Russian Blogosphere

Russian blogosphere is mostly divided between two camps and the Russian Government is not in any of them. One camp is Stalinist with a heavy degree of antisemitism. The other camp are the "demchiza" people who demand immediate occupation of Russia by the NATO forces and the like. Imagine how popular they might be with simple people in the street.

Seems that the Russian bloggers are locked in the Georgian triangle of Dzugashvili (Stalin)-Saakashvili-Chkhartashvili (pseud. B. Akunin, a detective writer who fashions himself a public figure) with no exit. Below I recite a humorous verse which I downloaded from Russian blog and which probably came from a few authors retaining overall sanity. Because it refers to several nursery rimes unknown to the English-speaking reader, I supply my translation in a modified limerick form.


Кошка бросила котят.
Это Путин виноват.
Зайку бросила хозяйка.
Кто виновен, угадай-ка!

Вот кончается доска
У несчастного бычка.
Наша Таня громко плачет.
Рядом Путин, не иначе.

Свет погас, упал забор,
У авто заглох мотор,
Зуб здоровый удалили,
Иль залез в квартиру вор,
Не понравилось кино,
Наступили Вы в г…но.
У любого катаклизма
Объяснение одно:

Знает каждый демократ-
Это Путин виноват!

If your wife is a bitch,
And the movie was kitsch,
If you stepped into shit,
Or your son is a twit,
Every creative mind
Would not be so blind
There is Putin behind all of it.

Comment censored by Farid Zakaria's Global Public??? Square

This comment of mine has not been posted on your Dec. 18, 2011 blog for unknown reasons despite compliance with the Terms of Service, so I try to post it, belatedly,

Dear Fareed Zakaria,

You mention that "Historians have pointed out that the Russian nation was literally the property of the Czar, that serfs were more like slaves than simply peasant workers..."

For your information, Russian Empire abolished serfdom in 1861, more than fifty years before
the revolution and two years before emancipation proclamation in the US. For comparison, serfdom
was abolished in Austrian Empire, at that time ruling much of the Central Europe, in 1848
and Brazil empancipated its slaves in 1889.

Local self-government and trial by jury were established in 1864. By contrast, French Napoleonic
system of prefects was dragged long into the twentieth century.

Russian Empire became a constitutional monarchy in 1905 and by 1914, the start of the Great War, its
institutions were not particularly different from contemporary Germany and Austro-Hungary. A significant
fraction of the population of the Empire, namely, Congress Poland (1815-1831) and Duchy of Finland
(1814-1905) were endowed with separate constitutions written under heavy influence of Jeremy
Bentham. These constitutions at the time were simply the most democratic than any in
Europe, pre-1832 England included. No European country before the mid XIXth century had
universal male suffrage. Since 1906, Finns enjoyed universal suffrage (the only country after
Iceland and New Zealand).

All that said, Russian Empire was similar in level of development to contemporary Continental European
monarchies and far ahead of the European periphery (Balkans, Iberian peninsula, etc.).

You are either ignorant of textbook Russian history of which you allow yourself such absurd generalizations
as above, or, what is even worse, are consciously telling untruths for the sake of ideology. This is sad because
millions of Americans view you as one of the few remaining public intellectuals in the mass media.

Lies and Obfuscations. Condolezza Rice. No Higher Honor. A Memoir of my Years in Washington. Crown publishers.

Lies and obfuscations

In her memoirs, Condolezza Rice glosses over at least four glaring failures of her as a national security adviser and secretary of state. First, is of course, the failure to observe the rise of Taliban and the danger Al Qaeda presented to the United States. She writes: "Yes, everyone knew that bin Laden was determined to attack the United States... We were not told how he might carry out such an attack, only that he had been impressed by the partially successful attach on the WTC.” (p. 69)

She already explained that in her congressional testimony that (in light of the above quotation) there was no specific information about the attack. It seems that nothing short of the map of the Manhattan with drawn planes approaching World Trade Center and the letters “Caboom! Caboom!”—in English, not in Arabic because few people in our National Security apparatus knew it—would convince her to take seriously threat from Osama bin Laden. With the warning above only a single meeting with the president was spent on the impending threat.

