“War in South Ossetia: Georgia started it”

Thus did today’s editorial in Britain’s Guardian say what almost the entire US media elite refused to do last summer. It referred to the comprehensive EU investigation that found the war to have been started by Georgia and not Russia, but could just as easily have been quoting this humble blog.

In a series of articles in August 2008, FPA Russia Blog exposed the blatant pro-Georgian bias of the US political class and  near hysterical anti-Russian propaganda spewed by mainstream news organs, when “the press’s credulity of official US government positions, easy embrace of jingoism and susceptibility to hawkishness reminded me queasily of its very similar performance in run up to the Iraq war”.

In an excellent commentary on the media’s complicity in the war, Glenn Greenwald denounced those “deceitful methods that permeate our political discourse, especially when it comes to demonizing America’s Enemy du jour“, methods which, as I pointed out last August, reinforced “to the uninformed viewer that it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade”.

Much of the media’s bias towards Georgia, whatever the true facts on the ground, was due to its love affair with the telegenic, fluent and media savvy president. Yet, as the Guardian shrewdly notes, “the ability to jump in front of a CNN camera does not confer on the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the gifts of a democrat”. Not surprisingly, however, his crackdown on civil society groups and political opposition received little mention.

For example when CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry breathlessly delivered the following lines (with a straight face):

“…What’s really going on is that Russia is trying essentially to reconstitute the old soviet union.bring back the old spheres of influence. if you take over Georgia today, what’s next? Could they then move into the Ukraine (sic), could they take over the Czech Republic? These are awful options that are on the table, but there’s a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

A year long EU probe was not necessary to unmask such claims as the nonsense that they are. But equally, perhaps not even such an investigation is enough to dispel the enduring anti-Russian sentiments nursed by the conservative-Atlanticist clique within Europe’s elite. This gang includes the usual suspects - a smelly alliance of right-wing pseudo-intellectuals (Bernard Henri-Levy) and past-their-prime freedom fighters determined to reinstate the Cold War that once gave them underdog hero status (Vaclav Havel). Just last week, that very group had issued a letter that compared Russia to Hitler’s Germany and urged the EU to defend Georgia at all costs.

In the wake of the report, that kind of comment becomes as ridiculous as the rubbish (so ably gathered by Greeenwald) that was spewed by John McCain:

[Putin] has exhibited most aggressive behavior, obviously, in Georgia. . . .We have to make the Russians understand that there are penalties for these this kind of behavior, this kind of naked aggression into Georgia, a tiny country and a tiny democracy.

and the Washington Post’s editorial board:

Part of the blame-the-victim argument is tactical — the notion that the elected president of Georgia foolishly allowed the Russians to goad him into a military operation to recover a small separatist region of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili says, in an article we publish on the opposite page today, that the facts are otherwise, that he ordered his troops into action only after a Russian armored column was on the move. . . . Moreover, the evidence is persuasive and growing that Russia planned and instigated this war.

A year on, with a detente-minded Obama in the White House and the likes of Sarah Palin relegated to a museum of political curiosities, the EU investigation underscores just how much the GOP and the elite US media were on the wrong side of history.

In Russia we have a saying: “Dwell in the past, and you’ll lose one eye; forget the past and you will lose both eyes”.

Amidst all the recent recriminations between Russia, Eastern Europe and the West thrown up by the anniversary of the start of WWII, there’s certainly no danger of anyone going blind. Yet the decidedly monocular perspectives of the parties concerned are not the best means of seeing the truth.

A rough timeline of the confrontation:

1) The OSCE equates Nazism and Communism.

2) Russia retaliates saying Communism saved the world from Nazism, denies Red Army rampage over liberated Europe.

3) Poland blames the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for starting WWII; Polish president says: “On 17 September, Poland received a stab in the back. This blow came from Bolshevik Russia.”

4) Russia retaliates by blaming Poland for starting WWII with its own non-aggression pact.

Who is right?

Russia Blog has already written about the folly of equating Nazism and Communism. However,  the current fashion of exhuming the crimes of Stalin and the USSR as if they were somehow newly discovered is a politicized attack; not so much against Russia as against the Left.

