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asfunction:_root.launchURL,0They were born and live in a small, prosperous and democratic country. Yet that country refuses to give them citizenship rights because they happen to share an ethnicity with its large and authoritarian Eastern neighbour, which has invaded it in the past. Aggrieved at such discrimination, they see their cries fall on deaf ears among the Western powers, for whom this country is an important strategic ally. Meanwhile, the country’s dominant ethnic group plans further crackdowns to ward off what it fears is an impending demographic ‘time bomb’ that might see them lose their majority status.

Sound familiar? Yet this is not Israel or the West Bank, but Latvija, in the heart of the European Union. And the discriminated group are not Arabs, but ethnic Russians who continue to be denied key citizenship rights.

Today, a BBC article by Damien McGuinness about these people’s ‘Life in Limbo’ deftly illustrates many of the dark absurdities of the situation:

Dmitrijs is not an immigrant. Like most of the people in this room, he was born in Latvia. In fact, even his parents were born here.

But his family is ethnically Russian. And because they moved here while Latvia was part of the USSR, he is not automatically eligible for Latvian nationality.

Instead he is classed as a so-called resident alien. Only those born after Latvian independence in 1991 automatically receive citizenship.

The words in Latvian for “non-citizen” are printed in large bold letters on the cover of Dmitrijs’ passport.

This means he can’t vote, can’t work in many state-employed positions and often has trouble crossing borders.

It is also true that in Russia, too, fundamental rights are denied to many people who live and work there, as ethnic minority groups and guest workers face routine discrimination and even violent attack. However, Russia has a long way to go before it can boast of EU levels of human rights, and at least such behaviour does not enjoy legal sanction.

Of course, no ethnic Russians are being shot from unmanned drones or have their houses bulldozed over.

Nor do they have their property confiscated or get deported/killed, as happened to many Latvians under Soviet rule - historical abuses which, like the Holocaust, were horrific but should not now be used to justify new oppression.

But even if the oppression facing ethnic Russians is less stark than that faced by Palestinians today or Latvians themselves under Communism, such anachronistic and racist sentiments as ‘Russia for the Russians’, ‘Germany for the Germans’ , or ‘Israel for the Jews’ should justifiably inspire fear and distaste. They simply have no place in the modern concept of statehood and citizenship.

So, as the EU correctly criticises Israel’s illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, it shouldn’t forget about the apartheid-lite taking place on its own turf.
Categorized in 'Near Abroad', Inequality, Russia-EU Relations1 Comment Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Gossip Girl: Russian History EditionBy Vadim Nikitin Monday, April 19 5:20 pm EST


With their tweedy manner, fancy degrees, thousand paged books and tenured positions, it was all too easy to forget that Russia historians are really just backstabbing, gossipy teenage egomaniacs at heart. Until now.

It all started when a few Russia scholars, including Robert Service, noticed some mean reader reviews for their books on Amazon. They all came from the same anonymous source, one that also happened to leave universally glowing reviews for the books of Orlando Figes (another disreputable place that has favourably referenced Figes’s work has been this very blog).

In a dramatic geek showdown, the thin-skinned gang confronted Figes, accusing him of puffing up his own reviews and character assassinating his rivals. ‘It wasnt me!’ he cried, though no one believed him. But on Friday, Figes’s denials were vindicated, kind of: it was his wife, herself a prominent law professor at Cambridge.

The only thing that remains unclear in this delicious debacle is: which is the more shocking revelation - superstar professors poo-pooing each other’s work on Amazon, or those same professors pouring over every Amazon review of their work? I bet they will even read this post through their personalised google alerts…

And that’s good news for all of us lowly bloggers and amateur book reviewers who need no longer think of themselves as (just) a bunch of saddos toiling in total obscurity and irrelevance.
Categorized in Culture and Society, History, Intellectuals, NarcissismComment Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Adoption Scandal: The US-Russian Nuclear (Family) StandoffBy Vadim Nikitin Tuesday, April 13 8:03 pm EST


While Medvedev and Obama were negotiating nuclear quotas and ways to protect the world from atomic terrorism, back home, some wondered whether they would have been better off talking adoption quotas and ways to protect Russian kids from their American foster parents.

