Russia

Now that the artillery smoke has lifted and Sarkozy and Medvedev’s 6 point ceasefire plan is imposed on Georgia, it’s time to figure out: what the hell happened between last Thursday and now?

Gary Brecher has the most elegant, if undeniably sociopathic, explanation:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

Except, there was more than one war; and which one you were following depended on where you lived.

The US media covered the Russian invasion of Georgia and its airstrikes on Gori, while the Russian media covered the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and its attacks on Tskhinvali, its capital. And there was no overlap.

For example, on all of last night’s three major CNN news shows - the Election Center, Anderson Cooper 360, and Lou Dobbs Tonight - there was no more than one mention of Ossetia itself, of any Georgian atrocities or Ossetian refugees. It was all pictures of the aftermath of Russian raids on Gori, Russian tanks rolling into Georgia, with captions like “Russia invades”. Yet, as CNN itself reports in a paragraph buried on its website,  “up to 100,000 people are thought to have been displaced by the violence, which has left South Ossetia’s capital of Tskhinvali in ruins”. Moreover, as the brilliant journalist Margarita Akhvlediani writes, Reuters has reported that up to 2,000 civilians in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, are dead.

So why does CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Of course, a mirror-image situation exists in Russia, which has asserted that up to 1500 people have been killed by Georgian forces in South Ossetia as part of an alleged ethnic cleansing operation, and where the media have been largely quiet on the air bombing of the Gori apartment blocks. In the rare event that these reports have appeared on the Russian news (just as a minority of US shows, like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, have reported on Georgian attacks in Ossetia) they remained in the distinct minority. But it is notable that much of this selective coverage has been down to government censorship, with journalists who had been reporting on the sorties, like Russia today’s William Dunbar, being taken off the air.

What is troubling is the US media’s willingness to similarly tow the party line, but in the absence of any of the coercive measures, such as the state censorship, that the Russian press endures. There have been no William Dunbars on CNN, despite the fact that every report I’ve seen on the channel yesterday had been framed as “Russian invasion”, with endless clips of Saakashvili alleging Russian crimes etc, in a loop of totally pro-Georgian coverage. Georgia is a key US ally, the 3^rd largest troop contingent in Iraq, and occupies a strategic, oil rich zone. The self-policing in the US media, which has basically been uncritically promoting government talking points, is very disturbing.

To the uninformed viewer, it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade; in reality, they both did. In addition, there have been several mentions of Georgia as a fledgling democracy, but no mention of Saakashvili’s recent crackdown on the media and civil society. The US media has been guilty of a procrustean tendency to distil a messy conflict between two flawed states into a Manichean struggle between good and evil; as Campbell Brown said yesterday: “there’s much more at stake here than the freedom of a former Soviet republic and Russia’s attempt to big-foot itself back onto the World Stage”.

And how’s this for hysteria, from CNN’s breathless hack Ed Henry reporting live from the White House on Monday night:

“…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 theres a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

On distinct occasions, I noticed straight factual inaccuracies. For example, both Campbell Brown and Lou Dobbs consistently asked why Russia was refusing to agree to international demands for a cease fire, when in fact Russia had convened the UN Security Council for just such a ceasefire last week, only to be rebuffed by the United States. As an AP story from August 9^th, and quoted in Mark Ames’s excellent article for The Nation, put it:

“At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement.

The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides “to renounce the use of force,” council diplomats said.”

Of course, there can be no room for such inconvenient nuance on CNN if the Georgian use of force in Ossetia and Abkhazia is not mentioned to begin with and the conflict is framed exclusively in terms of the Russian invasion.

In addition, there have also been no mentions of Kosovo, despite the fact that Russia widely sees the West’s sponsorship of Kosovo breaking from Serbia as a precedent for Ossetia breaking from Georgia.

