re. public transport in Moscow:

“Not sure how you can do without.”

Quite! But I have met very many “New Russians” who proudly state that it is years since they have used the metro. They seem to like sitting in traffic jams. And of course, to use trolleybuses, buses or trams would be absolutely unthinkable for them.

I travel to our dacha, situated about 50 miles south west of Moscow, by suburban electric train, and a return ticket there costs 265 rubles. I was on one of my very rare visits to the UK last June (on average I go back there about once every 5 years to see my sister) and my family and I stopped for 4 days in London before heading off north for Manchester, and the cost of transport in the UK shocked me. I have never been out of Europe, so I do not know how US transportation costs compare with those of Russia.

Happy New Year 2017, Anatoly!

Welcome back to Russia!

How long are you going to be living here in Moscow?

Have you tried out the new Moscow Central Circle railway yet that has been resurrected from the constructed at the turn of the 20th century “Little Ring” railway? I gave it a go when it opened last October and was well impressed.

Do you use public transport here? I suppose you do, because from what you have written earlier, you are living way out of the city centre in a well known Russian Nationalist enclave that has a large population of people from the Caucasus / Central Asian “-stan” republics.

Have you noticed how greatly the Moscow metro has expanded in recent years?

How does public transport here compare with that in the USA pricewise and as regards amenability and efficiency?

Have you been to Kolomenskoye yet and seen there reconstructed wooden palace of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich?

However, one would only use the second person singular in this way if one were addressing one person who is a close friend or relative, a child or even an animal if one loves it.

So really, in addressing the powers-that-be in the USA, the US government or the nation seen as a group of individuals one would say:

By Way of Deception Shall You Lose Your Empire

unless one were addressing the chief executive of the USA, whom one considers a personal friend and intimate.

In archaic (though not in my old neck of the woods) style, the title of the article would have been better as:

By Way of Deception Shalt Thou Lose Thy Empire

Subject-verb inversion as the sentence begins with an adverbial clause.

No, “thine” is the second person singular possessive pronoun, thus:

This is mine and that is thine.

However, “thy” is the second person singular possessive adjective, thus:

This is my book and that is thy book.

The second person singular personal pronoun as the subject of a verb is “thou”:

Thou art wrong! Thou hast made a mistake!

The other second person singular pronoun that is not the subject of the verb is “thee”:

I love thee; I am talking to thee; I shall walk with thee; I shall give thee my love etc.

Where I lived in the North West of England over 40 years ago, such forms were still in use. I last spoke using “thou”,”thee”, “thy” and “thine” with old friends when visiting the place of my birth 10 years ago.

Good man!

“The assertions that Russian security services are responsible for the bombings is at least partially incorrect, and appears to have given rise to an obscurantist mythology of Russian culpability. At the very least, it is clear that these assertions are incomplete in so far as they have not taken full account of the evidence suggesting the responsibility of Wahhabis under the leadership of Khattab, who may have been seeking retribution for the federal assault upon Dagestan’s Islamic Djamaat.”

Dr. Robert Bruce Ware of Southern Illinois University

According to research into the bombings undertaken at the Conflict Studies Research Centre, UK, the conspiracy theory that the FSB was behind the bombings was kept alive by Boris Berezovsky.

(The CSRC was a component of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom that arose in 1972 at the British Royal Military Academy from the Soviet Studies Research Centre (SSRC) and whose purpose was to examine any Soviet military threat. In 2006, CSRC was absorbed into the Advanced Research and Assessment Group (ARAG), another component of the Royal Military Academy, which was subsequently disbanded. CSRC is now an independent, privately funded body providing expertise in security issues with a primary focus on relations with Russia, and specialist knowledge on military, domestic political, and cyber security questions.)

Researcher Gordon Bennett of CSRC has pointed out that neither Berezovsky nor his team (which included Alexander Litvinenko, who was co-author of the book “Bombing Russia”, a book that has been panned far and wide by academics and researchers) provided any evidence to support their claims.

In the BBC World Hard Talk interview on 8 May 2002, Berezovsky was also unable to present any evidence for his claims, and he did not suggest he was in possession of such evidence which he would be ready to present in a court.

It should be recalled that Berzovsky’s mendaciousness was strongly reprimanded by a senior British judge during his 2013 case against Abramovich in London. The judge in question, Mrs Justice Gloster, stated in her summing up: “On my analysis of the entirety of the evidence, I found Mr Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes”.

In other words, she was politely calling Berzovsky a malicious liar.

Of course, I should imagine that there are very many who would suggest that the FSB has infiltrated CSRC, Southern Illinois University and many other academic institutions and research organizations that have crticized suggestions that “Putin did it”; that this criticism is the result of the machinations of the dastardly FSB and its agents, who are lurking under everyone’s beds in the free world and are always ready to sow seeds of doubt and confusion amongst those who fight for freedom and democracy.

I shouldn’t think so, though the nature of this enquiry probably speaks volumes about its poser.

The Russian president must be really shitting himself now!

It’s also been stated today that Khodorkovsky knew full well of his mother’s return to Russia from Berlin when he flew poste-haste off to the German capital, where he is now ensconced in the Adler-Kampinsky Hotel, which establishment fits cosily between the embassies of the United States of America and that of the United Kingdom.

Seems like he had to tend a briefing.

Sorry to hear about this, but I saw it coming: who couldn’t have? You were right all along and shouldn’t have heeded the pleas off others not to shut it down.

And what about “The Russian Spectrum”? Is Weiss going to have no competition?

Neither having the time nor the desire to counter immediately all your assertions above, which assertions, it seems, you deem adequate proof of your propositions – a common logical fallacy, by the way, in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction until all contradictions dry up, at which point that which is asserted is presented as fact owing to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam) – I shall for the while take issue with one assertion that you have made above, namely that in answer to my question whether you thought that the oligarchy in Russia is something unique to that country and, furthermore, whether you thought the present Russian head of state was responsible for the existence of such oligarchy, you asserted that there is a “Big difference between companies and their bosses like Apple, Microsoft, etc and the oligarchs of Russia”.

And how do you intend to back up this assertion with evidence?

Do you, in fact, intend to do so?

Furthermore, I should think that comparing the present Russian oligarchs and their rapid increase in wealth from ground zero, within 10 years and less, which burgeoning wealth of theirs was concomitant with a commensurate growth in their political power, with the likes of Gates and Jobs etc., fabulously wealthy though the latter are or, in the case of Jobs, were, is rather like comparing apples with oranges.

I should think that it would be far more accurate to compare present day Russian oligarchs and their activities with those of US oligarchs who rose to power in the last quarter of the 19th century.

“Following a major economic Depression beginning in 1873 … powerful American industrial and banking families grouped around J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller concentrated the wealth and control of American industry into their own hands.

“… the Morgan and Rockefeller interests deployed fraud, deceit, violence, and bribery – and they deliberately manipulated financial panics. Each financial panic, brought about through their calculated control of financial markets and banking credit, allowed them and their closest allies to consolidate ever more power into fewer and fewer hands. It was this concentration of financial power within an elite few wealthy families that created an American plutocracy or, more accurately, an American oligarchy…

“Whether it was called an oligarchy or a plutocracy – government by a wealthy “class” – the real power in the spectacular rise of the American Century at the end of the 1890s did not rest democratically in the hands of the majority of its citizens. It did not even lie in the hands of a broad, educated and growing middle class. Power, together with control over the nation’s economy, was being ruthlessly centralized in the hands of the wealthy few, every bit as much as it had been in the days of Imperial Rome…

“[In the late 1800s an American] oligarchy used its immense economic power, often secretly and in coordinated fashion, to orchestrate events that generated waves of bankruptcies and severe economic depressions, even panics. The emerging American oligarchy cynically corrupted and co-opted state legislatures, governors, US Congressmen, judges, newspaper editors and even Presidents to serve their private interests. Those interests were served by wars their captive press helped trigger, wars from which that oligarchy profited while thousands of young Americans perished for causes they knew nothing about…

“By the 1880s two colossal groups had emerged within the United States’ wealthiest families. Initially they were bitter, hated rivals. In the end they became allies, not out of love but out of practicality, in one of the greatest concentrations of financial and industrial power ever seen. The two families, Rockefeller and Morgan, created a combination of wealth and control so powerful in its influence over the economic and financial life of the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century that Congressional critics named it the Money Trust…”

“By the end of the 1890s [J.P.] Morgan and [John D.] Rockefeller had become the giants of an increasingly powerful Money Trust controlling American industry and government policy. There was little room for the actual practice of democracy in their world. Power was the commodity of their trade. It was the creation of an American aristocracy of blood and money, every bit as elite and exclusive as the titled nobility of Britain, Germany or France – despite the Constitutional ban on titled nobility in America. It was an oligarchy, a plutocracy in every sense of the word – rule by the wealthiest in their self-interest.

“Some 60 families – names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Dodge, Mellon, Pratt, Harkness, Whitney, Duke, Harriman, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, DuPont, Guggenheim, Astor, Lehman, Warburg, Taft, Huntington, Baruch and Rosenwald formed a close network of plutocratic wealth that manipulated, bribed, and bullied its way to control the destiny of the United States. At the dawn of the 20th Century, some sixty ultra-rich families, through dynastic intermarriage and corporate, interconnected shareholdings, had gained control of American industry and banking institutions.”

Source: Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century; Engdahl, F.W.

All this took place in post-bellum USA, the “shining beacon” of freedom and democracy.

But after 25 years of what the Germans call “Raubkapitalismus” – “Robber Capitalism”- there arose by the turn of the 20th century winds of change in the US and a general feeling that the political power that these US oligarchs possessed had to be curtailed.

The president who took these thieves and looters to task was “Teddy” Roosevelt, the “Trust Buster”.

In Russia, however, 10 years and a financial crisis was time enough to sicken Russian society as a whole of the drunkard Yeltsin and his corrupt coterie of oligarchs. Yeltsin was threatened with multiple impeachments and in a palace coup, as it were, was replaced by his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who was elected president three months later.

Most of the rats then fled the Russian ship of state – with one notable exception, who in his hubris decided to soldier on with his accumulation of enormous wealth and political machinations, whilst at the same time attempting a PR job in projecting himself as a man-of-the-people and defender of democracy.

His bullshit was so good that he probably still believes in it himself right now at his present address – some prison colony in the Far East.

Which leads me to restate that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has stated not once but twice (in 2011 and 2013) that Khodorkovsky’s trial and conviction in Russia was not politically motivated:

“The Strasbourg-based court, which considered Khodorkovsky’s case together with that of his business partner Platon Lebedev, ruled that the tax-fraud accusations against them had a ‘healthy core’, and ‘corresponded to a common-sense understanding of tax evasion’.”

See:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/05/31/Court-rules-against-Khodorkovsky/UPI-94171306851214/

http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-european-court-khodorkovsky/25056475.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/world/europe/european-court-says-russia-did-not-persecute-ex-tycoon.html?_r=0

That’s not an assertion on my part: the latest (2013) ECHR ruling on Khodorkovsky, for example, is available on-line and can be downloaded, wherein may be read the following key section:

“908. The Court’s approach to the present case is similar. The Court is
prepared to admit that some political groups or government officials had
their own reasons to push for the applicants’ prosecution. However, it is
insufficient to conclude that the applicants would not have been convicted
otherwise. Elements of “improper motivation” which may exist in the
present case do not make the applicants’ prosecution illegitimate “from the KHODORKOVSKIY AND LEBEDEV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT 197
beginning to the end”: the fact remains that the accusations against the
applicants were serious, that the case against them had a “healthy core”,
and that even if there was a mixed intent behind their prosecution, this did
not grant them immunity from answering the accusations. Having said that,
the Court observes that the present case, which concerned the events of
2003-2005, does not cover everything which has happened to the
applicants ever since, in particular their second trial.”

See: http://khodorkovsky.ru/files/_docs_/c51a2886c76108aac4aa6ed32c5d11c1/CASE_OF_KHODORKOVSKIY_AND_LEBEDEV_v._RUSSIA.pdf

PS You forgot to mention the journalists murdered on Putin’s orders for having criticized him and his “regime”, not to mention Putin’s order to murder Litvinenko in London, and then there’s the question of the palaces he’s had built for himself.

Error: “It is a fantasy that members of the “opposition” have not been arrested because of their criminal activities” should read It is a fantasy that members of the “opposition” have been arrested because of their criminal activities.”

The reason why there isn’t a serious discussion about these matters is because they are largely fantasies conjured up in the fevered minds of malicious Western politicians and journalists and swallowed wholesale by the gullible, uneducated masses that need a bogeyman and a bogeyman society in order to reassure themselves that they should be grateful for what little they have in their obviously bountiful “free world”.

It is a fantasy that members of the “opposition” have not been arrested because of their criminal activities.

See, for example, the ECHR ruling on Khodorkovsky’s conviction.

Likewise the allegation that there are political prisoners in Russia: who exactly are these people?

The Bolotnaya protesters?

Are you serious?

Is the head of state responsible for the “general corruption” in Russia?

Really?

One party rule?

Is there only one party in Russia?

Really?

In the UK and its first-past-the-post system for elections, a party that achieves a simple majority effectively dictates policy until the next general election, no matter what Her Majesty’s Opposition may think of said policies, not to mention the opinions of the unelected upper house as regards bills presented to them from the lower house. In effect, majority governments under the UK system – one that has no written constitution, I should like to add – enjoys a one-party dictatorship, something hardly possible in most other European democracies, where proportional representation is the norm.

Human rights issues?

Russia is not one of those 79 countries in the world in which sodomy between consenting adult males is a criminal offence.

Why don’t you take up this argument with the Saudis, for example, and the Indians?

Free speech?

I am writing these words in Moskva (if Westerners insist on “Beijing” and “Kyiiv” as being “politically correct”, then this place is called Moskva!) I do not expect a visit from the FSB for penning these words. And I can read a swathe of political articles in the Russian media everyday that endlessly beats the drum about what a shit Putin is.

Ever hear of Radio Ekho Moskvy and of Yulia Latynina and the opinions emanating from various Western funded think tanks, NGOs and schools of economy here in Moskva? Have you ever read “The Moscow Times”?

Interference and aggression against neighbouring states?

How long has the USA boycotted Cuba and why? Same goes for regime change in the USA’s Central American backyard and elsewhere. Any drone attacks launched by the Russians lately?

Have any Russian diplomats attended mass meetings of, say, Scottish nationalists, in a similar way as foreign diplomats have done in their egging on of Kiev protesters on the Maidan of late?

Oligarchs? You mean people who have become rich through questionable means and who influence government policies?

Again, are you serious? Do you think this is a feature unique to Russia and , furthermore, something for which the head of state is responsible?

A questionable economic system?

Please define what is meant by “questionable”.

Do you mean it doesn’t work?

Do you mean it is somehow illegal?

Do you mean it is not a capitalistic one and, therefore,”wrong”?

Are you saying that the Russian economy is a centrally state planned one?

What do you mean by “questionable”?

Burgeoning police state?

What evidence have you for this?

Are Russian citizens living in constant fear of arrest for crimes unknown? Are Russian citizens vanishing mysteriously into the night after being visited by the KGB? Is living in Rossiya (that’s the correct name of this country) some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare?

I am going to be travelling to work on the metro soon. Will I be accompanied on my journey by gibbering loons who live in mortal terror of the powers that be? Am I going to be observed all day by countless CCTV systems such as exist in the UK?.

Immigration?

Again, are you serious?

Although you have used the term “gotten”, you also have the letters “UK” following your “name”. If you are a British citizen and not a US one, have you ever visited a British city lately… or Rotterdam, or Paris or Berlin for that matter? If you have, have you not noticed anything different in these places as compared with some 25 years go?

Or are you only 16?

So you believe that Putin is running ” what looks like a Soviet state apparatus”?

Were you ever in the Soviet Union?

Have you ever lived in Russia – post-Soviet Russia that is?

I lived in the USSR. I have also lived in Russia for 22 years. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it, but I can assure you, present day Russia is not like the Soviet Union. For one thing, there is something that exists now in Russia – in “Putin’s Russia” – that was anathema in Soviet times: it’s called capitalism.

However, I suppose you are one of the millions of Westerners who, having digested one sentence spoken by Putin and reported in the West out of context, that believes that the Russian head of state regrets the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he described as a “catastrophe”.

I eagerly await your response.

I am off to work now.

I may not return…

I have spent some very happy times on holiday with my family in the Ukraine: in the Crimea at Yalta, Evpatoria, and near Kerch, and on the Ukrainian littoral, in what was formerly an Ottoman province seized occassionally by the Russian Empire and most recently, in 1939, by Stalin, in Bessarabia really, at Serhiivka”, and in none of these places have I heard Ukrainian spoken by the natives, though I have heard it spoken on Ukrainian TV channels there and have seen that language written on street signs in those places. When last in Odessa I commented about this to a taxi driver, asking him if anybody spoke Ukrainian in that city. “Nah”, he answered, “only Russian – and Odessian!”

Wrong link above!

It should have been this: “Yanukovych Is No Alpha Male”, in which she wrote: “1 million Ukrainians have no qualms about taking to the streets in protest”, which could have meant in the Ukraine as a whole, but then she goes on to write about Moscow “opposition” protests of last year and in December 2012, comparing the numbers that took part in them with the “1 million Ukrainians” who lately have had “no qualms about taking to the streets in protest”.

Latynina seems to be found of the number “1 million” and its approximation “millions”, for she then goes on to write about the “oil windfall” in Russia that “even trickles down to millions of migrant workers”.

However, as regards her “1 million Ukrainians” who “have no qualms about taking to the streets in protest” that she wrote about at the beginning of her article, she then makes it abundantly clear that those 1 million protesting Ukrainians are situated in Kiev, for she writes later, when comparing the number of Kiev protesters of recent days with the numbers of 2011-2012 white-ribbon protesters in Moscow: “The 100,000 Russian protesters went home frustrated, but the 1 million in Kiev have stripped Yanukovych of whatever legitimacy he once held”.

She’s stating that 1 million have protested in Kiev.

Also, I might point out that In her haste to pump up the figures, it seems that Latynina’s attentiveness to PC has slipped somewhat, for she has written “Kiev”.

Shouldn’t that be “Kyiv”?

After all,one should say “Beijing” and not “Peking”, shouldn’t one, and “Mumbai” and not the Eurocentic imperialistic “Bombay”.

Which is all well and good, but following the same PC “reasoning”, the “Moscow Times” should then be the “Moskva” Times”, shouldn’t it, and “Cologne” and “Munich” and “Warsaw” and “Prague”, for example, should be “Koeln”, “Muenchen”, “Varshava” and “Praga” respectively, shouldn’t they?

Nice to hear Anatoly has not lost some of those Lancashire vowels that he must have picked up during some of his formative years in my home county.

The Moscow Times head-banger-in-chief reckons there are a million protesting in Kiev and compares their numbers with that of her buddies, whose numbers in Moscow, she now admits, were at a maximum of 100,000:

“It turns out that 1 million Ukrainians have no qualms about taking to the streets in protest if they find their president’s actions insulting — and that’s even after riot police had broken up earlier demonstrations. In Moscow, a city of 14 million, even generous estimates put the maximum number of demonstrators during the peak of the protests in December 2011 at 100,000. After that, a turnout of 30,000 or 40,000 at subsequent protests in 2012 was the most that organizers could muster.”

See: “Yanukovych’s Russian Gambit”.

I don’t recall her playing down the Moscow white-ribbonist figures at the time of their protests, however.

As I’ve said many times before in several other blogs about this corruption in Russia issue, in the course of 21 years’ residence in Russia I have never once paid a bribe, nor has it ever been suggested that I do so.

Can I really have been so amazingly fortunate over these past 21 years spent in such a corrupt country as this, a country which, according to some Western journalists, is more corrupt than Nigeria and Afghanistan, and never once been asked to pay a bribe? Or is the simple fact of the matter that persons such as I can get along quite nicely without paying any “extras” whatsoever, nor are persons such as I expected to do so?

The simple fact of the matter is, I believe, that in normal day-to-day-life here corruption is not as dire as it is painted by Western scribes; at least, it has not been so for me.

The key thing in this matter – that which has led to my not being expected to pay bribes – is that I am not a businessman: I did not come here to pay bribes, to set up business, to corner a market. And I only earn 60,000 rubles a month – a little more than the recently announced present Moscow average of 58,000 rubles.

However, the ones that wail constantly in the West about how dreadful it is here are, I believe, mostly businessmen. Furthermore, I suspect it is often a fact that these businessmen come here with the intent to pay bribes, only to return back to the squeaky-clean West with their tales of woe because they’ve been too small time in this regard and unable to compete with the big boys, such as Siemens (see: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/2-siemens-execs-guilty-of-corruption/404369.html) and Hewlett-Packard (see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/09/20/germany-says-hp-paid-kickbacks-to-get-russian-contract/).

As I wrote recently in an opinion page comments section of that rag the Moscow times (see: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/russia-cant-grow-and-steal-at-the-same-time/490264.html):

“Where I come from, they say: ‘It takes two to tango’. Whenever I hear endless criticism of corruption in Russia, I often think of the contract agreed upon between a prostitute and her client. Of the two parties, which one’s actions are the more reprehensible: those of the prostitute in offering her services for a price, or those of her client who is willing to pay for said services? Or are the actions of both morally reprehensible?

If I remember rightly, in recent years both the German engineering firm Siemens – the manufacturer of the high-speed Sapsan trains purchased by the Russian government – and Hewlett-Packard of the USA have been accused of participating in hugely corrupt practices in Russia in order to win valuable contracts there.

Who were the ‘most guilty’ in these deals: the whore or the client?

