Russian Horror: Read All About It (if you have the stomach)

Filed under: Russia

[Note to readers: This post contains profanity. I assiduously try to avoid it whenever possible, and am only quoting it, not writing it. I deem it absolutely necessary in this post and apologize to anyone who is offended.]

A Russian who'd spent the last 30 years in a coma and woke up to read a copy of the Moscow Times newspaper this morning would be hard pressed to notice any changes which had occurred in his country since he lost consciousness.

The lead story would tell him about the nation's dictator announcing plans to remain in power indefinitely. The paper quotes Putin as follows:

If the people vote [in the December parliamentary elections] for United Russia, whose list I lead, it means that they trust me and, in turn, means that I will have the moral right to hold those in the Duma and the Cabinet responsible for the implementation of the objectives that have been identified so far. In what form will I do this? I will refrain for now from providing a direct answer. But various possibilities exist.

Even more in the mold of dictator Josef Stalin, Putin simultaneously declared that his party is attracting "all kinds of crooks," implying that he could purge it any time he likes.

Then the Russian would have passed on to a second story about how "pro-Kremlin youth groups, backed by police, are in the final stages of preparations to inundate the city with tens of thousands of loyal teens with orders to prevent an Orange-style revolution in the lead-up to the Dec. 2 State Duma elections." The red-jacketed thugs from the Kremlin's youth cult "Nashi" are shown at left. He'd learn that the Kremlin has banned various opposition parties from the ballot outright, confiscated the campaign literature of others, refused to engage in any debates, artificially lowered food prices with draconian state-imposed price controls, and excluded the vast majority of foreign elections observers from entering the country. It would become obvious that the Kremlin intends to rig the parliamentary vote in order to insure that Putin has the excuse he needs to remain in power for life, and intends to brutally crush any opposition that may arise along the way in the well-known style of the Soviet Union.

Next, he'd turn to a story about how the Kremlin is aggressively moving to seize control of the last bastion of Russian freedom that remains somewhat viable, the Internet -- and how, like lemmings, even so-called iconoclasts are selling their souls to the devil. The paper reveals:

With a dashing head shot of President Vladimir Putin set against the Russian flag, Zaputina.ru appears to differ little from the fawning pro-Putin propaganda favored by the political establishment.But the man behind the web site is in fact a counterculture icon and obscenity pioneer on the Russian Internet who has launched dozens of web sites, including the legendary Fuck.ru. Zaputina.ru is the latest project of Konstantin Rykov, a 28-year-old media entrepreneur running on the Nizhny Novgorod ticket of pro-Kremlin party United Russia. Launched last week as part of the nationwide For Putin movement, the site gives Russians the chance to urge Putin to stay on after his second term finishes next year. As of Tuesday, the site claimed that more than 35,000 visitors had expressed their support for Putin, including several other iconoclastic personalities of the RuNet, arguably the country's most vibrant venue for political discussion.

When he learned that a proud KGB spy had been ruling the country for eight years already, he might be somewhat shocked. After all, such a thing never occurred even in the darkest days of the USSR's history.

The horror would continue. He'd go on to read how Dictator Putin has announced the promotion of known human rights villain General Lieutenant General Vladimir Shamanov to the position of commander of the Defense Ministry's department for combat training. The paper states: "Human rights organizations have said that troops under Shamanov's command in Chechnya committed atrocities against civilians. In one instance, up to 40 people died when his troops stormed the Chechen village of Alkhan Yurt in 1999."

Finally, he'd review an op-ed piece written by one of the last remaining Russian patriots willing to risk her neck speaking truth to power, Yulia Latynina of the Echo of Moscow radio station. Latynina classifies her country, along with other rogue nations like Iran, as "dystopian regimes of the 21st Century" and states:

Dystopias do not represent mankind's future but its past. Modern dystopian leaders are very similar to Nero in the 1st century or Persian King Shapura in the 3rd century. They hand out provinces, high-ranking posts and oil companies with one stroke of a pen. In their capacity as benevolent "national leaders," they are always struggling against exaggerated -- and often invisible -- enemies. And they attempt, in vain, to cover up their countries' 1,000-year economic and technological backwardness in an era of personal computers and satellite telephones.

"Oh," he'd think, "my country is still hell-bent on destroying itself, just as it was when I hit myself on the head with that hammer three decades ago." And then held lapse back into his comforting sleep.

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