It is no coincidence that every sponsor of such historical muck-raking has been a right wing government, including Poland’s Lech Kaczynski. July’s OSCE resolution was no exception, having been proposed by none other than Lithuania. After all, its ex-US citizen president Valdas Adamkus used to be an active member of the Republican Party and received a medal from Ronald Reagan.

In this light, it’s impossible to deny a glaring ideological subtext to any discussion of Soviet actions in the world, before, during and after WWII.

As Seumas Milne has impressively written, “Battles over history are more about the future than the past”, and those on the right who bring up the spectre of Stalinism are doing so “to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed”. After all, as Milne astutely notes, where is these same parties’ condemnation of European colonial crimes and massacres?

In the waning days of the USSR, Gorbachev publicly admitted that the Katyn Forest slaughter was committed by the NKVD and not the Nazis, as the USSR had maintained for over 40 years. ”It is not easy to speak of this tragedy,” he said, “but it is necessary”.

It remains necessary to speak of all the atrocities committed by European powers in the 20th century, from Katyn to Algeria to Vietnam. But there is something cynical and sinister about using historical crimes to smear ideological and/or geo-political adversaries: let’s not forget that the first people to publicly wave around evidence of those Polish killings were…the NAZIs themselves.

In any other news week, the title of most amusing story would certainly have gone to the BBC for comparing Putin to a character out of Brokeback Mountain: “Photographs of a bare-chested Mr Putin riding a horse through mountain scenery may of course put some people…in mind of a recent Hollywood film about gay cowboys”.

But that was before Twittergatesk.

You’ve heard the story: “Russian attempt to silence dissident stopped the tweets“, “Root of Twitter’s woes lies in Russia“, etc etc.

According to the overwhelming narrative in the English language media, a plucky Georgian blogger (named George, natch), who also happens to be a John McCain supporter, was targeted by Russian cyber-warriors for speaking out against Russian aggression last summer.

But because it was too difficult to bring down a single web-page or twitter account, the government hackers decided to take down every social networking site in sight, just to silence the pesky truth-teller.

How do we know this? Well, because he said so. “I’m certain the order came from the Russian government”, said George, and the major English-language newspapers have literally taken the blogger’s word for it.

Only the BBC deigned to point out that “despite the blogger’s claims, security researchers say there is “no suggestion the attack was state-endorsed”.

He may of course be correct. After all, recriminations have been flying from both sides in recent days, with many in Russia remain unhappy at the decision to not ‘go all the way to Tbilisi’ and depose Saakashvili when they had the chance.  None of this would explain, however, why George was selected for special punishment amongst millions of like-minded bloggers, in Georgia and all over the world, who skewer the Russian government every day.

But even if all bloggers were not by definition the narcissists and hyperbolic self-promoters that they are, the absolute credulity of the elite free press during instances of such accusations against ‘official enemies’ is striking and rather scary. Moreover, it often seems that a burden of proof is only required when challenging the established point of view.

Indeed, just yesterday the New York Times condemned Russia’s exaggerated claims of genocide by Georgian troops in Ossetia: “It was as if senior Russian officials pulled out a dog-eared Soviet propaganda playbook that called for hurling the most outlandish charge, without recognizing that in the modern global media climate, their credibility would quickly suffer if the facts proved otherwise”.

It would have been a compelling article, had the same paper that decried crude Russian propaganda itself not been so willing to swallow the Georgian variety.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) recent resolution marking August 23rd as a day of remembrance for Nazism and Stalinism has sparked quite an uproar over the past couple weeks. Russia’s Federal Assembly (the 176 member Federation Council and 450 member State Duma, respectively) issued a statement that the decision to equate Nazism with Stalinism is a “direct insult to the memory of millions” of Soviet soldiers who “gave their lives for the freedom of Europe from the fascist yoke.” The resolution, passed by a majority of the 56-nation OSCE parliamentary assembly, marks August 23rd as a day of remembrance for the victims of Nazism and Stalinism. August 23rd is the date of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact,  an agreement signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov stating that the Soviet Union and Germany would not attack one another and would resolve any conflicts peacefully and amicably. This meant that, should Germany choose to invade Poland, the Soviet Union would abstain from coming to Poland’s aid or entering any subsequent war on the side of Britain and France. The two parties also signed a secret additional protocol dividing Poland between the two countries and permitting the Soviet Union to appropriate the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, buffer zones desperately needed to protect the Soviet Union from invasion by the West (and still needed-note Russia’s ongoing assertion of its sphere of influence). This pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov paved the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland a week later marking the start of World War II.

