Annals of Russian Barbarism
Filed under: Russia
In his final news conference of his "presidency" on Valentine's Day, Vladimir Putin was asked about persistent rumors that he has stolen billions from Russia's national treasury. He refused to answer the question, saying it was "blather not worth discussing." But he did comment on how this information came to circulate in the press: "They just picked it out of their nose and smeared it on their little sheets," he said. When the Kremlin's translators published the official English version of the answer, they ignored the nose smear comment and claimed Putin had merely stated: "They just made it up and included it in their papers."
A few days later Konstantin Syomin, anchorman for state-owned RTR television declared during his evening news broadcast that "slain former Yugoslavian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic 'got a well-deserved bullet' for his pro-Western policies." See it now:
Then most recently we had Putin's foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko, who told the BBC: "Georgia can't always be like a little boy that takes a fork or a hammer and tries to whack its neighbour. Even a small child knows that if you spill tea or mess up your bed, you might be punished." Do you dare to imagine how Russians would react if a high-ranking official in the Bush White House uttered this statement, replacing "Georgia" with "Russia"? It defies human intelligence for Russia to wail and moan about such treatment from the United States and then to turn around and deliver it by the truckload to its own smaller neighbors. This is the horror of the neo-Soviet state revealed.
You might think, though, that perhaps Russia is a freewheeling type of society where such remarks as these are generally accepted -- but you'd be wrong. Because when human rights activist Lev Ponomarev said the country's prison chief was "the author of a sadistic system of torture" he immediately found himself "charged with falsely accusing a civil servant of committing a serious crime, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison."
All of this, perhaps, is what led Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves to observe yesterday that in today's Russia "there is a mentality of being stabbed in the back that reminds me of the Weimar republic. The Weimar mentality is so similar that I really hope that we do not go off in the wrong direction."
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