Is the Pussy Riot reporting over the top?

I subscribe to Registan.net’s RSS feed to stay up to date on Central Asia, and I generally don’t mind them, if I don’t always find them the most professional. But I think their Pussy Riot commentary is really off the mark. Joshua Foust starts off his whopper of a piece, “When Putin Becomes Religion,” innocuously enough, with a summary of the Pussy Riot case, but quickly veers into explaining just how wrong it is that people care about the plight of these women, comparing it right off the bat to Kony 2012:

In a real way, Kony 2012 took a serious problem — warlords escaping justice in East Africa — and turned it into a crass exercise in commercialism, militarism, and western meddling. Local researchers complained about it, and lots of scholars used it as an opportunity to teach how not to do damaging activism.

In Russia, Pussy Riot is doing the same thing — taking a serious issue (Russia’s lack of political freedoms or civil liberties) and turning it into a celebration of feminist punk music and art. Pussy Riot are being unjustly imprisoned, but that doesn’t mean all of the protests against their imprisonment should be lauded.

Wait, really? “A celebration of feminist punk music and art” is the same as “commercialism, militarism, and western meddling?” Madonna’s show of solidarity, for example, is “damaging activism,” and/or the same as a falsified PR campaign that led to military involvement and a Senate resolution? (OK, haha, let’s not pretend that Senate resolutions really mean anything, but still.) Because they don’t seem that similar to me. Let’s read on for a better explanation:

For example, the media frenzy over Pussy Riot’s possible three years in prison is obscuring the much harsher sentences facing their not-famous, not-female co-protesters.

First of all, is it? Would there be more reporting on the Bolotnaya arrests if Pussy Riot weren’t around? Maybe – there is a limited amount of Russia news the West is really interested in hearing (I have tested this hypothesis by talking about Russia at parties) – but can we see some proof? Second, it’s worth noting that no one in that case has actually been sentenced, much less given a “much harsher” sentence. The “much harsher” sentences in question are three extra years of jail time – a ten-year maximum instead of seven.

I guess they’re not pretty girls in a punk band with a naughty name, so they don’t deserve the Amnesty International campaigns and celebrity solidarity. When Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Russia who was arrested after alleging widespread political corruption, died from the abuse he suffered in prison — having never even gotten the courtesy of a trial, like Pussy Riot — there were some peeps of protest by some politicians but nothing on the scale of the Pussy Riots. Russian authorities acted suspiciously after his death, leading many to assume they had something to do with it.

Magnitsky’s death prompted some wrangling in the US Congress, where a bill named after him now awaits enactment. But the many celebrities urging their fans to show concern about Pussy Riot, about Russian women, about the plight of Art, apparently don’t know about the many men, non-punk rockers, regular Russians who face far worse brutality and mistreatment by Putin’s government every day.

OK. OK. The West not paying attention to Magnitsky was not Pussy Riot’s fault. Also, the West did pay attention to Magnitsky, to the tune of over a hundred mentions in the New York Times since his 2009 arrest, and, you know, a Senate bill. (Note: not a resolution.) It wasn’t a Madonna concert, sure, but since you’re so contemptuous of that sort of “slacktivism” anyway, isn’t solemn NYT reporting and legislative activism actually better than a Madonna concert?

Also, can we bring up their gender a few more times? I get that you’re frustrated that the media loves young, attractive women more than middle-aged lawyers – as someone whose time as a young, attractive woman is waning, I feel you! – but this is starting to sound a little misogynist, along the lines of “She only got that raise because the boss likes her tits.” The fact that this case is the one that drew widespread attention to the abuses of the Putin-era judiciary does not in and of itself mean that those abuses have been obscured. Attractive women and serious journalism can and do mix.