As I have pointed out in my last post, the US and, to a lesser extent, British media have been very quick to jump on the Russia bashing, jingoist bandwagon, hungry for the reinstatement of the Cold War narrative. Here are two excellent articles exposing this tendency:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/08/how_russia_became_a_bear_again.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia1

Even more unnervingly, are we in fact witnessing the crystallisation of a ‘CNN effect’? On both Lou Dobbs and the Election Centre, Obama was criticised for not taking a strong enough stance on Russia in the wake of its invasion. Here is a sample quote from Campbell Brown from yesterday’s programme:

“John McCain…saw an opportunity here. He was quick to condemn Russia, he’s been keeping up the sort of steady drum beat. Obama a little more cautious, at least initially, in his statements. He’s since toughened up his stance. Should he have come out stronger right from the get-go?”

Yes, you are not mistaken: that was the word ‘drum-beat’, as in ‘drum-beat to war‘, used in a positive way, by a news host. Of course, McCain’s stance was to be expected, writes Mark Ames,

“considering McCain’s raving Russophobia, and his campaign team’s financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili. As has been reported, McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to lobby his interests in the United States.

On Monday, only Obama had made any reference to Ossetia, and only Obama had called on Georgia to rein in its offensive there. Yet, some time after his comments were circulated, Obama made another press conference, this time being much harder on Russia.

While it is impossible to establish causality, I can’t help thinking that the press was at least partly responsible for pushing him into a more hard-line position. McCain’s hawkish position has been almost universally derided by the independent strategic and foreign policy community as irresponsible and inflammatory, yet it seemed to be endorsed by the mainstream media, who seem to love their drum-beating!

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. Have any lessons been learned? More importantly, is there some structural feature of the free press that explains this effortless falling-into-line? Does the Obama/McCain vignette show that press pressure can in fact actually escalate conflict?

So is it any wonder that, despite the fact that, as Mikhail Gorbachev writes in the Washington Post, that Georgian leaders badly miscalculated when “they could get away with a “blitzkrieg” in South Ossetia”, no matter how much “the quick and easy victory exposes the west’s lack of leverage over a resurgent Russia despite years of heavy American political investment in Georgia”, the war will have been a military victory for Russia, but a PR defeat.

In fact, so successful has been Saakashvili’s wooing of the Western media that, according to Mark Ames,

No one’s bothering to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they’re fighting for their independence in the first place. That’s because the Georgians–with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann–have been pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.

In an article headlined “Russia has Lost the War”, the online daily Gazeta ru reaches very similar conclusions, after an analysis of Russian, Georgian and Western press treatment of the conflic.t It suggests that another reason for Western press’s favourable treatment of Georgia was the relatively greater access and support it gave to foreign journalists, where Russia’s propaganda effort focused much more heavily on its own media.

Modern conflicts are fought in the ‘courtroom of public opinion’, as Adlai Stevenson said at the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s time for Russia to get media-savvy.

—— —– —– —– —– —– —– —– AND ALSO —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

FOLLOW THE OIL:

Something that surprised me was the candid (and frankly, quite callous) mention of oil interests as motivators of US interest. Here is CNN Anchor Campbell Brown explaining why Americans should care about Georgia:

Georgia is a vital gateway to the rich and untapped oil and natural gas fields around the caspian sea.to get to that energy market, you really have to go to Georgia. and look to the south - you have to go through Iran, not good. Go east or south, you run into Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, countries that to say the least are not known for stable governments. Go North, you hit Russia, which already controls much of the oil and natural gas being sold to Europe, and wouldn’t mind controlling more. That leads a little path to the north west across Georgia. Whoever controls Georgia controls the flow of oil and gas.

BEST SUMMING UP OF THE WAR:

Gary Brecher:

The bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

A QUESTION OF RUSSOPHOBIA?

As I was thinking about the reasons for US media coverage of the conflict, I read a very compelling and thoughtful rumination on Russophobia and the media from Timothy Post, an American buinessman and blogger living in Krasnodar.:

There’s a significant disconnect between what I see daily with my own eyes and what I read in the Western media. The question keeps bumping around in my brain, Why do so many people in the West hate Russia?

NOT ALL MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE WAS RUBBISH:

Post also has on his site a valuable run down of some of the best mainstream media coverage of the conflict, which is very much worth reading especially after hearing all the above tales of woe.

