his playground toughs should form a team and become a great football power. The three toughs were intrigued. How better to become rich and famous than to become a great football power?

But there was a problem: While the boys were strong and clever, and could dominate the neighborhood playground in any fight, they had never spent time developing the skills necessary to win at football. They were strong and athletic, but had little patience for passing, foot speed or ball control drills. As a result, when they did play football in the neighborhood, more skilled teams could easily steal the ball, get past their defenses and score. As a result, the young toughs tended to win some but mostly to lose.

Of course, that is the essence of competitive sports, but the boys did not like to lose. Besides, they pointed out to Slava, if we lose on our home turf, we cannot be certain of becoming a great football power, so what's the point?

Slava, being very clever, knew better than to suggest that his new team spend time practicing its football skills to become a better and more competitive team. Instead, he recognized that the reason his tough friends tended to lose the ball and get scored against was because they were limited by the rules of the game to controlling and moving the ball with their feet.

"Just think!" he told Vladimir, "how we will dominate the football pitch if we control the ball with our hands!"

"That's a great idea!" Vladimir answered. "If we use our hands, we cannot lose, and our domination of football at home will propel us to the big leagues!"

And so, the team implemented its clever plan. When other teams would call fouls for using their hands, Slava would argue with them about the rules, while his team members went on scoring goals and declaring victory. Referees who ruled against them would disappear from the neighborhood and be replaced for the next match with friends of the toughs. These friends had been coached to rule that in this form of neighborhood football, the need for order and stability on the pitch meant that Vladimir's team (as it became known) must be allowed to use its hands.

"Besides!" playground supporters exclaimed, "they are on a winning streak and have a chance to make it to the big leagues!"

"Isn't it good for our neighborhood," Slava cleverly argued, "for a team of our own to go undefeated so we can climb into the ranks of the great football powers?!"

And so, Vladimir's team came to dominate football in the neighborhood, and to claim a place in the upcoming great football power tournament. The great football powers were impressed to hear of a new, undefeated aspirant to their league, and looked forward to welcoming Vladimir's team to the competition.

The teams drew lots, and it turned out that the first match would be between Vladimir's team and George's team. You can imagine what happened when the whistle blew and play began: when Sergei, Vladimir or Dmitry ran with the ball in his hands, or used hhis hands to knock the ball away from one of George's players, the referee would call a foul and stop play. Not long into the game, the players on Vladimir's team were being sent off with red cards for their repeated violation of the most basic rule of football: no hands. This went on all day, as Vladimir's team played against each of the big league teams.

The big leaguers were, of course, astonished to learn that Vladimir's team thought it acceptable to play football with their hands. They were nonplussed that Vladimir, Slava and their teammates were unapologetic for their behavior, and were even angry and resentful that the fouls called against them were costing them game after game.

By the end of the day, the controversy reached such a fever pitch that the great football power team coaches called out the new team's coach, Slava, to demand that his team play by the well-defined rules of football.

Slava was defiant. He knew that Vladimir and his team could not win if they played by the rules. They had not trained, practiced, or committed themselves to football. Their dream of being a great football power, and his own of being one of the guys, would fail if they played by the rules.

So Slava stood defiantly and declared to these great powers: "You can define the rules of football however you like, and play only with your feet. We do not mind. Have we ever complained? But as a great football power, we have decided that we are not just playing football, we are playing sovereign football. In sovereign football, Vladimir's team gets to play with its feet, or its hands or whatever it wants. We learned to play football on a tough playground in a tough neighborhood, so this is how we have to play to win. Our fans like it, and we win. You cannot tell us that we are not playing football; we are playing sovereign football."

It was a sad day for the world's "beautiful game," because the other teams did not stand up for the game of football as it had been played in its simplicity for generations of boys and girls. With one prominent team claiming the right to play sovereign football, other teams began to adopt their own rules to do whatever necessary to win. Soon even small children in remote parts of the globe were using their hands to play "football." Some followed Slava's lead by claiming they were playing sovereign football, but in the cynical treatment of honorable sport that developed, some began to use entirely new terms for the strange games that developed. It turned out that back home in the neighborhood where George's team played, the new version of football in which hands were used far more than feet became very popular. They also called it football, which seems strange for a game played hardly at all with one's feet, but this shows you how messed up things had become.

As with every fable, there is a moral of course. But it may not be the one you expect. Yes, one of the morals is that when you have something beautiful that brings out the best in children all over the world, it is best to keep the standards high and the rules and definitions intact. The point of playing football is not just to win, but to train, and practice and truly to play. Sovereign football was not football at all, and those who played and loved the true game -- win or lose -- should have refused to play anything less.