But not here, apparently! Mr. Foust’s claim that “focusing on the spectacle of Pussy Riot actually obscures from the real issues that prompted the Pussy Riot trial in the first place” is proven by quotes from a New York Times article about an event in support of Pussy Riot, held at a hip Manhattan hotel and mostly attended by well-off, liberal women and mid-range celebrities for whom he actually appears to ooze disdain:

It wasn’t thousands of people rallying in the streets of Moscow for political freedom that got Le Tigre into Russia, it was three girls in a punk band showing up in her twitter feed. And she responded by going to a poetry reading in Manhattan.

What does Mr. Foust think she ought to have done instead, I wonder? Or does the very fact that she would go to a poetry reading, or Manhattan, negate the value of anything she could do? Look, this isn’t the kind of party I’d go to, either – if there’s a reporter there taking note of Chloe Sevigny’s eyelet dress and flats, it’s probably not my scene – but that doesn’t mean it was completely worthless.

He goes on to protest the numerous mentions of the patriarchy at this event (“I didn’t realize Russia’s biggest sin against freedom was its male chauvinism,” he whines), not seeming to have ever learned that this is a normal thing that happens, different people deriving different meanings from art (which he would capitalize, because Art! How silly and pretentious!). And not seeming to realize that an anti-patriarchy reading of Pussy Riot’s actions would, um, probably not be censured by the group themselves.

He closes his discussion of this article by eviscerating this quote: “Three women standing up against Putin,” she marveled. “They are nobodies. They could be silenced tomorrow. They are sheroes, to the world.”

Kudos for introducing me to the term “sheroes,” but honestly: give me a fucking break. Pussy Riot are not normal peasants grabbed off the road and put on trial for being women — they are rather famous (at least in Russia) political activists who got arrested for political activism. That is a horrible, ludicrous thing for Russia to do, but making them into everyman “boy life sure is hard under government” types is worse than silly. It is ignorant.

Dude, I’m pretty sure that was a reference to Samutsevich’s closing statement:

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial.

(Except “sheroes,” cause that pun doesn’t work in Russian.) But has he read her closing statement? Does he care about this case at all? I mean, it’s fine if he doesn’t, but then why is he writing about it? Oh, right, to bitch and moan:

That’s what is so awful about the way the Pussy Riot media frenzy has played out. Reporters have focused on the most narrow, attention-grabbing aspect of the story (pretty young punk girls being told feminism is bad and put on trial) and have completely ignored that Pussy Riot are part of a larger mass movement within Russia to demand more political freedom that’s being literally, physically, beaten back by Vladimir Putin’s thugs.

Citation needed. I haven’t seen many articles about this case that haven’t mentioned the mass movement, the larger problems with the judiciary, Putin’s thugs. Like, “Move along, folks, nothing systemic to see here, just some poor pretty little girls being pushed around.” Also, again with the feminism-hating. Literally no one is saying this is about “girls being told feminism is bad,” or, as he asserts above, that these girls are being “put on trial for being women.” Are we straw-manning, here? Josh, do you have a problem with women you’d like to talk about?

I’m sorry, but this just sounds like ordinary whining that there are n00bs on your territory who couldn’t ever possibly know or care as much as you do, with a dash of distaste for women who are obviously not as cool and tough and smart as you. From where I’m standing, the Western attention Pussy Riot has gotten is largely a positive thing. It has been coupled with equal attention and support from within the Russian protest movement – hey, another way it’s unlike Kony 2012! – and, with today’s guilty verdict, two-year sentence, and further arrests of dozens of protesters, I think it’ll be great if the media continues to milk the story’s popularity by demanding follow-up reports from Russia.

The mass media, social media, viral media, Ksenia Sobchak remaking her playgirl image via Twitter – none of these are unproblematic. It sucks that most people don’t know that much about the world around them, until someone somewhere gives a push and a story snowballs big enough to roll downhill and smack them in the ass. And it sucks that those pushes aren’t administered fairly. For example, I would love it if the English reporting on this case had done more to explain what Voina is, and what these women’s ties to it are. But Mr. Foust’s argument that the attention Pussy Riot has garnered is wrong or unjustified just doesn’t hold water.

FREE PUSSY RIOT.

