On June 22 residents of Voronezh found their local billboards featuring an ominous, but familiar face: Comrade Stalin  “Victory will be ours!” reads a slogan in large white letters below a large picture of the vozhd.  The question, curious residents asked, was why Comrade Stalin’s visage was once again taking such a prominent public space, and more importantly, who put it there? 

According to Kommersant, the Stalin billboards are part of a campaign by the Communist Party to commemorate the 130th birthday of the generalissimo.  Sergei Rudakov, a KPRF regional deputy, told the daily that his party wanted “to remind every resident about the great person and his achievements.  The billboards, which were designed by three advertising companies, cost 8,000 rubles apiece. 

Not everyone was happy to see Stalin dotting the skyline.  Most of all, Voronezh’s city administration, which ordered that the billboards be taken down because, according to the law, “the contents of posters are not regarded as either commercial or social advertisements, are not directed toward a charitable or a socially useful purpose, maintain the interests of the state, and there are not objects of advertisement on the billboard.”

“In my opinion,” KPRF regional secretary Andrei Rogatnev told Kommersant, “If you follow the principle of the lack of objects of advertisement on billboards, then it is necessary to remove the posters where Vladimir Putin is presenting [Voronezh] mayor Sergei Koliukh with a certificate conferring Voronezh as the “City of Military Glory.”

Well, double standards hold in Voronezh.  The city administration has demanded that the billboards be taken down, and if they aren’t, it will revoke the licenses of billboard companies who put them up.
 

The court said the four men, who were accused of assisting the killer of Ms. Politkovskaya, should be tried on the same charges in the same military court in Moscow. In ordering the retrial, the court sided with the prosecution, which argued that there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the original trial, a court spokesman, Pavel Odintsov, said. Other critics, however, including President Dmitri A. Medvedev, cited the prosecution’s errors and unfamiliarity with the jury system, which is relatively new in Russia, in the acquittal.

A statement issued by the Politkovskaya family on Novaya gazeta’s website said the following the about the Court’s ruling:

We recognize that the trial of every one of the accused was a fiasco.  A fiasco from the standpoint of the evidence which was presented to the court.

But we think they are accessories in the case because we have yet to received an answer about what [they] were doing near the building at the time of the murder.

Therefore, the verdict, which the jury decided was just because there not enough evidence was presented.

We, as before, think that there is one possible option in the progress of the case–its transfer to a supplementary examination.  We, as before, are sure that the case was not investigated and not transparent, and our main demand to the investigation which has yet to clarify who ordered the murder and the rest of the participants in the crime.

We only want the case to be investigated as it should be, and hold accountable all those persons responsible including the [murder's] client.

For an excellent article on the first trials proceedings, I highly recommend Keith Gessen’s ‘The Accused“  Hopefully this time the prosecution will present a better case.

There is nothing more hilarious when people give wondrous powers to the United States.  It’s no surprise that Russia Today would feast on a the idea that the “Green Revolution” is a US orchestrated plot.  Russia already convinced itself that every colored revolution was cooked up in Langley.

And this makes Craig Roberts a perfect guest (I know nothing about Wayne Madsen, but his wiki entry suggests that he’s a crank).  He argued that the Iranian protests are  “classic CIA destabilization” in an article on Counterpunch.  What a sad convergence of opinion between  some in the American Left, Russia’s conservatives, and the theocrats in Iran.

The idea among some Leftists that every uprising they don’t like is the work of the CIA (or Mossad) always strikes me as orientalist.

Yes, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev has recorded an album (with Russian rock star Andrei Makarevich) of romantic songs titled Songs to Raisa in dedication to his wife.  The album, of which only one copy exists, has already sold out.  An unknown British philanthropist bought it for a whopping $169,940 at an auction to raise money for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation.  Reports Sean Michaels in the Guardian:

An “anonymous British philanthropist” bought what we suppose is Mikhail Gorbachev’s “debut album”, Songs for Raisa, in London this week, bidding $164,940 (about £100,000) at an auction to benefit the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. Nearly 350 luminaries were present at the private event, including Gordon Bown’s wife, Sarah, London mayor Boris Johnson, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, actor Vanessa Redgrave and Russian ambassador Yuri Fedotov, according to the newspaper Pravda.

