(1) If you love Siberian Light, why don't you post comments on it?
(2) If "there are people capable of being both objective, decent and critical of the Kremlin" why don't you post a link to their blog? And while you are at it, please give an example of how such an approach has led to fruitful results in terms of changing Russia in the past.
(3) Did you know that my blog has more published traffic and more links from blogs than any other English language Russia politics blog in the world?
(4) Have you ever made a constructive suggestion to my blog? Have you ever offered some content in the form you "approve" of?
(5) Why do you advise other people to ignore me when you clearly can't?
TALOS
You wrote: "La Russophobe considers Gaidar and the Locusts some sort of 'move towards democracy'"
I challenge you to document that charge by linking to the post where LR said it. If you can't, I challenge you to apologize. We've never written a post praising Gaidar, we've only said he was a Kremlin critic and it was wrong for the Kremlin to try to kill him.
BALBUZ
Do you feel it was wrong for Malcolm X to hate the KKK? Do you think the abolitionists in America shouldn't have hated the slavehholders and waged war against them? Was it wrong for Solzhenitsyn to hate the masters of the Gulag?
You wrote: "It's a bit like giving equal time to intelligent design and to darwinism and letting the viewer/reader decide." You might be interested to know about a blog called "Russia Blog" that only says nice things about Russia. It's funded by an organization called the Discovery Institute, who's goal is to ban the teaching of Darwinism in Russia in favor of intelligent design. I hate them. Is that OK with you?
You wrote: "You have professional haters everywhere." Are you implying I'm a professional hater? I don't receive a penny of income from my blog or anything related to Russia, it costs me money to put it out.
You wrote: "Anyone who will interchangeably use the words "Russia", "the Russians", "Putin", as if the nation, the people, the regime, the autocrat, etc, were all the same, isn't worth more than 2 minutes of my time." Is that the kind of tolerance you'd like to see from La Russophobe? If the Russian people aren't responsible for electing a proud KGB spy president, who is? Do you think Russians are inferior to Westerners like you, and therefore can't be called to account for their actions the way Westerners might be? If so, why do you hate Russians so much?
If you were LR, reading what you wrote, would it make you reconsider your position or would it make you even more sure you were right? Be honest. Russia is the best country in the world . . . except for all the others!
(1) I rarely post comments on blogs other than ET and Daily Kos.
(2) Off the top of my head, Stephen Cohen, Georgi Derlugian, Jerome, several of the writers at intelligent.ru (which appears to be kaput), and ... ok, definitely not decent, but Mark Ames has written some otherwise impressive articles.
I don't personally feel it is my place to save the Russians from themselves. So far as fruitful efforts to change Russia go, I'm struggling to make a fruitful effort to change my own country, you know, the one running about invading countries, spying on its citizens, imprisoning people without cause and torturing prisoners, rigging elections, becoming frighteningly isolationist, and in the grip of some maniacal ideologues. Hint: it's not Russia. So, my hands are full. You're on your own. Good luck and Godspeed. I'm confident the Russian people will adore you when your blogging finally succeeds in freeing them from their oppression. Though they'll inevitably get sick of your shit and wage a possibly bloody coup on your mythology a few decades later.
(3) Congratulations. Especially considering all the competition out there.
(4) Save for one or two times I've been led astray, I don't read your blog. I only know of you because you visit all the blogs focusing on Russia and say confrontational and nasty things to the people writing them. Instead of accepting that fact it's a big world and there are bound to be people who disagree with you, you seem to be under the misguided impression that you can harass people into either agreement or silence, which is profoundly ironic given your concern about freedom of thought/speech in Russia.
(5) Ignore you? Impossible. (See above.)
P.S. I should let you know that I am no expert and have never asserted any kind of objectivity when writing about Russia. I make it clear that I am just trying to get the pendulum to swing the other way and to illustrate the hypocrisy of the American media and its coverage of Russia. I have a deep and perhaps irrational love for the country and its people, and while I can champion democracy with the best of them, I've experienced enough to know that I don't have the answers for Russia, that I don't even have the answers for my own country, and that the answers America has tried to give Russia have been the wrong ones. I don't think there is anything implicitly negative about state-run operations or anything implicitly positive about capitalism. I know that the people I've known are not the backwards crazies unable to get their act together, or amoral and duplicitous figures that the American media has for decades portrayed Russians as. I know that Putin's regime is not a beacon of democracy, but that things are notably better than they were under Yeltsin, and that I'm having "smart and savvy leader" envy at the moment. I can appreciate Putin, Khodorkovsky and Limonov at the same time, though I can't say I'd want any one of them running my country. But then, that's not my predicament, choosing who should run Russia or deciding how they should do it. My predicament, Russia-wise, is monitoring the propaganda spread in my own press, wondering what kind of ideology the belief that "Khodorkovsky is simply too hot to be stuck in Siberia like that" comes under, and generally being in awe of the audacity, resilience, beauty and absurdity of this country.
It's a rather satisfying feeling, once you let it start being about Russia and stop being about you. I hope you can one day experience it. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
здравствулте!
(2) Intelligent.ru is a rabid Russophile propaganda site. Claiming that they are a source of criticism of Russia is an outrage. They publish the craziest of the crazy. Moreover, as you say, it's defunct. Cohen (a frenzied Russophile who is published mostly by his wife in her crazed left-wing diatribe the Nation) doesn't have a blog and I'm not aware that Derlugian does either. As for Jerome, your comments are belied by my view of his text, which is both personally abusive and uncritical of the Kremlin (when it rarely addresses Russia).
You haven't named a single blog (or even author) that regularly criticizes Russia in a manner more "appropriate" to your taste than mine. In other words, your claim is utterly devoid of substance.