Bronze Soldier of Tallinn

The OSCE resolution is meant to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as remember those who perished in World War II. It calls for all OSCE members to take a  “united stand against all totalitarian rule from whatever ideological background” and condemns the  “glorification of totalitarian regimes, including the holding of public demonstrations glorifying the Nazi or Stalinist past.” This is a clear chastisement of Russia, which in recent years has encouraged the heroification of Stalin for his role in defeating Nazi Germany several years later in World War II, even passing laws to maintain its historical narrative. This past May, President Medvedev established a truth commission to “counteract against attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia.” The Duma even introduced a law giving the Ministry of Education the right to decide which textbooks to publish and distribute in schools in order so as to ensure the ‘correct’ dissemination of history. The 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia began amid Estonia’s fracas with Russia over the decision to relocate the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a Soviet WWII memorial.

Russia’s Victory Day (Den Pobedi), celebrated on May 9th, is the country’s most important non-religious holiday. It can be compared to July 4th celebrations in the United States-the difference being, of course, that no living American was around at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Second World War, on the other hand, is still very much a part of the Russian national consciousness. In a country full of citizens accustomed to instability (to put it lightly) World War II remains the one longstanding source of national pride. Putin and Medvedev have both made it clear that a key pillar of their respective administrations rests on inspiring Russians to feel proud of their history. For Russians, there can be no doubt that Stalin and the Red Army succeeded in defeating the Nazis and liberating the Baltic countries from Third Reich domination.

Russia is not alone in the world in its desire to maintain a certain narrative about World War II. Every country has its own historical narratives, but when such narratives stand in the way of understanding the actual history, problems inevitably result.  There is some truth in Russia’s vision of itself as victor of World War II and liberator of Poland and the Baltic states but it is not, however, the whole truth. The Baltic states have fiercely disagreed with Russia’s historical interpretation. A visit to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (or its website), for example, exhibits a portrayal of the Soviet Union as occupiers and certainly no better than the Germans it defeated.

There is no doubt that the Soviet Union under Stalin committed mass atrocities and the issue should not be about whether people suffered more or less as a result of Nazism versus Stalinism. Nor should the issue be whether the suffering under fascism and communism is comparable - one can make comparisons of the numbers of people killed, the level of violence, etc. What is problematic about comparing Nazism to Stalinism does not have to do with any of this-it has to do with genocide and the documented intention of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the clearest example the world has of genocide because of the documented intention to kill every last Jewish man, woman, and child.  Stalin’s aims were different and as such there was no such documented intention of Stalin to kill every last Ukrainian man, woman, and child, nor was there a documented intention to deport every last Lithuanian man, woman, and child, etc. There is also a difference between Jews (along with some other groups such as Roma and Sinti) in that, during WWII, they did not have a country or an army. Baltic leaders have referred to communist crimes as “genocidal”, an alarmingly inaccurate use of terminology. It is understandable that people want legitimate recognition for suffering at the hands of communism-but this needn’t undermine the status of the Holocaust.

Caught in the midst of all this, European Jewry is faced with an historically unusual situation. As a result of its desire to deal with its “near abroad”, the Russian government has now become somewhat philo-Semitic.  Note, for example, the preparations for the new Russian Museum of Jewish Tolerance, set to open in 2011 in what is currently Daria Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, for which Putin even donated a month’s salary in 2007 towards the construction (reportedly 70,000 rubles or $2700 at the time). At the same time, Anti-Semitism has been growing across Russia and all of Europe.

It is important for countries like Latvia and Estonia to be able to openly recognize those who perished at the hands of both the Nazis and the Communists. Russians, though deserving in part of the right to maintain dignity and pride over their role in WWII, need to let go of their defenses and deal once and for all with the past.  That is not a reason why, however, after so much struggling on behalf of European (and worldwide) Jewry for Holocaust education and remembrance, in the process the concept of genocide in World War II should be diluted.

