Russia

The English may accuse Russia of bad sportsmanship in the boardroom, but they certainly wouldn’t mind taking a bit of a corporate raiding from the new crop of Soviet bloc sportswomen.

A series of ‘interviews’ to “assess the changes on court” was The Daily Telegraph’s highly plausible excuse to “meet eight rising stars from the east in distinctly non-regulation kit”.

Good to see the Tottygraph fly its lecherous old flag…for the Motherland!

Sorry for the silence! Been away celebrating Russia’s Independence Day…from itself.

(It is true: 12 June marked the secession of the Russian republic from the USSR. Not only is the occasion modishly Freudian, but it’s also simply a matter of justice: the US has an independence day, and so is Russia to be left without one?)

I’ll be writing a few proper posts filled with reflection (surely ‘invective’?-ed.) over the weekend but here are some things to keep you busy till then!

INDIE DAY:

Not content to celebrate Russia Day by relaxing with a crate or two of Soviet Champagne and a Brat 2 DVD, a rather energetic lot of Left wing democracy activists attended street rallies condemning the government’s treatment of dissidents.

EXILE AGONY:

The beleaguered organ is holding a paypal donations drive to replace its cowardly sponsors. The Moscow Times has the (hopefully exaggerated & premature) obituary!
The epic danse macabre, previously confined to this Blog and a select few other organs, is finally getting picked up in the mainstream English language press, with a vengeance.

Here is a rather good Radio Liberty piece that sums up and contextualises the event.

Mark Ames continues to chronicle the whole dismal affair on Radar Magazine. Read his latest “Russia Independence Day” post here, and weep sardonic tears.

TNK-BR VS RUSSIA BRAWL:

Follow the dirty energy confrontation over oil, foreign drilling and Russian sovereignty! Articles here and here.

Today, Mark Ames, the editor of the embattled Russian dissident paper The eXile (whose plight this Blog has been morbidly following) writes for the first time about the harrowing ordeal in an article for Radar Magazine. It is required reading.

In addition to the Limonov factor, he sheds some more light on the possible causes for Federal complaints against the often terrifyingly obscene newspaper.

Ironically, of all the reasons why a paper as brazenly scandalous as the Exile, whose content could have easily got it into trouble in even the most liberal of democracies (its masthead once read: ‘Making use of Russia’s lax libel laws’); reasons like his last article, which stated “that the Exile ‘farts in Russia’s face’ and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can “urinate into the president’s mouth without any fear of consequences,” and he’s so small he should be “zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail”; of all those reasons,

Ames believes that the crucial factor in the probe was not the paper’s affronts to Medvedev (or occasionally racist, pornographic content), but its lack of seriousness:

In my opinion, this is the real reason they’re moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the “serious” rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin—so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it’s also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West’s Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia…

…The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There’s no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the “New Yorker without political reporting.”

So there you have it. I had written earlier about the creeping spectre of seriousness stalking Russia. It seems that it is now striking painfully close to home.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is well known for his adversarial, even anachronistic, approach to Russia.

Straight talk, right?

Perhaps.

But, asks Mark Benjamin today on Salon.com, could his bluster have had less to do with the Republican base than with the lobbying connections of a close advisor?

The architect behind McCain’s hard-line Russia policy, including kicking it out of the G8, is Randy Scheunemann.

And Scheunemann has until early this year been a long-time lobbyist for Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia, receiving over $2 million in pay from them.

Moreover, “much of Scheunemann’s work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann’s clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him”.

Of course, that does not mean that any of these countries paid Scheunemann to influence McCain to enact an anti-Russian agenda. However, “‘those are countries whose advantage it is to point the finger at a Russian threat, particularly Georgia,’ explained Thomas Simons, ambassador to Poland under George H.W. Bush and to Pakistan under Bill Clinton”.

Crucially, asks Harvard’s Dmitry Gorenburg, if McCain and Scheunemann “‘have had an association for a long time, how do you tell if it is because they think alike, or one has told the other how to think because he is getting paid?’”

McCain likes to say that unlike Bush, who claims to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul, he saw the letters K, G and B instead.

But maybe what he really saw were the letters U, S, and D?

Hey, America! Think your Obama is so special??

A young charismatic man of African descent becomes a national icon, whose eloquence inspires a generation, whose dashing looks send girls fainting and whose liberal politics threaten to derail the establishment?

That sort of thing might still be hot over here, but it is OLD NEWS in Mother Russia.

199 year old news, to be precise.

That’s right, today Russia celebrated the 199th anniversary of the birth of its national poet Alexandr Pushkin, whose life I summarised in the first paragraph.