Gorbachev was there too, and he brought his singing voice. The former Soviet leader warbled a song called Old Letters. “The performance … was greeted with delight and a storm of applause,” said Pavel Palazhchenko, chairman of the Foundation’s press service. You can judge for yourself by listening to Old Letters.

Like the rest of the tracks on Songs for Raisa, “Old Letters” is an old Russian romantic ballad. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, died 10 years ago. The foundation established in her name is dedicated to fighting childhood cancer.

Two songs are available for download :
Old Letters
Dark Night

And they aren’t that bad!  Who knew?

In the aftermath of the Ahmadinejad “success” at the polls, his supporters were handing out leaflets condemning the secular revolutions of Eastern Europe, and their content says much about the anxieties of Iran’s clerical leadership. One of them was entitled: “The system of trying to topple an Islamic Republic in a ‘velvet revolution’.” It then described how it believes Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and other nations won their freedom.

“‘Velvet’ or ‘colourful’ revolutions… are methods of exchanging power for social unrest. Colourful and ‘velvet’ revolutions occurred in post-communist societies of central and Eastern Europe and central Asia. Colourful revolutions have always been initiated during an election and its methods are as follows:

“1. Complete despair in the attitude of people when they are certain to lose an election…

“2. Choosing one particular colour which is selected solely for the Western media to identify (for their readers or viewers).” Mousavi used green as his campaign colour and his supporters still wear this colour on wristbands, scarves and bandannas.

“3) Announcing that there has been advance cheating before an election and repeating it non-stop afterwards… allowing exaggeration by the Western media, especially in the US.

“4) Writing letters to officials in the government, claiming vote-rigging in the election. It’s interesting to note that in all such ‘colourful’ projects – for example, in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – the Western-backed movements have warned of fraud before elections by writing to the incumbent governments. In Islamic Iran, these letters had already been written to the Supreme Leader.”

Another leaflet maintained that a study – which Khamenei’s advisers have obviously undertaken, however inaccurately – demonstrated that vote-rigging will be alleged on the very day of the election and that victory will be claimed by the opposition hours before the counting is finished and before their own defeat is announced. The results, says the document, will therefore already have a “background” of fraud. “In the final stages… supporters gather in front of the regime’s official offices, holding colourful banners and protesting against vote-rigging.” This part of the demonstration, the leaflet says, “is run by the foreign media who are the opposition movement’s supporters so that they make good pictures and mislead the international community”.

The connection between the boiling discontent among Iranians and the possibility of a “colored revolution” in the Islamic Republic hasn’t been lost on the hardline leadership.  According to Abbas Milani, prior to the election, Sobhe-Sadeq, the main organ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard “warned in a lead editorial that the opposition’s use of the color green had become dangerously similar to the kind of “color revolution” that dethroned governments in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Georgia.” With his eyes clearly on events in those countries, Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered the creation of a committee to investigate the possibility of “colored revolution” three years ago.

Nor has the “colored revolution” paradigm been far from the minds of observers. When protests erupted in Tehran, Joshua Tucker asked in the New Republic whether Ukraine could teach us anything about events in Iran. After pondering the question for a few days, he rejected the idea. Not because of the anatomy of the protests, but because “the Iranian authorities may have learned a number of specific lessons from their less fortunate post-communist counterparts.”  But after more than a week of escalating protests, every lesson Tucker says the Iranian government learned have proved to be ineffective against a determined and growing opposition. The question is: are we witnessing a “colored revolution” in Iran?  Given that events in Iran do appear similar to colored revolutions in the former Soviet republics, how do some in the Russian press see in the Iranian protests? After all, Russian journalists should know a colored revolution when they see it given all their experience with observing them in their near abroad or watching their state hysterically dedicate its security apparatuses to preventing one at home.

