Vladimir Putin is a Goddamned Liar!

Two pairs of articles give profound insights into the state of the new cold war between the United States and Russia.

First, Putin launched a wave of hundreds of Stalin-like raids on human rights organizations including such internationally respected outlets as Amnesty International, Transparency International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the leading Russian outlet Memorial.  When questioned, Putin claimed that these were “routine events.” It was an absolutely brazen neo-Soviet lie.  In fact, records clearly show that Putin’s actions against the NGOs are totally unprecedented in Russian history.  Just as in Soviet times, the Russian government simply doesn’t care about facts and has no respect whatsoever for the people of Russia, much less for other countries.

Then, even as a major article in the Wall Street Journal exposed the “axis of evil” being fomented by Russia across the globe, a shocking story from Reuters reported that there are members of the Obama administration who argue that it would be better to antagonize members of the U.S. Congress than to antagonize Putin. For that reason they want to serve Putin’s interests rather than follow the Magnitsky law and ban Russian human rights offenders from U.S. soil. There’s only one word for such behavior, and that word is treachery.  In Russia, they’d surely jail such venal traitors.

If you want to get  really deep insight into the way Russians see the world, check out a truly crazy diatribe by Vladislav Inozemtsev, the director of the Moscow-based Center for Post-Industrial Studies, in the Moscow Times.   Inozemtsev calls for the U.S. to give Russia “more respect” and to “treat it as an equal.”  His hypocrisy is breathtaking, because Russia certainly doesn’t treat countries like Ukraine and Georgia as equals, and he doesn’t call for it to do so. While claiming that Russia should be treated as an equal, he says 100% of the burden for changing the relationship lies on America’s shoulders, a pretty weird definition of equality to say the least. And he ignores the fact that America’s population is double that of Russia and its economy is ten times larger, making it difficult to see exactly how the two countries could ever be considered “equals.” An avalanche of reader comments expose Inozemtsev’s crazy neo-Soviet propaganda for what it is.

Or check out a recent piece in the MT by Georgy Bovt, showing how Russians delude themselves into imagining that China is treating them like an equal when in fact the Chinese see Russia as nothing but a potential vassal state, a lackey, a barrel of oil into which China can dip its pump.

We are right back where we were at the height of the first cold war. Russia is run by the KGB, and it is descending into a truly bizarre world of self-deception and lies,cut off from the truth after wiping out real journalism and real opposition politics.  Russia fumes with anti-American hatred and spends money it does not have on arms racing and ideological confrontation. The USSR was driven to collapse by these crazed policies. Russia is asking to meet the same fate.

We Told you So!

Over on the powerful and influential American Thinker website, Kim Zigfeld shows how darkly neo-Soviet Russia has already become and says a big:  We told you so!

And on the mighty Pajamas Media website, she decries the outrageous Chamberlainian appeasement being practiced by Twitter, in giving in to the dark neo-Soviet forces in Russia by censoring tweets on demand from the Kremlin.  Google has fought back against these measures with a lawsuit, but Twitter is eager to curry favor with the Kremlin.

If you want to demand that Twitter reverse its outrageous policy of anti-democratic censorship, you can do so by signing this petition.  You can also sign a petition to demand that the Obama administration speak up for U.S. human rights organizations under assault in Putin’s Russia. That one is here.

Even as these pieces were appearing, as if to put an exclamation point on our perspicacity, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was recklessly plunging his country into a full-blown new cold war.  In precisely the manner of Stalin, Putin launched a wave of assaults by Gestapo-like goons on the offices of human rights organizations across the country. Heedless of the consequences, he attacked such lofty rights bastions as Human Rights Watch, Transparency International and Amnesty International.  When his forces moved against two German NGOs, the response from Berlin was swift and furious.  The German state department all but declared cold war.

Putin’s foreign and domestic polices are dragging Russia backwards in time, into its failed Soviet past.  Though even weaker than the USSR was, Putin asks for brutal cold war with much stronger countries, exactly what the USSR did.  Though he knows the consequences of brutal domestic repression, Putin cannot help but seek to liquidate dissent just as was done in the USSR.  The USSR now lies rotting on the ash heap of history. How can anyone expect any other fate for Russia?

Teflon Putin, by the Numbers

Levada Center polling data (Russian-language link) shows that for quite some time now Russians have been deeply ambivalent about their country’s future.

According to Levada, Russia’s most respected polling agency, more Russians have felt the country was on the “wrong track” than the right one in seven of the past 26 months, or roughly 25% of the time — this includes the most recent polled month, February 2013, where 42% of Russians felt the county was on the wrong track compared to 41% who believed it was on the right one.  A fact that ought to disturb the Putin regime is that three of those seven months occurred in the past half year. Only once in the past 26 months did more than half of the respondents believe Russia was on the right track.  In other words, even when Russians think the country is on the right track, they’re not too sure of it (it’s worth mentioning that a consistent fifth of the Russian population has no idea what track the country is on, they’re clueless).

