Category: Russians

Kerry’s Visit to Russia

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I keep dumping on John Kerry for making a visit to Russia and allowing Putinoid propaganda to present the event as evidence that pathetic Americans are horribly suffering because of the sanctions and have now arrived to beg the mighty Russians for mercy.

A teacher in the Russian city of Irkutsk is teaching her students in class that Michelle Obama is a man and that American tourists poke Russian women with infected needles to make them infertile and destroy the Russian race. Obviously, I’m not happy about Kerry going over to Russia and feeding this sort of triumphant anti-Americanism.

However, the only thing that is capable of preventing Russia from escalating warfare in Ukraine right now is very evident, painful and detailed humiliation on the part of Americans. And so Obama sends Kerry to play the role of a supplicant who crawls in to beg for mercy.

It’s all quite disgusting but what else is there to do at this point?

The Sarcophagus in the Red Square

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

It’s like Putin is trying to freak everybody out on purpose. I’m sure you are familiar with the following famous image of the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin:

As the clock strikes 12 on the most important night of the year (the New Year’s eve), the people of Russia and the Russian-speaking immigrants all stare at this image.

But this year, the famous tower looks like this:

There is a whole variety of conspiracy theories explaining that scary sarcophagus. My theory is that Putin wanted people to concentrate on something even uglier than him during the festive season. And he is succeeding.

Putin’s Press-Conference, Part III

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

Putin then heaped praise on the Ukrainian President Poroshenko, saying that Poroshenko was ready to collaborate with Putin but some mysterious members of the Ukrainian government were preventing him from doing that. This limp-wristed attempt at discrediting Poroshenko tells me that Putin fears him and sees him as a political force to be reckoned with.

Then Putin confirmed that the heroes of the Donetsk Airport were still alive and still fighting. This is great news because we’ve been fearing that they were no longer among the living.

There was also a long discussion of how the mean, horrible Ukrainians just had to get into a war (with themselves) on purpose to prevent the Russians from enjoying their massive win at the Olympics. They are really obsessed with those Olympics, folks. It’s been almost a year, and they are still going on and on about the Olympics. There is a huge sense of grievance that is being fostered in Russia about those Olympic Games. I actually started feeling sorry for the Russians after hearing this endless blabber about the Olympics. Poor freaks.

One of the journalists was holding up a pink bunny and a poster that said, “I have a kind question.” I found that to be an interesting journalistic tactic of attracting attention. 

Putin informed the audience that the line between a member of the opposition and a traitor to the nation was very blurry. You’ve really got to appreciate the honesty with which he warned the dissidents of what awaited them.

What I find really funny is that Putin moves, talks and gesticulates exactly like the career criminals in Russian TV series that N. and I love to watch. I think he works with an acting coach to acquire this persona because people watch a lot of these shows and find it easy to relate to this kind of character.

Ukraine Freedom Support

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

Nothing annoys me more than the way in which the war of Russia against Ukraine is described in the Western media. Here is one example:

Over the weekend, Congress passed the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014, a bill which would impose stricter sanctions on key Russian sectors like weapons and energy, and which authorizes the President to provide lethal aid to Ukraine for the first time. . . President Obama so far appears to be holding back from signing the bill immediately, despite bipartisan pressure for him to put pen to paper. With the economic situation rapidly deteriorating in Russia, however, having the bill hanging over the Kremlin’s head, maximizing uncertainty and unease may not be the worst strategy.

Are you seeing the problem with this analysis? The journalist is discussing  a bill called “the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014.” Got it? Ukraine freedom support. But the analysis is all about how wonderful not signing the bill will be in the dealings with the Kremlin. How about Ukraine, though? The one whose freedom this bill is supposed to support? It’s not even mentioned in this analysis!

The idea that any of the pathetic “sanctions” introduced against Russia have had any effect is completely bizarre. The idea that the Kremlin is anything but overjoyed with news of this bill is even more bizarre. The fantasy of Putin cowering in “uncertainty and unease” is simply deluded. 

It’s high-time to stop trying to impress Putin. The West has proven itself to be signally incapable of that. The only people who have managed to thwart Putin in any way recently are Ukrainians. Instead of pretending that they don’t exist, it would be much smarter to help them keep thwarting him.