When Putin imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky for wanting to sell parts of his oil business to the West, he was criticised abroad for political interference in the energy market.

What to make then of the EU and US cheerleading for Nabucco, a pipeline with no economic rationale being built solely for the political reason of isolating Russia as a gas supplier?

Certainly, it makes very little business sense: running from Turkey via Southern and Eastern Europe to the West, the pipleine’s capacity would be less than half that of Russia’s alternative South Stream route, which is already supported by key states such as Italy, France and Azerbaijan and ‘could reach 63 bcm annually‘.

“‘Nabucco is turning pipeline economics on its head,’ says Paul Stevens, senior research fellow on energy at Chatham House in London quoted in the Christian Science Monitor. ‘Normally you find gas and build a pipeline. Nabucco is building a pipeline, and then looking for gas.’”

But it does not take long to undertand the real rationale behind the plan. The very same article’s headline reads: ‘Will Nabucco pipeline deal free Europe from Russian gas?’, and makes at least one (mindblowing original) reference to “the Russian bear”. Lest any additional meaning be lost, the name Nabucco itself, we are told, “is named after a Verdi opera whose subject is liberation from bondage”.

But whose bondage from whom? The only supply problems the EU have ever experienced with Russian gas has been during disputes with Ukraine. But South Stream, which bipasses Ukraine and other conflict prone states such as Poland, should guarantee against such shocks in the future.

This conscious and costly policy of isolating Russia, ostensibly to avoid dangerous over-reliance, seems doubly odd given the overwhelming Western reliance on China, which boasts both a more repressive political system and stronger military might, and the Arab world.

Unsurprisingly, most Western media have been reliably backing Nabucco, not least the New York Times.

In a strange article about the two German cheerleaders of Nabucco and South Stream respectively: Joska Fishcer and Gerhadt Schroeder, the Times inevitably sides with Fischer - ‘a man in a white hat riding into town to stare down or be gunned down by a guy in a black one’, blind to the the irony of a former Green Party leader lobbying for a project widely condemned by environmental groups.

Nabucco’s commercial irrelevance, coupled with its heavy reliance on Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania - which comprise a Nato arc all along Russia’s south-western flank - threatens to awaken Russian fears of a return to Cold-War era encirclement.

Most English-speaking readers didn’t know about Ingushetia until this morning, when its president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov miraculously and barely survived a massive suicide bomb that nearly levelled a whole city block (lending added weight, if any were needed, to Russian officials’ traffic aversion).

The headline grabbing stunt, on the anniversary of a bloody 2004 raid on Russian forces, capped off months of political violence in the semi-autonomous republic that borders Chechnya.

All the signs - the suicide nature of the bomb, the symbolic date - point to the work of Islamic extremists operating out of Chechnya.

But as with most things in Russia, the obvious answer may not be what it seems.

For a start, Moscow had recently appointed Yevkurov, a brave and principled man, to replace a hated former hardline KGB general who had failed to pacify the republic.  But rather than crack down on ‘militants’ (read: any young males you can get your hands on), Yevkurov chose a different path.

He increased goodwill by actually relaxing the draconian and racist round-ups, or ‘chistkas’, while training his sights on corruption instead. This was very smart policy because greedy officials can do more damage than actual militants; from blowing up airplanes to besieging Beslan. And as Yulia Latynina writes, it was common knowledge that Ingush officials up to the highest levels were on the take.

Indeed, the Saudi paper Arab News compared the violence against Yevkurov to Colombian and Mexican drug gangs: “He has made strides in fighting corruption and tackling the economic mess he found and it is difficult not to believe that he did not make enemies in doing so…As in those two countries, there are people in Ingushetia who are not afraid to strike at the heart of the state to keep things as they are”.

Russia’s Audit Chamber chief Sergei Stepashin openly speculated that it was Yevkurov’s anti-corruption drive had prompted the attempt on his life.

Anywhere in Russia, fighting corruption is a potentially fatal undertaking: crusading officials and journalists are routinely targeted more for their whistleblowing than their politics. All things considered, with “a brain concussion, a ruptured liver, a torn lung, several broken ribs and a damaged knee”, Yevkurov got off lightly compared to Judge Aza Gazgireyeva, assassinated earlier this month in front of her kids. However, he remains fighting for his life at a top Moscow hospital, and it is not yet clear that he will make it.