And the usual argument in defence of such corrupt practices offered by Western firms is that if they hadn’t done it, another firm would have.”

What purpose does the Council of Europe serve?

Why are Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan members of the Council of “Europe”?

See:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/03/azerbaijan

http://www.cpt.coe.int/documents/arm/2011-08-17-eng.htm

http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/greco/news/news(20110411)eval3_armenia_EN.asp

http://en.itar-tass.com/old-top-news/701551

“In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, residents elected opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman as their new mayor”, writes Vladimir Kara-Murza.

No mention, of course, that Roizman is a convicted criminal strongly suspected of having ties with the notorious Uralmash gang.

The day after Roizman’s election victory, he was summoned to the Investigatory Committee for an interview.

So they got a thief in Ekaterinburg and narrowly avoided getting another one in Moscow.

As I have already commented on “The Russia Debate”, even chief headbanger Latynina at the Moscow Times has stated that the election was kosher in her opinion piece: “Finally, a clean election”, though she does strangely write that “Fair elections have returned to Moscow” .

This makes me wonder when that loon thinks elections were previously “fair”.

Back in the USSR? – Surely she doesn’t believe that to have been the case!

During Putin’s previous ministry or that of Medvedev?

I somehow don’t think she is implying that.

Does she mean during the golden Yeltsin years, as Navalny once described them, when Soviet Russia had been transformed into a land flowing with milk and honey, albeit that said rivers of milk and honey mostly flowed into off-shore accounts; when the Moscow White House suffered artillery bombardment because that drunken oaf of a president who ruled by decree did not agree with the opinions of its democratically elected deputies.?

With one noteable exception, right across the political spectrum the consensus is that they were fair. And the exception is, of course, Team Navalny.

The Chosen One and friends have already started the ball rolling big fashion in that the have already prepared 50,000 pages of writs to be presented to the Moscow courts demanding that a re-ballot take place.

See: “Навальный подготовил грузовик жалоб” [Navalny has prepared a truckload of complaints]

“Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who in in the election for mayor had the support of over a quarter of Muscovites, has not abandoned his intention to have the election result canceled. In the near future he intends to file a complaint with the Moscow City Court.

‘Tomorrow morning, we are serving Moscow City Court: 1) an application to set aside the election results as a whole, and 2) 951 applications to the district court to cancel the election results …

‘… We are bringing approximately 50,000 pages on a truck’, he wrote in his blog. According to Navalny, as a basis for the submission of claims was the unequal access of candidates to the media, as well as food packages that were distributed to pensioners…”

A quarter of Muscovites voted for him says the above linked article.?

Surely 27% of the 30% of the electorate that voted for him does not represent 25% of Moscow’s population?

My answers:

(1) Sobyanin

(2) 5-10%

Extra forecast:

Navalny will lose his appeal and go down for 5.

“Are these people really so self-centered and parochial?”

In 1995, a colleague of mine, newly arrived from England, took up a teaching post in Moscow. He spoke no Russian at all. He claimed he had been a member of the Communist Party of great Britain. His particular pet subject turned out to be racism.

Within a few days after his starting work in Moscow a state school as an English language teacher, he began to voice his great displeasure over what he perceived as the inherent racism of all Russians. When I asked him why he believed all Russians to be racist, he said it was because of how the children in his class repeatedly used the term “nigger” without any shame about it at all. Apparently, on starting work at the school, he had immediately set up lecturing his class about the evils of racism. I pointed out to him the the error of his ways after having asked him whether the children in question had actually been saying “nigger” or “negr”. He confirmed that they had been saying “negr”.

In the end, I persuaded him that the children had not been using the “N-word”. Nevertheless, he told me later that he had forbidden the children to use that word in his presence because to him it sounded like “nigger”.

One of the children told his father that his English teacher had forbidden the use of “negr” in class. The father reported this fact to the director of the school and the teacher was dismissed.

The teacher didn’t stay much longer in Russia, As he was preparing to return to the UK, I asked him what he thought of Russia, “Not much”, he replied.

The translation of a non-native Russian speaker:

July 24, 2013
Andrey Kamenetsky

Dear readers,
In July there took place two major crashes in Russia. Both of them were very revealing, but only one carried a wide resonance: the “Proton-M”rocket accident. We shall now have a talk about the second crash, which was in its own way also catastrophic.

The puzzle hasn’t been solved
I’m talking about the unexpected failure of the now traditional fun and games ratings that annually “equates Russia with Zimbabwe”. One of the leading international human rights organizations that regularly publishes its corruption ratings, Transparency International, has this time not included Russia in its bribe-taking rating because of a “technical fault” caused by the receipt of research information that had not been verified for its authenticity. Because of this, a whole row of data has been removed from the process, and instead of the usual solid news about how everything is terrible in Russia, there has spilled out into the media a whole pile of claims made against one another by the organizers.
What makes this story piquant is the fact that all the interested parties are organizations of word-wide renown. The research data customer, Transparency International, has come down on its research agent, the international sociological corporation Gallup. Even more interesting is that as the conflict widens, their representatives are beginning to remember things amongst themselves and have even started to talk, which used to be considered quite indecent.
“Judging by the received data, the question was either misunderstood or incorrectly set by the company that undertook the research”, pointed out Transparency International Research Director, Finn Heinrich.
Gallup, in the shape of its legal entity “Romir” – its exclusive representative in Russia and the Ukraine – does not accept this claim. Not to be outdone, “Romir” Communications Director Evgeniya Rubtsova has stated:
“After we had passed on the data, nobody contacted us further and there were no requests for clarifications and amplifications. They (Transparency International) are customers of our research data, so they interpret the data that they receive from us. Unfortunately, we have already experienced precedents, wherein they have shown some data while there has been other data that they have not shown, and on some issues, in comparison with other countries, Russia has come out of this in a not too favourable light.”
However, the accuracy of the answers to other questions suits the research client. Anton Pominov, deputy director of the Russian branch of Transparency International Research, said that: “It is alarming that no one really believes that the anti-corruption strategy, which was begun by President Medvedev in 2008, is effective. Citizens have now completely cast off their rose-tinted spectacles. For example, 74% of people give civil servants the highest score: 5 points: that is to say, they are “very corrupt”.
In general, he thinks that “the barometer still shows a situation of some tension in society”. So while the main news fragmented as does a meteor entering the atmosphere, some fragments of the pre-planned number of mandatory headlines about the deep corruption in Russian still reached Earth.

The explanation is quite simple
Now let’s just see what data is involved. From Transparency’s final report there were omitted two answers given by Russian citizens to two questions.
In question number seven, respondents were asked to answer how often during the past year were they or members of their families in contact with some official agency, including the police, the tax authorities, medical services, educational institutions, and whether they had to pay a bribe to them.
Question number eight specifically asked what the reason for the bribe was. A choice of four answers was given: a gift/gratitude; a service at a lower price; the desire to speed up the solution of a problem; the only way to get the service.

What are the puzzling answers that Russian citizens gave concerning these choices? Largely thanks to Eugeniya Rubtsova and Anton Pominov we can try to guess what kind of “technical failure” Transparency was talking about and what it consists of.
“Corruption is not only a bribe: it involves a lot more concepts, including favouritism”, begins Anton, justifying himself for no apparent reason.
“I do not know how they checked the received data. You need to look at it dynamically. For example, if two years ago a similar study was undertaken, and suddenly, for one question there was a very large and skewed response, the alarms went off. If, for example, people say that the level of corruption has increased, but at the same time the number of people who paid a bribe has gone down, then it is clear that there is a contradiction”, Evgeniya clearly states.
The final piece to the puzzle: there was an almost identical survey made by the “Public opinion” foundation and conducted in 43 subject states of the Russian Federation in April of this year. It was no less extensive, but we are interested in only two key parameters.
Firstly, according to the survey, 79% of Russians are not faced with bribery at all. (This number has grown from 60% in 2008). Only 15% paid bribes. (In 2008 it was 29%).

And secondly, in the opinion of 84% of the respondents, the level of corruption in the country is too high, while 46% believe that it is continuing to rise.

We’ve arrived
Of course, if 80% of people rated their country as having the highest rate of corruption but say at the same time that they and their families did not give bribes to anyone last year, then there is something wrong there, and that includes the validation systems used by the Transparency International.
And that’s why Anton Pominov interprets indicators concerning bribes as evidence of corruption in general – because such indicators are quantifiable. “They spent time and money, and it turned out that something went wrong during data collection. Of course, for us it is very frustrating because it turns out that some of the work that was done has not given the expected results”, he lamented last week.
The bottom line is that we have a completely crazy situation here, where a reputable rating organization has hammered its ratings so much into its respondents’ brains that it is getting these ratings back as answers that are completely uncritical, have no connection with reality, and do not pass any logical test; they are motivated by the answers of people who have read the news and know about previous ratings. This circus can continue for a long time, especially when you consider their habit of organizing themselves to interpret the data and downplaying their part in creating the “expected result”.

The real question is, how much longer are we seriously going to interpret our unspeakably terrible problems from the point of view of outsiders, and how effective will be the measures for dealing with the naive ignorance of the population?

Brotherly love shown at Beslan then?

The Negroes that can be seen handing out leaflets at the entrances to metro stations all around Moscow to pedestrians must be immensely courageous then. And there’s a big gang of very brave black Cubans, both men and women together with their children, who live at “Old Havana”, a large night club/bar near my house where wedding parties etc. take place (my daughter
celebrated her 5th birthday there), who go shopping in our local supermarket. And near my metro station there’s a big gated house where many African families live – I think they’re all members of
the diplomatic corps at various African embassies throughout Moscow – and I see these black people who live at this house, mostly the younger members of the families, both boys and girls, going out at the weekend. They travel by metro and are very often in the carriages on my line heading for the same station where I get off. I’ve never seen any of these black people abused or attacked, though I’m sure there are out and cowardly racists in Moscow, as there are anywhere, who do go around in gangs and assault black people.

I’ve occasionally seen some white people, usually very old women, staring at black passengers on the trains, though; not out of hatred but purely out of unconcealed curiosity. These gawping whites always appear to me to be country boors (boors – хамы).

I’ve never noticed any nervous fear amongst black people walking around Moscow or riding around on the metro. And occasionally, I’ve even seen a black African canoodling with a white girl, and the male has never appeared to me as though he felt he was putting his life in danger. I’m quite certain, however, that a black person would very much be putting his life in danger if he came fresh with a Chechen girl. So would a Russian as well.

However, I’ve heard during the past 20 years that I have lived in Moscow how Muscovites refer to a black person as “negr” (негр), which simply means “Negro”, and is for them an absolutely neutral term but which word, year in, year out, causes comment from some of my squeaky clean PC colleagues from the Anglosphere who arrive here to work and who express their horror at hearing Russians shamelessly using what they think is the Russian cognate of the so-called “N-word”.