However, the real moral of our fable lies in the ultimate fate of Vladimir's team. It turns out that it was able to win with sovereign football only when everyone else played by the rules of true football. Once everyone started cheating and making up rules as they went along, Vladimir's team began to lose. They were not the only ones who were strong and clever, you see: once other neighborhood toughs could make up their own rules, Vladimir, Dmitry and the others often found themselves bruised, bloodied and bested by even more determined aspirants to the big leagues. Sovereign football escalated to violent contests. I heard that a team once even brought weapons to the playground to ensure their win. Pretty soon, the old neighborhood was so unsafe that none of the children could play there, and everyone knew that it was Slava and Vladimir's team that had made it so.

So, the true moral of this fable is simple: When you cheat, you eventually lose the truly important game.

Over the past few days, La Russophobe has reported on a series of extremely disturbing developments in Russia.

First a paranoid, classically Neo-Soviet report was circulated in the Russian Duma accusing the United States of plotting secretly to destroy Russia and calling for Cold War with the U.S.

Then came news of the Russian military's intention to declare America its enemy in an upcoming military policy document.

And finally news of an attempted coup d'etat by Russia against the pro-U.S. government in Georgia came out, followed shortly by the disclosure of a spy ring and a major diplomatic incident in which Russia gave sanctuary to a member of the ring and recalled its ambassador for consultations. This news comes only weeks after NATO announced it was entering final negotiations with Georgia to enter the NATO fold.

La Russophobe has been documenting the provocation by Russia of Cold War II for months now, but even she is surpised by the rapid escalation that these events indicate. What's next? Will Russian troops actually move into Georgia? Will this then justify American troops being used against Russian allies in Cuba and Venezuela?

How can Russians possibly imagine that they can survive a second cold war with the United States, whose economy is ten times the size of Russia's and whose population is double, when the Soviet Union couldn't survive the first round with a much larger economy, army and population? Are Russians drunk on oil revenues? Or have they simply given up rationality? Or hope, and are hell-bent on suicide?

Tis true, if she were in Russia now La Russophobe would have to think about suicide seriously. How could she not, seeing the KGB return to power by means of elections so soon after it destroyed the USSR, white-washing and demolishing hundreds of beautiful Russian churches, kiling their priests, and rounding up Russia's best and brightest for the gulags?

Is this the beginning of the end for Russia as we know it?

Reader Jeremy Putley points us to a recent essay from the Jamestown Foundation's Vladimir Socor about the unfolding situation in Georgia:

SAAKASHVILI’S U.N. ADDRESS TRANSFORMS DISCUSSION ON POST-SOVIET CONFLICTS

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s September 22 address to the United Nations General Assembly has transformed the terms of international discussion on the post-Soviet “frozen” conflicts. After Saakashvili’s address, hardly any international actors other than Moscow’s ad-hoc supporters could any longer defend Russia’s “peacekeeping” and “mediation” or its prescriptions for political settlement of these conflicts.

Saakashvili’s address has -- for the first time in many years at this level -- clearly set down the basic parameters for dealing with these conflicts:

1. The conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are “territorial conflicts,” conducted by Russia against Georgia. Saakashvili outlined the process by which “these regions are being annexed” through military force and handover of Russian citizenship to local residents, directly violating international law. This part of Saakashvili’s speech implicitly underscores the long-ignored change in the nature of these conflicts: from local ethnic conflicts (Moscow-orchestrated in the first place) into a Russian assault on Georgia.

2. All ethnic communities suffer in the secessionist enclaves: the Georgians through ethnic cleansing and denial of native-language education, the others through rule by “sponsors of organized crime, fear, and lawlessness. Such suffering must come to an end.” Implicitly but clearly, the grounds for international humanitarian intervention are shown to exist.

3. “Proxies” underscore Russia’s primary role in the conflict. Saakashvili called attention to the heavy arming of Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces by Russia and frequently held joint exercises of secessionist and Russian forces.

4. Russia’s conduct poses a clear case of aggression: “Few examples are more blatant of a state seeking to annex the internationally recognized territory of another state.” Thus, Russia is shown to challenge the foundations of the international system as well.

5. Georgia holds the right of self-defense based on international law: Saakashvili wondered aloud “whether any members in this great hall would tolerate such intervention on their own soil.” Russia, he noted, expects the international community to accept this situation with regard to Georgia. If accepted, then “lawlessness and indifference to it [become] the new rules of the international game.” The ultimate stake transcends Georgia: “There is a vital interest to reject the unraveling of sovereign statehood.”

6. Resolution of these conflicts must be integrated with the agenda for rule of law and democracy: “The residents of our disputed territories are under a form of gangster occupation. The Rose Revolution and democracy in Georgia will remain unfinished until all citizens of Georgia have the right to participate in the life and decisions of the state.”