The value of Ukraine Freedom Support Act is symbolic a lot more than anything else. Ukrainians need to hear that they matter to the West, that their struggle is understood and supported. They need at least a tiny gesture of goodwill in their direction. And while the American President is mumbling and fumbling, Ukrainians are dying for the Western values that they alone in the world seem to recall and cherish.

Russia Discriminates Against Men

~ Clarissa ~ 31 Comments

The following reform is being proposed for Russian universities:

Dmitry Livanov, Russia’s new education minister, has unveiled controversial reforms for his country’s universities. Chemistry World reported that the changes proposed include consolidating universities and ending the tradition of free tuition.

The reason why this is an atrocious plan is not only that the low-income people will be prevented from accessing higher education. There is a much more tragic reason why a free higher education should exist in Russia.

Russia is a country that discriminates against healthy young men by forcing them to join the army where they are more than likely to be starved, tortured, raped, and forced into slave-labor. Every male high-schooler in the country lives in horror of the draft.

The only ways of avoiding the draft are:

1. Having several children in rapid succession (this is obviously something that the racist Russian government worried about the rise of Chinese and Muslim immigration wants to promote.)

2. Pay a huge bribe.

3. Go to college.

N. told me that the terror of being drafted had shaped his life. He knew that, even though he was tall, broad-shouldered and practiced martial arts, he would not come out of the army with his mental and physical health intact. Between the ages of 17 and 27 (when you can legally be drafted), everything he did was conditioned by the goal of avoiding the draft. Since he is from a very modest family that did not have money for the bribe and is ideologically opposed to the idea of procreating to avoid the draft, the possibility of getting enrolled at a college for free saved him from the army.

I know dozens of tragic stories about ruined lives and horrible personal misery as a result of this discriminatory draft policy.

The Constitution of the Russian Federation proclaims the equality between the sexes. Yet, this horrible form of discrimination against people whose only crime is to be born with a penis persists. It is unconscionable that the Russian government would now remove the only legitimate way out of being drafted that many men still have at their disposal.

It’s one thing when only the rich have the chance to get a higher education. I think that it’s completely wrong, of course, and that education has to be accessible to low-income people and penniless immigrants like I used to be. But when you get to the point where only people with money (or without a penis) can avoid being raped, starved and beaten, we have moved to a completely different level of horror.

Russia is not a poor country, mind you. This is not about a shortage of money. This is about a hateful genocidal policy aimed at punishing millions of young men for the fact of their existence.

Putin Is Elected President in Russia

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

The moment Putin got elected as Russia’s not very new President, look what happened to my Stats page:

Usually I have one or two people per day alight on the blog in search of information on Putin’s Botox treatments. Today, it’s 75 already, and it is only 11 am here.

Russian people have a very unique relationship with their political leaders. They both love them and hate them passionately. They also find it very hard to let them go in any significant way unless they die. They have gone and voted for Putin, and now they will have a blast analyzing his photos and ridiculing his plastic surgery.

I’m sure there were a few falsifications during these presidential elections in Russia. At the same time, it is obvious that Putin won fairly, and that most people wanted him as president. On the one hand, there wasn’t a single viable alternative candidate because a true opposition in the country is non-existent. On the other hand, the people of Russia are not ready to let Putin go yet. They will now get a chance to play out their favorite role of eternal adolescents making fun with their online buddies of the strict father whom they both fear and adore.

There Is No Demographic Crisis in Russia

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

The Russian people have been so brainwashed by the “let’s procreate to stop the brown and the yellow threat” propaganda that they unashamedly peddle these ideological goods overseas. Here is the opening paragraph from an article by a Russian journalist in Foreign Policy:

“Russia needs babies” may as well be the unofficial slogan of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia Party. The country is in a demographic crisis, shedding 2.2 million people (or 1.6 percent of the population) since 2002, and the government is trying to encourage more women to bring Russian citizens into the world.

First of all, there is no “demographic crisis” in Russia. There are racist scary tales but the “crisis” only exists in the heads of Russian nationalists. Our planet is at risk because of overpopulation. This means that any discussion of how people are not procreating enough has to be motivated by racism. The numbers this pseudo-journalist provides are, obviously, all garbage. The migration into Russia has been huge and any “loss” of population has been amply compensated for by the new arrivals. The journalist coyly refuses to mention that the only population she deems worth counting is the white and blue-eyed.