That’s because more adopted Russian children have died at the hands of their new American families than from any Nato ICBMs. “Since 1990, when Russian adoptions were made open to foreigners, 13 children have been murdered, 12 of those have been within the United States”, according to a 2007 article on About.com. If that number is correct, than it would mean that American foster parents were responsible for 92% of all Russian adoptee deaths.

What’s more, of the 18 children internationally who died at the hands of their US foester parents between 1996 and 2007, 14 were Russian. Since then, another child has died, bringing the total number of deaths to 15.

A spate of high profile instances of deaths and abuse committed by American parents against their adopted Russian foster children has culminated in the shocking case of 7 year old Artyem, who was put unaccompanied on a plane back to Russia by his foster mother Torry Hansen last week.

That came just a month after the murder of 7 year old Ivan Skorobogatov (by tragic irony, his names means ‘to get rich soon or quickly’) and one year after a ‘Virginia man was acquitted in the death of his son, who died of heatstroke after being forgotten in a parked car for several hours’.

And while the nuclear diplomacy has been going really well, this latest incident has inflamed diplomatic tensions between Russia and the US.

‘Calling the case “the last straw,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian television that he would propose adoptions by U.S. parents be suspended until the two parties are able to agree on a formal plan to govern the flow of children’, reported the Wall St Journal. And this morning, the US ambassador to Russia was foced to appear on the CBS Early Show to promise a thorough investigation of adoptions.

At least the Russian and American public are united in their incredulity, sadness and anger at the way the foster children have been treated.

Commenters on CNN’s story about Artyem were almost unanimous in their condemnation of the foster mother:

The boy is not like something that you purchased and then returned by shipment when you discovered that you were not satisfied with what you bought. This is human we’re talking about. This woman just proved that she is an unfit parent!

On the other hand, another commenter, on a recent USA Today story, asks:

Why doesn’t someone write a story about the many children adopted from Russia living in the United States and thriving?

She goes on to note that

Russia has over 700,000 children in their database. They deserve a voice. Most of the children adopted from Russia residing in the United States are thriving. The situation with the 10-12 children adopted from Russia abused and worse in the United States is tragic. The reality is that the situation in Russia is also tragic. The children in orphanges often experience severe developmental delays. Rates of prostitution, alcoholism and suicide are a very common theme among children in Russian orphanges. Russia does not seem to acknowledge that.

The halting of adoptions is a political move.

This commenter, Yamasheva, brings up several really important points. First of all, nearly 20 years after the fall of the USSR, Russia continues to have a severe problem with orphans and orphanages. The huge surge in social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse during the 1990s has resulted in hundreds of thousands of abandoned and orphaned children filling the increasingly dilapidated state orphanages.

For the most part, these are not happy places. They are dangerously underfunded, overcrowded and understaffed; most have not seen much investment or renovations since Soviet times.

I was involved for a little while with Diema’s Dream, a wonderful American charity run by Mary Dudley, which was involved in rehabilitating disabled orphans in Russia.

It is nearly impossible to describe the conditions in which these children are kept and how the underpaid, underquipped and undertrained staff of state run nurseries struggle to deal with them. It is especially heartbreaking to consider that, given personal care, good therapy and human warmth, a child with cerebral palsy, for example, that has very little hope in such a place could otherwise grow up to be a functioning and fulfilled adult.

It is also a fact that Russians themselves are not big on adoption. They aren’t even having their own children. Economic and cultural reasons consipire to depress adoption rates further. During Soviet times, orphans were cared for in a very statist way, and Russian people have not had a chance to develop a personal taste for adoption like Americans, where private adoption is a long tradition and the state generally plays a much lesser role.

So, given the high numbers of Russian orphans and the terrible conditions in which they live, and given Russians’ reluctance to adopt, Russia desperately needs people from other countries, such as America, to continue to take these children into their homes.

The abuses committed against Russian kids in the US are ugly, worrying and must be investigated and prevented.