It’s not surprising that Russians think so, given that for instance GDP growth has fallen precipitously in each of the last two years and in each of the last two quarters of the current year, with recession on Russia’s horizon.

But Putin is a Teflon president, and doesn’t receive much blame for Russia’s wrong direction. That one month when a majority of Russians felt the country was on the right track was March 2012, when Putin was reelected to a third term as president  in a landslide.

There is No Truth in Pravda

Is there a more ridiculous publication on the face of the earth than the Russian “newspaper” Pravda? You be the judge.

There is an old Soviet joke.  ”Pravda” is the Russian word for “truth” and there is was also a newspaper in Soviet times called Izvestiya which is the Russian word for “information.” The joke was:  ”There is no truth in Izvestiya and there is no information in Pravda.” These publications were instruments of the Soviet state, reporting lies and propaganda to the people of the country so they could be better controlled and managed, like sheep.

On March 20, 2013, the Pravda.ru website published an op-ed piece from Oleg Artyukov. No information of any kind is supplied by Pravda about Mr. Artryukov’s background or qualifications.

In the article, Artyukov stated: “Noteworthy [sic], there was not too much controversy about Brewington in U.S. media not to mention the fact that he was not represented as a victim of political persecution.”

This was an out-and-out lie.

Bleak Despair for the Russian Economy

In a stunning concession, the state-sponsored propaganda outlet Russia Today has reported that Renaissance Capital, the leading Russian broker of equities, has predicted that Russia could enter a recession in 2013.

The reason for this gloomy outlook is clear: Russia’s growth rate has plummeted from 4.3% in 2011 to 3.4% in 2012 to a projected 2.5% this year; but the latter figure is being handed out by the Russian government itself, and is clearly self-serving.  Renaissance Capital doesn’t find it convincing, and believes that Russia could slip into negative territory before the year is out.

That’s because Russian growth in the first quarter of this year was just 1.4% and this fell to a mere 1% in the second quarter. If this pattern continues through the end of the year, Russia will be flirting with or in recession.

A second stunning admission came from another state-sponsored propaganda outlet, Russia Beyond the Headlines.  It reported:  ”Energy prices were the only reason why Russia avoided a recession trough. Despite all the promises, or, to use the government’s rhetoric, ‘strategic plans’ to reduce oil sales proceeds to 5.6 percent of GDP, its share is still at least double that.”

And the Financial Times completes the picture, noting that even 4.3% growth is far below the level promised by the Kremlin, namely 5%.  So even according to its own data, in the best case scenario the Kremlin will be at a level of economic progress by the end of this that is half what it targeted. In the worst-case scenario, Russia will be mired in catastrophic recession.

And the only thing that will stop recession will be oil prices over which Russia has absolutely no control. That is, Russia’s economic fate is held in the hands of foreigners, not Russian hands.

And the reason for all this is simple:  Vladimir Putin.  Putin has totally failed to wean Russia off what Dmitri Rogozin has called the “needle” of fossil fuel dependence, and he has failed to generate significant growth in any other major sector of the economy. In fact, many areas are a major drag on Russian growth.

The dramatically straight black line shown in the graph above depicts the Russian GDP rate in freefall, descending at the constant rate of nearly 1 point per year. That’s a 20% loss in growth from 2011 to 2012 and a 25% loss from last year to this one.  Even under the government’s own projection, based on this trend next year would be even worse, with growth well under 2%, and recession would be inevitable, particularly if world oil prices decline. If the latter happened severely enough, Russia would instantly head into a major depression.

If not one but two Russian propaganda outlets are willing to admit things are this bad, do you dare imagine how bad they really are?

BBC Knocks Russia on the Canvas

Two recent stories from the BBC stand in amazing juxtaposition to each other, throwing prodigious light on the horror of life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The first was titled “Max Shatto Russia-US adoption death ruled an accident.”

The second was titled “The silent nightmare of domestic violence in Russia.”

The Shatto story explodes the outrageous torrent of defamatory lies spewed forth by the Putin Kremlin about alleged child abuse in the United States.  The parents of this poor child deserve an official apology from Putin, whose minions referred to them as “murderers” without the slightest scrap of evidence.

And then the second story shows which country in the world really does pose horrific dangers to Russian children and mothers:  Russia itself.  More than one Russian woman, for instance, is brutally murdered by her spouse every single hour of every single day in the wasteland of terror that is Putin’s Russia. That’s over 14,000 women per year.