Discovery of human embryos and fetuses in the forest exposes Russian government’s deep ambivalence toward abortion

Update 8/17: This post is, alas, no longer all that relevant. I was hoping to get it published by a reproductive rights blog, and I got an offer, but then they forgot about it (I guess). So, I am sticking it here for posterity. Better luck next time!

Last week, amateur mushroom-gatherers in a forest in rural Sverdlovsk Province discovered four barrels containing 248 human embryos and fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. The developmental ages of the remains ranged from less than four weeks to more than fifteen weeks. It was not immediately clear whether the remains were the results of abortions or miscarriages – a question that is currently under investigation by forensic scientists.

How the barrels got there and who should be held responsible is also under investigation. The barrels came from a hospital that was identified by tags attached to some of the remains; most Russian hospitals, including this one, contract out biomedical waste disposal. The contractors have denied everything. No one seems to have records to identify the path the remains took after leaving the hospital. The story has resurrected persistent questions about lack of oversight and inadequate funding that have plagued the Russian medical industry since the fall of the Soviet Union. Additionally, it has stirred up conspiracy theories that the remains were used for medical experimentation or stem cell harvesting.

It has also resurrected the deep ambivalence that many in the Russian government feel about the state of abortion in the country, which has fairly liberal abortion laws, provides abortion for free at state-run hospitals, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, has an anomalously high abortion rate. Russian Duma Deputy Elena Mizulina, chair of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, Women and Children and a constant anti-abortion presence in Russia, has seized on the story. She has used the fetal remains scandal to promote the idea that Russia is home to a sinister black market abortion business: “[Remains of fetuses] at 15-20 weeks means illegal abortion! It’s forbidden after twelve weeks! We’re not talking about the one million abortions [legally performed in Russia each year] but 5-6 million [illegal abortions].” In a separate interview with Izvestia, Mizulina is quoted as saying, “[Abortion after 12 weeks] is unsafe for the mother and is already murder of a fairly well-developed fetus. The remains discovered in these containers were not embryos, but human children – unborn murdered human creatures.” Mizulina is calling for laws educating women considering abortion about where “the so-called medical remains of abortion” end up.

While some illegal abortion undoubtedly take place in Russia, Mizulina’s claims are largely a scare tactic. Her statement about the illegality of mid-term abortions is demonstrably false – Russian law allows abortions after twelve weeks in cases where clear social or medical exemptions demonstrate a “need” for abortion. However, Mizulina’s version of the law could be coming soon. In the 1990’s, when laws were relaxed to decrease the number of illegal “back alley” abortions and ease the burden of unplanned pregnancy on a society reeling from the breakup of the USSR, the list of social exemptions allowing a second-trimester abortion included thirteen items, such as family income below the poverty line, death of the father, or imprisonment of either parent. But Russia has repeatedly scaled back on abortion access since the 1990′s, with lawmakers citing both demographic and moral concerns as justification for restricting women’s rights. As of the law’s latest revision in October of 2011, only one item, impregnation as the result of a crime, remains on the social exemption list.

Legislators aren’t the only ones concerned about the country’s demographics and its moral compass. The Russian Orthodox Church, which has steadily gained both followers and political clout since the fall of Communism and abolition of official state atheism, is vehemently against abortion. In 2010, the Russian Society of Orthodox Christian doctors proposed legislation enacting a 72-hour waiting period for abortions. (It was not signed into law – instead, a variable waiting period of two to seven days, depending on the term of pregnancy, was enacted in 2011.) A press release from the synod’s PR department on the fetal remains scandal called it a result of Russian society’s descent into moral relativism and opined that “society and the state will never solve the demographic problem if people continue to treat their unborn children like trash or raw materials for the medical industry” – an echo of conspiracy theorists’ stem cell harvest fears. The Church will be holding a reading of the Orthodox prayer “For the Innocently Slain” in the forest this Friday, joined by anti-abortion activists.