Pushkin, whose great grandfather was was a freed African slave, was not merely the founding father of indigenous Russian literature. He was Shakespeare, James Dean and Che Guevara rolled into one. (Well, maybe Che Guevara is going a bit far…but he did stand up for liberalism in solidarity with the Decembrists).

He even sported an afro! And died in a duel!!
Go Pushkin!

6 June 1799-10 February 1837

(Thanks to the decidedly cultured Cailtlin Miner LeGrand for reminding me of this splendid occasion!)

PS. Here is an interesting article about Obama, Pushkin and MLK.

So now we know the real reason behind the Federal hounding of the Exile, courtesy of good reporting by the Moscow Times: its associations with dissident leader Eduard Limonov.

In my earlier post, I noted that Limonov was a columnist for the paper and that his radical opposition movement had had scores of its members arrested and detained as political prisoners. The latest probe is the latest chapter in the story.

“Federal officials visited the offices of The eXile on Thursday and asked about the newspaper’s relationship with Eduard Limonov, a Kremlin critic who writes a column for the notorious English-language tabloid.”

Read the whole article by Alexander Osipovich here.

And it was good to hear Editor Mark Ames in characteristic fighting spirit:

“Despite his pessimism about The eXile’s future, Ames said he will not tone it down or stop publishing Limonov.

“Hell no,” Ames said when asked whether the column would be canceled. “Limonov was one of the inspirations for this paper.”

Being 4767 miles away from Manhattan, Moscow has had good reason to feel left out lately.

With all the hullabaloo about ‘oversharing‘, media blogs and New York culture, culminating in the appearance of sultry literary saloniste Emily Gould on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, this Blog has been forced to mantain a dignified, yet distinctly provincial, silence.

Frustrated, I had taken to neurotically refreshing the Gawker homepage several times a minute, scanning the New Republic’s back section, and even reading the obligatory Keith Gessen paean to post-Harvard ennui, All the Sad Young Literary Men (stingingly reviewed here by the critic John Minervini)… in vain.

Not only did the travails of these achingly hip young literati have sorely little to do with my achingly loserish existence, they had even less to do with Russia!

Until now…

In the second issue of the new ‘it’ magazine, “Russia!”, Emily Gould tells all about a devastatingly ‘relevant’ phenomenon sweeping the US literary landscape: the RUSSIAN-AMERICAN WRITER.

Good writing on a very interesting subject with very little to fault it.

All of which still has painfully little to do with my own life, but at least I can now continue to enviously stalk these literary guys with the excuse that I’m just conducting research for future posts.

Just yesterday I had written a qualified warning against blaming Russian media meekness entirely on the Kremlin. Now, I am really tempted to take it all back.

In a case of unabashed, iron gripped censorship of one of the most courageous, outspoken and thoughtful publications in the country, Russian Federal investigators have targeted The Exile, an independent English language newspaper that has been publishing since 1997, for possible violation of media laws. This crackdown must be exposed and stopped.

I have been a faithful reader of the Exile for much of its existence. Imagine a mix of The Nation, the Daily Show and Private Eye, all written by Andre Breton, on crack, and you will get an inkling of the Exile’s essence.

The paper, edited by American expat Mark Ames, is a fusion of irreverent, insightful, caustically funny, often offensive and always sincere observations on Russian politics, culture and society. Through its gonzo journalism, it has consistently told truth to power and acted as a fierce critic of the American media’s often shallow and prejudiced reporting on Russia. It was one of the few organs to predict the 1998 rouble crash, and during the 1990s, it was often the only critic of the Yeltsin regime and the West’s perceived blind support for his devastating reforms, consistently examining the tumultuous lives and struggles of everyday people through a blend of wit, erudition and scathing satire. Today, it remains an equally strong critic both of Putin and the West’s democracy promoters, while also, in its commentary on Russia, telling some home truths about the West itself.

The Exile’s radical politics, perpetual opposition to the powerful and provocative stunts have made it a pariah, with enemies in Western media circles (especially The Economist), Russian government and business elite groups, as well as in Russia’s liberal democratic scene (especially Michael McFaul). It is a truly independent voice of a whole generation growing up in post-communist times, and has unwaveringly stood up for justice.

The newspaper has also launched some well known talents: its co-founding editor, Matt Taibbi, is now the political reporter for Rolling Stone, and its war columnist, Gary Brecher aka the War Nerd, is an internationally recognised expert on warfare. It is currently one of the only media organs giving voice to Eduard Limonov, the tumultuous leader of the National Bolshevik Party, an extra-parliamentary opposition group whose members make up the bulk of Russian political prisoners today. Limonov writes a regular column for the Exile.