Symbolism seems to always precede Russia into war. In the winter of 1994-5, Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, bloodily fulfilled its Russian translation as “fierce”: thousands died in the wake of Yeltsin’s callous Christmas day invasion.

But Gori, the name of the first Georgian city bombed by Russian aircraft this weekend, translates simply as ‘grief’.

When, at work, I watched the footage of an aftermath of one of these raids, the sacking of an apartment block by Russian planes, I cried, struck by how much the target resembled my grandfather’s building just several hundred miles away, in the southern Russian city of Voronezh; in the expressions of the wounded pensioners who would normally gossip on the benches outside, who had probably fought alongside him in the war and now 65 years later sat bloodied and dazed in the courtyard, there was nothing but simple grief, not even anger.

The raids are numbingly, chokingly absurd: Russia could’ve saved the ignominy and fuel, and bombed Voronezh itself: for we are all citizens of Gori, not because Georgia is ‘actually’ Russia, or should belong to Russia - it is not and cannot - but because the one thing a bomb hurled from a Sukhoi jet can’t ‘neutralise’ is the 80 year story that, however coersively, however cynically, unjustifiably or cruelly, had bound the ex-citizens of the USSR together as inextricably as a rocket binds metal, concrete and flesh. That the same Putin who had famously called the collapse of the USSR the single biggest catastrophe of the 20th century could have unleashed such violence against its still impoverished, shell-shocked orphans is incomprehensible, nauseating, unpardonable.

Yet equally shameful has been the press coverage of this tragedy, by both American and Russian media. In the West, the Guardian has been perhaps the only outlet to have avoided a knee-jerk anti Russian stance. In today’s paper, Peter Walker decries how, “to the UK press, Russia is once again a fierce grizzly bear”:

Most UK papers, while critical of Georgia for triggering the current South Ossetia crisis through its ill-advised intervention in the breakaway region, are beginning to side firmly against Russia.

The Daily Telegraph even manages to squeeze a claim of Russian “ethnic cleansing” into its lead story while, curiously, failing to detail who made the allegation, let alone give any evidence supporting this.

Also in the Guardian, the conservative James Poulos laments the credulous press treatment of Georgia’s role in the violence (it is hardly ever mentioned that Saakashvili had been the first to use the Olympics as cover for a Chechnya-style invasion of Ossetia). He writes that

the anti-Russia lobby is giving the pro-Israel lobby a run for its money, hyping the settling of scores among two European, Orthodox Christian countries as more dangerous to the peace and security of the west than any clash of civilisations or jihad ever was.

Chillingly, he notes the dangers of turning Russia into an enemy: “which, indeed, would be a far more formidable foe than Iran, Hizbullah, and al-Qaida combined”. He quotes a scathing Washington Post editorial, as blatant in its hypocrisy as in its criticism of Russia:

The editors of the Washington Post have railed that:

The principles at stake, including sovereignty and territorial integrity, apply well beyond the Caucasus. To abandon Georgia and its fragile democratic Rose Revolution would send a terrible signal to other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics that to Moscow’s dismay have achieved or are working toward democracy and fully independent foreign policies.

Would that these sacrosanct principles had applied to Serbia, which fought on just those grounds to keep Kosovo an integral part of its recognised territory.

Perhaps the most surprising and sick aspect of most Western reporting on the war has been the absence of almost any mention of Ossetia itself: coverage of Russian sorties over Gori had displaced investigation of the alleged 1400 killed in Georgian attacks on Tskhinvali; just as the Russian incursion into Ossetia had displaced the earlier and Georgian raid on the breakaway province, which had come, underhandedly, just hours after the conclusion of negotiations. This conflict has now become another chapter in the Great Game between Russia and the West, fought by named (Georgian) and nameless (Ossetian) proxies. Such exploitation of human suffering in the service of a good guy-bad guy, us vs them, freedom vs authoritarianism re-heating of the Cold War narrative is cheap, and gut-wrenchingly callous.

Somewhat ironically, the right-populist British tabloid the Sun was one of the few to suggest the blunt truth behind at least some of the Western interest in the conflict: “Georgia is pro-Western and has troops in Iraq. The £2 billion Baku-Tbilisi-oil and gas pipeline passes through Georgia on its way to supplying the West”.