Referring back to a comment above by Дарман about the Chechen attack tactic that he has observed, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen it put in operation on a few occasions during disputes in local markets: three in front and two behind. The attacked party in all these incidences that I have witnessed were also what Slavic Russian citizens call “black arses”, though not Chechen. “Black Arse” (Черножопый), by the way, is a Russian “N-word” equivalent usually directed at Caucasians, be they Chechens, Georgian, Armenians, Dagestanis or whatever.

In my experience, I don’t think Slavic Russian citizens are any more intolerant than any of their non-Slav fellow citizens are; nor are they, in my opinion, more intolerant or xenophobic than most of my fellow countrymen as well. This so-called Russian xenophobia is just another Western russsophobic meme used to beat the Russians (Slavic ones, of course) about their collective heads.

I should also like to add that those people who live in the nearest settlement (Dorokhovo) to where our dacha is situated some 84 kms. from Moscow all seem to live in run-down Krushchevkas and very many of them seem to earn their crust in Moscow, judging by the packed and very frequent elektrichkas that run between Mozhaisk and Moscow early in the morning and in the evening. The first one to Moscow is at 5 a.m. and is full of locals, mostly fast asleep. The market there, however, has been totally re-vamped with new, well-built brick buildings containing all varieties of shops: originally one could only buy local produce there on an open square, This market is frequented mostly by Muscovite dacha dwellers who park their big new vehicles in front of the railway station: the locals drive old bangers. Goods are more expensive in the oblast’ as well. I know Muscovites who have chosen to live in the new dormitory town Odintsovo (Navalny’s neck of the woods) who tell me that prices in the shops there are higher than in Moscow. The air is fresher though.

I was thinking of that after reading a previous comment in this thread re. Moscow property values. However, having sold our flat, where should we all live? At our dacha?

I used to think of this during the house buying boom that occurred when I last lived in England and heard of folk who were continuously buying and selling properties and moving from one property into another and wonder if this were really such a smart thing to do, for if their most recently bought property had been sold for a far greater price than that which they had paid for it, surely the price of the new property into which they had moved had also increased in price; unless, of course, they hadn’t “moved up” but rather “moved down” into some hovel and deposited their “profit” into a bank account.

I must be piss poor then, because I earn 60,000 rubles a month, have two school-age children and one that attends kindergarten and I don’t have a car. I am the sole breadwinner in my family.

I live in central Moscow as well, at Taganka. However, we own our own 3-room flat that is on the third floor of a house built in 1971. We also own a dacha situated 50 miles southwest of Moscow as the crow flies.

We use public transport. The cost of a one-way elektrichka ticket to our dacha is 132 rubles.

We do all our grocery shopping at a neighbouring Pyatyorochka or Monetka supermarket. We never eat out.

As regards travelling abroad, we’ve only done that 3 times since the children started to arrive, namely since 1999: twice to my home country, where we lived at my sister’s, and to Eurodisney near Paris last November. True, we’ve had three holidays in the Ukraine – at Kerch, Evpatoria and Sergieva near Odessa – but I don’t really count that as abroad. This year we spent 3 weeks in Anapa.

Funny thing is though, I feel better off here than when I lived in my home country. Bear in mind, that was over 25 years ago.

I never had a foreign holiday until I left England and went on honeymoon to Paris with my wife in 1997, nor did I ever have a car in the UK, where I lived in a rented council house. I never learnt to drive because I used to walk to work. And I only first opened a bank account in the UK two years before I left Merry England. Never had need for an account before that, because what I used to get paid weekly on Fridays for working down the pit was usually gone before the following Tuesday, if not earlier. Bear in mind, I wasn’t wed then and I used to piss most that I earned against a wall. I don’t drink now. Haven’t done for 6 years. Don’t smoke either.

God, life is hell in the Evil Empire!

Did in June though, didn’t it?

http://25signals.ru/reference/statistika-urovnya-inflyacii/

По последним данным статистики, пик многомесячного роста инфляции, мучившего российскую экономику в конце прошлого – начале этого года, был пройден где-то в феврале. В марте инфляция снизилась в годовом выражении, а по итогам года она может упасть до 5%.

8 апреля. FINMARKET.RU – Мартовские данные по инфляции преподнесли приятный сюрприз: явно заметен тренд на замедление роста цен. В годовом выражении инфляция даже сократилась.

Владимир Осаковский из Bank of America Merrill Lynch уверен, что к концу году инфляция замедлится аж до 5%. А ЦБ, получив такие данные, уже в мае сможет начать цикл снижения ставок.

http://www.interfax.ru/business/txt.asp?id=300274

You pays your money and you takes your choice!

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/You+pays+your+money

Yes, when I last lived in the UK there was a Goethe-Institut in Manchester. That was 25 years ago.

This language question is indeed key and a comparison of Russian with German an interesting one.

The world domination of English as a result of the British Empire followed by the United States empire-in-all-but-name will, I think, last for the forseeable future.The huge majority of published material and emails, faxes etc. are in English. However, last time I checked, the second most published language after English is German, largely because of Germany’s scientific and technical prowess, namely the second highest number of scientific and technical publications after those written in English are in German.

When I was at school some 50 years ago, students of chemistry who had no knowledge of German had to do an intense course in the German language so as to help them read treatises written in German. As regards science and technology, Russians are no dullards, yet few learn Russian and read Russian works and scientific journals in the original, relying only on translations.

As regards cultural exchanges andible misunderstandigs, this often leads to problems. Bronsky once said that the reason English speakers cannot discern the differences between the thinking of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they have never read these illustrious writers’ works,.only Constance Garnett’s translations of them.

As regards point (1) of AK’s posting above, I think bydlo answers that question well enough.

As regards (2): If the bird sanctuary is involved in political activities, then it falls under the categorization of an NGO acting as a foreign agent and is obliged by law to make this fact public and to register itself as a foreign agent, no matter how ludicrous this may seem to be at first sight. For if this is indeed the case, namely that a foreign funded organization involved in political activities is presenting itself as a charitable bird sanctuary, then this presentation of the organization’s activity as being the care and protection of a species of bird is just a sham intended to make ludicrous any accusations that the sanctuary is involved in political activities.

The purpose of the law is not to punish dumb animals, orphans, homeless people, drunken bums etc. and a host of other humanitarian charities that receive all or part of their funding from foreign sources, and to say that this is the case, as Yavlinsky and many others try to make out, is a smokescreen, a duplicitous attempt to hide the very real fact that the US government funds organizations in other lands, not least in Russia, in order to instigate a change of those countries’ governments to ones that will undertake policies conducive to US interests.

However, whenever new legislation is passed, there are very often anomalies and loopholes that have to be rectified or, as the case may be, closed. I recall that several years after capital punishment had been abolished in the UK it was discovered that there still remained three offences punishable by the death penalty: arson in Her Majesty’s dockyards, rape of a princess royal and witchcraft. These laws were immediately repealed on their discovery, of course, but technically, if someone had been tried and found guilty of witchcraft before it had been discovered that such an offence not only still existed in English law but was a capital one, then theoretically the guilty party could have been legally hanged. That didn’t happen, of course, and even in the highly unlikely event of anyone being found guilty of witchcraft before the repeal of said witchcraft laws in England, capital punishment of the guilty party would certainly not have taken place.

Mr. Yavlinsky and others of his ilk seem to be patently and conveniently unaware of the US 1966 Foreign Agents Registration Act

The goal of the 1966 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was to “minimize foreign intervention” in U.S. elections by establishing a series of limitations on foreign governments and nationals. In 1974, the prohibition was incorporated into the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), giving the FEC jurisdiction over its enforcement and interpretation.

According to the FEC, FECA “prohibits any foreign national or government from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign national or government violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and wilfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.”

What’s good for the goose is clearly not necessarily good for the gander, or so it would seem when one hears the arguments that Yavlinsky and Alekseeva and many others make concerning “crackdowns” on NGOs. Furthermore, these people also conveniently omit he fact that this legislation that they detest so much is not directed at all NGOs, only those that undertake political activities, so there will be no “crackdown” against, say, a foreign funded charity that finds homes for stray cats and dogs in Russia.

Have you included that Kommersant interview with Konstantin Lebedev and which Yalensis translated and posted on Kremlin Stooge? I’m sure Yalensis won’t mind it being posted on RS. As far as I know, it’s never appeared anywhere in the West apart from my posting of it at Yalensis’s suggestion in the Guardian, which action slammed down a white-ribbonist and his supportive chums in the UK who were commenting at the foot of a Moscow Miriam column. That action of mine was the first posting I’ve made to the Grauniad in almost a year: I just got sick of their “comment is free” hypocrisy.

I should think that “death by other cause” is simply a death whose cause is not of high enough recordable frequency to be included in a list such as this.

For example, my great-grandmother died as the result of bleeding to death in front of an open fire whilst asleep. She was very old, I was told, and in her sleep she had apparently cut her ankle with the sharp edge of a clog-iron. Clogs were the usual footwear for the working classes in my old neck of the woods.

No doubt, on her death certificate cause of death was given as “exsanguination”; I doubt that her cause of death was given as “bled to death after cutting leg on clog-iron”.

In any case, I should imagine that in any statistic alanalysis, my great-grandmother’s cause of death would be classified as “other”.

re: the wrongly scheduled article on Russia reaching №1 position in the European economies

I did a check on the available data after reading a comment demanding that AK give links to data supporting his case. For what it’s worth, I agree with AK’s oncoming announcement: the figures available now indicate that, much to the ridicule of many, no doubt, the Evil Empire might well be heading for the top position.

I was going to post what data I had gleaned in reply to the commentator’s demand that such data be presented, but the article had been removed by then.

In 1981, the elected in 1979 Briitish prime minister Margaret Thatcher was on record as being the least popular PM in parliamentiary history.

In April 1982, the chief of the ruling the Argentine military junta, General Galtieri, ordered that a British possession, the Falkland Islands, be invaded by Argentine forces. War ensued between Great Britain and Argentina, resulting in a victory for the British forces.

As a result of this victory, Thatcher’s popularity with the British public increased enormously, she called a general election, which she won easily, and thereafter won two more elections, remaining in power as prime minister until 1990.

Given as a major reason for the Argentinan attack on the Falklands was the removal of a British Royal Navy presence in the South Atlantic, in that in a 1981 British government defence review it had been decided to permanently withdraw from service in April 1982 the ice patrol vessel HMS Endurance, the sole RN ship patrolling the Falklands area.

In the light of events subsequent to this decision to withdraw HMS Endurance from service, it must have been Margaret Thatcher that made that decision to decommission the vessel, which decision led to the Argentine-UK war and to British victory and her re-election and subsequent 8 years of premiership.

Stands to “reason”, doesn’t it?

Post hoc ergo propter hoc!

If B follows A, then A must be the cause of B.

Common logical fallacy.

It’s what’s written on the Statue of Liberty pedestal that has gulled many US citizens over the years and has given carte blanche to anyone or group that claim that their freedom and human rights have been infringed upon:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

She squirmed because she was being exposed as a liar. The Belgrano was not in the war zone and was steaming away from the Falkland Islands when the order was given to torpedo her.