How ironic that even in the Caucasus, what gets you nearly killed is not being a Kremlin appointed ‘Quisling’ at the heart of an Islamist insurgency, but daring to clean up your own local government.

Mikhail Saakashvili is a politician known for following his gut, both figuratively and literally, as when he devoured his tie during a live BBC interview. Could this crucial organ also be his Achille’s heel?

Today, Tbilisi is a city under siege: the BBC reports that “usually the main roads in the city centre are full of fast-moving traffic. Now the cars are unable to get access because opposition supporters have closed off the roads with manned barricades”

Thus far, however, the man widely hated for provoking the Russian dismemberment of Georgia has been remarkably resistant to the near constant strikes, sit ins and even attempted government takeovers – usually by dismissing critical cabinet members and cracking down on the media, while a smitten west looks on.

But late last week, the mounting opposition fixed upon another strategy that might finally work to topple the embattled head of state: find out where he eats every night, and sabotage his dinners!

The Georgian president is renowned for his voracious love of food and fine restaurants.

As Victoria Floethe, a young Vanity Fair intern inexplicably wined and dined by him last autumn, wrote:

Pretty girls were not this potentate’s fatal flaw. Misha was much more desirous of … restaurants. He was obsessed with their meaning and importance. The more restaurants he could build, the better. He didn’t believe the Russians would attack a place that looked like Chicago.

(Possibly a strategic error on his part, as the Russian army had been training for the last 60 years precisely to attack American restaurant chains).

So how will he handle any more incidents like what happened on Thursday night?

On that occasion, hundreds of protesters surrounded him inside of the upmarket Italian restaurant where he was reportedly eating while opposition leader Georgi Khaindrava shouted into a megaphone: “Coward! You’re afraid of your own people! Get out of Georgia: the people hate you!”. Finally, an irate Saakashvili had to be whisked away in his motorcade via a back entrance mid way through his meal.

Khaindrava and his movement have vowed to follow the president everywhere he goes, in the most literal sense, and not let up until he resigns.

But who is Khaindrava and these malcontents? Contrary to accusations by Saakashvili readily echoed in western media (eg. “the Georgians quite rightly point to Moscow’s hand in Georgian unrest”), Khaindrava is anything but Moscow’s puppet.

In an interview with Café Babel, he stated: “Russia has been an imperial, aggressive land since the ninth century. It has never changed. Russia is the initiator of the barbarianism that exists in Georgia today”.

Far from siding with Russia, the opposition accuse Saakashvili of having played into Moscow’s hands and cracking down on democracy. Khaindrava:

Under Saakashvili’s regime, there is no freedom of the press anymore and we have no impartial courts either. In 2007, a peaceful demonstration was put down by army units with gas grenades. Then there were the numerous falsifications at the parliamentary and presidential elections. The independent TV station Imedi was shut down.

Because the US administration and the leaders of the European countries are turning a blind eye on the tyranny in Georgia for superior, geopolitical reasons of their own, and the completely unbalanced Saakashvili is receiving international support, despite the fact that he is practically leading a Soviet regime in Georgia –an international crisis was bound to come about.

Saakashvili might yet survive this latest challenge to his rule.

After all, notes the BBC, “in some quarters it seems that public tolerance of the opposition leaders may be starting to wear thin”.

Who will blink first: the opposition, or Saakashvili’s stomach?

IS EUROVISION THE NEW STALINGRAD?

For whatever reason, in Russia this contest is taken very seriously… people feel that the Eurovision Song Contest is like an annual Stalingrad battle.”

THE RUSSIA-GEORGIA SPLIT AS PLAYGROUND POLITICS:

Saakashvili supposedly lost track of time while doing laps in his hotel pool, arriving at the Kremlin half an hour late and leaving Mr. Putin seething, according to three Georgians who were there.

“I hope that you had a good time swimming,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Saakashvili.

RUSSIA’S OWN ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’ IN CHECHNYA:

Harsh Ruler Wears Track Suit, Keeps Pet Tiger, Urges Men to Take Second Wives

For Lenin, the only question that mattered in a revolution was ‘kto - kogo’: who is dominating whom?