A good place to start to identify what parallels Russian commentators see between Iran and post-Soviet states is a commentary by Andrei Kolesnikov published in Vedomosti.  Kolesnikov sees the Iranian protests and the “revolutions” in CIS countries as symbolic of what Jurgen Habermas calls “catch-up revolution.” Kolesnikov writes:

This phenomena described in political philosophy is called “catch-up revolution.”  The philosopher Jurgen Habermas labels a revolution in reverse rewind when a society painfully attempts to make up for years of induced stagnation. Moldova, lived through, like the majority of post-Soviet states, a national revolution but did not undergo a bourgeois revolution. The part of Iranian society disposed toward modernization were seriously disillusioned in the years of the predecessor of Ahmadinejad–the moderate reformer Khatami.  And now 12 years after what began as Khatami’s rapidly unfurled “thaw”, and after came to be a genuine “frost”, results in a catch-up revolution, a revolution not so much of hope, but of persistent disappointment.

Whether a catch-up revolution is in the making is difficult to gage.  Plus the whole idea of “catch up” suggests that a there is something to catch up top.  Habermas’ idea, and Kolesnikov embrace of it, is based in the historical teleology that state’s political development follows a singular path toward liberalism. Still, one gets the feeling that Kolesnikov musing in political philosophy has little to do with Iran per se.  Kolesnikov’s views speak more to his native country, Russia. Indeed, like so many around the world, the Iranian protests have been subsumed into the desires of the observers.  Iran, therefore, only highlights the nadir of political change in Russia.  “Perhaps,” Kolesnikov writes, “one of the few comparatively poor states, where a catch-up revolution is now impossible by force of the shapelessness of political protest is Russia.  Our political revolutions occur in kitchens and social salons.  And protest continues to be purely social, and Pikalevo-like.”

Perhaps this is why the Russian press lacks the adulation that one finds in the Anglo press.   Whereas the American politicos see an Iran budding into a potential Persian America, the Russians are more pessimistic and emphasize the limits of political change; limits which undoubtedly stem from their own historical experience with “revolutions.”  Take for example, Petr Goncharov’s opinion in RIA Novosti,

The situation in Iran indeed recalls something revolutionary. And the “green” opposition chose the green color of Islam as “a symbol of struggle against stranglehold of the regime.” The most recent circumstances gave the possibility to adherents of the “sacredness” of any order to see in it its “orange” essence.  Today, every protest, slogan and other demands “for liberalization” have accepted the stamp of the danger of “orange” revolution. There won’t be a revolution.  Neither “green,” nor “orange” for that matter.  The revolution has been postponed.  Postponed by Imam Khamenei the Supreme (and lifelong) spiritual leader of Iran.

Statements about the revolution being postponed are certainly premature.  But the foreclosure that both Kolesnikov and Goncharov place on it speaks volumes.  They both seem to be saying in their own disillusioned way that, “It’s happened in Iran, but it cannot and won’t happen in Russia.” Russia liberals, of course, are asking similar questions along similar lines. “Why isn’t Russia Iran?” asks Alexander Golts. The question must eat at liberals like Golts  as they watch citizens of a theocracy excercize their rights while those in an arguably more open Russia remain idle.  As for why this is the case, Golts gives this answer,

There are several objective factors which makes Iranian society more “passionate” than the Russians.  First of all, the age of the [Iranian] urban population. Seventy percent are young people who absolutely don’t want to rot for several more years under the leadership of a narrow-minded fanatic.  Moreover, in this theocratic state, as it’s been shown, political competition has a place with frank, you will laugh, debates on television. But the main conclusion is that Vladimir Putin does not mess with Russians to the degree and with such passion as Ahmadinejad does Iranians.  The Russian government does not meddle, in contrast to the Iranians, in private life.  However, I surmise that the effectiveness with which Vladimir Vladimirovich guides the national economy will very soon compel Russians to spit on his charisma and remember their right to choose . . .

Of course, Golts, in all his liberal hopes, forgets that while he thinks that the future of post-Soviet Russia is still up for debate, or rather than he and his ilk are part of that debate, the reformers in Iran are.  As the last weeks have proven, the Iranian opposition is part of Iranian mainstream political culture however much the hardliners who back Ahmadinejad try to deny it and paint them as part of a CIA/Mossad plot.