The fact that you dare to make statements about the content of my blog when you admit you don't read it makes you an enormous hypocrite. So much for the depth of your liberal values in fairness!
In short, you are not to be taken seriously. Russia is the best country in the world . . . except for all the others!
Interesting info, thanks.
Is this close enough:
You see, Gaidar believed that there was a really good possibility that, given the chance, Russians would go right back to Soviet dicatorship. He thought they'd vote for it. Everybody told him he was crazy, it would never happen, the changes in Russia were "irreversible." But Gaidar still worried. So he decided that it was necessary to transfer Soviet power into other hands just as fast as humanly possible, and he knew it would be messy, very messy. That's why he sold off assets as fast as possible, and why he had Boris Yeltsin tell local leaders to "take all the power you can grab." Granted, many problems would result. But the alternative was USSR II, and a second round of cold war with the USA and a second massive failure, something Gaidar wasn't sure his country could survive. And uh... Gaidar was right. That's exactly what the people of Russia did when given the chance. They didn't give democracy even one decade to work, not even two different presidents. They didn't build a variety of political parties and send forth able leaders. They kept voting for the Communist Party.
And uh... Gaidar was right. That's exactly what the people of Russia did when given the chance. They didn't give democracy even one decade to work, not even two different presidents. They didn't build a variety of political parties and send forth able leaders. They kept voting for the Communist Party.
This is an absurd analysis IMHO, but anyway it does lend itself to the interpretation that "La Russophobe considers Gaidar and the Locusts some sort of 'move towards democracy'". Does it not? The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
I think it's "absurd" to call something "absurd" without explaining how your own view differs. In fact, it's childish and exactly the kind of thing you purport to despise.
Your characterization of our comment about Gaidar is quite insane and offensive. There is absolutely NOTHING in the comment, NOT ONE WORD, about Gaidar favoring a "move toward democracy." The OPPOSITE is true. The post says that Gaidar feared Russia would slip back into dictatorship, so he favored the UNDEMOCRATIC dissipation of assets in order to deprive the center of power when the return occurred. We believe he was right to do so, since the facts clearly show Russia did exactly what he predicted it would do.
Sir, you are way WAY worse than the accuse LR of being. You're a hypocrite the size of Mt. Olympus. You are free to disagree with our view, but to claim it is "absurd" without even characterizing it acccurately is obscene. Russia is the best country in the world . . . except for all the others!
I don't know that I'm worse than "what i accuse LR of being" - because the worse I accuse it of, is that its a bad joke. Actually so much so that it only makes sense as some sort of weird FSB psyops: rabid anti-russianism as a scarecrow that unites russians against the enemy. To rational people, the tone of your blog is such that it creates sympathy for Putin. Think about it. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
Do you know the eXile has a thing going trying to figure out who LR really is? They think it's either the work of an anti-Russia NGO or a lonely American girl. Other people have written in with suggestions about a disgruntled Balkan emigree, nasty Brit journalist, etc. But I think you should send them your theory. She's FSB!
I don't think it's true for a second, but it's a delicious accusation. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
LR's (her?/his?/them?)anti-russian style reminds me of the speeches of Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya, our пламенная революционерка (passionate revolutionary). I adore listen to her, she's kind of Zhirinovsky (but attacks from a western-right side) and for more aesthetically challenged snobs, just like me
:-)
Theory that she's an FSB bug is nice too, not in a kind of some or t'other Nasty Colonel Ivanov from KGB but, say, a retired ex-Soviet journalist who was working abroad for ages could've created such blog. Easy-peasy
I don't think Gaidar ever believed Russia could become a democracy and I don't think he ever said it could. I don't think he ever took any action to promote democracy, and my blog has never praised him for doing so. Your claim that we have is BOLDFACED LIE , pure and simple. You've twisted our words to suit your own propagandistic purposes, and that is an outrage. You didn't even do us the courtesy of quoting us in your original comment. Disgusting!
What Gaidar wanted was to make Russia as benign a state as possible, and to make it as difficult to consolidate power for a dictator as possible. This is basically the same idea that the American founding fathers had. They didn't create true democracy (they excluded women and blacks from voting guarantees), but they did create a government that was failsafe against dictatorship. Moreover, stopping a Hitler is not the same thing as electing a Ronald Reagan. There's lots and lots in between and Gaidar was not so stupid to fail to notice that (even if you are).
It turned out Gaidar was exactly correct, and Russia did almost immediately lapse back into autocracy. Had he not done as he did, Putin's power would be far greater now. He's spent almost his whole term of office scrambling to collect the broken pieces of power left by Gaidar.
Labeling "absurd" views you don't agree with is the mark of a nasty undereducated little child (or a meglomaniac). It's amazing that you can proceed in such a childish and haughty manner and yet dispense criticism of others as being beneath you. A slug's belly is not beneath you. Russia is the best country in the world . . . except for all the others!
Finally - and I mean finally - labeling in an internet discussion (as a side remark outside the scope of one's reply) a stated opinion of an (obvious) non-expert as "absurd", is by no means and in no way the sort of invective you seem to think it is. It's not. It is a statement of dismissive opinion. On the other hand, your demeanor over here has been anything but polite. I really don't think that the proponents of the Ann Coulter school of argumentation can lecture on debating manners. In fact your behavior here (as seen in your reply above) is truly "the mark of a nasty undereducated little child (or a meglomaniac)". And while I might very well be a "moron", I leave our readers to judge our relative IQ levels based on what we have respectively written.
All this if indeed you are not an FSB operative, a possibility that I find more and more likely with each of your responses. If that's the case, you are a genius and you are doing your masters a great service. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