Today, the questions of which people? and whose power? are seldom directly addressed in the media’s euphoric mentions of ‘people power’ during eruptions of popular protest.

However, they often determine the press angle and coverage of the events, especially during the recent near simultaneous anti-government demonstrations in Moldova and Georgia.

Throughout, all the Coloured revolutions adhered to a narrative that pitched the “modern and western” against the “backward-looking and Russian”. The recent events in Moldova were no exception.

As today’s NY Times article states: “In a way, Moldova is grappling with the same challenge as Georgia and Ukraine — trying to join the West after decades of Russian influence”

The young anti-government protestors, “in their teens and 20s, say they are desperate to escape a Soviet time warp and enter Europe. But many of their elders feel more affinity with Russia, and see the protests as a plot by their western neighbor Romania to snatch away Moldova’s sovereignty”.

Of course, these cleavages are misleading. For a start, the Communist Victor Voronin, whose electoral victory launched the revolt, has actually been vocally and consistently in favour of joining the EU and modernising the economy.

But those kinds of facts don’t matter. This is because, as we’ve seen so often in the past (remember Yeltsin on his tank?) when it comes to Western media interactions with people power, image is everything.

Just protesting the government is not nearly enough: here are the boxes that must be ticked for an uprising to get positive coverage in the US press:

Young?
Western educated?
Photogenic?
Media savvy?
Branded? (eg. Orange)
Modern?/Using new technologies? (eg. Twitter, Facebook)

In fact, the puerile coverage of these types of revolution does not even hinge on the specious and oversimplified left/right, young/old and pro-Western/pro-Russian distinctions. More disturbingly, it is all about perception, about being cool or uncool.

For instance, in Georgia, more than 50,000 protesters were on the streets on Thursday, many more than the crowds in Moldova.

However, the media coverage, as well as the Georgian social media, have been much more supportive of the Georgian status quo. For instance, Saakashvili - young, western educated, branded, photogenic, media savvy - gets his statements routinely turned into headlines in the west.

When was the last time something Vladimir Voronin – middle aged, Soviet educated, apparatchik-looking – said that appeared this way? Or Victor Yanukovich, for that matter?

The discrepancy is reflected in the internet response to the protests in Georgia, which has been much less enthusiastic than the Moldovan.

The young, westernised affluent bloggers in Georgia, who have much in common with the president, are generally lukewarm regarding the opposition, posting comments like the following:

Are opposition leaders more tolerant to different opinions that the government? Is Georgian society, maybe, not in general receptive to diversity of opinions or was this incident the result of a mob effect? Is Georgian opposition willing to listen to youth? These are some of the questions to be addressed and thought about.

Often, they have been downright sceptical:

Methinks, many people have one question in their mind these days - who wants Misha’s resignation? Are these protests in Tbilisi a genuine grassroots democratic movement, or is it just a Russian-orchestrated operation to oust Mikheil Saakashvili and to replace him with a marionette?

Whereas Moldovan bloggers and Twitterers have been portraying the protests as representative of public opinion, Georgian bloggers and Western observers have been much more cynical of the opposition:

It’s generally agreed that the main reason the rallies did not manage to chase Misha from power was that the opposition are trapped in a radical stance that is no longer widely popular in Georgia. People say they lack vision and that if they did oust Saakashvili their temporary unity would crumble and they’d be at each others throats, all vying for power, within days. Now, no one understands the limitations of the opposition better than the government.

Similarly, while much has been written about the Twitter-centric character of the Moldovan unrest…

it appears that text messaging and social networks like Facebook and Twitter played a key role in driving young people into the streets

….the Twitter tone is quite different regarding Georgia:

mhikaric: My friend couldn’t make it to work and is walking home. Once sympathetic to Opp, now pissed off & wishes they’d leave. Prob typical #tbilisi

Of course, in Moldova, only 16.2% of the population has access to the internet; with only 47,200 broadband connections in the entire country (for comparison, it is 70% in England and about 30% in Romania).

And as for twitter, Daniel Bennett has estimated that the number of people using twitter does not exceed 200 in the entire country.

Hardly a mass movement then. In fact, elitism was a central part of all the coloured revolutions. But who cares? For papers like the NYT, if a few cool people are doing something that correlates with a journalist’s conventional biases, it’s a trend!