For all intents and purposes, the Iranian opposition isn’t calling for an undoing of the Iranian Revolution.  For the most part, their calls are for the regime to abide by its own rules.  Their demands are still very much within its ideological and discursive confines, though as some note, the situation is so unpredictable that Islamic regime could be swept away as easily as its predecessor. This relationship to the past is what differentiates events in Iran with those in post-Soviet states.  The “colored revolutions” in former Soviet states are in part an effort to break from the past, and in particular, move away from Russia’s orbit to face the West.  In this case, they were a continuation of a process of national revolutions began in 1991. In Iran, the position of the opposition leadership appears to be for a retooling of the past, a return to the principles of the Revolution, rather than its utter disregard.

“Lenin” and “Death”
these words are enemies.
“Lenin” and “Life”
are comrades . . .
Lenin
lived.
Lenin
lives.
Lenin
will live.
–Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924

Vladimir Ilich Lenin turned 139 last month making him the oldest living person on Earth. However, Lenin does not live like his eulogizers had imagined.  When some mourners proclaimed that “Lenin has ceased to be an individual-Lenin belongs to the millions,” or that “Lenin has not died. Lenin lives.  There is not a corner in the world . . . where Lenin is absent,” they imagined a transhistorical Lenin, whose spirit marched through time and space.  His body may have died, but his essence continued to haunt the world.  “And when Ilich was no more, we still had Lenin,” declared the Bolshevik jurist Peter Stuchka. And this transfiguration of the spiritual Lenin from the corporal Ilich even defied the empirical sensitivity of the human eye.  “This metamorphosis went on before our eyes imperceptibility,” the jurist added.  Yet, this metaphysical Lenin met his demise years ago.  No longer does his spirit serve the “world proletariat” as source of inspiration or defiance.   Yet, ironically, while Lenin is dead, Ilich still lives.

Perhaps it is wrong to say that Ilich lives.  It might be more correct to say that he straddles the line between life and death.  Ilich’s mummy state makes him undead.  He is, as the wiki definition of undead states, “deceased yet behave[s] as if alive.”  Granted, Ilich doesn’t wonder the streets of Moscow, attend restaurants, shits, pisses, or fucks.  He hasn’t added to his oeuvre. “Better Fewer, But Better” remains the last article penned by his own hand.  Ilich simply lies in state, motionless, in an eternal state of sleep.  Mummy Ilich patiently waits for a time when science would revive him, and his two bodies, the corporal Ilich and the spiritual Lenin, would be a reunited whole.

There is, however, one way Ilich lives just like the rest of us.  Every few years he’s given a new suit.

Or, he usually gets a new suit.  Thanks to the economic crisis, Ilich’s attendants can’t afford to furnish him the threads he’s become accustom to. Lenin is supposed to get a new suit every three years, though his handlers admit it’s more like every 8-10 years.  “There are hardly enough funds for the preservation works,” says Yuri Denisov-Nikolsky, deputy head of the Russian Institute for Healing and Aromatic Herbs. “Since 1992, the mummy has been sponsored by charity funds alone. And now we’ve got this crisis.”  There is no doubt that Ilich’s suit costs a hefty buck.  It’s tailor-made in Switzerland out of lustrine, a soft silky fabric that Lenin preferred when he was more mobile.  And if Ilich does rise again, he’ll be in fashion.  His suit is a modern cut, which Pravda says “is still popular nowadays in men’s fashion.” But alas, he will remain in the suit, though recently steam cleaned and pressed, he was fitted in 2003.  Perhaps this is a testament to capitalism’s true universalization.  It even dogs the indefatigable, albeit undead, Lenin.

One might say that the fact Lenin doesn’t acquire a new suit himself is a sign that he is indeed gone.  After all, if Lenin truly lives, couldn’t he put in the order to the Swiss himself?  Couldn’t he just say, “Bah! Suits are for the bourgeois. Their self worth is always wrapped in fine threads to mask their internal wretchedness and degradation.  Give me something simple.  Like a tracksuit.” But the truth of the matter is that if there is one constant in Lenin’s life and Ilich’s undeath, is that he rarely picked out his own clothes.  Someone else always did it for him.

