The city fathers decided today to ban any gathering at the Freedom Monument next Monday, citing fears of further conflicts and riots. At the same time, Russia reacted to the March 16 march more than a week before it was slated to take place.
On March 7, Russian media quoted an anonymous Russian foreign ministry source describing the Legionnaire’s Day commemoration as a “Nazi supporters march” and drew parallels between it and Holocaust denial.
This guy. The saddest part is probably the last paragraph:
The celebrations continued after Isayev’s body was taken away in an ambulance, and a winter dummy was burnt in a symbolic farewell to the coldest months of the year, the paper said.
The Economist’s Moscow bureau chief Arkady Ostrovsky warns of consequences for Russia as the reversal of fortune takes place. Will Russia be next on the list of countries that saw a public’s outrage in the time of economic collapse?
Whether the current Kremlin is prepared to open fire on its own people is unclear. Soviet hard-liners held their fire when thousands of Russians defeated the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. But back then, the kgb and its communist patrons were disoriented and weak. Putin and his regime, on the other hand, are stronger and, most importantly, have more to lose.
What’s even less clear is whether Russia’s police or military would obey the orders to shoot if they were given. The Vladivostok protests and the government’s violent response sparked an online debate in the chat room of Russia’s Interior Ministry. One post read: “Dear colleagues, Russia is at a crucial junction. An economic catastrophe is coming.… People’s patience is coming to an end.… Are we going to be the attack dogs of this regime?”
Another member replied: “I will never shoot at my own people.”
The ministry hurriedly closed down the forum, citing “technical problems.”
….
“There is nothing more misleading than to portray Russia as a liberal-minded society suppressed by a nasty bunch of former kgb agents. The uncomfortable truth is, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed boss of the Yukos oil company destroyed by the Kremlin, put it: Putin “is more liberal and more democratic than 70 percent of the population.” And unlike late Soviet leaders who inspired the contempt of the population, Putin even now remains authentically popular.
Putin’s most damaging and possibly longest-lasting legacy is that he has played to Russia’s worst instincts. Rather than develop a sense of pride in Russia’s victory over the Soviet Union in 1991, Putin has fostered feelings of past humiliation and defeat, and subsequently a longing for retribution. Many foreign responses haven’t helped in this regard: American hawks who argue triumphantly that their old Cold War adversary is irrelevant have been of as much assistance to Putin as some of Europe’s appeasers.
RIGA – The Latvian journalist, Juris Kaža, has set up a blog devoted to the “Free Speech Emergency” in Latvia. Although I may not share Juris’ zeal, I think the situation with the freedom of speech is disheartening. It is as if the government has taken a page straight of the Kremlin rulebook. Moscow blames the crisis on the rest of the world and particularly on the Best Nation on Earth ™. It also wants to control how local media covers the crisis. It even bans the use of the word “crisis” on national TV.
So it’s no coincidence that the Russian business daily Kommersant on Saturday splashed across the front page a story about Latvian authorities trying to keep everyone’s mouth shut. With the subheading, “In Latvia, authorities started to send to jail for economic forecasts,” the article explains the story of one arrest and one criminal proceeding last week.
The newspaper, however, says “Latvia became the second country in the world that persecutes for dissemination of information about the possibility of the devaluation of a national currency and a threat of the failure of the financial system as a whole.”
The first country? Russia. Apparently, regional prosecutors are to monitor media and are not to allow publication of articles that may provoke a panic among the populace at the time of crisis. Thus, the ban on the c-word. One journalist, Pavel Verstov has already become a victim of the attack. He published a report about cases of suicide on one of the businesses of Magnitogorsk due to the economic crisis on his portal verstov.info (the site is currently down).
Sean’s Russia Blog has more:
In Sverdlovsk, the prosecutor began a check of their local media for disseminating information that might “destabilize the [economic] situation in the region.” Namely, according to Timma Bobina, the head assistant to the prosecutors office, “We were assigned to check information about media attacks via the Internet on credit organizations in Yekaterinburg. If we establish evidence that the law was broken, we can follow up with disciplinary measures, and even criminal punishment against the perpetrators.”