Of course, the US and European press were not alone in unquestioningly validating the jingoism of their countries’ leaders. At the same time as Russian “Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said Sunday that Western media had failed to show the plight of Ossetians and what was left of their capital after it was almost razed by Georgian troops”, the Moscow Times’s Anatoly Medetsky reveals how journalists reporting about Russian violence in Georgia are prevented from going on air. Such was the fate of William Dunbar, a correspondent for Russia Today, whose reports from Gori were blatantly censored:

“The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn’t conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn’t let me report it, [said Dunbar].

“I felt that I had no choice but to resign,” he added.

For their part, Georgian authorities have taken Russian media off the air, and blocked access to any internet sites in the “.ru” domain.

As I write, Russian troops are securing Abkhazia and continuing their advance into Georgia proper; it is not clear how far they will go, how long this tragedy will trample the lives of Ossetian, Georgian, Abkhaz and Russian civilians. It is not clear how Saakashvili will pay for his egregious miscalculation that the West would come to his aid against his northern neighbour; how the Georgian nationalists from whom he drew so much support will punish him for the increasingly irrevocable loss of Georgian control over its breakaway regions; how Ossetians will retaliate for Georgian atrocities in Tskhinvali and the Georgian people ever forgive Russia for its fratricide in Gori.

It is left only to hope against hope that reason and love will, if not prevail, then at least dare to stand firm and tall and strong against this mindless horror; as did Georgia’s Nino Salukvadze and Russia’s Natalya Paderina - sports shooters of all people! - whose simple hug on the Olympic podium pierced, however naively, fleetingly, momemtarily, the fog of war with the possibility of redemption.

“Russia: Hmmm. Lemme think. It’s cold, with nuclear missiles, and… BEARS! Right? Russian BEARS! Bears in…Siberia! That’s in Russia too, right? and it’s cold! Cold and full of Russian bears! Perfect!” (-NOT Luke Harding’s last words, morning of July 24)

I never thought I’d say it, but as I glanced at the menacing headline: “Bears Eat Two Men“ and then spotted the words “Luke” and “Harding” below, I felt an, ahem, grizzly pang of conscience.

The Guardian’s man in Moscow may have been a smug, plagiarising hack, but still, being eaten by a bear is a bit harsh.

Besides, didn’t he just re-write a witty annual expose of the craaazy Putin youth camp Nashi?

But several signs immediately told me that Harding was in no immediate danger:

1) The article was an almost exact rehash of a piece published a day earlier in The Scotsman (Starving Bears Kill 2 Geologists) by Alexei Dovbysh (who was actually reporting FROM Siberia). That article is itself a re-write of Dovbysh’s original piece for Reuters on the 22nd. That’s where Harding found the following quote: “‘Either way there is not enough food,’ the spokesman said.”

2) It also contains entire quotes lifted straight from an AP wire story from the 23rd: (”These predators have to be destroyed,” Leushkin was quoted as saying. “Once they kill a human, they will do it again and again.”)

3) The actual event happened a week ago.

4) As a former BBC employee put it in a response to my email that Harding may have been eaten alive:

“No such luck. I mean, it’s not as if he actually leaves the Guardian’s bureau, right? Another piece pulled shamelessly off the wires. Good old Luke“

Phew!

“In America, there are many fewer good journalists than in Russia”, said Exile editor mark Ames before barely escaping with his life.

So now that the Exile has relocated to Panama and gone global, who will fill its gaping ulcerous void?

The FPA’s Russia Blog is launching an ongoing project to expose promising new alt-journalist talent to virgin Western eyes.

What sort of things are we (ie. just me, blogging alone in my windowless office, after work) looking for? Ideally, a toxic mix of non-preachy social consciousness, wry observation, sophomoric antics, modern aesthetics, political engagement, eclecticism and investigative reporting.

A tall order? Well, the Exile had set the bar high, but there are plenty of reasons for optimism. Russia has a burgeoning young literary scene, but one we in the West seldom hear about amidst all the din surrounding the state’s repression of the ‘respectable’ media, the sort of New York Times-style papers that would never have had the guts to cover such original protests as this , with or without government censorship.