But Medvedev’s rather populist posturing smacks of politicking. After all, if the Russian government is so concerned about the well-being of a dozen orphans in America, what has it done to help the thousands who continue to languish in dire conditions on its own soil?
Categorized in Crime and Punishment, Diplomacy, Russia-US Relations3 Comments Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook United by Tragedy: Can the Katyn Crash Reset Russian-Polish Relations?By Vadim Nikitin Monday, April 12 6:12 pm EST


When it comes to Russia, Anne Applebaum suspects the worst at the best of times. She saw the nefarious hand of the Kremlin even behind her recent car breakdown. So if Applebaum, whose Polish foreign minister husband could easily have also been on that doomed plane, is lauding the way Russia has handled the aftermath of the tragedy, that’s big news.

“The open discussion of a tragedy represents a revolutionary change”, she writes, noting that “Russian officials are showing more transparency in the wake of this tragedy than they have shown after some of their own”.

In my last post, I worried that Russia might do the wrong thing and revert to its usual secrecy and brusqueness, which is what Putin had done in the wake of the Kurk disaster with his refusal to even cut short his holiday, and the Politkovskaya murder, with his diffident remark that “she did not have a serious influence on the political mood in our country”.

But this time he acted entirely differently, taking charge, opening up the investigation fully, declaring a day of naitonal mourning, and going so far as to hug Prime Minister Donald Tusk. It wasn’t just good politics: ordinary Russian people were deeply and genuinely saddened by the tragedy.

The sympathy was well received by Polish people and elites.

“Russia-Poland thaw grows from tragedy”, adds the BBC.

“It’s a paradox but the tragedy in Smolensk is a chance to connect our nations like never before,” Marcin Wojciechowski wrote in a column in the leading daily, Gazeta Wyborzca.

“Russia’s behaviour after the tragedy in Smolensk totally contradicts the thesis of those who claim that closer relations between Russia and Poland are impossible,” he said.

‘It is something of a paradox’, the article continues, ‘that this latest tragedy to befall the Polish nation may actually prove to help the process of reconciliation between the two nations’.

But it is not only Russia which rose to the occassion and above pettiness. Poland must be equally praised, especially when it could have easily turned the tragedy into an opportunity to whip up anti-Russian sentiment and conspiracies.

Russia’s behaviour is reminiscent of its outreach to the US after the September 11th attacks, when Putin, in the words of the US government, “seized upon the tragedies of the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an opportunity to transform relations with the U.S. from distant and sometimes hostile to one of broad cooperation and new opportunities in many fields”.

Yet Poland’s magnanimous response is very different how the US responded to Russia’s unprecedented overture: by unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty. As Stephen Cohen writes, after 9/11,

Putin’s Kremlin did more than any NATO government to assist the US war effort in Afghanistan, giving it valuable intelligence, a Moscow-trained Afghan combat force and easy access to crucial air bases in former Soviet Central Asia.

The Kremlin understandably believed that in return Washington would give it an equitable relationship. Instead, it got US withdrawal from the ABM treaty, Washington’s claim to permanent bases in Central Asia (as well as Georgia) and independent access to Caspian oil and gas, a second round of NATO expansion taking in several former Soviet republics and bloc members, and a still-growing indictment of its domestic and foreign conduct. Astonishingly, not even September 11 was enough to end Washington’s winner-take-all principles.

The Katyn crash could have plunged Russian-Polish relations into darkness; happily, cooler heads - both in Moscow and Warsaw - have so far prevailed.

Categorized in 'Near Abroad', Diplomacy, Russia-EU Relations, Vladimir Putin4 Comments Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Polish Plane Tragedy: What Now?By Vadim Nikitin Saturday, April 10 7:00 pm EST


This morning’s horrific plane crash that killed Polish president Kaczynski his wife and many senior staff en route to Katyn forest contained some tragic irony.

Not least that, curiously for a president famous for his anti-Russian sentiments, Kaczynski insisted on continuing to use a safe but ageing Soviet jet for his official travels, long after even Russia and China had phased out the Tu-154.

Or that such bloodshed could come at the end of a long diplomatic dance to finally heal Polish-Russian relations over the Katyn Massacre.