7. On their track record, Saakashvili noted, “The inherited peacekeeping frameworks and negotiating formats neither promote peace nor encourage any genuine negotiation.…They have served to perpetuate, rather than resolve the conflicts.” In the course of 12 years, Russia’s “peacekeepers” have failed to facilitate the return of Georgian refugees to Abkhazia. Russian peacekeeping operations have “abused and made a farce of the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and trust.”

8. Georgia calls for international action to “replace and transform the current frameworks for negotiation and peacekeeping in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” It seeks demilitarization of both areas and the deployment of internationally mandated police units, backed by active engagement of the UN, OSCE, and the European Union. Russia’s ‘peacekeeping’ forces “themselves, by their own choice, not by ours, have in effect annulled their own mandate.” The negotiating formats must be reconfigured to focus on “direct dialogue on the ground between Georgians and Abkhaz, Georgians and South Ossetians” as well as opening the prospect of economic rehabilitation: “Why should our citizens be reduced to such miserable economic conditions?”

9. Thus, Georgia serves notice that it intends to exercise “the sovereign right to request the removal of foreign military forces. We make no secret of our intentions to fulfill this sovereign right and solemn duty.” Saakashvili was alluding to plans by the Georgian government and parliament to issue in October an evaluation of more than a decade of Russian “peacekeeping” and, based on that track record, to demand the termination of those operations.

10. The onus for a peaceful resolution rests not only on Georgia, but on the international community as well: “Let no one ever say that Georgia was not clear as to how it would protect its democracy and its State, let no one ever say that we did not seek to do so by peaceful means alone.…All nations that share these values are willing to sacrifice for them.”

In the run-up to the Georgian parliament’s vote, some governments and international organizations that have over the years grown comfortable with the Russia-created status quo were beginning to discourage Georgia from trying to change that situation. Saakashvili’s UN address -- a consensus product of Georgia’s presidency, leading parliamentarians, and its government -- has rendered those attempts to protect the Russian-made status quo unsustainable from now on.

First Russia inks a deal to supply the crazed America-hating dictator of Venezuela with thousands of assault rifles and attack planes, and now it agrees to provide a bailout to the failing economic of dictatorial Cuba. How Neo-Soviet can you get?? The Associated Press reports:

HAVANA - Russia agreed on Thursday to grant Cuba credit worth $350 million and restructure some of its recent debt during a visit by Russia's prime minister, officials said. The two countries also signed a military cooperation agreement.

Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro, who is acting president while his elder brother Fidel recovers from intestinal surgery, gave red-carpet treatment to Mikhail Fradkov, the highest-ranking Russian official to come to Cuba since a visit by President
Vladimir Putin in 2000.

Wearing a gray suit instead of his customary military uniform, Castro escorted Fradkov through the halls of Havana's Palace of the Revolution, past rows of soldiers playing Cuba's anthem.
The two met privately and did not speak to the press about the encounter.

But Alexander Bochanov, the press liaison at the Russian Embassy in Havana, said that Russia had agreed to restructure some $166 million of debt acquired in recent years.

The $350 million line of credit will be used to buy Russian goods and services. It is a 10-year loan with annual 4-percent interest, according to Russia's RIA Novosti news agency, which reported that Fradkov said the credit would be used to help modernize Cuba's energy sector and transportation system, reconstruct water conservation facilities and railroads, and design and deliver air navigation systems.

Under an ideological and economic alliance that lasted three decades, Cuba once relied on Soviet Union subsidies for about 20 percent of its gross national product. Its economy has since become more self-sufficient, though it now benefits from strong relations with Venezuela, its current leading trading partner.

Bochanov said Raul Castro and Fradkov did not discuss Cuba's Soviet-era debts with Moscow, which Russian media reports have estimated at more than $20 billion. Havana puts the amount at closer to $11 billion.

Fradkov arrived in Havana late Wednesday as the head of a delegation looking to increase business with Cuba in the aviation, transport and energy sectors.

The group will visit Russia's pavilion at the International Transport Fair taking place in Havana through Saturday. Fradkov will also go to the island's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, and is scheduled to meet Friday with Parliament Speaker Ricardo Alarcon.

Relations between Russia and Cuba chilled after the Soviet Union's collapse but warmed with Putin's visit in 2000.

The Caribbean island exports sugar to Russia, as well as vaccines and other products from its advanced biotech industry.

If you are interested in the issue of anti-Americanism in Russia and the resulting cold war climate being provoked by the Kremlin, then check out La Russophobe's most recent piece on Publius Pundit regarding the issue, summarizing recent developments, and feel free to comment. Everyone's thoughts and ideas are important in this time of renewed Russo-American tensions.