So where do these fellows hang out? One place is Bolshoi Gorod (Big City) magazine. It’s a uber-cool mix of nightlife, style, literature and politics, with pieces like this but also some rather thought provoking social reporting. For example, the most recent issue carried a provocative series of interviews with the ‘invisible faces’ of nightclubs–the wardrobe attendants, cleaners and security guards.

BG’s sparse and ironical prose turned a potentially leaden and sanctimonious homily into an edgy and open-ended commentary on modern Moscow.

You get the idea.

This series will be frequently updated, so please send any tips this way!

What writers, magazines or papers would you nominate?

The recent spat with America and Britain over Zimbabwe and Russia’s continued intransigence over the US AMB shield in the Czech republic have dashed the hopes of many in the West that Medvedev would make a qualitative departure from Putin.

The Guardian’s Luke Harding put it just so:

Medvedev’s hardline comments in one of his first major speeches on foreign policy since his inauguration in May are likely to disappoint western observers. They had hoped that his presidency might usher in a more conciliatory era in relations with the west.

However, whether one defines Russia’s position on these issues as anti-Western grandstanding or pragmatic self-interest, one thing is clear: the Russian press has been covering many sides of the story.

In the immediate wake of the Zimbabwe brouhaha, much of the reaction in the Russian mainstream news was refreshingly critical of the government’s policies.

For example, Vremya Novostei, a liberal but pro-government paper, contextualised the veto with a recap of recent moves by Russia to protect Burma and Sudan against Western reprisals. Then, it quoted Sergei Oznobischev, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies as saying that appeasing pariah states is a sure recipe for conflict with the West, and that the key to Russian great power status lies not in Burma, Zimbabwe or even China, but in partnership with Europe and the US.

Naturally, the government has not loosened its grip on the media, and that fact alone makes the appearance of such articles all the more interesting.

In a recent interview, former White House rebel Vladimir Ryzhkov drew a tentative parallel between Medvedev and Gorbachev. Gorbachev started out as a liberal, not a democrat. He wanted to democratise institutions in order to promote his vision of liberal humanism, not to have a free for all. Similarly, he started off with very cautious economic reforms, that began with a tinkering around the edges and concentrated on efficiency and market accounting mechanisms.

Medvedev has certainly started to tinker. Earlier this month, he announced that Gazprom, Putin’s Koh-i-Noor, would have to start sharing its pipelines with other companies. This was a pretty important announcement, as one of the things that made Gazprom such a threat to Europe was its ownership of both gas and pipelines: EU monopoly regulations forbade such things for its own companies, who ended up outflanked. Today came the news that Gazprom would lay off 500 executives, or 10% of the staff, at its head office.

It is too early to say whether Medvedev has any plans for a full fledged Perestroika. As the closure of the Exile has revealed, he’s not one for free for alls. Yet the critical press line and gentle economic restructuring may point to a liberal impulse that, like with Gorbachev, not only may come to fruition with time, but also be eventually overtaken by events.

The exile is back…sort of. Newly reincarnated as the exileD, it is run out of “Putin-proof” Panama.

Fuelled by paypal donations from readers, the first edition came out on July 14, Bastille Day.  

Exile fans can be reassured, at least for now: despite bitter avowals to quit Russia for good, the issue contained the familiar by-lines of Edward Limonov, Mark Ames and War Nerd, a typically hard hitting article on political prisoners, and plenty of photos of scantily clad Russian girls, covered in mud.

Gone are the heady heroin nights of the nineties, and with them, many of the expats who had come East to trade in the drudgery of their suburban lives for a more visceral, tragic version of humanity.

Now that the country brims with the Toyota Priuses (Prii? Priux?), hipsters, libel laws, Time Out Magazine, nuclear families, decent sushi and the other assorted petit bourgeois nightmares of back home, what’s the point of putting up with a scary government and summary bureaucracy?