If Deputy Mizulina’s unqualified medical opinions and proposed use of emotional manipulation to restrict abortion access – and the Orthodox Church’s actions against abortion – sound eerily familiar to American readers, there’s a historical reason for that. The United States isn’t the only country where the resurgence of conservatism has led to a war on women’s reproductive health and a reversal of relatively liberal policies. Anti-choice activists around the world are surely learning at the knee of vocal American activists. The extent to which this particular scandal will shift the landscape in Russia remains to be seen, but it seems likely that it will serve as a symbol and rallying point for those who would further restrict Russian women’s access to abortions – either for a long time to come or until they achieve their goals, whichever comes first.

Gamburgers and gastro- xenophobia

My friend Denise pointed me to this somewhat amusing piece in the Washington Post about Gennady Onishchenko, the Russian public health commissioner (or “head sanitary doctor,” if we are translating literally from the Russian)/Consumer Safety Commission head, and his crusade against hamburgers – specifically, hamburgers from that beacon of global capitalism, McDonald’s.

Instead of citing specific health concerns connected to the consumption of processed meat and/or deep fried potatoes, he invokes the idea that hamburgers are “not our food,” playing off some Russians’ vague sense of superiority of their diet over the American diet – a sense that is deeply ingrained in the culture (after all, Viktor Pelevin in Homo Zapiens famously and evocatively coined the term “govnososy,” or “shitsuckers,” to refer to young Russians swilling Coca-Cola) and has undoubtedly been fed (ha) by exactly this sort of official propaganda.

I say “vague sense” because I have found, personally, that Russians who express these feelings of superiority tend not to know much about either what Americans actually eat, except “fast food all the time;” or about what, specifically, makes their own diet better. Like Dr. Onishchenko, they tend to believe that their diet is more natural, even sometimes using the word “organic” to describe it. (Onishchenko: “If you are fond of American chicken legs, you will get them soon. But Russian legs are better. There are less antibiotics and hormones in them. Our legs are better. Buy our legs.”)

But since all the eggs and chicken I ate in Russia came from establishments called “ptitsefabriky,” or “bird factories,” and since the Soviet agricultural system from which the current Russian infrastructure and farming practices are descended did not exactly prize environmentally sustainable, low-output but high-quality techniques, I think I’ll hold out on believing that one until faced with some evidence. Not that the U.S. food supply chain doesn’t produce foods full of chemicals, preservatives, hormones and antibiotics – it just seems likely that the Russian one does as well.

This sort of culinary jingoism is excusable coming from businesses that have to compete against American mega-corporations in a globalized market – take Nikola, a Russian brand of kvas (bubbly fermented rye drink – I promise it’s tastier than it sounds). Nikola sounds like the Russian for “not cola,” and that’s exactly how the drink positions itself in commercials like this, showing the humiliation of an Uncle Sam lookalike circus ringleader by a bear and a guy whose shirt somehow becomes a traditional Russian peasant shirt when he takes a swig of kvas:

 

Appropriate for a commercial venture, but for the Kremlin? Fortunately, as the Washington Post article points out, Russians aren’t just naively swallowing (oh the puns) what Onishchenko is dishing out. I’d say that they don’t exactly naively swallow McDonald’s, either; my experience is that attitudes toward it are far more ambivalent than WaPo lets on. But in any case, wouldn’t it be more effective and responsible of the country’s head public health official and head of the consumer protection agency to offer data supporting his claims, and not just medically inaccurate claims about Russian DNA (“We are people with established traditions and must not fall for exotic types of food – eat what is inherent to your genetics”)  and sales pitches?

(BUY OUR LEGS.)