Isn’t the opinion of the majority that which counts, or is this not the case when it comes to Russia?

If the majority of public opinion outside Russia is supportive of the Pussy Riot “heroines”, whereas the majority of public opinion within Russia is not supportive of them, does this mean that the majority opinion in Russia, the opinion of the citizenship of a sovereign state, is of no import?

In other words, who makes the decisions when it comes to Russia: the Russians themselves or the opinionated chatterers who are neither Russian citizens nor do
they live in Russia?

It was the withdrawal from service of HMS Endurance that certainly gave the green light to the Galtieri regime.

Thatcher used to have all the sycophant journalists in her thrall and used to bully and hector them into submission and evade answering any questions she chose not to discuss. Only once, and that was during the Falklands War, was she outmanoeuvred by an interviewer, a woman, Mrs. Gould, during a live on air debate.

Thatcher’s Nemesis ‘phoned in to ask why the Belgrano had been torpedoed against all the conventions and rules laid down (Belgrano was not steaming in the declared by H.M. Government war zone) and who had given the order to sink her.

Thatcher huffed and puffed, saying that the Belgrano had been in the war zone and tried to talk about her duty to protect “our boys”, but this woman persisted and wouldn’t let go.

In the chair was the BBC’s Sue Lawley, who dutifully rose in defence of the prime minister, and tried to curtail Mrs. Gould’s persistent questioning. In the end, Thatcher started to appeal to authority (“I know the facts”) and told Mrs. Gould that the truth of the matter (Her Majesty’s Government’s version, that is) would be publicly disclosed in 30 years.

It was good, for once, to watch Thatcher squirm.

See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O184yGKknSQ

It was the BRITISH coal mining industry: although the majority of deep coal mines were situated in the English Midlands (Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire) and the North West (Lancashire, Cumberland) and the North East of England (Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland), as well as there being a small coalfield in the South East in the County of Kent, there were also coalfields in North and South Wales, the latter being of great importance because of the high quality anthracite that is still there, and in
Scotland.

Do I think it’s true?

Go to the former industrial heartlands of the UK, look around you, then think of the words inscribed on Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral:

SI MONVMENTUM REQVIRIS CIRCUMSPICE

AK, not so very far from where you spent part of your youth in the UK they had been mining coal for at least 400 years. With the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century, south Lancashire was one of the earliest industrialized regions in the world: steam power and the railway transport revolution increased the demand for coal; shafts were sunk deeper because of the ability of steam powered pumps to overcome inundation, and of steam powered ventilation fans on the surface to help sweep the pits of firedamp, whose dangerous presence as the pits became deeper and more “fiery”, was detected by the “Davy” flame safety lamp, invented at the turn of the 19th century. And the coal industry boomed.

Because of the age of the coalfield and the intensity of the mining there, by the turn of the 20th century, the seams mined in Lancashire were the deepest in the world. I worked in the deepest of them all – the Arley Mine (seams are called “mines” in Lancashire and coal mines there are “pits”) – at nearly a mile below ground. The shafts down which I descended to work were 920 yards deep, and from the pit bottom I had to travel almost a mile, descending to different horizons down steep inclines in order to reach the coal faces where I worked near naked because there it was as hot as the hobs of hell.

Any miner will tell you that a pit has a “life”: when it is young and the faces are near the pit bottom, a pit is at its most profitable; as it ages and the coal has to be hauled ever further from the faces to the pit bottom, thereby giving rise to the necessity of hiring more and more men, the profitability of the enterprise begins to decline.

Mechanization was late arriving in the privately owned British mines: labour was plentiful and cheap. In the UK , coal was still mostly won with picks and shovels in my father’s day – the 1930s. After nationalization in 1947, however, there was a massive investment programme for the mechanization of mining. That’s why my pit, deemed a long life colliery with abundant reserves, was thoroughly modernized in 1954. Increased mechanization of the pits also led to a decrease in the workforce. The net outcome of all of this was an increase in the productivity and profitability of the UK deep mining industry. But this investment programme was long term, hence the “Plan For Coal”, a tripartite agreement thrashed out between the National Coal Board, the NUM and successive British governments – including Conservative ones – that had been adhered to for 20 years or so, hence the contraction of the coal industry in the ’60s: the almost exhausted and very old pits were phased out in favour of huge investment in the thick seamed coalfields of South Yorkshire and the East Midlands. That’s why from the mid-’60s you could hear more and more Scots, Welsh and Geordie accents in the Nottingham coalfield: men from the “peripheral coalfields” who wanted to stay in the industry were transferred to the new “super pits”, whereas the old and infirm or just simply indolent were persuaded to leave the industry thanks to attractive redundancy payments commensurate with years of service.

It was this plan for coal that the Conservatives trashed in 1984. In fact, the plans to destroy the NUM and with it the state coal industry were drawn up before the Conservatives took power in 1979. This was the infamous “Ridley Plan” and economics had nothing to do with it but was used as a cover for wreaking revenge on the NUM, the “Enemy Within”, just as “human rights” and “democracy” are used as a cover for US imperial policy.

By the way, as regards subsidies: by far the biggest subsidised industry in the UK was and still is agriculture.

You don’t hear much off the Conservative Party complaining about farmers “holding
the nation to ransom” though, do you?

In 1980 over 80% of UK electricity was generated at coal fired power stations. Thanks to Thatcher, 40% of UK electricity is generated that way, which, no doubt, keeps the Greens happy, but 90% of that coal used to fire present UK power stations is imported.

Batting for Britain?

Remember “the dash for gas” after the closure of pits?

Did the price of electricity decrease after the closure of “uneconomic” deep coal mines?

They’re putting great faith now, I believe, in the shale-oil gas deposits that they say they have found in that very same county where I mined coal almost 30 years ago.

Fracking marvellous!

As regards your comment concerning miners’ co-operatives operating pits, this is exactly what happened at Tower Colliery, South Wales, which was doomed to closure post-strike with all the rest – including, I may add, the whole of the highly profitable, and very modern mines in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, despite the majority of men choosing to work there throughout the strike because of what they deemed to be breach of democratic procedure. The fate of the Notts. coalfield absolutely nails down the Thatcherite lie that the British deep mined coal industry was shut down because of its drain on the national economy. Tower pit, on the other hand, despite being labelled by the National Coal Board as being a hopelessly uneconomic unit, went on under the men’s ownership and direction to become not only profitable, but also to have some 20 years of life after the virtual cessation of deep coal mining elsewhere in the UK. That pit was worked by the men until the further working of its seams became economically non-viable.

I am sure that what happened at Tower would have held true of the majority of collieries in the UK. The pit where I worked had been making huge losses in the early ’80s – sunk in 1878, it had been modernised in the ’50s, becoming at the time the most modern mine in the UK – because of adverse geological conditions. In 1983, I wanted to move off to the brand new, state-of-the-art Selby coalfield in order to increase my earnings, which had fallen drastically because of low bonus payments at my own pit. My manager persuaded me to stick it out at my local pit, saying that there were at least 30 years of winnable reserves there and once we had broken through the fault that was denying us access to our seams, my earnings would increase and I would be able to work there until my retirement.

One year later I withdrew my labour; two years later, immediately after the end of the year-long strike the pit was closed and almost obscene haste its three shafts were capped, thereby in effect sterilizing the vast reserves of coal that are still there. And the super modern pits in the Selby coalfield were closed as well.

Thatcher’s attack on the NUM was a political act of pure vengeance for what had happened to her party a decade previously, a vengeance made even more despicable because of her undeniable class hatred.

And the lie is still being peddled that the miners brought down the Heath government. They didn’t: British voters brought down Heath, and even then the result was a hung parliament with a Labour Party government under Wilson.

More specifically, it was the Ulster Unionists, who decided to ally themselves with the parliamentary Labour Party, that brought about Heath’s political demise – ironically those self-same Ulster Unionists whose Irish policies gave rise to the creation of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain of which Thatcher was a member.

Why do you think British coal mines of the 80s needed modernizing? British deep mining was the most technological advanced in the world. It is British mining technology that is still used world wide. The first fully automated coal face with a power loading shearer was first utilized at a colliery in my home town: that was in the late ’60s.

In 1980, a ton of coal had to be won in the UK for £30 in order for a colliery to be efficient. At the same time, coal was being won in the German Federal Republic for £60 a ton in mines that enjoyed a considerably higher state subsidy than did British deep mines. Thatcher stopped the subsidies. The Germans didn’t, choosing to gradually phase out deep mining and to retrain its work force.

Productivity at British mines had also been increasing year in year out when the Thatcher administration launched its long thought out and well planned attack on the mining industry in 1984.

There were approximately 200 deep coal mines in the UK in that year with about 180,000 miners, whose average age (35) was the lowest on record. There are now, I believe, only 4 deep coal mines in the UK (open cast “mines” are not mines but quarries), yet the same amount of coal is at present utilized in the UK as was over 30 years ago – only it’s almost all imported now.

This is the result of the energy policies of a woman who was fond of declaring that she was “batting for Britain”. She wasn’t: she was batting for own class to which she, the millionaire wife of a millionaire husband, belonged.

Speaking as someone not from the outside looking in through a distorting lens, I should imagine that the vast majority of Russian citizens do not consider Pussy Riot in any way as “heroines”, and it those very Russian citizens who are, as Alexander Mercouris has so rightly in my opinion pointed out, “the only people who ultimately matter” in this instance, .

For very personal reasons I loathed her and now find myself extremely grateful to her!

I loathed her for her being, in my opinion, the root cause of the misery and penury that I endured as a 35-year-old miner during the 12 month miners’ strike of 1984-1985 and for the custodial sentence that I received just two weeks before the end of that dispute.

I loathed her and her government for the post-strike unemployment that I suffered on being released from prison. In fact, after the strike had ended, I, together with a very large number of former striking miners, were blacklisted and had become unemployable in the UK.

Thanks to Thatcher’s policies, I had to leave the UK in order to gain employment (as Norman Tebbit, her employment minister advised, I “got on my bike” – to Germany), which venture resulted in the widening of my horizons and my decision to enter higher education, which was partly undertaken in Germany and the Soviet Union. For this, I shall, therefore, be ever grateful to Thatcher.

In the final analysis, then, I have Thatcher to thank for my having a wonderful Russian wife, three beautiful Russian children and peace and contentment in what the vast majority of Thatcherites would no doubt call a “mafia state” run by criminal former KGB operatives.

If there had been no Thatcher and no strike; if I had continued working underground in my old workplace which had, according to a 1983 seismological survey, at least 30 years of winnable reserves, I should have probably died long before now or suffered serious injury or a debilitating industrially related illness.

As regards that woman’s death: so what? She was 87. It happens to all of us.