Sverdlovsk isn’t the only region going through such a “check.” Kommersant reports that all of Russia’s regions will look into how local media is reporting on local banks. According to prosecutors, customers in the Far East received an SMS saying that Dalkombank and Vladivostok banks were going bankrupt. In three days, clients withdrew $2.4 million rubles. In Yekaterinburg local media started a panic when it reported that Severnaya Bank, Bank 24.ru, and Ural Bank were to undergo “reconstruction and development.” Apparently the economic crisis has sent many Russians into a panic to withdrawal their savings from banks.
People running to withdraw money; government trying to control the situation; SMS sent out warning of economic collapse; it all sounds very familiar.
RIGA – Excerpts from an interview with Juris Savickis published in Diena newspaper on May 19, 2008. A former KGB officer, Savickis is now involved in energy, chairs the Russian chapter of Itera energy company and sits on the board of Latvian gas monopoly Latvijas Gaze. Original can be found on the Diena newspaper Web site.
…
So you’re saying that 10 years later Latvia’s 70 per cent dependence on Russia gas would be okay? Is that your vision?
My vision is the same as yours – we have to find an independent source… Why am I not afraid of Russians? All our experience shows that there has never been a single moment when Russians somehow managed to influence us through gas. A monument ought to erected to Juris Savickis and Adrians Davis because we’ve managed to make sure that prices rise gradually in the last ten years when Russians decided to raise them really quickly a long time ago. Russians own 34 per cent of Latvijas Gaze. Four men from Gazprom sit on the board of Latvijas Gaze. They work as a lobby with Gazprom so the prices wouldn’t be raised because we’ve approved a Latvijas Gaze program for three years with investment and everything else. I had a thought that in the construction of a new power plant we need to involve Russians and Germans, but everyone jumped on my case for political reasons. What’s he want from those Russians? Germans are very attentive, very precise in following everything – there are many pluses there. On the other hand, Russians never neglect their property. All history of Latvijas Gaze shows that they understand it and it benefits us. Another reason why I’m not afraid of Russians is because we have [natural gas storage in] Inčukalns. Don’t underestimate it – it’s a colossal argument against Russia. 600 to 800 million cubic meters of gas goes from Inčukalns to Russia. In those regions, they only can sell gas from Inčukalns. We have 5.7 billion cubic meters of gas in Inčukalns. We can survive five years without the Russian gas.
The EU is afraid of its dependence on Russia for energy resources not because they’re worried that Russia would turn the gas off – Russia needs customers. The fear is that Russia’s energy policy is defined as a strategic weapon in formation of the foreign-policy discussions.
Those are two different questions. First one is that Russians use gas a political weapon. I absolutely cannot agree with this thesis. In my opinion everything is quite the opposite. In my view, gas is used as a political weapon against Russia.
Who uses it?
Russians haven’t violated a single agreement. Even with Ukraine and Belarus. I know everything in detail what really happened in Ukraine and Belarus.
You’re saying that Russian gas isn’t a political weapon. Why then in your interviews, you’ve said that they were worried that Latvia harms Russia? If it’s a clean business – one side harms Russia, the other trade with gas. Why are you saying that Latvian television should not have shown Putin’s System documentary before the Russian elections if it’s got no connection with politics.
It’s got no connection with gas politics.
Why then you were concerned about [a rescheduled anti-Putin documentary]Putin’s System [that was to be shown on Latvian TV on the eve of the parliamentary elections]?
Now you’ve moved into political questions about which I wouldn’t want to talk. It had no connection with politics. All agreements are fulfilled. Latvia’s relationship with Russia doesn’t stop with only gas and electricity. There are sprats and hell knows what else – then starts politics. I wasn’t shocked about the documentary but I had a few questions. For example, why did you make a ruckus about the question who canceled the film? I have another question – why weren’t you asking who scheduled the film in that time for our taxpayers money?