Indeed, to witness non-oligarchs holidaying abroad, taking up sales and marketing jobs and driving new model Ladas or even Peugeots can be very bittersweet. No matter how clichéd, the question begs asking: has the well-adjusted middle class life that has enriched the hitherto threadbare existence of so many (though still not even remotely the majority of) Russians cost us that self-destructive, protean, brooding, extremist yet spiritual truth seeking poetry - borne of suffering, longing, deception and isolation?

Has Russia lost, in a word…its SOUL??!

More chillingly, has said Soul been sold to a rentier state whose petrodollars drown questions of illegitimacy and oppression in the warm, moist umbilical fluid of light sweet crude?

Not quite! And here’s why:

1. The 90s Paradox:

The libertinism of moral clarity and/or cheap drugs, anarchy and play that the expat rebels revelled in proved catastrophic for their Russia’s own Rimbauds.

In fact, the Soviet enfants terribles of the 1980s: young guys trapped in obscure think tanks penning underground verse or music, hippies and political dissidents who shocked and shamed their bankrupt system in the same way that the Exile shamed and shocked its own, could not survive in the new climate.

Their rock music – filigreed, cryptic and high maintenance - didn’t stand a chance against Aerosmith or the Spice Girls. In a country drowning its collective sorrow in endless re-runs of Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful, no-one had the time or money for their now-permitted protest literature. Their well paying research jobs, at which they could comfortably sit and write, disappeared. Many sold out; for others, despair and the dulling embrace of heroin replaced the creative kick of vodka and kombucha tea.

By the end of the 1990s, the Soviet intellectual, dissident and underground scene effectively disappeared. In 1998, Claude Frioux had written its obituary in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Russia’s intellectuals are now entirely absorbed with questions of material survival, paralysed by a fear of displeasing somebody, and confused about how to deal with the mafia face of power….They are no longer the small islands of lucid dignity that they once were. They are now an amorphous mass, and outside observers comment dismissively on their cynical lack of concern and their total absorption in the business of making ends meet.

Even in Russia, people sitting in unheated flats and using furniture for firewood eventually switched from questions of philosophy to questions of finding scraps of food; undoubtedly in an homage to Bakhtin.

2. Biting the Hand that Feeds You:

A cursory look at instances of mass intellectual awakening/rebellion reveals that such events generally follow periods of increased material wealth and stability. 1968 is the obvious example. In Russia, it was no different. The impoverished and hellish 1930s and 40s gave way to the staid, authoritarian and materialistic 1950s. Yet before the decade was out, Khruschev’s famous Thaw began. Similarly, the wealthy, even ‘decadent’ years of Brezhnev’s stagnation (few in the West realise that Soviet living standards peaked in the mid 1970s, and that it was the time of every baby boomer’s life) preceded the grass roots rebellions of the late 1970s and early 80s that eventually paved the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost.

History shows that as soon as (but not a moment before) a country raises a generation of reasonably well fed, educated young people in an ordered, stable society, they will immediately proceed to do their best to undermine and destroy that society, tear up its sick, fraudulent and oppressive underbelly, and seek freedom. Before long, they will become bankrupt and bitter or ‘grown up’ and responsible, and the cycle will continue.

Thus, is it any surprise that after a decade of abject poverty and national trauma beginning in the late 1980s, Russia now witnesses an era of a materially comfortable, socially conservative authoritarianism?

Indeed, it would be useful to keep in mind an article by Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov that appeared in today’s Grani.ru newspaper.

In it, he writes that Putin’s authoritarian system will be overturned not by the impoverished masses, but by a growing wave of educated disaffected youth feeling stifled and demanding philosophical rather than material freedom. Thus, unlike with the masses, the regime’s capacity for delivering the goods economically would no longer be enough to save it.