She made some right political decisions, not least, in my opinion, her choice not to abandon the Falkland Islands to Galtieri and his Junta. Unfortunately, however, her legacy will not be undone, and it is this legacy that I cannot but fail to judge negatively.

As Shakespeare has Mark Antony say in Julius Caesar:

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.”

Yes, I should have added that one could argue that Russian is a dialect of Ukrainian, though I should think that it would be more accurate to say that both languages originated as dialects of a common proto-East Slavic one.

I checked out “дяковать”, the verb that I could not recognize, by the way, and from which one arrives at the first person singular “дякую”. It means “to thank” (благодарить) and evolves from the Polish “dzięk”, giving “dziękować” (“благодарность), Polish loan words not being uncommon in the Ukrainian lexis.

So the expression translates into English as:

“I thank Thee, O God, for my not being a Muscovite!”

More colloquially and in Modern English:

“Thank God I’m not Russian!”

Which is what I thought it meant at first glance.

It’s not Russian in any sense?

Looks like a Russian dialect to me. I can’t speak Ukrainian, but I’m pretty sure I know what it
means.

4 words in the expression are identical in meaning to Russian: боже, я, не, москаль;

two words have slight pronunciation differences to their Russian equivalents (тебе, что), resulting in slight changes in their orthography when compared to their Russian cognates, including the letter (i) no longer used in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet: тобі, що;

the remaining word I do not know but recognize as a verb, as it has an identical 1st person singular ending of a Russian conjugation: дякую.

Oh, it’s Ukrainian!

So it IS a Russian dialect.

So is this, but it’s a dialect of Russian:

Че те надо?

🙂

Adomanis started bleating about Russian police brutality after the so-called Bolotnaya riot last year when planned attacks on the police took place and rioters tried to break through the cordon near Udarnik cinema so as to gain access to the bridge across the Moscow River that affords access to the Borovitsky entrance to the Kremlin.

I took Adomanis to task about his police brutality allegations and asked him for evidence: he replied that the films showing the police beating the poor white ribbonist freedom fighters was evidence enough of their brutality.

I then queried how he thought the London Metropolitan Police would react if a police cordon of theirs was attacked and broken by demonstrators.

I for one know full well how the British police react to such confrontations off protesters, having on several occasional suffered assault from them. You see, they don’t like having half bricks chucked at them from within crowds. They’re funny like that.

Interestingly, having taken a quick glance at the comments to the Forbes article, a large number of people have stated their opinion that the journalist is a “liar”, that the whole piece is a tissue of lies, that the article smacks of the FSB, that it stinks of the Lubyanka etc., etc.

As regards Berezovsky’s character, I’ve mentioned on other threads that I am acquainted with someone who knew him well in academia and who disliked him intensely. That acquaintance of mine is no intellectual slouch either: he arrived in Moscow as a 14-year-old Wunderkind in order to study mathematics at MGU. At first I thought his dislike of the man was because of his political intrigues and alleged criminality. Not so: he disliked him, he said, because of his immorality.

At first I thought my acquaintance was referring to some sexual peccadilloes that Berezovsky may have had, but that was not the case. I then asked if he was really referring to Berezovsky’s possible amorality, to which suggestion my acquaintance again replied in the negative, saying that Berezovsky certainly knew the difference between “right” and “wrong” but didn’t give a damn about such trivialities and that the only criterion in his decision making processes was to how great an extent any action he took would be of benefit to him.

Russian auto industry protectionism an a par with this perhaps?

Ernst Young has stated in its report “An overview of the Russian and CIS automotive industry February 2012” that “We remain positive about the long-term prospects of the Russian automotive industry and believe that the next few years will bring additional significant investment, particularly in the supplier sector”.

What’s the matter?

Don’t you also wish every success to capitalism in Russia as well?

I asked my wife about incidences of her paying bribes in her pre- and post-Soviet life. She said that she has paid small bribes, and infrequently at that, and that they have almost always been paid to doctors in order to receive a better quality medicine than that provided by the state health care system.

But were these really bribes that she admits paying? She was not being denied treatment unless she made a payment: the doctors in question were, rather, earning something “on the side”, albeit unethically.

I asked her if she could tell me of a bribe she had paid that was not connected with medicine. She told me that when her mother died and on the undertaker’s suggestion she paid him so that he would put make-up on the deceased party’s face. He did a good job, apparently. I told her that that wasn’t a bribe either. She said it was, because she paid him cash in hand. I countered that he was offering an extra service – unethically, maybe – but that she had chosen to pay.

She also told me that she knew of plenty of students that had paid bribes to enter the prestigious Bauman Moscow State Technical University that she attended. I agreed with her that that was bribery. She stressed, however, that no bribe was paid so that she could study there: she gained entry to Bauman off her own bat.

I believe her, because Mrs. Moscow Exile is pretty smart.

All men are corruptible; the least corruptible have the highest price.

It’s not a system. It’s what corrupt people do. My wife spends a lot of time at the school that my children attend. It often seems to me that there is a concert there every month for some “day” or other. The next concert coming up is for “Defenders of the Fatherland Day”, February 23rd. She also goes on school excursions. Last week she went to the Pushkin Museum with my elder daughter’s class. Other mothers and fathers do this voluntary work as well. My wife does not pay the teachers bribes and it has never been suggested that she do so.

It’s the relinquishing of British citizenship if I accept Russian citizenship that deters me from becoming a Russian citizen. If I became a Russian citizen, that would mean that any future children (unlikely, but a possibility) would not be British citizens; more importantly, it would mean that after my death my wife would, I should imagine, find it difficult to get a visa to visit the UK – even if my children should choose to live there.

British bureaucrats make her jump through hoops as it is before granting her a visa whenever we visit the UK as a family, which is the main reason why we seldom go there. They demand to know who her sponsor is (I am) and what relationship, if any, she has to her sponsor (they know full well of our relationship – I had to swear an affidavit at the British consulate and in the presence of the consul during the bureaucratic rigmarole that involved marrying her), how long this relationship has existed (I once angrily told them that I hadn’t picked her up the night before in some bar), how much money she plans to take with her and a full itinerary of her intended travels in the UK and the addresses of the places where she will be staying.

This interrogation always infuriates me! She is, after all, the wife of a British citizen and the mother of three others. They make it perfectly clear to her that if she overstays the period set by her visa, she may be refused any further issue of one.

They mean what they say. They did just that to a former girlfriend who applied to stay with me for 3 weeks in the UK but only returned with me to Russia one month after her arrival with me in the UK. She was never given a visa again, even though the visa with which she travelled to the UK with me was valid for 6 months: they said, when refusing her next visa application, that she had lied to them when stating that she was previously going to stay in the UK for 3 weeks. And I have a Russian acquaintance who lives in England and who is married to a British citizen; this person’s mother was refused a visa to visit the UK: she wanted to travel there in order to attend his wedding.

In short, there would be problems for my wife and me if I relinquished my British citizenship as regards travel to the UK and Western Europe. These problems would mostly stem from the British side. When I explain to other Westerners that I have not applied for Russian citizenship, they always assume that this is because I would become a “prisoner” in the “Evil Empire” if I did so. You see, everyone knows that Russians have no freedom of movement both within and without the Mafia State!

PS I’ve just checked it out and the Russian state now recognizes dual British/Russian citizenship.

I remember now that that “right of abode in the UK” document that I mentioned above and which was granted by the British consulate to my son in 2000 was, in fact, a stamp that they put into my wife’s Russian foreign passport next to my son’s name and which read “Indefinite leave to remain in UK”.

We were told to use my wife’s stamped passport for my son’s Russian exit and his new British passport for entrance into the UK at Heathrow. I remember walking through “UK & EU Citizens” gate there with my son in my arms whilst my wife had to wait in line for ages with the “aliens”.

When returning to Russia, my son left the UK using his British passport and entered Russia using his mother’s. That was in August 2000.

In August 2007 we paid our next visit to the UK, but this time with my elder daughter in tow. I remember now that when I asked at the British consul about the indefinite leave stamp, they just said that that there was no longer any need for one. It was the same when we next visited the UK in 2010 with our younger daughter. As for myself, I just present passport control with my residence permit together with my British passport whenever I come back “home” to Russia.

The last time we all did this multi-passport and, in my case, passport/residence permit travelling was last November after visiting Euro-Disney near Paris: no problems whatsoever, and our outward bound journey was via Riga.

So the law in Russia as regards dual British/Russian citizenship must have changed between 2000 and 2007, as did the law concerning Russian passports and the issuing of them to minors as well as the removal of the “nationality” entry from them.

In answer to that question, I should first like to say that the circumstances that led to my taking up residence in Russia were rather unusual: in 1992 I was unemployable in the UK (blacklisted), had recently been awarded a degree in Modern Language studies (German and Russian) and had been offered work in Russia by acquaintances whom I had met whilst studying in the USSR.

When I took up a teaching position in Moscow 20 years ago, I had no intention of returning to the UK: I do not call myself Moscow Exile for no good reason. I was also no youngster in 1992: I was 43. I met my wife in 1997 and married her three months later in the same year. Our first child was born in 1999 when I was 50.

At the time of my son’s birth, there was, in so far as I had up to then been led to believe, no British/Russian dual citizenship. By British law, my son became a British citizen at the moment of his birth. At the time of the registration of his birth, I had to decide which citizenship he was to have. It was the British consul who told me that, as regards Russian law, I had only an “either/or” choice in this matter. He told me that if I wished my son to have both British and Russian citizenship, then I had to make a statement that I was willing that my son be given Russian citizenship and then, after having him registered, I should bring all the Russian documentation concerning his registration and paternity to the British consulate, where he would be registered as my son and he would be granted a British passport if and when I applied for one.

One year later I applied for a passport for my son and took him and my wife to the UK. When I was handed my son’s passport at the consulate, I was warned not to present it at passport control on leaving Russia lest Russian officials try to seize it, as according to their reckoning he was not a British citizen but a Russian one. My then one-year-old son left Russia on his mother’s Russian foreign passport. She, of course, had applied for and received a British visitor’s visa in order to accompany us to the UK; my son had no need for a British visa because he is British. However, in order to satisfy demands from Russian passport control that he have a UK entry visa, my wife was given a document by the British consul on which was stated that my son had the right of permanent abode in the UK. In other words, he did not need a British visa even though he was a Russian citizen.

It was all a bloody silly bureaucratic game, I know: the Russians knew he was in reality a British citizen as well as a Russian one, but the demands of the Russian law concerning the non-existence of dual British/Russian citizenship were satisfied.

Our second child was born one year and four months after the birth of our first, and the same old silly rigmarole was undertaken as regards her registration as a Russian citizen and her acquiring a British passport.

The reason why I kept my British citizenship was so that my children could acquire it as well. Having a British passport allows them to travel freely throughout the EU and negates visa requirements in many other states, e.g. my children are rather pleased to know that they need no visa in order to travel to the USA to visit Disneyworld. And when we all went to Eurodisney last year, my wife needed no visa as she is the wife of an EU citizen.

