Monthly Archives: February 2007

“We’re punks!” declare immigrant teens mostly from the CIS who hang out at Petah Tikva’s Gan Yehonatan club in Israel. They are also skinheads. But skins come a various types. You have anti-racist skins, Nazi skins (or boneheads as anti-racists call them), and apparently a new type, one that fits well in Israel: “radical right wing Islamophobes who believe in the working class,” according to one youth who talked to Moti Katz for his article, “We’re Not Nazis, We’re Punk-Anarchists” in Haaretz.

One might be surprised, even shocked, to learn that there are neo-Nazi youths in the Jewish state. But events over the last year, one of which included vandalizing a synagogue with swastikas, show that not all Russian immigrants experience a Jewish rebirth upon arrival to the homeland. Many don’t even identify themselves as Jews. Others, who ..read more

Steven Lee Myers article, “Post-Putin” in the International Herald Tribune and in the New York Times Sunday Magazine is sparking some commentary among bloggers.

Robert Amsterdam has alerted readers to a rather amusing section where Myers speaks of Aleksandr Donskoi, the young mayor Arkhangelsk who declared his candidacy for president. Since his declaration, Donskoi has been a victim of harassment, some of which are rumors in the local press that he is gay. The rumors have apparently gotten so bad that he has had to hold press conferences to deflect them as well as charges that he falsified his university diploma and has an interest in “gypsy hypnosis”. According to Myers, at one such conference, Donskoi’s wife Marina, visibly flustered by the tabloid style accusations against her husband, interrupted him and shouted “He’s not gay! He impregnated me.” It appears ..read more

Dmitri Minaev, who runs the Russia history blog De Rebus Antiquis Et Novis, submitted the following article about the strange incident involving a human rights group called Froda and their run in with the FSB in Novorossiysk. The article is a compilation to two posts Minaev did on the story. I’ve demarcated the break between the posts below.

I should note that this incident was followed by a raid on Institute of War and Peace Reporting by North Ossetian police in Vladkavkaz. There is no direct connection whatsoever between the two incidents except to say, as Valery Dzutsev, IWPR’s North Caucasus coordinator, put it to the Moscow Times, “The problems with the authorities began a month after the NGO law went into effect last April.”

You can draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, I present Dmitri Minaev’s article on the incident in Novorossiysk.—Sean

Attack on Civil Rights?

By Dmitri Minaev

I found ..read more

As I’ve already indicated, the adoption and enforcement of the January 15 migration law has caused confusion among administrators, police, officials, and foreigners alike. Nothing points to this confusion more than the following transcript of Vyacheslav Postavnin’s briefing with the American Chamber of Commerce on February 8. I provide the transcript here as it was posted on Johnson’s Russia List #41, with some minor edits to reduce its length.

The briefing is interesting reading for a number of reasons. First it shows just how confusing the registration process is to most people, including Russians. Second, it gives a picture of the Russian bureaucratic process. There are many times when Postavnin urges questioners to apply to him personally. Not only does this suggest that Postavnin is well aware that existing bureaucratic channels are clogged, confused or just broken, it also shows that in ..read more

A reader sent me this comment about foreign registration in Russia:

I realize that private registrations are the cheapest way to be in R BUT a traveler’s time is also money, especially when you are on a tight schedule. For between 125$ and 200$, you can get legal, convenient registration in less than 24 hrs through almost any travel agency. Who cares if it says that you are at the hotel Ukraine? I can testify that it will work against any Moscow cop seeking a bribe at 2pm or hunting drunks at 2am, trust me. This is a simple tourist registration and for a few more $, you can get a ‘business’ visa by the same means. It is more flexible.

On my first trip to R, I had an absolute nightmare experience with a private registration. ..read more

By Michael Averko

Saturday’s Feb. 10, BBC telecast to the US portrayed an “aggressive” Russian President Vladimir Putin “lashing out” at the US during a weekend gathering in Munich. The White House was then quoted as being “disappointed” with Putin’s comments. This BBC segment had an excerpt of an interview it conducted with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. Ivanov claimed a one sided American approach to handling global trouble spots.

No example was given to support Ivanov’s view. The BBC frequently utilizes this tact, leaving not so informed viewers with unanswered points of relevance. To fill in the blank on this particular: an American official recently visited Moscow with the brazen attitude that Kosovo could be independent and that the basis for such didn’t apply to pro-Russian former Soviet territories in dispute. There’s nothing “aggressive” about ..read more