Quick links – Eastern European voices on AIDS

A site I spend too much of my day reading, RHRealityCheck.org, is quite invested in covering the 2012 International AIDS Conference set to begin Sunday here in DC, and has two great posts up today from women writing about the challenges facing IV drug users in Ukraine and Russia. Viktoria Lintsova, an activist, mother, former drug user, and person living with HIV, writes on the incredibly restrictive regulations limiting access to opiate substitution treatment drugs in Ukraine. Irina Teplinskaya, who spent 30 years dependent on drugs, 16 years in Russian prison for drug-related offenses, and is living with AIDS, criticizes the Russian government’s drug policies, including the amount of money invested in prosecuting drug crimes rather than preventing HIV and hepatitis transmission among drug users (needle exchanges are illegal in Russia, as they are classified as “drug propaganda”), and the ban on opium substitution treatment. Even given these dehumanizing policies and Russia’s continued attempts to downplay their HIV problem, Teplinskaya claims that Russia was praised as a leader in the region’s fight against HIV at last October’s MDG-6 Forum in Moscow, a high-level event focusing on the region’s progress toward the sixth UN Millennium Development Goal. Maybe this isn’t so surprising – after all, I can think of some other countries that consider themselves leaders, but continue to spend outrageous amounts of money incarcerating drug users, and allow fears of “propaganda” promoting immoral behavior to guide policy on serious public health issues.

RHRealityCheck does great work covering a broad spectrum of reproductive health-related issues, and it’s wonderful to see people from the former Soviet Union, where these issues are particularly acute, getting a platform there. It’s extra-wonderful that these two pieces were written by women giving voice to the huge marginalized population of drug users in the region. You should definitely give them a read. May they garner many page-views!

Young Women in Chechnya

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature, one of my favorite things on the Internet, has a post up today about young women in Chechnya. It’s mostly a photojournal of teenage girls’ lives: high school classrooms, snowy walks through the village, lunch with friends, cell phone conversations held while smoking a cigarette or pulling on a stocking. The photos, by Diana Markosian, are beautiful and evocative. But as Westerners tend to, Markosian focuses her lens on the headscarf as the symbol of repression, and the small space allotted for text means the nuances of Chechen religion, state and society are glossed over.

One theme that remains largely unexamined is the disparate forces pushing girls toward covering. There’s no doubt that many women feel enormous pressure from the authorities – and let us remember, here, that Chechens are living under the rule of a petty dictator of questionable sanity who is loyal to (and was installed by) their oppressors - to cover up, as Human Rights Watch detailed in a report issued a year ago. But several of the photo captions reference the growing popularity of Islam among youth, and show girls who cover up against their parents’ wishes. This is really interesting: the government is moving toward Islam, and the youth are embracing it at the same time.

The reasons for the push from above and the groundswell from below are vastly different. For the youth, this is in line with a larger turn toward religion in Russia, by Muslim youths in the Volga region to the famously disaffected Russian Jews to the country’s Orthodox Christian majority. It is also a lasting effect of Chechnya’s brutal war for independence, which flowed seamlessly between patriotic freedom fight and jihad; a reflection of money and mullahs sent to the region in the last 20 years by rich Islamists in the Gulf; a result of the conflation of Islam and ethnonational identity; and an effect of Chechens’ outsider status in mainstream Russian society. (Even the liberal political opposition in Russia has been known to rally around the cry, “Enough with feeding the Caucasus!”) The government’s promotion of Islam probably also plays a role. And, perhaps, too, it reflects the simple desire of each generation to be unlike their parents.

Another nuanced issue that gets glossed over is bride kidnapping. This is a problem, yes. In some regions, like rural Kyrgyzstan, it is more popular now than it ever was in that shiny idealized ethnically pure pre-Russian past. In almost any form, it is dangerous, sometimes traumatic, and unfair to girls and women. However, it is worth noting that many “kidnappings” are prearranged, either by the girl and her lover or with the involvement of both sets of parents. There is a negotiation phase, in which the girl’s parents have the right to refuse her hand and take her back if the groom is unsuitable (or, one hopes, if the bride is unwilling). Official statistics are hard to come by, as the practice is illegal, which means that it is actually a bit meaningless to say that girls are “often” kidnapped off the street by men they don’t know. In any case, tragic stories like the one Markosian profiles in photo 32 are by no means the majority of weddings.

