Posted by Sean on September 5, 2007
“Football stands have turned into mass media,” writes Yabloko youth leader Ilya Yashin in his article, “Ku-Klux Fans” in Novaya gazeta (A rather crude English translation can be found here). “It all started under a sports’ “rubric”: banners and slogans. Then it spread to politics. And now it’s radical. In the last few weeks there have been several incidents involving Nazi football fans: flags with Hitler, effigies of lynched blacks, and masquerades as the Ku-Klux-Klan.”
One recent incident Yashin cites occurred at a match between two amateur teams, Alliance and Makkabi, in the city of Vnukov. A group of Alliance fans wished the players from Makkabi, which is a team from the local Jewish community, “a happy holocaust.” On 9 August, at a match between Vologda Dynamo and Cherepovets Sheksna, a group of fans dressed in Ku-Klux-Klan outfits waved a large flag with Hitler’s picture and unfurled an enormous banner showing ..read more
Posted by Sean on September 5, 2007
I received the Fall 2007 issue of the Slavic Review in the mail yesterday. While flipping through it, I couldn’t help admiring the accuracy of this quotation from Khrushchev that opens Timothy Frye’s review of Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.
Khrushchev told Castro during the latter’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1963:
You’d think I could change anything in this country. Like hell I can. No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia is like a tub full of dough, you put your hand down in it, down to the bottom, and think you’re master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That’s what Russia is like.
Beautifully put Nikita Sergeevich.
Posted by Sean on September 5, 2007
The investigation into Anna Politkovskaya’s murder took another dramatic turn today as Novaya gazeta reported that the chief investigator in the case, Piotr Gabiryan, was replaced for a “more senior official.” According to the Moscow Times, Dmitri Muratov, Novaya’s editor, said on Ekho Moskvy that Gabiryan’s removal was the “result of interference by the siloviki. “The siloviki are achieving what they set out to achieve,” Muratov said. “They wanted to ruin the case, and now they will remove Gabriyan and finish that process.”
Muratov’s statements initiated a deluge of admonishments, speculation, and confusion. RFE/RL reports that the Prosecutor General’s office has since denied Muratov’s claims, counteracting them with a statement that in fact more investigators were added to the team because of the “large amount of work involved.” Case supervisor, Sergei Ivanov, who was also rumored to have been removed from the case, told Kommersant that there was no political or ..read more