Check out La Russophobe's latest on Publius Pundit regarding the ominous political situation brewing now in Georgia. Following the foiling of a Russia-sponsored coup d'etat against the country's elected, pro-West government, Georgian police uncovered a spy ring sponsored by Russia and including a number of Russian military officers as participants. It arrested a group of them, but one took refuge on one of the vestigial Russian military bases that still exists, outrageously, on Georgian soil (indeed, in the nation's capital city). He refused to come out, Georgia blockaded the building, Russia cut off travel visas to Georgians and recalled its ambassador. Russia's naked, neo-Soviet aggression in seeking to keep control of the former Soviet slaves states before they manage to break free by joining NATO is an international outrage and calls for immediate action by the NATO powers. Russian hypocrisy is truly breathtaking; it has no problem fomenting tumult in parts of Georgia that want to break away and join Russia, but if anyone seeks to assist Chechnya in breaking from Russia then Russians scream to high heaven about Russian sovereignty.

La Russophobe has posted two items recently about the attempt by Russian authorities to impose a giant fine (it could be more than one year's average Russian wages) or a jail term (it could be one year at hard labor) on Vladimir Rakhmankov for writing an article satirizing Russian "President" Vladimir Putin. Here's the full text of his article, in English and in Russia. Remember, if La Russophobe were in Russia she could be hit with a crippling fine or jailed (at hard labor!) for publishing this innocuous material. Scary, isn't it?

Why do journalists love the the press offices of government departments? Do you think it is because of their effectiveness and authenticity of their factual accounts? No! Journalists love them for their unique ability to perceive crucial turning points in Russian history.

Take, for example, one particularly life-affirming press release from City Hall in the town of Ivanovo. It is an expression of the celebration of life, the roaring of hormones, the joy of spring. It is hymn the the wonders of procreation!

Here it is, verbatim:

There has been a new addition to the family of Prezhvaslky horses in the Ivanovo zoo. These animals are endangered and rarely breed in captivity. However, this already the second foal, that has appeared at the zoo, six years after horses first arrived . The newborn is doing well and still breast feeding, as it will continue to do for nearly half a year before gradually weening itself to adult food. There are also newborns in the fox family, but vistiors will not glimpse them any time soon as they are under the watchful guard of their mothers. Other newborns eagerly antipated include a pony, Volkov lynxes, and many birds (pheasants, peacocks, exotic chickens). A pair of hawks has also settled in to lay for the first time, after residing at the zoo for three years already, and there is hope for a pair of polar owls and eagle owls to begin nesting as well.

And so it came to pass that Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, also found his thoughts turning to reproductive matters, and decided that he himself should become the phallic symbol of the country. And so he issued an edict unto his minions that they propagate themselves and be multiplied, with no exceptions, and further that a clutch of petrodollars be unleashed to reward those found in compliance.

And verily, Putin is remarkably like the phallic symbol of the country - in all senses - and a perfect personification of the national drive to increase the population. Indeed, now it is possible to conceive of a mascot to signify the national effort: the presidential body with his head in the shape of a penis. A new national idea.

Naturally, all the personnages of the oligarchy rushed to thrust themselves verbally into the flow of spermotazoa, shouting "yes! yes! let there be procreation! and with no exception!" Yet there will inevitably be disappointment with the results, since both the phallus and its spermotzoa are symbolic rather than acutal.

And in any case, your average Russian broad is no fool. She knows how to get her hands on various contraceptive methods, so the national rebirth may need to wait years until all those are disposed of.

But the animals of the zoo had no such encumbrances, and they raced to respond to the call of the president without delay, whereas in prior to hearing his edict they had been reluctant to breed in capativity and even in the wild, hence becoming endangered. Lucky were they, then to fall into the clutches of Russian captivity!

The Russian text (if anyone would care to supply a better translation, La Russophobe will be happy to adopt it).

"За что журналисты любят пресс-службы казенных контор? Вы думаете, за оперативность и достоверность изложения того, что в этих конторах происходит? Нет! Журналисты их любят за талант и очень правильное понимание исторического момента! Вот вам неимоверно жизнеутверждающее сообщение пресс-службы ивановской мэрии. Это ж просто какой-то праздник жизни, буйство гормонов и ликование весны. Гимн деторождению! Итак, дословно.

"В семействе лошадей Пржевальского в ивановском зоопарке пополнение. Эти животные занесены в Красную книгу, в неволе размножаются довольно редко. Это уже второй жеребёнок, появившийся в зоопарке спустя 6 лет после того, как там поселились лошади. Новорождённый чувствует себя хорошо, пока питается только маминым молоком. Им он будет питаться около полугода, а потом постепенно перейдёт на взрослую пищу.
Совсем недавно появилось потомство у лис. Лисят пока посетители не увидят, их бережно охраняют мамы. В ближайшее время ожидается приплод у пони, рысей, волков, многих птиц (фазанов, павлинов, декоративных кур). Впервые на кладку яиц сели канюки-курганники. Пара этих птиц в зоопарке живёт уже 3 года. В этом году птицы сами свили гнездо и сделали кладку. Готовятся к размножению полярные совы, филины, неясыти".