Readers have probably now started wondering why I keep harping on this topic. The truth is that I am deeply convinced that the tendency not to take Russia seriously and not to pay any attention to it since the fall of the Berlin Wall is a huge mistake. The same people (or their children) are still in power in Russia. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a huge symbolic event. Its practical dimensions, however, were limited.

Racism, xenophobia, contempt for everything Western, and religious fanaticism are being promoted in Russia right now. Nobody wants to pay attention, however, because today’s narrative in North America is that Russia has been democratized, now all attention should concentrate on bringing the joys of democracy to the Arab countries. This attitude is as unreasonable as it is short-sighted.

Where Is Russia Headed?

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

Russia is not going in a good direction, people. A scary brand of religious fanaticism is promoted by the government that refuses to respect its citizens in any significant way and offers religious hysteria as compensation for depriving people of their most basic rights. The results of the so-called democratic elections are falsified and everybody knows it. (Everybody, that is, except American journalists who keep screeching about “democracy in Russia”, as if it weren’t the greatest joke of the recent decades.) The country produces nothing and only manages to keep afloat by exporting oil. My readers are an intellectual bunch, so I won’t explain why an economy that is tied to a single natural resource is hopeless.

Russia’s official ideology is profoundly racist. There is a widespread hysteria around the supposedly imminent extinction of the white people and the terrifying spread of the brown folks of scary and barbaric ethnicities. The Russians seem to have forgotten that only seventy years ago, Hitler was planning to exterminate all Slavs as an inferior, barbaric race. The so-called “demographic crisis” is discussed in the Russian media in such dramatic ways that you’d think the planet was on the brink of extinction as a result of depopulation (rather than the opposite.)

The Russian authorities are worried that the Russian women don’t procreate enough to make up for the advent of the brown people*. So they do all they can to force women into procreating. A while ago, I reported on the ridiculous campaign that attempted to shame women into having more children. As was to be expected, this was immediately followed by an assault on women’s reproductive freedoms. A piece of legislation is now being pushed through Duma (the Russian joke of a Parliament) that will impose waiting periods women have to submit to before getting an abortion and that will allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions on religious grounds**.

During the waiting period, a psychologist and a social worker will persecute women who seek abortions, telling them ridiculous fairy-tales about how they will be psychologically damaged for life if they refuse to have an unwanted child. This is a very poor country, mind you. Just think about how dedicated its government must be to the cause of stripping women of their reproductive freedoms if it’s willing to waste money on psychologists and social workers whose only job will be to hound women who request abortions.

Even though the healthcare system in Russia is free, abortions are now to be excluded from the list of free services. As a result, rich women will be able to be in control of when and whether they give birth, while indigent women (of whom Russia boasts staggering numbers) will be forced to procreate or seek clandestine, dangerous abortions.

There are millions upon millions of orphans in Russia. These children live in horrible conditions. Some are kept in orphanages that are so bad it would break your heart to see what they look from the inside and to hear what the poor kids kept there have to go through. As a result, many kids run away. They become homeless and are exploited in all kinds of ways by adult criminals.

The government that has done nothing to help these kids is now forcing indigent women to bring even more unwanted miserable babies into the world.

If this sounds completely nuts, I want to remind you that Russia imposes an obligatory period of military service on all its young males. Except, of course, the rich ones who can pay a bribe and get out of the military service obligations.

*If you are shocked by the rhetoric, that’s good. On my blog, at least, you’ll hear the actual terminology that is used in Russia to discuss these issues. The mainstream media in the US are so dedicated to promoting the myth of the democratic Russia that you don’t get to hear the truth from them.

** In the context of Russian history, this is the funniest thing anybody could suggest. After decades of complete and utter atheism during the Soviet era, people who are of the age that allows them to be doctors cannot possibly be religious in Russia today. 

Are There Differences Between the Russians and the Ukrainians?