And the two stories are directly related, of course. Instead of focusing on the true enemies of Russian women and children, Russian men, the Kremlin chooses to focus on illusory “foreign enemies” who pose no threat at all.  The level of domestic violence is immeasurably lower in the USA compared to Russia, so blaming the USA for threatening Russian kids is simply absurd.

It is nothing more than a shameless attempt to shift attention away from the failed policies of the Putin regime, exactly the same tactic that was practiced in the USSR.  Which is no surprise, of course, since Putin is a proud KGB spy.  But ignoring problems only makes them worse, and doing so will destroy Russia just as it destroyed the USSR.

In other news, Britain granted asylum to Kremlin foe banker Andrei Borodin, further tweaking the Kremlin’s nose as it proceeds with a formal investigation into the murder of another Kremlin foe, Alexander Litvinenko.   Russia is catching well-deserved hell from every angle in Britain, and we can only applaud and call for more.

Bloggers get it Wrong on Navalny

Two of our favorite Russia bloggers are Brian Whitmore (blogging at The Power Vertical) and Vladimir Kara-Murza (blogging at Spotlight on Russia).  So we were deeply disappointed to see both publish highly misleading reports on the activities of their fellow blogger Alexei Navalny.

Recently, both Whitmore and Kara-Murza wrote about the resignation of United Russia State Duma Deputy Vladimir Pekhtin, who was exposed by the blogsphere as owning vast property holdings in the U.S.A. even as he viciously attacked Americans and Russians who sympathize with American values.  Both Whitmore and Kara-Murza credited Navalny with bringing down Pekhtin, with Whitmore writing acidly that Navalny had “claimed a scalp.”

But the actual truth about Pekhtin was not to be found on either Power Vertical or Spotlight on Russia. It was found instead on the website of Andrei Tselikov (a blog called RuNet Echo operated by Global Voices).  Tselikov reveals that it was not Navalny at all who brought down Pekhtin, but an anonymous physicist blogging from Spain under the moniker “Dr. Z.”  As Tselikov reports:  ”Curiously, while Navalny thanked Dr. Z for giving him a ‘heads up’ on Pekhtin, he never made it clear that around 80% of the materials he posted were first found and published by Dr. Z.”

“Curiously” is the type of language that the milquetoast bloggers at Global Voices use when they want to denounce outrageous misconduct like plagiarism, which is what Navalny is clearly guilty of.   His failure to give due credit to Dr. Z, attempting to steal the thunder for himself, obviously misled both Whitmore and Kara-Murza, who didn’t look deeply enough before lauding Navalny with credit he simply did not deserve.

Whitmore and Kara-Murza also missed another important component of the story.  Their one-sided reporting implies that the downfall of Pekhtin highlights Navalny’s ever-growing power and influence, but the reality is that it shows the exact opposite.  We are delighted to see Navalny return to his roots, bringing publicity to the work of others in rooting out instances of corruption in Russia, which is where his talents lie. But his doing so only further emphasizes the total and disastrous collapse of Navalny’s so-called “movement” seeking to bring political change in neo-Soviet Russia.  Every promise Navalny ever made about that movement was broken, and now it has completely given up its feeble attempt to run candidates for office.  Whitmore’s grossly misleading headline “Advantage Navalny” has it exactly backwards. Advantage:  Putin.

As we’ve said many times before, there is far too much breathless, fawning, rose-colored reporting about the Russian opposition by those who oppose Vladimir Putin.  What these reports routinely fail to remember is that in the end the opposition faces a fundamental obstacle nearly impossible to overcome:  They are comprised of Russians, and Russian vices inevitably bring them down.  We’ve said from the very beginning that Navalny is a dead-end for Russia, he simply has far too many classically Russian faults to be the country’s Gandhi or Martin Luther King.  He’s not even Che Guevara.  He’s just a pretender, whose exploits have sucked all the oxygen out of the opposition room and prevented a more viable alternative from emerging, something that can only delight Putin and help Russia further down the road to national collapse.

Wall-to-Wall Zigfeld

LR/DR founder and publisher Kim Zigfeld offers readers a full slate of columns this week on all three of her major forums:

• On Pajamas Media, Kim gapes slackjawed at Russia’s decision to revive the name “Stalingrad” and return to its failed neo-Soviet past

• On American Thinker, she documents the latest horrifying escalation of Vladimir Putin’s war on the Russian Internet

• And on RUSSIA! magazine, she exposes the breathtaking hypocrisy of Dmitri Medvedev in calling for plagiarism reform while ignoring the outrageous acts of his county’s plagiarist-in-chief, Vladimir Putin.