So I hung on to my British citizenship in order to widen the options for my offspring. And having married late in life, and having also decided to do my little bit in alleviating the Russian demographic crisis, I decided to father as many Anglo-Russians as my wife would allow me.

Our last child was born 4 years ago. However, when our youngest child was given a British passport before we set off on a visit to the UK in 2010 (my fifth of very short ones there in the course of 20 years), I asked if it was still necessary not to show it at Sheremet’evo passport control, only to be told that all that silly playing around had long ago ceased. So we now travel as a family with a bundle of passports: four British ones and four Russian, and use them where appropriate. Whether this means that there now exists dual Anglo-Russian citizenship, I do not know.

The strange thing about all of this – and it is the British that are to blame for this stupidity – is that although I and my family can all move to anywhere in the EU to live and work (my children because they are British citizens and my wife because she is married to an EU citizen), my wife cannot move to the UK to live and work there: to do that, she would have to apply for British citizenship. However, if she lived in another EU state for 6 months – and this she can freely do if in my company as my wife – she would then be allowed to live and work in in the UK.

So although there are plenty of Russians living in the UK who are citizens of the Baltic States – not to mention Berezovsky and Abramovich’s divorced wives, who are British citizens because their former husbands are fat cats – my wife is not allowed to live in England because she is a damned foreigner and a bloody Russian to boot!

Notwithstanding the fact that I possess a British passport, I have no plans in the foreseeable future for returning to the UK in order to live there with my family, though I do often tell my folk “back home” that I shall return when England is a republic.

In any case, I much prefer living in Russia and I have never been as happy in my life than when I am living at my dacha in summer with my wife and children.

Freedom is an attitude of mind!

This business you did at Taganka OVIR was such a pain because, I presume, you had to get a temporary residence permit quickly.

When I have had to go through this residency permit malarkey, I’ve had all the time in the world because I live here with my Russian wife and family.

I used to get a multi-entry visa every year, but the rules concerning this procedure kept on changing so frequently that in the end I decided to go for the full residency permit for a foreign citizen. The reason why I had not decided to do this earlier was simply because of all the tales I had heard about the tortuous nature of the bureaucracy involved in getting such a permit.

The first thing I had to do in this respect 9 years ago was to apply at Taganka OVIR for the necessary documentation and prove to them by my tax returns that I was earning at least the minimal income as set annually by Moscow City Hall or that I had in a Russian bank account no less than £17,000 (quoted 800,000 rubles) – a sum which, it seems, varies year in year out. This was to convince them that having received permission to be resident here, I should not be a burden on the state. This money had to be transferred from my account in the UK. I contested this rule with the Taganka OVIR director, asking her if all the Tadzhiks lined up outside in the corridor also had to prove that they had £17,000 in the bank. She got rather irritated at my temerity in posing such a question, but then pulled out a file that contained details of all the foreign residents in the Taganka Moscow district who had permanent residency permits. She pointed out that they all had had to prove their solvency in this way. (Interestingly, I noticed that very many of them were Italian.)

Getting this money transferred from the UK was a pain – and it cost, of course.

Then I had to start a trek around Moscow to prove that I was sound in mind and limb.

My first port of call was Bolshaya Tartarskaya St., where I had to prove that I was employed and had a work permit. I had to take to this place documentation from my employer. I then received a stamped document. It cost me a couple of hundred rubles I think – as did all the subsequent stamped documents. All the fees had to be paid in first at a local Sberbank and the receipt of payment shown in order to receive the appropriately stamped document.

On another day I went to a dispensary at Bolshaya Gruzinskaya St., where they did blood tests to find out if I had syphilis, if I was HIV positive etc. Again, a stamped document was duly paid for and received a few days later at the same place.

Another day – another dispensary at Radio St., where I had chest x-rays to prove that I was not suffering from TB. I received a stamped document there right away.

Another day – yet another dispensary – this time at Bolshaya Ordynka St. to prove that I wasn’t a junkie. (I did not make these diispensary visits on consecutive days, by the way: the whole business took several weeks.) The doctor asked if I was drug dependent. “No”, I replied, “apart from ethyl alcohol”. He just laughed and stamped the document. He seemed more interested in finding out if there were such places in the UK as I found myself in then: outside in the corridor there were lines of youths waiting for their freebie methadone or whatever. I assured him that there were.

Another day, and again another dispensary – this time on Tatarskaya St. and almost facing Paveletsky Vokzal; its purpose: to find out if I was crazy. The shrink just asked me if I or any of my family were nuts. I said no. He gave me the appropriately stamped document.

Then on yet another day back to the place on Bolshaya Tatarskaya, where I handed in my collection of stamped documents. In return, I was given a master document, as it were, multi-stamped to show that I had been cleared by all the dispensaries that I had visited and that I wasn’t, amongst other things, a crazy,TB-suffering, HIV-positive syphilitic.

Then I had to visit a hell-hole on Pokrovka St. in which I seemed to be the only European present. There I had to hand in my master document and my passport. I was told I would be informed in due course concerning my application for a full residence permit for a foreign citizen.

I received my “Vid na zhitel’stvo inostrannogo grazhdanina” almost 9 months later at the Taganka OVIR. In all, the whole process took me the best part of a year, most of which time being spent in waiting for the announcement of my having been granted a residency permit.

Three years later I had to undergo the same process once again.

Last year, I had to re-register my residence permit. I expected to have to undergo the same old trek around Moscow once more. To my great relief, this proved not to be the case. Apart from my having become a father yet again, my circumstances had not changed: they didn’t ask me about my finances either.

In February 2012 I handed in my documents at OVIR, which documents I had downloaded on line (progress!), and received my extended by five years full residency permit for a foreign citizen last June. On being handed my permit, I told the girl in the office that I hoped to see her in 5 years’ time.

On no occasion during the processing of my application for a full residency permit was it suggested that there were ways of speeding up the whole procedure. And even if it had been suggested that I make a payment to hurry things up, I should have refused.

Perhaps they realized this whenever they saw my British passport. Matter of principle, old boy!

🙂

How did he know that teachers “expected” bribes?

I have never expected bribes to be asked of me by my children’s teachers nor have teachers ever asked me or my wife for bribes: my children go to school, get taught, do their homework, get their marks. This has been the routine for the past 6/7 years – no veiled suggestions, hints, signs or signals that certain payments may be necessary.

Perhaps some parents are more than willing to offer money to teachers for extra tuition or for the preferential treatment of their children?

That’s the one! Five minutes’ stroll from my house and I’ve never spent more than half an hour there, probably because of the proximity of my house to the place: I get there before it opens at 10 o’clock.

The place is always packed out with Caucasians and Central Asians, but every time I’ve been there they’ve been on other business than mine – probably applying first time for a Moscow residence permit.

You have to apply for that at least 6 months in advance, as such permits have a quota that changes year in year out. Being married to a Muscovite, however, I am exempt from the quota. I should imagine that dodging the quota is the purpose of most bribes.

I applied for my first three-year probationary “permanent” residence permit, 9 years ago, then, 3 years later, for my “permanent” one, and then last year, for my renewed “permanent” residency permit. You have to reapply for a new “permanent” permit every 5 years.

After my visit there 9 years ago, when I started the ball rolling in order to get my probationary residency permit, I then had to traipse around Moscow visiting assorted “dispensaries”. The whole operation took a couple of weeks as I had to visit these places during windows in my work schedule. Just over a year after my application, I got my “vid na zhitel’stvo inostrannogo grazhdanina”.

The reason why so many cops are apparent in the vicinity of the Taganka OVIR is because there is a big cop shop across the street from it.

Funny thing is, I’ve never heard my wife talk about paying bribes. She was born in 1965 and graduated from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University in the late ’80s. She was a member of the Communist Party for about a year – and then it all ended. In short, she was a child of the Soviet Union. I shall ask her how often she paid bribes. As far as I am aware, she has never paid a bribe to anyone during our 16 years of marriage.

I should just like to comment on my experience of Russian education as regards the education of my three children.

My 13-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter attend a local state secondary school (that’s “middle school” in Russian and “high school” in US English) and the youngest, my 4-year-old daughter, goes to a local state kindergarten.

I have no complaints whatsoever about the standard of education that they receive and the professional competence of their teachers. (The director of the school, by the way, is from Dagestan.) In fact, I am of the firm conviction that were they attending school in my home country, the standard of education that my children would be receiving there would be much inferior to that which they now enjoy in Russia.

As regards the kindergarten that my youngest child attends, on several occasions American colleagues of mine have voiced their amazement at finding out that I have not paid a bribe to ensure my daughter’s enrolment there. It seems that they have all done this in order to have their children attend kindergartens. I suspect that the kindergartens that their children attend are so-called elite ones for expatriates’ and New Russians’ offspring.

The fact is, I have “gone native” and live as a local does. My children attend a state school and, as the case may be, a state kindergarten. If need be, I go to my local state polyclinic for medical and dental treatment. Again, my colleagues often voice their amazement on finding out that when I speak of treatment at a clinic, I do not mean a “foreign” one.

I have state insurance and get “free” medical treatment. Soon I shall receive a state pension as well.

I have also been in hospital three times whilst resident in Russia (diphtheria, pneumonia, broken arm) and did not pay for my treatment. I did not pay any bribes there either, nor was it suggested that I do so.

They certainly were precious. I lived in both Soviet and immediate-post Soviet Voronezh, and condoms brought back with me to the USSR/Russia as a result of my toing and froing between that city and the UK were the greatest gifts that I could hand out to my acquaintances.There were Soviet condoms, but they were always deficit. I think they were made in India. I used to joke that they appeared to have been made out of recycled bicycle inner tubes.

But I’ve never had to wait for hours and days at OVIR.

About seven years ago I underwent the lengthy process of becoming a permanent foreign resident of Moscow, which meant my having to visit several “dispensaries” in different parts of the city in order to undergo medical tests. It was all time consuming and tedious and involved pages of documentation, but nothing untoward.

The whole process had to be repeated three years later as the so-called permanent residence permit for a foreign citizen is only a probationary one of three year’s duration.And even then, the “vid na zhitel’stvo” that I have now has to be reprocessed every 5 years and each year I have to register my place of residence at my district (Taganka) OVIR.

I’ll be doing this shortly, and when I do, it’ll take half an hour at most. Yet I hear tales off others of how awful Russian bureaucracy is.

I don’t think it is: it’s just bureaucracy. I’ve experienced similar tedious bureaucratic processing in my home country. I suppose some people don’t want to wait, but even if I’d had to wait for lengthy periods in the past, on point of principle I still would not have considered giving someone a “present” to speed things up. Furthermore, such an option has never been hinted at by any of the many Russian “chinovniki” that I have had to deal with.

Perhaps I have just been lucky.

I’ve made this comment in other threads before and I shall make it here again: I have lived in Russia for almost 20 years and have never paid a bribe to anyone, nor have I ever been asked to pay one.