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Even though Russians and Ukrainians often speak the same language, there are important differences between us that are the result of our different history, geography, climate and culture. Here are some of these differences:

 1. The most important invasion that was suffered by the  Russians was that of the barbaric, fiercely militaristic and nomadic Golden Horde. The presence of the Mongol invaders (who did nothing but burn, rape, rob, and ravage) throughout the 13th century isolated the Russians from the rest of Europe, putting them behind other European countries in terms of culture, economy, politics, religion, etc. While this was going on in Russia, a part of Ukraine was subjugated by the Lithuanians (who were behind the Ukrainians in terms of their civilization and development and quickly adopted Ukrainian culture and practices). Another part was conquered by the Poles (who were highly civilized ans sophisticated and brought European trends into Ukraine.) The consequences of this can still be felt today when the idea of being European and belonging to Europe is very attractive to most Ukrainians. Russians, however, are a lot more oriented towards Asia and view Europe with suspicion.
2. Most of the Russian lands are infertile and it is very hard to survive on them. For this reason, there were always strong communal tendencies between people who lived on the land. It was a lot easier to survive if you joined your paltry possessions with neighbors and cultivated the land together. The lands in Ukraine, however, are among the most fertile in Europe. Everything grows, blooms, and requires very little effort to become productive. This is why people are a lot more individualistic. It was a lot more difficult for Stalin to enforce collective ownership in the agricultural areas of Ukraine than it was in Russia. Also, the respect for private property is a lot weaker in Russia than in Ukraine.
3. There was a very strong legacy of democracy in Ukraine that was completely absent from Russia. Between the XVth and the XVIIth centuries, Ukrainian cossacks created a democratic government where no distinctions were made between people of “high” or “low” birth. Russians, however, were always governed by extremely autocratic rulers. This is why today, Ukrainians are still trying to establish a democracy in their country, while the Russians seem to be quite content with their authoritarian government. Every Ukrainian is the maximum authority in his or her own life while Russians keep waiting for their good tsar du jour.
4. Women always had much greater freedom in Ukraine than in Russia. Since the Middle Ages, Ukrainian women had an opportunity to choose their partners freely. Unlike in Russia, Ukrainians did not practice arranged marriages where women were not allowed to see their future husbands before the day of the wedding. The practice of having the women’s side of the house where women had to stay was prevalent in Russia, but nobody ever heard of it in Ukraine. Women did not cover their heads in Ukraine (unless they felt like it), while in Russia they had to do so and cover parts of their faces as well.
5. As a result of a greater freedom for women, sexually Ukrainians always enjoyed a much greater freedom and fulfillment. The sexual revolution in Ukraine began at around 1910 (earlier than anywhere else in the countries of our Western Civilization) with the writing of one of our greatest writers (and the future Prime Minister of the independent republic of Ukraine) Volodymyr Vynnychenko.
6. As a result of their climate, the fertility of their lands, the beauty of their landscape and the joyfulness of their culture, Ukrainians became much more open to the world than the perennially gloomy and self-centered Russians.

>Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

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The first post in this series got a huge number of visitors, which makes me think that the topic is of interest to people and has to be developed further. So I’ll keep writing on this subject until I run out of things to say (which will not be very soon.)
Now, the most important thing you need to do if you want to understand what happened to the Soviet Union and what’s going on in its former republics right now is forget about the United States. I know that there are many people who like to believe that every single thing in the world is caused by the United States. Pseudo-liberals unwittingly demonstrate just how much they despise those of us from other countries by their insistence that if life in our countries does not correspond to their standards, that must have been caused by the interference of the US. This attitude is condescending, reductive and wrong. Today’s reality of the former Soviet countries was created and is maintained by people in those countries. And it’s not a reality that makes them unhappy, so fake compassion for us, poor unintelligent victims of the bad, all-powerful US, is completely misplaced. If that’s the direction of your thoughts about us, you need to reexamine what psychological issues make you want to exaggerate the importance of your country at the expense of others.
Even Naomi Klein, who in her imaginative and often funny book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism demonstrates a grievous misunderstanding of the post-Soviet Russia (she refers to Yeltsin as Russian Pinochet, for Pete’s sake), recognizes in a grudging manner that the Russians beat the IMF at its own game. Those of you who have read the book know that it’s informed by Klein’s extremely Americentric agenda. Still, even she doesn’t manage to create a convincing account of American protagonism in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the further fate of the former Soviet republics.
Now that we have established a productive framework within which these events should be discussed, we will be able to continue exploring this topic.