“[Lenin] was no dandy,” writes his biographer Robert Service.  “While wanting to remain tidy, he did not enjoy shopping for clothes; he got others to do this for him–or rather he wore his clothes until such time as one of his relatives became sufficiently exasperated to buy a new suit or a pair of shoes for him.” Indeed, a read through Lenin’s correspondence shows that his mother and sisters were always furnishing his wardrobe.  In 1896, in letter to his sister Anna, Lenin wrote, “You can put a few clothes in there, too-an overcoat and suit, a hat. The waistcoat, frock coat and rug that were brought for me can be taken back.” Or to his mother in 1901, “If I have to spend the next winter in these parts [i.e. Munich] I shall write for a quilted coat. Without it you either have to wear a woolen jersey or put on two sets of underclothes (as I do).”  In another letter from 1897, Lenin reassured his mother that he had enough winter clothes. “As far as my winter clothes and other things (which you ask about) are concerned, I have ample. I have already bought many winter things in Minusinsk and will buy some more.”  Lenin appeared somewhat frustrated with shopping in Minusinsk.  In the same letter he complained that there “was practically no choice” in the village shops.  “It is difficult for one accustomed to city shops to find anything in them,” he complained.  Though he made a promise to rid himself of these “big city habits” when it came to shopping, he still thought in “the St. Petersburg way.”  That is, “you have only to go into a shop and get what you want . . .”

Despite, his apparent love for Swiss lustrine, Lenin was never much of a flashy dresser.  A lover of hunting, he tended to wear mountain boots, sometimes with a sheepskin coat to protect him from the cold.  A 1970 photo of his clothes on display in the Lenin Museum shows that the Bolshevik leader at one time owned a bowler hat, suit jacket, and half boot shoes. Lenin was apparently somewhat vain.  His early baldness concerned him, so much that he even asked his sister Maria if there was a way to reverse the process.  He kept his beard and remaining hair trim and neat.  According to Service, Lenin was a bit of a neat freak. “He hated untidiness–and he admonished family members if they failed to keep their buttons neatly sewn and their shoes repaired.”

Lenin left his own dress in other people’s hands.  One such person was Karl Radek.  During the journey from Switzerland to join the Revolution in Petrograd, Lenin and his entourage stopped in Stockholm to meet the city’s mayor, Karl Lindhagen.  Also present was a reporter from the newspaper Politiken who was writing a profile on the émigré revolutionaries.  The incident wouldn’t have been significant, except that it was Lenin’s first audience with an important politician, and perhaps more importantly, the first time his photograph was published in a newspaper. Having a keen eye for the importance of image in politics, Radek recognized that Lenin couldn’t present himself to the public in the shabby clothes.  Radek recalled,

Probably it was the decent appearance of our solid Swedish comrades that was evoking in us a passionate desire for Ilich to resemble a human being.  We cajoled him at least to buy new shoes.  He was traveling in mountain boots with hug nails.  We pointed out to him that if the plan had been to ruin the pavements of the disgusting cities of bourgeois Switzerland, his conscience should prevent him from traveling with such instruments of destruction to Petrograd, where perhaps there anyway were now no pavements at all.

Radek quickly rushed Lenin to a department store and fitted him with a new suit and shoes.  Now properly dressed, as Service sardonically writes, “he was judged appropriately dressed to lead the struggle against the Russian Provisional Government.

Lenin’s dress markedly changed after arriving in Russia to lead the “proletarian” Revolution.  Gone were the worn, heavy mountain boots.  He often donned the suit purchased in Switzerland, but added the worker’s cap to his attire.  The cap actually wasn’t the one popular among the Russian working class, but rather the cover worn by turn of the century painters.  Regardless, Lenin’s suit and cap combo became his signature.  It was a class statement that “distinguished him from [other politicians] and their solemn Homburg hats.”

