I’m going out of town for a few days. Posts will resume on Tuesday. A message to my merry cohort of frequent commentators: Play amongst yourselves. Just try to play nice.

Presidents Bush and Putin are set to meet this Sunday at the former’s family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush’s camp has already announced that it has low expectations for the meeting especially on such issues as cooperation on missile defense and Kosovo independence. “I would caution against expecting grand new announcements,” cautioned White House press secretary Tony Snow. “This is, in fact, an opportunity for two leaders to talk honestly and candidly with one another.”

It appears that the global public feels the same. In anticipation for the summit, Pew Research Center did an extensive poll on global attitudes toward each president and other global powers. As the report states:

A 47-nation survey finds global public opinion increasingly wary of the world’s dominant nations and disapproving of their leaders. Anti-Americanism is extensive, as it has been for the past five years. At the same time, the image of China has slipped significantly among the publics of other major nations. Opinion about Russia is mixed, but confidence in its president, Vladimir Putin, has declined sharply. In fact, the Russian leader’s negatives have soared to the point that they mirror the nearly worldwide lack of confidence in George W. Bush.

Disapproval for Bush results from the America’s Iraq War, the War on Terror and its violation of human rights and use of torture. “Favorable ratings of America are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which trends are available,” the survey reports. Approval of the US is highest in West Africa and lowest in the Islamic countries. Displeasure with Putin is significantly strong in Western Europe where dependence on Russian energy has increased. Many Europeans feel that they are held hostage to Russia’s willingness to use energy as a weapon of foreign policy.

When looking at each president’s respective countries, the results are telling. In the States, 45% of Americans have a confidence in Bush’s leadership and 30% have similar views of Putin. In Russia, 18% have confidence in Bush, while Putin garners an overwhelming 84% of his compatriots’ confidence. Putin maybe disliked the world over, but he is loved in Russia.

While Bush and Putin are unpopular, the study states that this hasn’t translated in support for nations that may serve as countervailing forces. Leaders in China, Iran and Venezuela all remain similarly unpopular.

If Victims of Communism Museums, nuclear bomb shelter tours, and talk of a “New Cold War” isn’t enough to satisfy your nostalgia for a bi-polar world, try Cold War Unicorns. Yes! Cold War Unicorns are bound to fully recreate that pitched battle between Communism and Capitalism that only ideological warfare and proxy wars could produce, albeit this time with a magical mythical flare. As the Archie McPhee Toy Company website promises:

The Cold War Unicorns Play Set allows you to play out the intense struggle between two global superpowers in the majestic fantasy world of the Unicorn! Can the Communist Unicorn’s horn of classless social structure hold up against the Freedom Unicorn’s hooves of capitalist opportunity? Each hard vinyl unicorn is 3-3/4″ tall with articulated joints for all sorts of dramatic poses.

And to think I thought a gas mask with a Geiger counter was cool.

A friend passed this along and I just couldn’t resist sharing.

Some old habits die hard. Eighty years after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Bolshevik Party, the KPRF is still afraid of Trotskyists. The Moscow Times reports that Anatoly Baranov, the KPRF’s webmaster, has been hauled in front of the Party’s Central Control Commission and charged with stubbornly pushing “the Communist Party from the victorious Leninist path onto the false Trotskyist path of a rapid revolution, effectively carried out in the interests of the pro-Western bourgeoisie, rather than in the interests of the Russian people, and leading to the total occupation of Russia by NATO forces.” Baranov called the charges “schizophrenic raving.”

To quote Kyle’s mom, “What! What! What!?” Trotskyism? You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Yes, Trotskyism is alive and well in the KPRF. Now dubbed “neo-Trotskyism,” the followers of the shunned revolutionary appear to continue to pose a severe threat to the Communist Party’s path to revolution. In a resolution titled “On the Dangers of Neo-Trotskyist Manifestations in the KPRF”, accused Baranov of the following:

The particular danger lies in that the site’s editor A. Iu. Baranov is using the internet resources of the KPRF (central and regional sites, internet portals) not for the organizational fulfillment of the decisions of Party organs, but for the purpose of discrediting the KPRF program on the solidarity and inseparable connection between socialism and patriotism, and also against the unification of social-class and nationalist movements into a single mass resistance movement in opposition to the destruction of Russian civilization and the oppression and exploitation of its people.