But Russia must be extra careful to prevent one other irony from coming into fruition: the “supreme irony if the result of today’s tragedy would be to deepen the mistrust engendered by the original Soviet massacre which Lech Kaczynski was flying to commemorate’, as Krzysztof Bobinski writes in the BBC.

To prevent this, Russia must ensure that the investigation into the crash is as transparent and thorough as possible.

Unfortunately, Russia has tended to do the exact opposite in such situations, such as the terrible way it handled the Kursk disaster. But even when it has facts on its side it ends up looking guilty through equivocation and secrecy- like during the KAL 007 aftermath.

Repeating those experiences would be the absolute worst thing Russia could do now: considering the tense Russian-Polish relations and the already proliferating conspiracy theories, it might threaten to invite comparisons with Mozambique and Rwanda.

The lie of Katyn Forest - that it was Nazis and not Soviets who killed the Polish officers - underpinned a false friendship between the USSR and Poland. It would be a shame if the plane crash would now lay a false groundwork for enimity between them.
Categorized in 'Near Abroad', Diplomacy, Russia-EU Relations, USSR1 Comment Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Reasons to Despair - CNN’s Kyra on KyrgyzstanBy Vadim Nikitin Friday, April 9 10:38 am EST


Unbelievable displays of ignorance like this make me wonder if those who accuse the US media’s post-Soviet reporting of bias are just giving it way too much credit.

Here is Kyra Phillips, anchor of CNN’s afternoon newscast, on Kyrgyzstan, via Gawker:

Kyra Phillips: Kyrgyzstan, impossible to spell, hard to say, good luck finding it on the map, so why should we care that its government is now gone, swept away by armed protesters? Well, we’ll tell you.

PHILLIPS: You know I remember when the war first broke out, and we all said to each other, OK, we have to learn the “stans.” You know? It’s not just Kyrgyzstan, but you’ve got all the other stans in that area.

LEVS: All the one — that’s right.

PHILLIPS: Yes, why “stan” at the end of the names?

LEVS: Yes. This is actually really interesting about that suffix. There’s two different reasons for that going on in the same place. And it has a lot to do with what’s going on there. I was looking at this from About.com. In Persian, the suffix “stan” means place of. And in Russian, it meant “settlement.”

And all this after she had FIVE years to learn how to pronounce it! That’s right, in 2005, Ms Phillips had similarly enlightened us about the Tulip Revolution:

Miles O’Brien: Well, it looks like we’re talking about another revolution in a country some of us can’t pronounce. We’re not mentioning any names, of course. It’s kind of like Kyra-stan, but it really isn’t. We’re calling it ‘The Tulip Revolution’: People power in the ’stans, coming up.

Kyra Phillips: I love tulips… Hey, Miles, is that a new portable PlayStation?

Making light of an impoverished country in turmoil and mourning? Hilarious! Or, if you are a normal person: sad, callous and scary.

As Gawker commenter Chainaya Lozhka so correctly puts it:

This woman is everything wrong with American media. Xenophobia should not be tolerated on a national news network. There are millions of people over there and the majority are struggling and you sit there and make fun of their culture and country.

Who has it worse: Russians forced to live with state propaganda or Americans condemned to rely on such sheer, mind-blowing stupidity for their international news?

Any wonder then that so many can be so ill-informed about the outside world, with no help from any government censorship?
Categorized in 'Near Abroad', Press and Media, Surrealism, USSR4 Comments Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Ukraine and Now Kyrgyzstan: A Coloured Thermidor?By Vadim Nikitin Thursday, April 8 5:58 pm EST


And then there was one.

Seven years after Saakashvili ushered the first of three coloured revolutions in post-Soviet Europe, February’s Ukrainian elections and now the Kyrgyz overthrow of the Tulip revolution have left him the last man (precariously) standing.

While it is still unclear what the final outcome will be in Kyrgyzstan (although the opposition leader Roza Otunbaeva has declared victory and Bakiyev himself admitted that “I don’t have any real levers of power”, he remains defiantly clinging to the presidency from an undisclosed location in the south), the self-appointed opposition is likely to bring the country closer to Russia .