The suit and cap also complimented his wild oral gesticulations.  Lenin had a habit of rocking when he spoke.  He shoved his thumbs in his waistcoat, and with his left foot forward and the right slightly back, he would bend his body back and forth as if in some Talmudic trance.  When beads of sweat tickled down his brow, he would pull out a white handkerchief to dry his shiny dome, giving an almost Pentecostal flare to his theatrics.  In his hagiography of Lenin, Lev Trotsky relayed this description from an eye witness:

[Lenin] got up on the platform.  He was wearing a dark, I think, a black suit, a short with a turn-down collar and a tie, and a cap on his head.  He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his bald head.  I do not remember what he said.  I was really paying more attention to how he was speaking.  Sometimes he kept bending down quite low from the platform, stretching his arms in front of him; he had his handkerchief in his hand and often wiped his forehead.  He often smiled.  I was watching his face, his nose, his lips, and his small beard.  His speech was often interrupted by clapping and shouting.  And so I also shouted.

While Lenin’s cap and rousing sermons skillfully distinguished him from the “bourgeois” politicians, after the Civil War, his suit distinguished him the style of ardent Bolshevik.  The latter was a lover of  the leather jacket, military tunic, cap, and jackboots.  The leather jacket in particular was a sign of an “iron Bolshevik.”  For example, the writer V. F. Panova noted in her memoirs that beginning of the 1920s, her husband, a youth from the intellectual family, “forged” himself as an iron Bolshevik. Like other young militants of his time, he spoke with a echoing base, worked at a furious pace, and his main compliment to these was a leather jacket.  The iron Bolshevik was a fashion ascetic who considered neckties symbols of the hangman’s noose or a reminder of the slavery of a bygone “bourgeois” era.  Many Bolsheviks of Lenin’s generation mocked this fetishism of the leather jacket as “faux proletarian” and a symbol of “communist arrogance,” though there are scattered photos of Lenin in such militarist dress.  Despite the ridicule from Bolshevik moralists, the style of the iron Bolshevik persisted throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s where it experienced a revival under Stalin.  In the end, Lenin’s conservative and proper tastes contrasted with the Stalin generation, who, though not completely opposed to suits, were more comfortable in their military tunics.

When the Lenin Mausoleum opened on 1 August 1924, mourners passed by an iron gated courtyard of flowers and bushes as they approached two guards standing with fixed bayonets at the entrance.  The tomb’s opening was fortified with lacquered wooden beams with a huge sign that read LENIN in black letters above it.  Lenin’s new home was decorated in somber communist regalia.  A red carpet lined the stairs to his chamber. The walls were covered with a red and black geometric pattern.  The ceiling was painted red with a large hammer and sickle in the center.  The sarcophagus was padded with red fabric, perhaps velvet, and covered with glass.

Inside was Lenin lying peacefully with his hands crossed above his waist. His lower extremities were covered with black and purple satin.  And what was the leader of the proletarian revolution wearing, this so-called symbol of “Marxism in action” as one slogan claimed?  Lenin was not dressed in his signature Swiss made suit.  Nor did his legendary Lenin cap cover his shiny dome.  Rather, Lenin was dressed in the old Bolshevik style: a khaki military tunic with the Order of the Red Banner and the badge of the Central Executive Committee pinned to his breast.  And perhaps in an ode to Lenin’s supposed vanity or maybe his obsession with order and cleanliness, Ilich looked as natural as could be. As the American journalist Walter Duranty noted, “The embalmers have even contrived to impart a smile to [his] face.”

Clothes, it is said, make the man.  And though afoul to his personal tastes, Ilich would wear his khaki military tunic until the outbreak of WWII.  It was then, according to Denisov-Nikolsky, “someone decided that the uniform symbolized Lenin’s militant character and totalitarian policy, and he was immediately dressed in civilian clothes.”  A new Lenin for a new era.  He has been wearing the same style ever since.  But not the same suit.  He currently awaits another one not unlike he did when he penned those letters to his mother and sisters requesting clothes.  Perhaps proves more than anything Vladimir Mayakovsky’s verses that “Lenin even now is more alive than the living.”

Sources:

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works.

Robert Service, Lenin: a Biography, Papermac, 2000.

Lev Trotsky, Lenin, Capricorn Books, 1962.

Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, Harvard University Press, 1983.