Talk about a blast from the past.

It seems, however, that Baranov has appealed. In a statement posted yesterday, the KPRF stated that the Secretariat has decided to look into the question of the Control Commission’s decision. In the meantime, the text of “On the Dangers of Neo-Trotskyist Manifestations in the KPRF” has been removed from the KPFR website.

You know Russia has hit the mainstream when CNN decides to devote a entire week of programming to it. All week CNN is running a daily half hour series called “Eye on Russia: The New Dawn.” Presumably the series is connected to Putin’s upcoming trip to the US. The topics include Russia’s “resurgence,” Russian youth, business, “the future,” and arts and culture. The first topic ran yesterday and you can view segments of it online here.

I must say that I think that former Gorbachev scribe Alexei Pushkov did an excellent job addressing CNN’s Jim Clancy’s loaded, and rather simpleton, questions. You could hear the disappointment in Clancy’s voice when Pushkov had to inform him that Russia isn’t going to be just like the West. “It’s not,” Clancy muttered with disappointment. What a boob.

What I really wonder is who Pushkov and Clancy meant by the “opposition.” I believe that they were talking about two different oppositions, or really a real one and a fake one. Pushkov perhaps about former Yeltsinites or even the Communists and Clancy, well, was referring, of course, to Kasparov. Too bad Pushkov didn’t ask for a clarification.

Looking at the list of guests, besides St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko and perhaps Mikhail Kasyanov, there doesn’t seem to be any real players on the Russian scene slotted to appear.

Still I will tune in as much as I can stomach CNN’s mealy mouthed squeamish approach to journalism. I especially look forward to today’s panel on youth, though CNN picked Maria Gaidar from Da! as the representative of youth organizations. I would have liked to see her or Ilya Yashin square off with Yakemenko from Nashi and Belov from the DPNI. But that would require CNN to acknowledge that their liberal darlings don’t represent the alpha and omega of Russian youth politics.

I am also looking forward to the interview with Alexei Balabonov. His new film “Gruz 200” is already causing controversy.

At any rate most Americans don’t get to hear or see much about Russia on the idiot box. At least CNN is providing the opportunity. And who knows? For once it might defy my already low expectations.

Update: Well it appears that Americans won’t see Eye on Russia after all. Or at least very few will. I just found out that CNN International, not CNN in the States, is broadcasting the series. I guess we homebody Americans will be treated to the CNN’s same old cutting edge journalistic potpourri of forest fires, tornadoes, child abductions, and celebrity scandals, and anti-immigrant rantings a la Lou Dobbs. It kinda feels like one of those times when Newsweek or Time Magazine runs real news as the cover story of their international edition but the same infotainment slop on their American editions. Bastards.

A street brawl broke out near Slavyanskaya Ploshchad in Moscow on Friday night when Russian nationalist youth “armed with metal poles and broken bottles” attacked Caucasians reports the Moscow Times. One Armenian youth was hospitalized with stab wounds and 42 persons were arrested. Estimates suggest that 50 Russian nationalists, some of which are members of Alexandr Belov’s Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) participated in the fight. In a statement Belov denied that DPNI did not have any kind of relations with organizers of the brawl. Further, Belov was quoted in the Moscow Times that DPNI members were there “peacefully guarding Moscow from gay prostitutes when groups of people from the Caucasus approached and provoked a reaction.”

The DPNI TV (which I must say is disturbing in and of itself) has posted footage of the incident on its website. Click here to view: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

In a statement to the press, Yuri Luzhkov, who Putin recently renominated as mayor of Moscow, said “Any display of chauvinism, xenophobia or nationalism will be harshly put down in our capital, on the basis of the Constitution … and on the basis of the law.”

Belov cracked back at Luzhkov in the Associated Press, saying that “[he] has been sitting in his chair too long. He has lost control of the city.”

Amid all the banter about a “new Cold War” between Russia and the United States, the Confrontation Cold War Museum in Moscow takes on a whole new relevance. The new tourist attraction is the former Taganski Underground Command Center, a 75,000 square foot underground dwelling built in Stalin’s last years to house the Soviet leadership in the event of a US nuclear attack. As David Holley of the LA Times reports, “historical remembrance and a touch of make-believe mix in an ambiguous but thought-provoking cocktail.”