Unfortunately, the complexities of life in Chechnya can’t be adequately conveyed by girls in headscarves alone. But Diana Markosian’s photos do serve, in conjunction with good reporting, as sensitive, humanizing illuminations of Chechen realities.

Linguistic innovation, the internet, and politics

Educated Russians are the only people I know among whom vigorous grammar Nazism is as voguish as it is among educated native English speakers. (Disclaimer: I don’t know French.) It helps that standard literary Russian is buttressed not only by venerable scolds à la Strunk & White, but by ideologically motivated Soviet campaigns to prove and reinforce the greatness of the “great and powerful” Russian language,[1] a nationalized education system that ensures the standardization of grammar education, and a relatively short literary history that greatly limits the body of evidence for the validity of this or that construction. (Unlike English descriptivists, with claims about Shakespeare’s use of split infinitives always in our back pocket, Russians can only reach as far back as Pushkin, writing in the early to mid-1800′s; before that, Russian was only rarely used as a literary language.) Plus, Russian culture values intelligence and erudition in a way that American culture, frankly, doesn’t. Grammar-induced scolding and nose-wrinkling is a national pastime, at least among the educated elite (Muscovite and provincial alike – to say nothing of Petersburgers, likely the worst of the bunch!).

All of this is a long way of saying that you can find a lot of people complaining about the current state of Russian; the abominable slang that’s worked its way into daily use, from criminal argot to Soviet officialese; the ever-encroaching Anglicisms; the failing education system that does not effectively squelch the pedestrian habit of saying звОнит in place of the correct звонИт[2]. Fortunately, we foreigners get off easy – usually when I use an incorrect or slangy form, the tsk-tsking is directed at the questionable acquaintances from whom I presumably picked it up.

This is misguided, though – while I did learn a lot of slang from my younger acquaintances in Russia and from spending a lot of time on Russian livejournal, I know my way around it better than I let on, and probably deserve to be tsk-tsked in my own right. An incurable descriptivist defender of my native tongue, I can’t resist playing the same part in Russian. Thus, I was delighted when I stumbled upon a speech example that combines, a grammarian might say, Anglicisms and internet stupidity:

Слоупочный слоупок слоупочен.

sloupochnyj sloupok sloupochen

This is a variation on an English internet meme that takes the tautological form “[adjective] [noun] is [same adjective],” e.g. “awkward penguin is awkward.“ What it says is, literally, “Slowpokey slowpoke is slowpokey.” Слоупок is just a Cyrillic transliteration of the English slowpoke. In the adjectives we see consonant alternation between k and ch before a suffix, a feature of Russian phonology. That in itself never fails to delight me – the application of native phonological rules to borrowed words.

Its real brilliance, though, lies in the grammatical subleties of Russian. Russian requires slightly different adjectival forms for adjectives directly modifying nouns (e.g. “tall woman”) and predicate adjectives (in forms like “The woman is tall”). Russian is also fantastically liberal in its use of derivational suffixes, allowing for flexible nouning of adjectives and adjectiving of nouns. Add in the fact that Russian is null-copula – the present tense verb “to be” is omitted entirely – and you have an easily-derived phrase consisting simply of three forms of the same root. Its repetitiveness is both more elegant and less redundant than the  equivalent English form. Beautiful, right? I mean, for a meme.

While I would love it if Russian grammar Nazis gave a little more credit to language innovators and the unique characteristics of Russian that they’re showcasing, I can respect that it’s probably not going to happen any time soon. The anxieties expressed by Russian prescriptivists reflect deeper insecurities – Russian’s loss of status as a language of empire and its weakness vis-a-vis global English; the frailties of the Russian educational system compared with the Soviet one; the replacement of the remembered culture of intellect and erudition with a crass consumerist mentality. Acceptance of language change is a sign of liberalization, but it’s also a sign of comfort and confidence in your language’s place in the world. This raises the question: will the playfulness of the younger, internet-loving Russian innovators fade as they age? If Putin’s third term turns out to be a crucible that decides the fate of the post-Soviet experiment with democratization, what role will it play in the development of the Russian language?