Several years ago I made this same comment on redtape.ru, an expats’ site in Moscow, and was immediately set upon upon by expat businessmen, who accused me of being a sock puppet and not an expat.

I should add that I am not a businessman and I earn an average Moscow income, paid in rubles.

A contributory factor to my never having had to pay a bribe is probably the fact that I do not drive, so I have never experienced the charms of the local traffic cops at the scene of a breach of traffic regulations.

I have expat acquaintances here who also tell me that they have never paid a bribe.

I always think as regards this matter of bribery that “it takes two to tango”: both the demander and giver of a bribe are, in my opinion, just as guilty as each other in the degree of their unethical behaviour.

Some would perhaps argue metaphorically against this proposition, saying: if there were no prostitutes, there would be no punters. However, I would argue that the corollary is valid as well: if there were no punters, there would be no prostitutes.

So, using the German Siemens company as an example: who is the most guilty party in the alleged payments made by that respected and prestigious company in Russia in order to win lucrative contracts there: the Russian party or Siemens?

Siemens, by the way, has already admitted its guilt in paying bribes in many other countries besides Russia.

It all depends on how you’ve been brought up. My wife and none of my Russian acquaintances throw garbage around. My children sometimes did, and I always chastized them and told them to go and pick it up and keep hold of it until they had found a suitable place to dispose of it. And that’s what my dad did with me.

Thus spake a French aristocrat at the time of the so-called Orleanist July monarchy in France, a French monarchy that had been restored in 1814 after over 25 years of war, first revolutionary and then Napoleonic, had raged throughout most of Europe from Cadiz to Moscow.

In Custine’s imagination, the uncultured French urban mob, “les sans-cullottes”, and peasants that partook in the early part of those tumulteous revolutionary years that resulted in misery for most of Europe no doubt bore more than a passing resemblance to the huge majority of the Russian population that he beheld during his tour of the Russian Empire.

Most of Custine’s caustic observations, however, were reserved for the Russian nobility: Russia’s aristocracy, he said, had “just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be ‘spoiled as savages’ but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like ‘trained bears who made you long for the wild ones’”.

Clearly, Custine considered himself to be a “real” aristocrat.

Custine very likely looked down his nose at what he perceived to be an uncultured people because he was French, a national habit of which nation that is, in my experience, still evident amongst many French citizens, whose culture is mostly consided by themselves to be the epitome of human civilization.

Speak the words “culture” and “American” in front of most Frenchmen and observe the polite reaction.

By the way, I’m very fond of France, its culture and its people.

In my 20 years of residence in the Evil Empire I have never come across this “self-loathing, bullshit pride of Russians who want so badly to be Western” that Ioffe writes about. No doubt she has met such Russians: it all depends on whom you hang out with. And even then, I feel that more and more of those who were so previously enamoured with all things Western, after having waited for a couple of hours for their first bite into a Big Mac and for their first swig of Coca-Cola, are changing their opinion, not least because of the ceaseless barrage of animosity from the West directed at all things Russian and clear evidence that US Cold War containment policies towards Russia never ended.

Oh yes, and US girls are also mostly fat and ugly.

🙂

It’s Udaltsov bez shades!

🙂

Where do the Scots, Irish and Welsh come into this?

That may well be the case, but I cannot find any mention of Navalny on the Narodny Alliance website:

http://peoplesalliance.ru/

Trouble is, “lawyer, politician, and political and financial activist” (Wiki) Navalny has no party and seems to be of far greater importance to Western journalists than he does to Russian citizens.

When I returned to the partially re-united Germany (Königsberg, Stettin, Breslau, Danzig etc. are still Kaliningrad, Szczecin, Wrocław, Gdansk respectively) after having lived in the former “West Germany”, I noticed it to be less tidy than it had been before re-unification. Must be the fault of all those damned Slavs flooding into “das Vaterland”. 🙂

I’ve lived in Russia for 20 years and can largely vouch for what Anatoly says and also feel that what he has translated concerning the Ukraine rings true.

When I walk through the woods along the path that leads from my dacha to the country railway halt in order to return to Moscow after having spent the weekend with my family at our summer residence, I am often dismayed by the mounds of rubbish that I see dumped in the undergrowth: empty beer cans and vodka bottles, household garbage, old shoes, clothes, broken items of furniture, food containers etc. I’ve even seen people pitching their full plastic binbags into the woods without any apparent shame whatsoever as they walk to the station. And what gets me is this: they are middle-class, well educated people; they keep beatiful gardens and cosy little cottages in the country, yet they think nothing of dumping their trash not 100 metres from their summer homes. True, there are many who don’t do this, and our dacha territory has two containers in a specially allotted place and they become full every week and are removed weekly. Nevertheless, the majority, I believe, think nothing of of dumping their rubbish in the woods whilst on their way back to Moscow: it’s not their wood; out of sight – out of mind, and Russia is such a big country – the biggest, in fact – and anything that is swept under the Russian carpet, as it were, becomes invisible within the great expanse of the Russian land.

However, I must stress that I have seen exactly the same kind of behaviour in my native England perpetrated by all classes of people: there are always the bone-idle, lethargic, indolent or “fuck-you-why-should-I-be-bothered” types everywhere. Furthermore, many of these anti-social louts have the attitude that to obey “the rules”, to leave the place as you find it, to be neighbourly to those whom you don’t know and perhaps won’t even care for, is a sign of craven weakness. I think this attitude is especially prevalent amongst many Russian males.

I remember how over 10 years ago I was travelling home quite late by metro, when suddenly I smelt cigarette smoke. Smoking is, of course, forbidden in the metro, and at first I thought the motorman must be smoking in his cab and that there must be a crack in the parittion wall separating it fom the remainder of the first carriage in which i was travelling. And then I saw him. Squatting on his haunches next to the front slide-doors of the carriage was a youth – and he was smoking. At the same time, he was glaring at the passengers, as though saying: “Go on! Try and tell me to stop”. He’d clearly been drinking, but he wasn’t too drunk – not by Russian standards at least.

He finished his smoke and got off the train. No one told him to quit smoking, No one said a word to him. And I thought, if this were in Germany, there would be a riot! (I have lived for several years in Germany.)

I said nothing either.

I suppose I’ve “gone native”.

On 7th August, 2008.

No.

From the above link to Reuters:

“Viewers”, she [Samutsevich] said, “didn’t see us, they didn’t hear us because the federal TV channels have done their best to cut out our speech. They would cut all the episodes from the video (of Pussy Riot performing in the cathedral) where you could hear the lyrics of the songs. And when people hear the lyrics, they immediately understand the purpose of our action”.

She is being rather untruthful.

Samutsevich is spinning the lie to Reuters that the West wishes to hear: that there is no free access to information in Russia; that all information is filtered and controlled by the government.

She is lying through her teeth because she knows full well that the Pussy Riot “performance” that resulted in the imprisonment of two of them can be freely accessed in Russia by anyone anywhere on You Tube. Furthermore, she also knows full well that the words of the lyrics of their “prayer” can be heard on You
Tube and read on numerous Internet sites. She also knows full well that the those You Tube lyrics were dubbed onto the video after they had caterwauled in the cathedral.

A video of their cathedral performance can also be seen in some Russian “Kremlin friendly” on line newspapers such as Moskovsky Komsomolets. That
video recording was clearly shot by a worshipper or visitor on a cellphone
camera and the only discernable lyrics that one can hear them screeching are “Shit, shit, shit, Our Lord’s shit!” Whilst “performing”, some of them can also be seeen kicking their legs high in the air, thereby exposing their crotches as another repeatedly and mockingly crosses and prostrates herself before being
hauled off by a security man.

Of course, they did not intend to offend anyone by their actions – so they claim.

One of the worshippers witnessing all of this can be heard off camera saying “Why are they doing this?” and another says “Prostitutes!”

As one of the PR performers rushes past some worshippers on her way to the exit, one old man says “Fools” and a young man who can be seen hurrying off with the “artistes” replies “You’re a fool yourself!”

I’m sure the young man is Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s so-called husband, whom she now seems to have distanced herself from.

The British racist expression that referred to all except God’s chosen ones, namely the British – more exactly, the English – was, or perhaps still is amongst some: Wogs begin at Calais.

And there is also the barely hidden racist attitude of the Western media towards Russians, in that they are “different”, not Europeans, are Asian, outsiders, barbaric, cruel, not to be trusted, dirty (the “Moscow metro stinks” is a regular Russian meme), drunkards, degenerates, lazy, idiotic, sexually perverted etc., etc. One can, it seems, say anything about “Russians” without any censure whatsoever. I have heard them on more than one occasion being referred to by US citizens here in Moscow as “snow niggers”.

In its twilight days the Exile featured lengthy articles where Ames simply described in crude detail how he had picked up “dyevs” and seduced them. He made no secret of the very young age of some of these girls and in his articles he was often ridiculing their naivity. For a while he lived in Moscow near where I live and one of his seduction venues was a small local eatery eatery called the American Bar (its now a pelmeni house). I used to keep my eyes open for his presence whenever I was near the place to check out the age of his latest conquest. Never caught sight of him though. He was a criminal for sure and should have been apprehended for seduction of minors.

Die russische Deutschen kommen zurück!

http://www.kp.ru/daily/25963/2902157/

I agree: he writes shit. But I find it annoying that his addition of a title to his name, whether bogus or not, and the granting of a title to him by the British government, for some seems to add lustre and authority to the dreck that he writes.

You can’t polish a turd!

Come to think of it, there still is in office a European head of state who, although by all accounts unwillingly, served in the Wehrmacht in WWII: Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, otherwise known as the Pope Benedict XVI.

So von Eggert and Adamkus have joined those honoured ranks also occupied by the Russian traitor and former Colonel of the KGB Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, who was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for “services to the security of the United Kingdom” in the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Somebody somewhere in Whitehall has a wry sense of humour: the CMG is the same award that fictional true-Brit hero James Bond was awarded.

Adamkus, by the way, has the not so-honourable record of being the last living European head of state to have served in the Wehrmacht:

See: http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050511/39967058.html

Of all the German presidents of the German Federal Republic and of the Weimar Republic before that, only one, Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker (1984-1994), had the “von” in his name – and he didn’t use the title “Freiherr”, literally “free lord” and 2nd in the German rank of nobility, being above “Ritter” (knight) and below “Graf” (Count).

In the Bismarck Reich there were no presidents, the head of state being the Kaiser. The Kanzler (Cnancellor) was (and still is) chief of the executive. These were Graf Otto von Bismarck, Graf Leo von Caprivi, Fürst (Prince) Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Fürst Bernhard von Bülow, and Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. After Bethmann-Hollweg came revolution and the abdication of the Kaiser.

Since that time there have only been three chancellors who were either an aristocrat or of the nobility: Fürst Maximilian of Baden, who was chancellor for one month in 1918; Franz von Papen (1932); and Kurt von Schleicher
(1933). After Scleicher came the Austrian corporal who soon took upon himself the title of Führer.