Without the slightest exaggeration, the demise of the Exile would be an unquantifiable loss for Russian journalism.

This cynical attempt to use legal pressure to shut down the Exile strikes at the very core of free speech, not to mention the gut of everyone who cares about Russia and seeks to understand it, warts and all.

IMPRESSIVE RUSSIA CRUSH LITHUANIA in Euro 2008 warm-up. 

(Though I’m sure many Russia fans were disppointed it was not Estonia, to have another excuse for a bit of ultra-violence….)

Today’s New York Times carries on its front page an article all about how the Kremlin silences its opponents in the media. Now, it appears, the Russian government is even adopting Stalin-era airbrushing to literally photoshop people with uncomfortably critical views out of already-recorded shows.

Everything in the article is true (and, frankly, something that most people had already known for years) and the NY Times is right to be worried about Russian press freedom, which is being objectively scaled back.

Yet the total lack of any context in the article can cause some misleading conclusions to be made. Allow me to fill in the gaps.

1. The article makes it sound as if media black-lists, or ‘Stop-Lists’, exist only in Putin era Russia. In fact, that practice is widespread in the US media, too, and especially during times of high presidential ratings and nationalist feeling (which were very high in America in 2003-2004, and are now very high in Russia). How many times have you seen someone like Kucinich or Norman Finkelstein on the CBS evening news?

For example, CNN’s Jessica Yellin recently revealed that in the run-up to the Iraq war, she was pressured by executives to carry positive stories and drop negative ones about the popular Bush administration. In fact, as a study of US network coverage by the left leaning media criticism think-tank FAIR reveals, in the run up to the Iraq war,

More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources– Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.)– expressed skepticism or opposition to the war.

Therefore, in the US as in Russia, commercial media organisations routinely ’self-censor’ opposition to popular or strong executive administrations, without any ‘overt’ strong-arming from the government. Vladimir Putin is both extremely popular among Russians and very strong in terms of political power, so it is to some extent to be expected that Russian media organisations will take that into account when booking guests.

2. The article lacks some nuance about the state of press censorship in Russia. The crackdown on press freedom, like most abuses of power in Russia, exists as an indirect consequence of the coersive social, economic and power relationships in the country, rather than a blunt edict from the Kremlin. Social: the nationalistic feeling, strong support of Putin and general attitude of intolerance to dissent in recent years means that there are actually few vocal social figures willing to jeopardise their mainstream careers to go on the air and voice opposition to the authorities. Russian media society is saturated, as in any country, with sychophants espousing conventional wisdom and unwilling to voice overly controversial positions challenging authority. Why would a network go to the trouble of finding dissident guests and antagonising its relationship with a popular government and lucrative advertisers? It is more profitable and easier to play it safe and avoid political controversy by having headache proof guests. Conversely, media authorities and overzealous apparatchiks are very keen to avoid and dissipate those controversial statements that do get made on air in order to curry favour with the Kremlin higher-ups. The complacent, symbiotic relationship between a patriotic press corps; a weak, obedient civil society; and the dominant economic motive keeps the media in line better than any iron-fisted police tactics.

3. Attacks on press freedom did not start with Putin. In fact, the tradition of media coercion and journalist killings started in the middle of the ‘democratic’ Yeltsin era. Most glaringly, the liberal station NTV has admitted to having signed a Faustian pact with Yeltsin to broadcast propaganda on his behalf during the 1996 presidential campaign and withhold airtime from his opponents, the Communists:

“During the decisive 1996 presidential elections, in which Boris Yeltsin beat back a seriouschallenge from Communist Gennady Zyuganov, oligarch-controlled “independent media” played a decisive role in Yeltsin’s come-from-behind victory. NTV eschewed its independent character to become a propaganda arm of the Yeltsin team, and, in a staggering conflict of interest, NTV’s president became media coordinator for the Yeltsin team…Whenever its Kremlin paymasters were seriously threatened, as during the 1996 presidential elections or the 1999 legislative balloting (after which Putin first cultivated a pliant parliamentary majority), the media became a propaganda arm for the administration”. (Jonathan Weiler, Foreign Policy in Focus)

And herein lies perhaps the essential part to take away from all this: Russians are shedding very few tears about the demise of the liberal independent media, because that media let them down when they really needed it–1996 to name but one date. It has not been an honest broker in the past, throwing its lot with the despised oligarchs and Yeltsin era liberals, and that is one reason why Russians are not standing up to defend it against attacks from Putin.

Also worth noting: for every Anna Politkovskaya of the Putin regime, scores of journalists perished for their reporting in the ‘liberal’1990s. In fact, according to an analysis by the British weekly New Statesman, 27 journalists were killed under Yeltsin to 16 under Putin.