As Hamilton Nolan wisely observed in Gawker,

Try this fun game: think of the most ridiculous premise you can. Then track down three people—no matter how disparate—whose stories can be presented in a way that roughly hews to said premise. Write your trend up as a story, put in the Times, and watch it become conventional wisdom quicker than you can say, I don’t know, ‘Absolutely Nobody Eats Cheese Any More, Because of Money!

No-one wants to read about the losers who don’t twitter, or speak English, or live in the capital city; who didn’t benefit from the post-communist ‘European dream’; who feel disorientated by the blinding lights of the new order and, instead of longing to escape to even more vivid pastures, seek a retreat into the comforting ‘old ways’.

Similarly, no one wants to read about the sour-pusses who want to spoil the party for the media savvy young reformers such as Saakashvili and Yuschenko, no matter what the (extraordinarily persuasive) arguments against them. Just as no one wanted to read about the saddo miners and ‘unreformed’ industrial workers who spoke Russian and voted for Yanukovich.

Or maybe people do want to, and it’s just that so few Western journalists, with their high school crushes and casual class and cultural biases, are willing to write about it?

Not everyone in America or England knows this, but today is International Women’s Day, an official holiday in Russia.

Ironically, while the USSR had long prided itself on its feminist stance and some well-deserved progress in gender equality, Women’s Day often felt more like a mix of Valentines and Mother’s day, an orgy of flowers, cards and chocolates very different from the sort that IWD originator Clara Zetkin, the revolutionary feminist and free love advocate, may have had in mind.

Fast forward to today, when the popular online paper Gazeta ru’s headline announces: Sophia Rudyeva has been crowned Miss Russia! That’s right, International Women’s Day has become the venue for a beauty contest, showing just how much has changed since those days.

It seems that women in Russia have been hurled straight from the lipstick-free Soviet Victorianism of female discus throwers and into a post-modern culture which promotes female sexualisation, such as lap-dancing, as a form of feminist empowerment.

“”If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children” –Russian judge in a 2008 sexual harassment ruling.

Indeed, despite leading most Western countries in their share of senior management jobs (42% compared with a worldwide average of 24%) Russian women frequently do things that would be considered mediaeval if not illegal in Anglo-American workplaces, such as taking part in office beauty pageants and posing for glamour calendars.

Sexual harassment is so rife that the Daily Telegraph had reported that “100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32% said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped. 80% of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors”.

This has gone hand in hand with an explosion in human sex trafficking from the former Soviet Union (though Russia has recently been ‘promoted’ from exporter to exporter-importer status).

In fact, another sad headline on International Women’s Day, in Israel’s Haaretz, reads: “Tel Aviv police smash international human trafficking ring”. The criminals “located hundreds of women from villages and small towns in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Uzbekistan, and manipulating them in to traveling to Israel…forcing the women to engage in prostitution in clubs and brothels, under threat of violence”.

In spite of these news, or maybe because of them, there are heartening indications that Russian women are becoming more vocal and political. According to a survey by the All Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM), while 8% more Russians than in 2003 believe that women have as many rights and opportunities as men (11% fewer believe that men have more) 6% more people than in 2005 feel that there are not enough women in government.

In Moscow yesterday, women demonstrated in solidarity with female political prisoners such as journalist Aigul Makhmutova and National Bolshevik Tatiana Harlamova.

It was also announced that Hillary Clinton will honour Vernokia Marchenko, leader of the “Rights of Mothers”, an NGO which investigates & exposes peacetime deaths in the Russian army, with the International Women of Courage award.

But while all is not doom and gloom for Russian girl-power, as with much of Russian progress, it’s often a case of one step forward, two steps back.

For example, I was very excited to hear that a group of Communist Party activists is proposing a monument to Lenin’s largely forgotten mistress Inessa Armand, a major revolutionary figure in her own right.

Great, I thought: bringing back some of the edgy political-feminism of the original Women’s Day! Until I saw a banner below the story that reads:

“Women and girls of Russia: follow the example of the beloved of the great Lenin!

Support your husbands as Comrade Krupskaya did!

Fight selflessly for your beloved as Comrade Armand did!”.