Indeed. For a ticket price of $9.75 for students, $19.50 for adults and $39 for foreigners (ouch!), you can put on a Soviet army poncho and a gas mask and be led through the halls of a Cold War relic. The museum is still in development but as of now there are posters and other military equipment dawn the shelter’s mostly empty hallways and corridors.

But soon, promises Olga Arkharova, the museums director, a replica of the command center and a military themed restaurant will dazzle spectators.

The museum’s mission however is more than revisiting the Cold War through kitsch. “The task of our complex, which is called Confrontation, is to preserve this facility as a reminder and a warning that situations like this should be prevented forever,” Arkharova explained to the LA Times. “The idea we want to present to the children and the adults is that we want to have an open and frank dialogue with other countries, to prevent the world from entering another situation where we’re forced to build facilities like this.”

It seems, however, that all students are getting from the museum is that its creepy.

Andrei Kvyk, 21, a student at the Moscow Construction Institute, said being in the shelter gave him “the creeps.”

“They say that this is all a thing of the past and that the Cold War is over,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s the case. I am sure facilities like this still exist in Moscow and across the country and are on combat duty every second. I am sure the Cold War was never over. They are lying to us.”
. . .

“It is so spooky — these tunnels, this porridge, this damp air 60 meters under the ground,” said Yana Arutyunova, 25, a market researcher who joined the tour. “People in the tunnels look like ghosts of the past. You can’t but feel danger here. Everything was removed at some point, all the equipment, but you can still feel this concentrated cold fear permeating the air.”
. . .

Nina Borodina, 21, a university student, said that “these haunting shafts” made her think of how her grandmother “lived all her life feeling the danger of being bombed any second.”

“She told me how terrified they were of an imminent nuclear war back in the 1960s,” Borodina said. “Now I can understand a little of what she lived through. I don’t think there is any danger of nuclear war now. We are friends with the West.”
She said she was convinced that, whatever complaints the two sides may voice about each other, Putin “is leading the country along the way of real cooperation with the United States and other Western countries, and they will never be our enemies again.”

“But it was good to come down here,” she added. “It gives you a sense of what horrors we were saved from.”

Spooky or not, I know that next time I go to Moscow, I am so there.

Sixty-Six years ago tomorrow, Adolf Hitler put Operation Barbarossa into action. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union with initial overwhelming success. What Stalin knew, when he did, and what he did about it continues to be hotly debated. Like most topics in Soviet history, scholars are in a struggle to wrestle the Soviet response to the Nazi invasion from the politics of the Cold War. But these issues are for the most part academic and have little bearing on societies wider remembrance of June 22, 1941.

The real weight of WWII on Russia’s consciousness is difficult to measure. Opinion pulls show that 64% of Russians lost relatives in the war. Millions and millions of Soviet citizens were mobilized in the war effort. If there ever was a historical example of total war, Soviet Russia is it. However, this generation is now dying. When I was working in the Riazan Party Archive, the reading room head told me how she was working on a multi-volume encyclopedia of the biographies of Riazantsy who died at the front. She would call these old veterans at home urging them to give their testimony. Often she would yell because most couldn’t hear her of simply didn’t understand why she was calling. It is estimated that over 400,000 Riazantsy went to the front. Less than half returned. The window for collecting these remembrances, she surmised, was quickly closing. She estimated that she had about 5 years before all veterans were dead. As it stands, the encyclopedia is around 12 volumes.

The threat of forgetting is what RIA Novosti political analyst Maxim Krans finds so disconcerting. Statistics show that the memory of June 22, 1941 is being forgotten by Russia’s younger generation.

Seven years ago, I helped to conduct a poll of senior high school students in four Russian cities with dismaying results. Only 34% of the respondents knew when the war began; 93% said American, British and French forces had aided the Red Army in the capture of Berlin; and 81% knew nothing about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.

The situation has probably gotten worse since then. Only 20% of students polled in Krasnoyarsk, a city in Eastern Siberia, could say anything about the events of June 22, 1941. A sample survey by the Public Opinion Foundation, an influential pollster, involving Russians aged from 18 to 35 yielded similar results. It looks like all these people are suffering from amnesia.