The return of Memorial’s property followed another ruling in its favor by the Dzerzhinsky court that deemed the December raid by the police as unlawful. The case’s lead investigator Mikhail Kalganov decided to not press the issue further. “Yes, this is our victory,” Memorial’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov told Kommersant. “And we think that in this case the Russian legal system managed itself [well]. The court has shown that it is on the right side.”  It also didn’t hurt, the advocate said, that Russia’s representative to the OSCE spoke out on Memorial’s behalf.  So the question is did the legal system work or did Memorial have an influential patron?  Or better yet, is this another, albeit small, sign of a Medvedevian “thaw” in the forecast?

A thorough inspection of the “Winchesters” will be done on May 13 to make sure the authorities didn’t erase anything or damage any of the files.

Thus ends an almost six month ordeal.  It’s nice to see a happy ending to an incident that generated cries about the return of Stalinism.  As I said in my last post on the Memorial Saga, I expect this victory to get as much press as the initial raid.

Still, despite the positive outcome, Memorial still had to jump through several hoops for a victory that they never should have been forced to fight for in the first place. Which leaves one crucial question unanswered.  Why was Memorial raided exactly?  I guess we’ll never really know.  I don’t expect Chief Investigator Kalganov to shed any light on this any time soon.  For the time being, he’s got some wounds to lick.

Swine flu’s arrival makes Russia the fifteenth country to be infected.  The global hysteria sparked by the pandemic has led to altering flights, calls for a mass slaughter of pigs,  the quarantining of hotels at the first site of a Mexican tourist, and a whole host of other theories.  In Israel, the deputy health minister Rabbi Yakov Litzman won’t even say the word “pigs.” He officially calls the disease “Mexican flu.”

Of course, Mexico, where about 12 people have died and over 300 cases have been identified, has turned into a real life version of Outbreak. Mexico as epicenter has of course inspired our American xenophobes into a fury of anti-immigrant hate.  Fox News has predictably led the anti-immigrant charge with accusations that illness is part of some kind of viral conspiracy against America.  It is only a matter of time they follow the Israelis in adopting “Mexican flu.”

Experts are still at a loss as to what to expect from the pandemic.  It could simply fizzle out or up its body count. If all this really does worry you, I advise reading Anatoly’s breakdown of the disease at Sublime Oblivion.

Aleksandr Belov happily pointing at Kafe 88. In Nazi slang, 88 stands for "Heil Hitler."

Anti-racist activists finally have a reason to mildly celebrate.  Today, Russian xenophobe Aleksandr Belov was sentenced to six months in a penal colony for violating Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code (”Inciting hate and enmity as well as the debasement of human dignity”). The case stems from the Russian March in fall 2007 where Belov goaded protesters “to chant anti-Semitic and anti-government slogans.”

People were wondering whether Belov would serve any time at all. The authorities were apparently afraid that jail time would turn Belov into a martyr.

Belov’s sentencing also led to his resignation as leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), Russia’s largest ultranationalist movement.  According to Belov, he was forced to resign because  if he was convicted while serving as DPNI’s leader, the organization would have been banned as extremist.  “I do not want to let my brothers-in-arms down. I’m sure that they will never denounce me. That is the reason for my resignation.” he said.  At the moment, the DPNI is being led by a seven member “National Council.”

Belov might have squeezed through a legal loophole, but there is no mistaking the fact that DPNI is extremist by all Russian legal definitions.  They are certainly no more extremist than say the National Bolshevik Party.  Yet even the mention of the latter in print can lead to a criminal inquiry as the editor of Vyatka osobaya gazeta is discovering. According to Kommersant, Nikolai Golikov, Vyatka’s editor, is accused of “distributing” Natsbol literature because he used it in an item about their anti-crisis leaflets posted on banks in Kirovo-Chepetsk.

However, DPNI seems to possess no similar stigma.  Perhaps this is because, unlike Limonov, Belov’s views toward immigrants are widely accepted among Russians. Or as Shaun Walker explained in a recent article on Belov:

According to Belov, an Orthodox Christian who is fasting for Russian Lent and fingers a set of prayer beads throughout the interview, the Russian authorities are out of touch with what the average person on the streets wants, and this is what makes groups like his popular. “The last time that Medvedev actually went out onto the streets and met people was probably about 30 years ago; he doesn’t understand what ordinary Russian people want,” he said. “A normal society should have a high level of civil activity, but in the period of Vladimir Putin’s rule, everything was done to get rid of civil society and revive some aspects of Soviet totalitarianism. The elites are corrupt, and not working in the country’s best interests.”
Indeed, one of the more surreal aspects of talking to someone like Belov is that despite the fact that he is a neo-fascist with a racialist ideology, much of what he says could easily come from the lips of Garry Kasparov, the Armenian-Jewish liberal leader who stands for just about everything that the nationalists despise.

