Curious statistics

Causes of death per 100 thousand of population from 1980 till 2005.

Green – accidental alcohol poisoning
Red – homicides
Yellow – suicides
Blue – road accidents

The essence of Russia

This is a real gem. I don't know how much time it took Robert to write this wonderful column but he caught the the very essence of Russia. Copied and pasted from Moscow News "Is Chaos Key to Russian Soul?" by Robert Bridge:

It was during a walk through my American hometown with a friend from Moscow when I first felt the wide chasm separating the Russian and Western mentalities. During our suburban stroll, we came upon an old vacant house that had been up for sale for months. The owner had died and apparently there was nobody in the family to take care of the property. The lawn looked more like a wheat field, with crazy weeds and wild flowers sprouting up in strange places.

I was just about to explain why the property was such a mess when my Russian friend exclaimed, "You know, this is my favorite yard in the neighborhood."

I started to laugh until I realized that my friend was absolutely serious.

How strange, I thought. While the other houses boasted finely manicured lawns, with grass so perfect you could practice your golf putt, this uncultivated jungle - complete with mouse holes and a beehive - got the best reviews.

About a month later, the house was sold. No sooner had the moving vans departed then the landscapers pulled up to the curb. The lawn was de-weeded, sprayed with chemicals, and given a military-style crew cut. The diehard dandelions - the archenemy of every American gardener - had all been vaporized. The hedges were trimmed into perfect squares and rich black mulch was spread underneath them to give an accurate border at the grass line. To the dismay of my Russian friend, the verdant vegetation had been transformed into an immaculate American yard, complete with the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the freshly painted porch.

I will always remember my Russian friend's opinion of that overgrown lawn, which became for me a metaphor for Russia itself: On the surface, it may seem cluttered, disorganized, haphazard, and perhaps even a little bit dangerous. After all, even weeds are considered flowers in Russia, and in the summertime children wear tediously woven diadems of dandelions.

"Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things" exclaimed a Dostoevsky character, "the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart; so is the blue sky and so are some human beings..."

My first impression of Russia was one of unbridled spontaneity, a soft anarchy of sorts, where rules and regulations seem to take a backseat (without a seatbelt) to the human spirit. This will come as a bit of a shock - if not a breath of fresh air - to many westerners.

The culture shock is immediately apparent on the wild drive from Sheremetyevo airport. The drivers all seem to have studied from different driving manuals and the only reason for the presence of the road police, as far as I could tell, is to pull over the foreign sports cars.

But even on Russian roads, there is an underlying order to the chaos that the western mentality can barely perceive. The drivers in Russia, for example, cut each other off with a brazen disregard that would explode into road rage on American highways. Russian drivers heed the maxim, "nature abhors a vacuum." In other words, if there is an opening, the Russian driver will fill it, be that on a sidewalk or wherever. Yet, fastening your seatbelt is considered an insult to the driver.

And then there are the notorious Russian queues, a phenomenon that deserves serious anthropological study.

In America, when you go to the doctor's office, for example, you take a number and have a seat in the waiting room. When your number is called, the doctor will see you. Pretty straightforward. In Russia, you walk into a riot, ask who is last, and tell that person to hold your spot and then go shopping or something. You return about an hour later and hop back into line like nothing happened. This drives Westerners nuts. Then (then!), while all this is happening, or not happening, people are attacking the gates from other directions, with all kind of plausible and not so plausible explanations.

Yet, in the midst of this chaos, it seems the Russians truly enjoy the lively debate, the human friction, the feeling of being on the edge of god knows what.

Across the Russian capital, the sound of lawnmowers and the smell of cut grass are becoming more common. Grass is sprouting up everywhere. A woman I know even replaced her lush garden at the dacha with grass seed.

Yes, the weed whacker of Western rationalization is slowly making headway against Russian impulsiveness; I just hope it does not supplant what makes Russia so unique.

More on Cold War 2

I already wrote how Dick “Sharpshooter” Cheney gave Russia a very powerful signal – what it should really do to become democratic. Mark Ames has an excellent article (one of his best, I think) on the very same topic “How Dick Cheney Got His Cold War On: A Cold War Timetable” published in eXile.

Cheney's speech raised a lot of questions and a lot of debate, but no one asked one of the most obvious questions of all: Why did Cheney choose to flaunt his hypocrisy in everyone's faces? Why not try faking it, the way most Western leaders operate when they mix righteous words with rapacious policies? Why didn't Cheney choose to put a bit of space in between his speech attacking Russia's record on democracy and his visits to the despotic Central Asian states?
Or put another way, what if it wasn't a mistake. What if the blatant, insane hypocrisy WAS the real message...and always has been all along?