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[1] great and powerful Russian language/великий и могучий русский язык – the Russians are great lovers of compact, easily meme-ified quotations (known as “winged phrases/крылатые фразы”) like this one, which entered the linguistic heritage via a Turgenev poem.

[2] English equivalent: using “bring” for “take.”

Update 2: Gay Rights in St. Petersburg

Back in November, I posted (twice) about Allout.org’s petition to stop legislation in St. Petersburg aimed at making the promotion of homosexuality a crime. The December 4 parliamentary election and ensuing protests put the bill on the back burner, but on February 29, it passed.

The law has gotten more press this time around, and there’s another Allout.org petition to get St. Petersburg regional governor Georgii Poltavchenko to veto the bill. If you’re willing to say that you won’t visit St. Petersburg if this bill is passed (probably a pretty low-stakes claim for most of us), please consider signing. There’s also a youtube video, and Allout.org is currently asking people to leave positive comments there to drown out the flood of negative reactions from Russians and others.

There’s just one thing I want to add to the conversation. A lot of the protest rhetoric I’ve seen so far has talked about not letting a small minority of bigots silence LGBT people and their allies. I think it’s important to understand that a “small minority” is not actually what we’re up against. The bill passed 29 to 5. Fear and disgust around LGBT and queer issues is the cultural norm in Russia, and most Russians – especially those who live outside major cities and outside the relatively young, well-educated internet-using class – aren’t presented with any alternative ways of understanding gender and sexuality. In that cultural context, it makes sense to pass a law to protect innocent children from exposure to the perversion of homosexuality. Many Russians see this as a no-brainer, like laws imposing steeper penalties for dealing drugs near a school. That’s why it’s already been signed into law in Ryazan and Arkhangelsk.

Considering that, I don’t know if this law can be stopped. But I do think the international outcry is important, in that it may help to change public opinion within Russia. Let them see that there are millions of us who aren’t disgusted by gays, who don’t think everything outside a narrow conception of heterosexuality is a ‘perversion’ and don’t fear letting our children know that not everyone is straight, and who consider silencing LGBT people and their allies a violation of basic human rights. It may be true that real cultural change has to come from within, but it can certainly be helped along by pressure from without.

Pugacheva causes Zhirinovskiy to self-destruct

Russian speakers should definitely check out this video from Tuesday’s televised debate between presidential candidates Vladimir Zhirinovskiy and Mikhail Prokhorov. Aging but ever-relevant Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva (think Madonna in terms of star power) asks Zhirinovskiy a long-winded question about, essentially, how Russians can expect him to be a good public face for the country when he’s such a blustering jerk. Things quickly devolve into Zhirinovskiy screaming about how he says and does what he considers necessary, Pugacheva shouting “VY POZOR!” (“You are a disgrace!”) back at him, and Zhirinovskiy responding with increasingly unhinged insults (spoiler alert: he calls her a prostitute) and rants. There’s even Khrushchev-style banging on the table before the moderator, Vladimir Solovyov, finally cuts Zhirinovskiy off.

Someone needs to make a subtitled version of this.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming of waiting for whatever is going to happen in Sunday’s presidential election. Stay tuned!

So, Mikhail Prokhorov.

So, Mikhail Prokhorov announced yesterday that he’s going to run for president of Russia.

I’m not the biggest Prokhorov fan – after all, he got fabulously wealthy off others’ toil in a mine and smeltery in what’s pretty unequivocally one of the dirtiest, most depressing, least livable places in the world.*

But I did like this piece by Anton Orekh of Ekho Moskvy, quoted in the New York Times, where he argues that Prokhorov actually isn’t a bad choice:

Prokhorov definitely isn’t a Chekist. Prokhorov isn’t going to try to build a parody of the Soviet Union. Prokhorov isn’t going to tell us old ghost stories about NATO and America and waste half the budget building obsolete tanks. Prokhorov is scarcely going to suppress the media, beat people with police batons on the street, or leave Churov [chairman of the Central Election Commission] to keep working his magic. Prokhorov is rich, so he’s not running for president for the chance to steal. He’s a capitalist, and it’s high time we started building capitalism instead of this mix of socialism and idiocy.