If that happens, then it will follow on the heels of Ukraine, whose newly elected president Yanukovich is set on reversing some of the policies enacted by the Orange revolution and recalibrating its relationship with its northern neighbour to a friendlier footing.

The convenience of these two events has led to questions of whether Russia may have played a hand in engineering Bakiyev’s ouster.

Putin has emphatically denied this, but, according to Sean’s quote of David Trilling, he was certainly angry at his u-turn over the American Manas base and has been punishing the country with added duties on energy, which could not have helped the embattled president. On top of that, Russia was the first country to recognise the new regime, Medvedev’s conversation with Otunbayeva carrying uneasy echoes of Putin’s ill-fated, premature congratulations to Yanukovich in 2004 - exactly what Russia had so studiously avoided doing the second time around.

So is post-Soviet Europe inching towards a pre-2003 status quo, a post coloured revolution Thermidor?

That is unlikely. For a start, the coloured revolutions were never a rejection of the countries’ international policies or their geopolitical orientations. In fact, most Georgians and Ukrainians continued to oppose Nato entry and favour close ties with Russia.

The revolutions were a rejection of the corrupt political cultures, authoritarianism and dire economic performances of Kuchma, Schevarnadze and Akayev.

And they were eventually brought down for the same reasons: the incompetence of Yuschenko, the corruption of Timoshenko and the incompetence, corruption and authoritarianism of Bakiyev.

When people threw out the Orange and Tulip revolutions, just as when they had originally brought them in, they weren’t doing it to bring their countries towards Russia or away from America.

To inject some cheap faux-Hegelianism into the equation: think of pre-2003/2005 as Thesis, and the coloured revolutions as the Antithesis.

By that logic, the current events will not so much undo the coloured revolutions as offer a Synthesis - a cautious and pragmatic mixture of the pre-revolutionary (less radicalism, less hype) and the revolutionary (more demands for democracy, transparency and economic performance).

Let’s hope it succeeds. But, as Otunbayeva herself had once stated, “Once the people get the taste of toppling presidents by getting on to streets, it will be difficult to change governments any other way”.
Categorized in 'Near Abroad', USSR, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, democracyComment Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Why Should We Care About Russia?By Vadim Nikitin Tuesday, April 6 11:10 am EST


“Easier to spot a splinter in another’s eye than a log in one’s own” -Russian proverb

Sometimes this blog gets accused of being too soft on Russia, despite my consistent criticism of its government’s political ideology, human rights abuses, authoritarianism and economic, social, journalistic, cultural, education, environmental, law enforcement, religious and foreign policies.

Yet what these accusers actually take issue with is this blog’s perceived drawing of a ‘moral equivalence’ between Russia and the West.

Which brings up the all important question: why read, or write, about Russia at all?

A shot of post-Cold War schadenfreude?

A little Roman holiday from our Western malaise to jeer at that vanquished basketcase Russia - the pathetic neighbourhood bully with its smooth-chested comedy-villain president and imperial nostalgia, its impotent bluster, violence and weird taxidermy fixation, its Oriental backwardness - hoping the freak show would make us quit worrying and love our tolerant, peaceful, democratic, free-market selves?

If that’s your bag, then this blog will disappoint; Anne Applebaum and her ilk have long since cornered that used car market.

By contrast, this blog has tried, however incompletely, to understand why Russia does what it does, rather than simply condemn its actions as the work of some irrational Other.

That is understand, not excuse.

Such an approach frightens those people who equate empathy with sympathy; those who see it as a gateway drug that would turn us into Kremlin-operated Manchurian candidates, or those American exceptionists who fear it will erode their faith in ‘my mother – drunk or sober’.

But this blog is empathetic, not sympathetic.

It emphathises with Russia’s rejection of democracy and capitalism after a decade of untold suffering at the hands of Yeltsin, his free-market cronies and their Harvard mentors; without sympathising with its embrace of Putin’s macho authoritarianism.

It emphathises with Russia’s sense of betrayal over Clinton and Kohl’s broken promises over Nato’s eastward expansion; without sympathising with its meddling in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.