So it was a huge risk for Putin to cozy up so closely to America post-9/11. He went out on a limb, made a bold move against his own powerful base, in the hope that the benefits of a mutually-supportive relationship with America would in the end prove him right and make him, and Russia, stronger.And at first it looked like he might be right, as America was undergoing Pootimania.
But then America won the war in Afghanistan much more easily and quickly than we or anyone else thought. And that war victory went to our heads. Suddenly, we decided we didn't need Putin's help anymore. In fact, as the Newsweeks triumphantly declared, we didn't need anyone's help anymore. America was not just a superpower, it was a hyperpower, perhaps the most powerful (and benign) empire that the world had ever seen.

On December 13th, 2001 after it was clear that Afghanistan had fallen to our allies Bush announced that America was unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.
Putin went on national television, clearly stunned and weakened, calling Bush's move a "mistake." It was a painful broadcast, egg dripping from his face. I've never seen Putin so clearly bitch-slapped before or since.

I remember being shocked at what assholes we'd turned out to be. I couldn't understand why Bush didn't wait even, say, two or three months, at least for the victory dancing to settle down in Afghanistan, maybe throw Russia a bone or two. What was behind the timing?

I contacted a good friend of mine in the Defense Department to ask him why we chose to withdraw from the ABM treaty in such a time and manner as to maximally embarrass Putin for having sided with us. Why didn't we wait?

My DoD friend seemed surprised. "We didn't even consider the effect on Putin," he answered. "We only considered what's in our own interest, which is to withdraw now. Besides, we got rid of the Taliban, that was a favor enough for the Russians in our opinion." At the time, Russian anger over Bush's decision to start building a missile shield was dismissed as old Russian paranoia, a holdover of Cold War thinking. Russia had "nothing to worry about," we said.

Democracy isn't about voting. It's about serving America's interests. And serving America's interests is more tightly defined a serving the interests of the oil oligarchs in Houston, where Cheney spent the previous ten years. In fact, it's even more simple than that it's personal. America's interests are Cheney's interests. Il est l'etat. In that sense, Putin is indeed a genuine menace. And that's what makes this Cold War so different. Whereas the last one was a mortal struggle over two different systems, this is a struggle between two short, balding, bloodless men, and the oil other people's oil that made them as powerful as they are today.

Read more…

Desiphering Putin

Another mysterious Putin’s joke nobody could decipher. A year ago when talking about Polish president Kwasnevki – who said, “Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine” – Putin said, “Think about home! About home!” I thought about this joke when I read a comment from Owen, who believes that Comrade Wolf must be America – what else?!

Here’s the joke. Vova comes back home from school and says, “Mommy! I wrote a four letter word on our fence!” Mother, “Vova, how dare you?! It’s so rude! Who taught you such words! I hate four letter words! It’s so disgusting! You’re only 10 years old! My parents never used four letter words! I was 21 when I heard such words for the first time in my life. Blah-blah-blah!” The boorish dad who was listening to the rant for ten minutes says, “Think about HOME, darling.”

The proof of pudding

The proof of pudding is in its eating. The proof of real freedom of press is in the level of knowledge readers have. No matter how much “democrats” yell that in the West the press is absolutely free, it takes only one conversation with a person who regularly reads what Western media writes about Russian politics to realize – the person knowledge is either outright wrong or very distorted. Take, for example, Owen who posted a comment on my blog. Owen writes:

I think that making a law kicking out foreign NGOs and disallowing foreign money is a pretty good step towards tightening down on a country's civil society.

How did she/he come to such ludicrous conclusions? Didn’t “free and unbiased” press write about it?
The law was about making NGO (not only foreign NGOs but all of them) activities transparent. It means stating where your money comes from and on what exactly projects you spend the money. What kind of activities should a foreign NGO lead that the possibility of openly and honestly answering the question, “Who gives you money?” is regarded as “kicking out” of the country. I bet Owen would never find a single newspaper article in the “free” press that simply stated these facts.

Another good example of “free” press objectivity is covering Russian-Ukrainian natural gas conflict. I bet nobody gives me a single link to any article from any “respectable” Western news source that mentioned the following facts:

- Since 1996 Russia stopped supplying natural gas to Ukraine SIX times. Reasons? Bad debts and gas theft. The usual period of no supply was 2-4 days. Ukraine was wriggling but paying. Also it never siphoned off European gas from its pipes. “Free” Western press wasn’t even noticing those conflicts. The last conflict was different because Ukraine started stealing European gas. In the absurd world of “free” press Russia was accused as an unreliable partner and as a blackmailer.
- Ukraine asked Russia to introduce market prices on gas not the other way round.
- Negotiations with Ukraine started in March and first Russia asked for the price 130 (to be bargained down).
- Ukraine sabotaged negotiations. Putin, Medvedev and Miller told about it many times but “free” press didn’t hear them. E.g. Gazprom delegation could come to Ukraine for a PLANNED round of negotiations just to find out that NOT A SINGLE high ranking official is in Kiev by the time – too busy. Gazprom was asked to talk with interns.
- Ukraine passed the 2006 budget based on $65 per 1000 m3 prices. When Gazprom said, “Hey! We didn’t agree on that price!” Ukraine immediately started a PR campaign – “Evil Russia uses gas as a political weapon! It revenges for Orange Revolution!”. I call this “OJ Simpson tactics.”
- And at this point the “well covered” scandal began. Ukraine says, “We have the budget and we won’t change it. Agree to $65 – you have no other choice”. Gazprom, “Our price is $130. This is a subsidized price as Europeans pay $230 for the very same gas.” Ukraine, “Ok, ok. $70 and this is our final proposal. Take it or leave it.” Gazprom, “We will stop gas supply.” Ukraine, “You won’t dare. We’re pro-Western now. Europe and America will punish you if you doing that.” Gazprom (really mad), “Ok. Our previous proposal is nil. If you don’t want privileged price then you should pay market price. $230, that is”. Ukraine, “Bloody murder! Blackmail! Intimidation! Imperialistic pigs! Mr Bush, please defend us from the tyrant!”
- January 1, 2006. Gazprom stopped supplying gas to Ukraine. Ukraine did what it never did before – it started stealing European gas.

Delirium of the day

It seems like Washington Times editors run out of sane persons to write op-ed on Russian politics. I cannot think of any rational reasons for publishing “Standing up to Russia” by Tsotne Bakuria. Below are some most interesting passages from his article:

They (Russian leaders) dream of restoring the Soviet Union to all its crumbling, dysfunctional glory. They dream of seeing the United States under a red flag (seriously). Communism is a latent virus in Eastern Europe, but forces are bent on seeing it become active again.

I grew up under communism and its harsh, vicelike grip on my country. Drinking Coca-Cola was prohibited.

KGB forced us to drink Pepsi.

Watching Hollywood movies might land you 12 years in a Siberian gulag.

On the other hand selling videos with Swedish hard porn could get you maximum 5 years in an ordinary prison.

Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn? You might as well drink arsenic the next morning and get it over with.

I personally run out of arsenic when I was reading Solzhenitsyn with my friends. That’s why I’m still alive.

A schoolmate of mine showed up one day in a pair of new Nike sneakers. For the next three weeks, he was mysteriously absent from school. The local police took him in for days of questioning.

Soviets were fighting competitors of Adidas (that was produced in Leningrad), you know.

Torturing journalists. Killing opposition voices. I remember listening to the Soviet-scrambled Voice of America in a musty, dank basement, afraid we would go to jail. Cars stopping in the night; KGB officers in black leather coats branding Kalashnikovs, taking innocent people away in the dark.

Those KGB officers also wore chains, high heel boots, runes tattooed on their foreheads. They also spoke with heavy American accent. Almost forgot – watching those KGB officers might land you 12 years in a Siberian gulag.

Do gambling-crazed, oil-rich, nightclub hopping Russian citizens really yearn for their ignoble past?

Tsotne Bakuria is a former member of the Georgian Parliament and visiting scholar at George Washington University. George Washington University is definitely in a very poor state. How can anyone explain why they recruit scholars at mental asylums?

Sovereign Democracy

Vasiliy Ivanov from Izvestia newspaper read transcripts of Cheney’s “New Cold War” Vilnius speech. He found a very interesting phrase “Vision we affirm today is of a community of sovereign democracies [...]". Hold on! But the phrase ‘sovereign democracy’ was re-invented by Putin just a couple of years ago. He meant democracy that is being developed by the people, whom this democracy serves, not by outsiders who know better what model of democratic institutions fits best for the particular country. Putin also hinted that countries, like Estonia or Georgia “built” their democracies simply copying word by word what they were told to do, either by EU or America. We are building are democracy ourselves, making a lot of mistakes, stumbling, doing two steps forward and one step back, but this democracy is ours to its root not a thoughtless copy of some “standard” that cannot even theoretically exist.

The fact that Cheney uses Putin’s phrase is ironic. This very phrase ‘sovereign democracy’ made Russian liberal democrats and US-sponsored NGO’s simply mad. For example, Nemtsov said that if there’s any attribute before the word ‘democracy’ then it’s not democracy but dictatorship. Carnegie Endowment in Russia was thundering that the idea of ‘sovereign democracy’ is dead for a hundred years already. One liberal from Novaya Gazeta even further – democracy today could not be sovereign because the Civilized Democratic International Community decides what is democratic and ‘sovereign’ countries should obey.