She mentions that the planning of war with Iraq was set in motion in the spring of 2002. Aha, that means that Bush already decided to go to war early in 2002 and all hullabaloo in the United Nations and leaks to the American media were just a smokescreen to justify invasion. "There was a sense of urgency to do something about Iraq but we wanted to get it right." (p. 177) Did they?
Rice writes about the motives, which brought G. W. to this pathetic conviction but much later, on p. 187. "We invaded Iraq because we believed we had ran out of options. The sanctions were not working [towards which goal?--A. B.], the inspections were unsatisfactory and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means..." I.e., the reason the pressure on Iraq was never to make it to comply with weapons inspectors but to change regime in Baghdad. But to what purpose?
The only thing clear is that she never admits her own influence in bringing about Bush's conviction that he is destined to remake Iraq—but how could that be that this poor man with zero experience and zero interest of foreign countries could have congealed this idea without bouncing it off his trusted national security adviser?

A failure to exploit Khatami presidency to try to stop Iranian nuclear program was another disaster in the making. Drunk by the neocon moonshine speciously provided by John Bolton, she insisted that nothing short of Iran developing something reminiscent of Swiss level of democracy will justify talking to Tehran. To add insult to injury, Bush (and, by the way, Clinton) administrations were incessantly haranguing on the intolerability for Iran to develop nuclear technology thus overblowing its usefulness in the minds of the mullahs. Screams by neocons after the purported “success” of Iraq invasion that Iran would be next target hardly could provide them any reassurance.

Fourth foul-up, may be of the least importance, but of the greatest stupidity was to replace quite docile and pro-American Shevarnadze in Republic of Georgia by the militaristic nut Saakashvili and arm him to the teeth with the purpose of attacking Russia [Comment1]. She repeats the Saakashvili story of some unspecified Russian provocations preceding his murderous attack on the sleeping city of Tshinvali: "Despite Georgia's unilateral ceasefire earlier in the day, South Ossetian rebel forces continued shelling ethnic Georgian villages in and around the capital Tshinvali." (p. 686). Yet, even the EU fact -finding mission prejudiced about the Russians did not find anything to bolster the story of Russian premediation. In fact, it was disavowed on CNN by none else than ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell. 

Georgian project demonstrated her tunnel world vision dominated by Washington power politics with little if any understanding of the world policy. Yet, even liberal well-minded but little versed in foreign policy commentators such as John Stewart bought her lies and obfuscations and lionized her as a wise senior politician. They never asked her questions like: “What particular readings in Russian history suggested to you that the Russians can be cowed, lest by a nation half the size of Switzerland and fifty times as poor?”

            Condolezza demonstrates spectacular ignorance in the matters she professes to be an expert: "...the ever-simmering Russian hatred of Georgia." (p. 681) Georgia, unlike many other territories was never conquered and was incorporated into the Russian Empire by petition of its Christian nobility to be saved from the forced conversion and/or genocide by the Turks and the Persians. Since then, Georgians beginning with Prince Bagrationi and ending with Stalin played important roles in the administration of Russia proper.
   Another feat of bizarre. "Sobchak and his wife were royalists..." (p. 61) What does this mean, in particular, for a country which never had royalty? Once, a Russian humor column ridiculing her haughty ignorance registered her surprise to Putin that she did not see bears on Moscow streets. Next, she asks him why on the negotiation table there is no samovar with vodka because as an expert on Russia she knows for sure that the Russians precede all formalities by drinking vodka from a samovar.

            An expert on the Middle East probably would notice in her memoirs similar glaring combination of self-assurance, haughtiness and ignorance so typical of Condy. Together with Justice Clarence Thomas she belongs to the cadre of affirmative action bureaucrats who cried racism any time anyone questioned their professional competence or personal integrity but now advocate policies of throwing away the ladder, which lifted them to the highest orders of the State.