А я то думал, что президент России Владимир Путин просто решил превратиться в фаллический символ страны, выступив с этим полубредовым посланием народу и федеральному собранию: плодитесь и размножайтесь, а то границу защищать некому, а мы вам от нефтедолларов отстегнем по четверти миллиона за каждого второго ребенка, но только не сейчас, когда я президент, а в течение лет десяти, или позже.

Вообще, Путин действительно похож на фаллический символ страны - во всех смыслах. Так отчего же ему было не закрепить этот символизм официально? В послании? Как говорится: уж послал, так послал. Сам на себя, так сказать, всю страну зациклил. Теперь можно смело фигурки соответствующие лепить и продавать - президентская голова в виде головки. Новый народный промысел.

Вся властная и околовластная сволочь, конечно, немедленно изобразила из себя поток сперматозоидов, орущих: да, да, давайте размножаться, а то границу защищать некому. От этого, разумеется, человеческая рождаемость в России не увеличилась, поскольку и фаллос, и его сперматозоиды - не более чем символ. А бабы - они не дуры. Контрацептических средств завались, так что можно и еще десять лет с возрождением нации подождать.

Но вот ивановские лошади Пржевальского, а также канюки-курганники и павлины на призыв президента откликнулись незамедлительно! Заметьте, до этого в неволе они размножаться не хотели. И вообще - в Красной книге находятся. Вот вам и окончательный символизм происходящего. Добро пожаловать в зоопарк!"

As an American who lived for many years in Europe - and has traveled through Russia and Central Asia - I have to say that most of my fellow countrymen are brainwashed fanatics when it comes to issues of "freedom" and "democracy."

Guess who wrote that: It was Wally Shedd of the Accidental Russophile, in a comment on the even more extreme Russophile blog "Russian Blog." Gee, what a suprise. Wally the crazed Russophile thinks that America is a nation of "brainwashed fanatics" except for a few enlightened souls who have managed to travel in Europe and thus purify their brains.

Now, if somebody (La Russophobe for instance) said that Russia was a nation of "brainwashed fanatics," can you imagine what Wally would say? Oh, he'd scream to high heaven about how La Russophobe is a "hate monger" and an "idiot." He'd call for patience and understanding where Russia is concerned. He'd say that Russia, which has existed five times longer than America, needs time to perfect its civilization. But where American is concerned? Like all Russophiles of his ilk, labeling America a "nation of brainwashed fanatics" is his idea of scholarship and humanitarianism.

And what is dear Wally's idea of freedom and democracy? Well, perhaps the author of Russian Blog sums them up best when he writes:

What I find fascinating about American mentality – their notions of democracy and freedom are also ingrained. This is the case even with the most educated, sophisticated and intellectual. This is not the case with Europeans. While Brits or Frenchmen also believe in freedom and democracy they are not religious about it and don’t regard it with enthusiastic devotion. With my English friend I can freely discuss problems of democracy and our disputes are not just normal but they also help to discover something new, change to some extent our views or find compromise. With Americans it’s almost always a missionary talking to a heathen. To treat democracy as just another technical model of effective government organization and freedom as a personal feeling of limitations for self-realization is the same as trampling down on the bible

In other words, Americans are a race of stupid people, who need to be told what "democracy" and "freedom" are by people who've studied and thought like humans rather than apes.

You know, the Europeans and the Russians.

Let's list their "great modern thinkers" shall we? Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Napoleon.

One by one, each of the European nations took their turns trying to enslave the world.

Twice in the last century they have caused their civilization to burst into flames, while the North American continent has remained steadfastly at peace.

America has exchanged power between rival political parties dozens of times without bloodshed under the same constitution since 1870. The governments of modern Europe date to World War II.

And Russia? It offers its people starvation wages, a shockingly short life span, pollution, degradation, corruption, violence, pandemic racism, universal conscription and extinction. This is the country America is supposed to look up to and learn from? Is it possible that in this day and age there are still folks who think so?

Yup. Just call them Russophiles.

La Russophobe has already reported on the attempt by the slobbering maniac Valentin Falin to introduce his rabid brand of Neo-Soviet anti-Americanism into the Russian Duma. Now, Georgy Bovt of the Moscow Times explores the issue further. Now is the time to ask: Will all those crazed Russophiles who vociferously condemn "Russophobia" now come forward to condemn anti-Americanism with equal zeal? Don't hold your breath. Just like the Soviet Union, Russia is baiting American into a confrontation that Russia cannot win.