For him, this forgetting is one of the underlying roots of neo-Nazi revival in Russia. “According to the Public Opinion Foundation,” Krans writes, “15% of young people believe that Nazism as a system of views has some positive aspects. When asked what would have happened to the U.S.S.R. in the event of a German victory, 33% of university students in Moscow said the defeat would not have had any negative consequences. Over 10% said national living standards would have improved, and 5% virtually praised a hypothetical German victory.” These views are made all the more concrete when you consider that the human rights group SOVA recorded 32 murders and 245 persons injured at the hands of extremists in January-May 2007 alone. Legal deterrence is minor since most of these crimes continue to be prosecuted as hooliganism.

Sure the war continues to be a central theme for remembering and celebration on holidays. But it appears, if Krans statistics are correct, that the memories those holidays seeks to induce are being performed by rote or simply lack the emotional substance to make the trauma of the past an inescapable weight on the present. Could it be that the pageantry around the celebration of WWII in Russia really yet another Potemkin village?

Abductions in Chechnya appear to be declining reports RFE/RL. The total number of recorded adductions of civilians declined “from 544 in 2002 to 323 in 2005, 187 in 2006, and 16 for the first three months of this year.” These numbers were corroborated by the Russian human rights group Memorial which monitors Chechnya. Pervious data suggests that from 1999 to 2005 some 3,000 to 5,000 persons were abducted.

However, along with this decline is a shift in who is doing the adducting. Before most abductions were carried out by Chechen militants. Now “Russian and Chechen human rights activists say that at least three agencies have resorted to such abductions: the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian federal forces, and the various pro-Moscow Chechen police and security forces.” Partisan terror has become state terror.

Also important to point out is abductions have increased in neighboring Dagestan.

At a press conference in Moscow on June 15, members of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) cited data for southern Russia as a whole, and for Daghestan. That data showed 68 reported abductions in Daghestan in 2006, compared with 12 in North Ossetia, 10 in Ingushetia, and five each in Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, kavkaz-uzel.ru reported on June 18.

By contrast, there have been nearly 20 abductions in Daghestan “over a very short period” this year, according to MHG chair Lyudmila Alekseeva. Meanwhile, in Ingushetia, which unlike Chechnya has not been the scene of constant fighting in recent years, abductions of young men appear to have begun in 2002, the year that former FSB General Murat Zyazikov succeeded Ruslan Aushev as president.

Chechen President and Moscow proxy Razman Kadyrov gave an interview to Kommersant. Here are a few of his choice statements.

Putin as President-for-life:

“Why can Kazakhstan have a president-for-life? Or Turkmenistan? Why can’t Russia have one too?”

“Putin gave the Chechen people a second life! Allah appointed him to his place.”

“I am not the FSB’s or the Main Intelligence Department’s man, I am Putin’s man. His policies, his word, for me is law. We are traveling his road. Putin saved our people, he is a hero. He not only saved us, he saved Russia. How can we not bow down before him as a person? I never liked to say pretty words in front of anyone, but Putin is God’s gift, he gave us freedom.

On Putin’s successor:

“A successor is a successor, but Putin is a personality.”

Kadyrov on Kadyrov:

“A cult of personality? Maybe in the good sense of the word. If I am carrying out the policy of the center, and 94-95 percent of the populace supports that policy and they hang some pictures somewhere, that doesn’t mean that it is a cult of personality. It means the right policy. If they burned the portraits and tore them up, that would be bad. But you see that, even if they hang the portrait of Putin or Kadyrov in the forest, no one will touch it. “

“I, Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov, am the way I am. I cannot be any different.”

On the Opposition and Criticism:

“No, I don’t see one. If there is, I welcome it. Opposition. What is that?”

“Well… I was among the people not long ago, and a woman said to me, “I used to hate you, but now I see your actions and I welcome you.”

Kadyrov in third person:

“[Malik Saidullaev] didn’t know Kadyrov’s real policy.”

“It was a historically important step when Kadyrov united the people.”

“Anyone will tell you that Kadyrov has authority, that he is respected, that he is a leader.”