It emphathises with Russia’s anger at Western recognition of Kosovo, without sympathising with its retaliatory occupation of Ossetia.

It empathises with Russia’s perception that the Western media is biased against it, without sympathising with its own attempts to curb freedom of speech or deploy government propaganda.

It emphathises with the 15 year tragedy of the Caucasus, carpet bombed into oblivion by Yeltsin, finished off by his protégé Putin and raped some more by Putin’s protégé Kadyrov; without sympathising with the suicide bombings or increasing religious radicalism.

It emphathises with socialism’s promise of justice, equality and compassion, without sympathising with the methods and policies employed by the USSR in its name.

Yet if empathy need not always lead to sympathy, it always takes introspection and imagination.

As the late, great British statesman Michael Foot said of Margaret Thatcher: “She has no imagination, and that means no compassion”.

And that’s where this blog’s alleged ‘moral relativism’ fits in.

Better understanding Russia’s actions involves deploying imagination to draw a parallel with one’s native America, to create the effect of putting oneself in another’s shoes.

It is obvious, except perhaps to Catherine Fitzpatrick, that such comparisons between the US and Russia require an act of imagination precisely because the two countries are very different. One is a developed (/decaying?) democracy and the other is a developing, still-authoritarian state.

But the two countries are neither so different nor act so differently as to render such comparisons absurd or false.

Both are sprawling, multi-ethnic, culturally formidable and militarily assertive nuclear-armed capitalist powers of European extraction, with wide spheres of interest and global reach.

Both struggle with high levels of inequality, racism, cultural arrogance and insularity; both imprison more of their own citizens than any other country; both contain oligarchic tendencies and a residual belief in manifest destiny, bully their smaller neighbours, invade Muslim lands and suffer the terrorist consequences.

Of course America’s mistreatment of its minorities, dissidents, women and immigrants, or its army’s mistreatment of foreign civilians, is nothing as bad as Russia’s. American CEOs are not neatly as ruthless as Russian oligarchs. America uses smarter bombs on her enemies and her soldiers don’t (any longer) rape widows or steal the watches off the dead bodies. America silences her critics by ignoring rather than poisoning them. America executes her death row inmates only after anaesthesia, rather than with a bullet to the head. America’s gulags are cleaner than Russia’s ever were.

Yet these differences, significant as they are, are mainly of degree; quantitative (America tortures fewer people than Russia) rather than qualitative (America is nicer than Russia).

Rather than making us feel smug and superior, seeing the crimes and abuses of Russia - which does its dirty out in the open for all to see - should impel us to scrutinise our own countries, whose crimes and abuses are all too obscured behind the walls of development, democracy, wealth, media bias and the our universal human preference of criticism to self-criticism.

To channel Steven Lukes, Russia’s ugly first face of power is a reflection of our ugly third.

Thus, these parallels are not designed to excuse or explain away Russia’s crimes, not to be less harsh on Russia so much as impel us to be harsher on ourselves; so that by studying Russia, the West can confront many things about itself, and, hopefully, improve.

In a previous post, I insisted that the things observers “criticise in modern Russia are not some kind of gross aberrations from Western norms: instead, they lay bare the problems and contradictions of Western society, civilization and culture”.

“The suffering of Russia”, writes British academic Peter Duncan describing the idea of Russian messianism, “just like the suffering of Christ or the suffering of the Jewish people, leads to the redemption of the world as a whole. In its more moderate forms, it can mean that Russia simply exists to show the rest of the world a lesson which can be either how to do things, or how not to do things”.

Russia is no messiah. But for the West, it can serve as both a mirror and a warning.

That’s why we ought to care about it.
Categorized in Cold War, Criticism and Self Criticism, Culture and Society, Dissent, Intellectuals, Narcissism, Press and Media11 Comments Email to friend Stay updated Share on Facebook Fox News-Russia Today: A Reply to Catherine FitzpatrickBy Vadim Nikitin Wednesday, March 31 4:17 pm EST


Yesterday’s post comparing Russia Today to Fox News provoked an impassioned rebuttal. Russian translator, blogger and Second Life estate agent Catherine Fitzpatrick of Minding Russia