Last week, a remarkable document titled "On a Likely Scenario of Action of the United States toward Russia in 2006-2008" was circulated in the State Duma. It is undoubtedly the largest-scale and most comprehensive anti-U.S. program that post-Soviet Russia has seen.

Yes, of course, a lot has been written over the past 15 years. But the fundamental difference between this and other similar exercises is that it appears to have been approved from on high -- probably in the section of the Kremlin administration responsible for drafting ideological doctrines.

Also curious is the way in which the 35-page typewritten "scenario" appeared. First, a small leak appeared in last Thursday's Nezavisimaya Gazeta. The newspaper named the report's authors as Valentin Falin -- a former member of the Communist Party Central Committee and sometime adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev -- who served as ambassador to Germany before turning on and pillorying his former boss at every available opportunity, and former foreign intelligence chief Gennady Yevstafyev.

The following day, Friday, Moskovskiye Novosti editor Vitaly Tretyakov devoted more than two pages of the newspaper to a copy of the report "accidentally" distributed in the Duma. He promised to publish the full text in the Politichesky Klass weekly, which he also edits. Tretyakov is a former democrat who is now a fervent, almost paranoid, anti-Western patriot who does nothing without consulting the Kremlin first, so it is unlikely that he would publish such a document without receiving direct orders.

It is impossible to recount the whole scenario here. Suffice it to say that it brings together almost all of the anti-U.S. myths of the last 15 years. For example, it says that the United States cannot "come to terms with Russia's growing strength," and that Washington is preparing to "bring down" the Putin regime from within, specifically around the time of the 2008 presidential elections. The United States will, the report says, work to isolate the Russian political elite, and look for a stalking horse among liberal groups -- currently former-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov -- and, inevitably, the CIA is drafting an "Orange project" for Russia. "For the United States, it is unacceptable in principle to have sovereign democracy in Russia ... that is not built into the construction of global American leadership." The United States will also work to undermine "Russia's energy sovereignty," and simultaneously push for Georgia to be accepted into NATO.

The whole document is filled with a spirit of confrontation, a paranoid search for enemies and all sorts of U.S. conspiracies. Yet in a strange way the doctrine is rather convenient, because anyone who criticizes Russian political practice can now safely be written off as an agent of U.S. influence.

Consider the war on corruption, for example. This will also become a U.S. conspiracy because, as we have already seen, the Americans are committed to the "international legal isolation of Russia's top leadership" and will attempt to create a "tense atmosphere around the siloviki and key business representatives" and "accumulate court decisions in the West" against top Russian officials. Any anticorruption campaign in the media can simply be explained away as "incitement" by the United States.

And if, during elections in 2007 and 2008, you hear anyone talking about the authorities breaking the rules, you can rest safe in the knowledge that this is also the result of a U.S. conspiracy. The United States is provoking various Russian Kasyanovs so that they, in turn, will provoke the Russian authorities, so that the authorities will persecute them during elections. Brilliant!

Mass protests -- by drivers, cheated investors or disgruntled tenants such as those in the Moscow suburb of Butovo who were stripped of their houses and apartments with insufficient compensation -- also, rest assured, are out on the streets only at U.S. instigation. The United States will also be behind almost all of Russia's spartan opposition. And any media reports about "deceitful propaganda on Russian television," corruption among senior officials, the interests of Gazprom-esque monopolists running counter to the interests of the people, and so on.

An alternative has long been sought for the idology of sovereign democracy, but obviously little progress has been made. We have ended up with something that should long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history. All that is left is to find out who will hoist this carcass up their flagpole. It surely won't be Falin and Yevstafyev.

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil.

La Russophobe has already reported on a series of disastrous performances by Russia in international evaluations for competent government and civil society. The Transparancy International think tank, prestigious Foreign Policy magazine and the World Bank itself have all condemned the Kremlin for destroying democracy and the market economy inside Russia so as to preserve dictatorship, placing Russia in the same company as the third-world African nation of Niger.

Now the World Economic Forum joins the fray. It places Russia #62 out of 125 nations surveyed in terms of "economic competitiveness"-- well behind Kazakhstan and in the same company as basket cases like El Salvador and Egypt. Russia plummeted from position #53 last year, a decline of nearly 17% in just one year. Former Soviet slave states like Estonia (#25), Latvia (#36) and Lithuania (#40) are leaving Russia in their dust. If you were to remove Russia's oil revenues from this picture, Russia's score would barely register on the WEF scale.