But when talk moves on from what is wrong with the current Russian authorities to what should be done about it, the divergence in opinions becomes obvious. Belov doesn’t want Moscow to be a place where there are “ghettos:” places where “a white man goes and doesn’t feel at home.”

Given Russian unemployment levels, he claims, there is no need for unskilled immigrants to come to Russia; they should only be allowed in when they can demonstrate a clear skill that is not available among the local population. He also claims, using the traditional arguments of the far right, that immigrants are responsible for social problems in Russia: “Illegal immigrants sell weapons, drugs and create petty crime,” he said. “If we introduced a visa regime with the former Soviet republics, 95 percent of illegal immigration would be dealt with overnight. We have an absurd situation where people come legally but work illegally.”

Another part of the opposition to migrants stems from classic racialist arguments that haven’t been much in favour anywhere since the 1930s, and rank races according to their level of development. “Take Azerbaijan,” said [Viktor] Yakushev [DPNI's chief ideologist], referring to a country from which hundreds of thousands of migrants come to Russia every year. “There is a different level of consciousness and knowledge. The society is still at the stage of feudalism; they don’t understand European civilization.”

“Different races have different cultural levels,” Yakushev continued, warming to the theme. “Just look at the state of BMW cars in the past few years—as more and more Turks work at the BMW plants in Germany, the quality has gotten lower and lower. Even though putting the cars together is relatively simple, the Turks don’t have the skill or cultural level to be able to do it properly.” (If this is, indeed, the way in which races are to be ranked, then it doesn’t bode too well for the Russians, I thought).

Belov may think that Medvedev and Putin are out of touch, but Yuri Roslyak, Moscow’s deputy mayor isn’t.  Speaking on TVC last Tuesday, he called for a toughening of the city’s policy toward unemployed migrants. “If a migrant loses his job and stays in Moscow unemployed, he should be deported,” he said.

Russian are fertile for anti-immigrant sentiment.  Immigrants are an easy target in bad economic times. And with unemployment hitting 7.5 million, or about 10 percent nationally, one shouldn’t also be surprised if anti-immigrant racism rises. Especially if it does among unemployed youth. About a third of unemployed Russians are between the ages of 15 to 29, many of which have little work experience.

The threat of rising extremism certainly isn’t lost on the Kremlin. According to Vedomosti, the government is thinking of creating a speacial commission under the President’s office to combat extermism. The commission would coordinate the MVD, FSB, educational institutions and social organizations in a united effort to fight “extremism.”  Of course, the mention of the E-word immediately raises the question of definition.  Extremism certainly applies to fascists and other neo-Nazis, as the Belov case shows.  But “extremism” is an elastic concept in Russia, and it is easily wielded against opposition political groups, ranging from Memorial to the National Bolsheviks.

Or in the words of Oleg Orlov from Memorial:

Everything depends on how this commission will concretely function and who will be on it.  I think that it could be profitable if not only representatives of security organizations and national Diasporas are on it, but also human rights activists because the struggle against extremism is now acquiring an ambiguous character.  The problems of extremism are used to expand the understanding of ‘extremism.’

Despite Orlov’s reasoned trepidation, the authorities aren’t blind to the growing Russian Right.  At the conference in Yekaterinburg where the commission was announced, the Prosecutor-General reported that there around about 200 extremist groups in Russia with a following of around 10,000.  The majority of them are under 25 years old.  The most influential are nationalist and neo-Nazi groups like Army of the People’s Will, the National Socialist Society, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the Slavic Union, and the Northern Brotherhood.

Thankfully, with Belov’s sentencing one more fascist is off the street.  At least for a little while.