I don’t agree that people who already have a lot of money can automatically be trusted not to steal more money from the state, or that people who own magazines necessarily won’t suppress the media. But I do like, and wholeheartedly agree with, the bit about ghost stories about NATO and the United States. Compare to what Dmitri Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to NATO, said from the stage at Monday’s allegedly poorly-attended United Russia rally:

There are forces today that consider Russia easy prey. They bombed Iraq. They destroyed Libya. They are approaching Syria. They stepped all over the people of Yugoslavia. And they are now thinking about Russia and are waiting for a moment when it is weak.

This is a pretty common attitude in Russia, shamefully perpetuated and played up by its leaders. Any whisper of interest, any news coverage, any American opinion proffered on Russian current events, is spun as an act of imperialism by evil Western forces that are bent on the worldwide dissemination of lies about Russia and the ultimate destruction of everything Russia stands for. Not that there aren’t legitimate criticisms of American imperialism to be made, but this blatant fear-mongering, this refusal to see the U.S. and its allies as having any interests other than blind aggression toward poor beleaguered Russia, this invocation of Cold War dualities… it’s really tiresome. It’s a way for the elites to make the people feel that they stand together on the us side of us versus them; Russians versus the rest of the world, instead of oligarchs and plutocrats versus the Russian people. And it’s a way to justify Russia’s flouting of international standards of, say, electoral procedures and human rights.

I’m still skeptical that we’ll see someone other than Vladimir V. Putin as Russia’s next president, but one of the most hope-inspiring things about this December is that it seems that Russia’s people are no longer interested in being told, or pretending to believe, that the elites are on their side.

*Just realized that “You’ll Never Leave Norilsk Alive” needs to happen. For one thing, the sun really does come up at ten in the morning and go down at three in the day.

Update: Gay Rights in Petersburg

(Original post here.)

Human rights advocates now have until November 30 to add signatures to the All Out petition to get St. Petersburg lawmakers to strike down a bill that would create a structure of fines for “homosexual propaganda” in any medium that could be seen by children. The petition has almost 230,000 signatures. If you feel so inclined, keep signing!

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress continues to be a great English-language source for news on the issue. Today’s post illustrates the maxim that as a given instance of fearmongering becomes more hysterical, the odds that it will invoke the demographic crisis grow exponentially. Here, we examine not the cancer-causing nature of abortions or the Muslims and Chinese who are poised to overrun Moscow at any moment, but the sinister nature of childcare centers named for rainbows:

​​Elena Babich, a local lawmaker who voted in favor of the legislation on its first reading, explains in a column for Izvestia that the measure is designed to save Russia from the same fate now plaguing neighboring Germany:

In Germany, they have awakened to their ongoing extinction as a nation. But here [in Russia], during the day of the city, we have hanging all over St. Petersburg the face of Peter the First and a bright rainbow. Why the rainbow, when it’s the global symbol of the gays? But here, all around the city – from the kindergarten “Rainbow” to the pharmacy “Rainbow.” All rejoice. Soon we will be rejoicing to the point of extinction.

One correction: Elena Babich was only mentioned in the Izvestiya column – she wasn’t the author of it. (Volsky’s wording makes that unclear, I think.) She’s a lawmaker for the racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (pretty savvy branding, eh?), and hopefully not a good barometer of public opinion. I mean, I would imagine most people would think twice before making the claim that Germany has it all figured out re: the “death of the race” (translated here as “extinction as a nation”).

Also, one linguistic note: Babich sounds just as silly, but a lot wittier in Russian – where rainbow (raduga) and rejoice (radovat’sya) have the same root. We’re rainbowing ourselves to death, here!