Here's what the WEF had to say about Russia's performance:

The private sector in Russia has serious misgivings about the independence of the judiciary and the administration of justice. Legal redress in Russia is neither expeditious, transparent nor inexpensive, unlike in the world’s most competitive economies. A ranking of only 110 among 125 countries in 2006 suggests that it is time-consuming, unpredictable and a cost burden to enterprises. Partly because of this, the property rights regime is extremely poor and worsening. Russia’s ranking in this indicator during the last two years has suffered a precipitous decline, from 88 in 2004 to 114 in 2006, among the worst in the world.

That's right, Russia's respect for property rights is "among the worst in the world." As Russia has gotten less poor, its respect for wealth has diminished. And these are GOOD economic times. Can you imagine how the Kremlin will deal with property rights, and other legal rights, once it's been squeezed for a while by the falling price of oil?

Scary, isn't it?

Time and again, what we see from outside appraisals of the Kremlin, from respected and diverse expert panels, is the indication of abject failure, fundamental corruption destroying even a semblance of morality, a descent back in to the darkness of totalitiarian dictatorship.

La Russophobe is put to mind of the character played by Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Released from prison, all he can think about is how difficult life is on the outside and what he might do to get himself arrested and put back into his comfortable prison home. Maybe, quite simply, Russians don't want to be free, don't want to shrug off the hardships of dictatorship, and don't care who they hurt in the process. How else can one explain continuing to favor "President" Putin with 70%+ approval ratings when study after study shows the disastrous consequences of his rule?

Yesterday, the RTSE index of the Russian stock market gained 2.17%, clawing back some of the horrifying 15% loss the index has sustained over the past month as oil prices have begun to recede. The total value of all shares traded on the exchange was $504,972,015.

Meanwhile, the DJIA index of the New York Stock Exchange (just one of several in America. to be listed on the NYSE a company must have at least $2.5 million in earnings and at least 1 million shares) gained 0.81%, soaring to the second-best closing value in its history. Nearly three billion shares of stock were traded. Even if each share was only worth a dollar, six times more value moved on this single American exchange than in all of Russia. If the average share price was $10, then sixty times more value moved on the NYSE than in all of Russia. If we assume the average share price was $50, then three hundred times more value moved on the NYSE alone than in all of Russia, despite the high price of oil which greatly benefits the Russian exchange while undermining that of the United States. In other words, the Russian stock market, with all its recent growth attributable to oil prices, is still microscopically small compared to that of America.

As the price of oil drops, the American market surges and the Russian market slumps. Once again, we see the direct interest Russia has to inflate the price of crude oil by doing whatever it can to foment turmoil in the Middle East. This is an issue to which Americans need to begin paying increasingly close attention.

Writing in the Moscow Times, Alexander Golts informs us that Neo-Soviet Russia is about to officially begin the Cold War, underway for some time now, by issuing a policy statement from its military junta that the United States is Russia's enemy.

Something strange is afoot this year in the Defense Ministry. Every other month or so there information is leaked about a group of high-ranking officers in the General Staff that is wrapping up work on a new military doctrine, which it will soon unveil to the country's military and political leadership. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov routinely denies the rumors, insisting that he knows nothing about a new doctrine.

It would be unfair to accuse Ivanov of knowing everything that goes on in his ministry. He recently told President Vladimir Putin that the navy's attack submarines carried nuclear weapons. If this were true, it would mean that Russia had decided to ignore the obligation it assumed in the early 1990s to place all tactical nuclear weapons in storage facilities.

In the case of the new military doctrine, Ivanov had to show some interest. Putin used his state-of-the-nation address this year to talk about necessary changes in the military doctrine to bring it up to date. There have also been reports that Ivanov will present the doctrine at a Cabinet meeting in the near future. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the Defense Ministry is not making any real progress on the doctrine.

The leaks have not simply been dreamt up by enterprising reporters, however. The people writing on this issue have obviously seen some sort of document, which they have quoted extensively. It is highly unlikely that someone in the ministry prepared a fake document just to swindle the press. More likely, the ministry drafted the new doctrine without direct orders from above.

If, as seems likely, we are dealing with an initiative coming from the military leadership, the new military doctrine points to a deterioration in the armed forces that has been going on since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As the latest attempts to reform the military run out of steam, the top brass are beginning to demand a military doctrine from the Kremlin, arguing that they cannot build up their forces without a document that clearly identifies the country's enemies, its allies, and the sort of war we are supposed to be preparing for. In short, they're looking for the equivalent of the General Secretary's reports to the Soviet Communist Party congresses in the good old days.

The main question, of course, is who should be included in the list of Russia's potential enemies. The journalists who wrote the latest article on the new military doctrine said it singled out the United States and NATO. If the document was drafted without instructions from the Kremlin, this means that the military leadership is pushing the country into a new confrontation.