So where is this new ‘class for itself’, these islands of lucid dignity? We don’t hear much about them in the West, but they are definitely out there. In the field, one group is Limonov’s own National Bolshevik Party foot soldiers, frequently arrested on trumped up sedition charges, and even occasionally killed. On the intellectual front, someone to watch is Kirill Medvedev, a young dissident writer, poet, activist and blogger whose work has recently been profiled by the dashing Russian-American factotum and animal lover Keith Gessen in his own thick journal n+1. What kinds of things can we expect from this new generation? Well, a recent essay posted on Medvedev’s site quotes the following poem:

Literature Will Be Tested
—
Entire literatures consisting of subtle turns of phrase
will be tested to prove
that where there was oppression,
there were also rebellions.
By the prayers of earthly creatures to heavenly beings
it will be shown that the early creatures trampled one another.
Their rarefied verbal music will testify
that many did not have enough to eat.

Don’t write off Medvedev’s Russia quite yet.

Mysterious message spotted on their website. Will update with more information.

“Russia Silences Tabloid”

By Carl Schreck

The National (UAE)

“The fall of The eXile, which launched the career of Matt Taibbi, a political correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, marks the end of perhaps the world’s most unique publishing project.”

“Irreverent mix of vicious humour, sharp political analysis and shameless hedonism”

“11 years of scorched-earth Gonzo journalism and taking down every sacred cow in sight”

“Sophomoric pranks on Russian government officials and western businessmen, savage criticism of western journalists covering Russia, and misogynistic club reviews informing male readers which clubs were optimal for finding overnight female companionship”

“The eXile once paid the handlers of Mikhail Gorbachev to convince the former Soviet leader to act as “Perestroika Co-ordinator” for the then-struggling New York Jets and give pep talks to the American football team”.

Moscow newspaper which mocked the powerful closes

Reuters

The Exile’s style of reporting blurred the line between comic and mainstream by tackling serious issues — crime, corruption, poverty and politics — with a harsh, jabbing humor. It also targeted Moscow’s foreign community and Russians with practical jokes and stunts.

“Raucous Russian Paper Closes Amid Kremlin Scrutiny”

By Alan Cullison

Wall Street Journal

Ribald pranksters

The paper’s club reviews advised which bars were frequented by violent thugs and which were popular with adventurous Russian women.

Michael McFaul, professor of political science and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a frequent target of attacks from the Exile, said he was “sorry to see the paper go” though he didn’t always agree with its politics. The Exile frequently assailed Mr. McFaul for his 1970s-style haircut.

The Exile assailed Western academics and journalists, whom it accused in the 1990s of understating the misery caused by the free-market reforms of President Boris Yeltsin.

Russian Bureaucrats Smother the World’s Best Alt-Weekly

Mother Jones

“Stormed into the Moscow bureau of The New York Times and threw a pie filled with equine sperm into the face of the bureau chief after accusing him of soft coverage of Russia’s political elite.”

Not to be outdone by yesterday’s tennis ‘interviews’ in the Daily Telegraph, this Sunday’s New York Times front page photo made sure no-one skipped straight to the magazine section:

“Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad”, the headline beamed, in case anyone might also be interested in reading the accompanying article, which happened to be about the new-found prosperity of ordinary Russians. Here are a few interesting titd -bits from the piece:

“The number of Russian tourists visiting countries outside the former Soviet Union grew to 7.1 million in 2006, the last year statistics were available, from 2.6 million in 1995, according to the Russian government.

…[Increased] foreign travel reflects not just Russia’s economic revival under Vladimir V. Putin, but also how the country has become, in some essential ways, normal.

Many Russians interviewed here credited Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, for their ability to travel, saying that he was responsible for Russia’s new prosperity.
If you have some time and a little money, you can travel. Just like everyone else in the world.

“It is now so easy — buy a package tour for $800, and here we are, in paradise,” said Ms. Kasyanova…”

Crickey! With all this globetrotting, is there like, anyone even left in Russia? Well, the New York Times certainly couldn’t care less.

But scholar and Russia blogger Sean Guillory has bothered to track down a few of these non-travelling losers, pickling peppers in Voronezh instead of packing La Scala.

21.7 million losers, to be precise. Yep, that’s the number of Russians living below the Federal subsistence (read: starvation) threshold of $95 dollars a month.

So here’s a little lesson in newsworthiness for the New York Times, next time it wants to devote a front page spread to a social phenomenon gripping Russia:

But then, how on Earth would you work a good bikini shot into such a story?