Latvian Constitution says that censorship is forbidden.
All people who scheduled that film – they were thinking what they were doing?
Yes, and they know that Latvia is not part of Russia and here censorship doesn’t work.
Why wasn’t the film shown a month earlier?
Why not show it on the same day? It’s timely.
Okay, we’re a free people. Why wouldn’t we now show a film about Clinton and Lewiski?
If you have a specific film, offer it to Latvian television and they’ll show it with pleasure.
No, they won’t.
Why not?
Because they won’t. It’s the same as with that monument – why did Estonia have to move the [Bronze Soldier] Alyosha near May 9? Do it in September, October. Your neighbor urinates on the steps when another is celebrating his birthday. but he pees on his own steps, not the neighbor’s, because he’s afraid to go near the other steps. That’s the level we’re talking about here.
RIGA – Say hello to Mr. Bear.
Dmitry Medvedev, whose last name is a derivative of the Russian word for a ‘bear,’ is an appropriate last name for a leader of the country, whose image abroad is associated with the clumsy and dangerous animal.
He will lead the country that continues its search for the Russian national identity continues. The pompous ceremony of the inauguration of the new president of Russia this morning in Kremlin mixes the remnants of the Soviet system and the Czarist symbols. And yet, this year it was somewhat different.
Setting all suspicions, reservations, concerns over the question of who really is in power of Russia right now, this is, perhaps, the first time in history when – at least in principle – the power was peacefully passed from the former president to his successor. Whether it is a de facto transfer of power remains to be seen. In the Czarist Russia, it was more or less hereditary. In the Soviet Union, backstabbing was done more or less behind closed doors and required a thorough analysis of the position of the Polutburo members on the Lenin mausoleum.
The Medvedev inauguration a big step for the country where the democracy in its Western sense may never find a listening ear.
The noon ceremony embodied the mix of the Russia’s Soviet and Czarist past. Under the Russian tricolor, a familiar tune was played. It was the old Soviet/new Russian anthem, restored by President Putin months after he came into office 8 years ago. After the oath of office by Medvedev, a closing chorus from Mikhail Glinka’s Russian patriotic opera “A Life for the Czar” blasts through speakers as two men walk outside of the Kremlin hall.
Choir “Glory” from “A Life For the Czar” performed by the Orchestre Lamoureux, directed by Igor Markevitch, 1957.
The lyrics and the context are telling.
“Glory, glory to czar, the ruler…”
The opera tells how a heroic peasant in 1612 purposely led enemy Polish troops on a wrong path and that way, he saved the life of the young Russian Czar Mikhail, founder of the Romanov dynasty. The Polish soldiers, part of an invading army, naturally get upset and kill the peasant. In the opera’s epilogue, people gather at the Red Square in Moscow to celebrate their victory over the Polish invaders.
The opera premiered in 1836 to the immediate success. Years following Russia’s victory in the War of 1812 against the Napoleonic army, Russia had undergone through its own spiritual awakening. Nobles in the Russian army who often learned to speak French before they’d speak their ‘native’ Russian were amazed at the patriotism of the Russian peasant for his will to fight for the czar against the invading French army.
Since that war, Russian patriotism turned from looking at the West for guidance inward in search for Russia’s own national identity, the same way it had happened under Medvedev’s predecessor. Looking at Russia for the national identity replaced mimicking Western customs and traditions after 1812. Just like Putin’s “managed democracy” replaced Yelstin’s clumsily-implemented democratic reforms.
It’s also notable that it was Putin who restored the forgotten old Russian holiday – November 4, or the Unity Day. Before it was abolished in 1917, it was called Day of Moscow’s Liberation from Polish Invaders.
Whether Medvedev develops his own policies and ambitions largely depends on his own strength and independence. At some point, it ought to be tiring living in the shadow of your predecessor.