It's worth remembering that when the current military doctrine was being drawn up in 1999-2000, the General Staff argued that the United States and NATO posed a clear threat to Russian security. At the time, the Kremlin was irritated by the actions of the West in Yugoslavia, but Ivanov, who was then head of the Security Council, had the sense to remove this provocative statement from the final draft.

Now it seems the generals are riding a new wave of anti-Americanism to throw the same old arguments at the Kremlin. And not because they seriously think a military confrontation with the United States and NATO is likely. Their only interest is in preserving the current structure of the armed forces so that they can hold on to their jobs as long as possible.

At issue is the Soviet model of a mass conscription army designed exclusively to counter a global enemy. Since China does not fit the bill, only the United States and NATO are left.

If the Kremlin agrees with the anti-American provisions in the doctrine, the generals will be able to dismiss complaints about the inefficiency of the military. And the result will be an unworkable situation, since Russia's chief potential enemy will be identified as a country with a military budget more than 20 times larger than ours. Criticism could be deflected by citing the lack of funding.

In this situation, leaks to the press are a none-too-subtle way to blackmail the political leadership. If the new doctrine is not approved, the brass will argue that the Kremlin is unwilling to face the truth and to take the country's security seriously. And the Kremlin, where the tone is becoming increasingly anti-American, will find it very difficult to counter such accusations.

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

Bloomberg reports that yet another domino has fallen in the Kremlin's all-out Neo-Soviet nationalization of Russian energy resources:

BP Plc's Russian venture, OAO TNK-BP Holding, may lose its permit to develop the $18 billion Kovykta natural-gas field in Siberia because of license and environmental violations, Russian prosecutors said.

Valery Pak, the head of TNK-BP unit OAO Rusia Petroleum, was summoned to the Prosecutor General's Office and ``officially warned'' his company must fix the problems or face losing its license in the Irkutsk region, according to a statement today posted on the prosecutor's Web site.

"We are developing the project in accordance with the license terms,'' Alexander Shadrin, a spokesman for TNK-BP, said today by phone from Moscow. "This week, we have started construction of the first stretch of a pipeline to supply gas to the local market'' in accordance with the license terms.

TNK-BP, Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA all face demands from Russia to cede some control of oil and gas fields to the state-controlled gas and oil companies, OAO Gazprom and OAO Rosneft. The foreign-led ventures have become anomalies in Russia as President Vladimir Putin increases state control over the energy industry.

Russia has previously threatened to revoke drilling licenses held by Rusia Petroleum for Kovykta, eastern Siberia's largest gas field, unless the venture comes to an agreement with Gazprom on the pace of the field's development.

Gazprom, which controls Russia's gas pipelines, opposed TNK- BP's plans to break its monopoly by supplying fuel directly to China or South Korea from the Kovykta, which holds 2 trillion cubic meters of gas, enough to power Asia for about six years. Gazprom, which produces a majority of Russia's gas, is developing a competing project to supply the fuel to the Irkutsk region.

Russia this month threatened to cancel Shell's permit to finish building pipelines and a plant to liquefy natural gas at the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project.

Rusia Petroleum must supply 9 billion cubic meters of gas to the local market starting from this year, according to the prosecutor's office statement.

The Kovykta project is in limbo because Russia's Natural Resources Ministry hasn't approved amendments TNK-BP submitted that would defer the start of full output to 2009, Anatoly Ledovskikh, the head of Russia's state agency for natural resource use, said May 31.

East Siberian Gas Co., equally owned by the Irkutsk region government and TNK-BP, planned to supply as much as 2.8 billion cubic meters of gas a year staring in 2010, East Siberian said last December.

The Associated Press added: "'I would see this as part of the pressure build on TNK-BP to consider restructuring the project to allow a greater role for one or other state companies,' said Chris Weafer, chief strategist for Alfa-Bank in Moscow. 'That's what we're headed for, these are all projects that were agreed by government before the current approach to strategic industries had been formalized.'"

If you want to gain some appreciation for just how far gone Russia really is, consider that Aljazeera is reporting the assassination of the Imam of a Russian mosque yesterday in the town of Kislovodsk, which Aljazeera reports "like many parts of southern Russia, has a strong Russian nationalist Christian community which eyes with suspicion the growth of a Muslim population arriving from the impoverished Caucasus region."

So Slavic Orthodox Russia (now in the early stages of bringing classes about Orthodoxy to Russian primary schools) has fundamental issues with Muslims, especially the dark-skinned variety. And despite this, Slavic Orthodox Russia is funneling nuclear technology to Iran which could easily be used to develop a bomb that could easily be dropped on Slavic Orthodox Russia.

How self-destructive is it possible to get?