We can’t think how it might be possible for any reasonable person to read all three of these pieces and conclude anything other than that Russia is a doomed, barbaric state committing national suicide.

Shocking Backwardness in Putin’s Russia

Vedomosti reported on February 14, 2013, as follows (original DR translation, corrections welcome):

Russians live in a constant shortage of municipal infrastructure.  For example:

• Central heating  is lacking in 8% of homes.

• About 11% of homes in cities nationwide do not have a water supply

• There are no sanitation services in 12% of residences.

• There is no hot water in almost 20% of homes.

• Over 30% of urban housing has yet to be gasified.

For 10 years these figures have remained unimproved.  The general deterioration of the utilities sector infrastructure has reached 70%.

These were the conclusions of the Russian Union of Engineers (RCI), analyzing the state of housing in 164 cities across the country. It is easiest to cope with these troubles residents suburbs. Eight of the top ten cities for infrastructure, nine were Moscow’s satellite cities.

The eight cities were Lyubertsy, Pushkin, Krasnogorsk, Podolsk, Odintsov, Balashikha, Shchelkovo and Zhukovsky. Lyubertsy took first place in rankings; it has 14 kilometers of heating network and 16 kilometers of water and sewer network for every square kilometer of urban territory.  This is the highest result in the country. In total length of gas pipelines (12 km/sq. km) the national leader is Barnaul , where 1 square kilometer of the city has 53 km of gas networking. In second place in that category comes Pushkino, where one square kilometer of territory contains over 23 kilometers of such networks. Neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg made the top ten. Other cities showing good performance were Kaluga, Morom, Stary Oskol and Novoy Urengoy.

The worst cities in nation were Samara, Essentuki, Tyumen, Novokuznetsk  and Chita.  In some cities, the situation is close to critical, according to RCI. For example, in Leninsk-Kuznetsk and Essentuki  the deterioration of water and sewerage network is close to 90%.

According to Rosstat, on January 1, 2012 (data through January 1, 2013 has not yet been published):

• 22.2 million Russians have inadequate heating

• 29.2 million Russians have inadequate water supply

• 34.9 million Russians have inadequate sanitation

• 47.1 million Russians have inadequate hot water supply

Rosstat found that 28.3% of Russians must use supplemental heat sources to warm their homes, and 13.3% rely on their stoves alone.  27.5% of households have inadequate electricity supply, with 8% seeing power failures more than once per week.

Closing in on Russia in the Courts

If you want to get a good insight into the true nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just compare a news report on Voice of Russia, one of the Kremlin’s state-sponsored propaganda mouthpieces, with one from the same day on the same topic by Reuters.

Both stories address a ruling in April 2012 by the European Court for Human Rights.  The Court was adjudicating a lawsuit by numerous survivors of the more than 22,000 Polish officers brutally and cravenly murdered in cold blood by the Russian secret police in the Katyn forest during World War II.  First the Russian army arrived on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched while the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Uprising, then they marched in and took the Nazis’ places as occupiers.  Then they rounded up virtually the entire Polish officer corps, trucked them into the Katyn forest, shot them down in cold blood and planted signs making it appear the Nazis had committed the crime, one of the most barbaric in world history.  They did this to eliminate the possibility that these offices might lead another uprising, this time against Russia.

The Reuters story reports truthfully on Russia’s numerous convictions for war crimes in Katyn.  It also notes that the ECHR found itself unable to address the subsequent Russian investigation into the crime, which the survivors also said was a perversion of justice, for technical jurisdictional reasons.  The Voice of Russia story ignores the convictions and only reports on the technical issue, making it appear Russia had been acquitted. It also minimized the possibility that the Polish families would pursue an appeal on the one area where Russia was not defeated, which it in fact they have done.  The appeal is now moving forward and can be followed on Twitter here.  Russia faces national humiliation and disgrace yet again.

Pussy Riot is also pursuing an appeal in the ECHR, asking the court to rule their persecution and imprisonment for singing in church was a violation of basic international norms of justice.

And now yet another legal battle has been opened against Russia. Google, on behalf of its YouTube website, has filed an appeal against Russia’s utterly barbaric new law that permits the government to block any website it wants for any reason, a law which the Kremlin has already tried to use against YouTube in connection with political videos.  Inevitably, this case will end up before the ECHR as well, when Russian courts refuse to apply the nation’s constitution in defense of basic civil rights and liberties.

Russia can run, but it can’t hide from the ECHR.  Russia has already been convicted there over and over again for state-sponsored murder, torture and kidnapping throughout the Caucasus.  Now the legal front is widening, as determined victims of Russian aggression and abuse turn to the ECHR for justice.  Russia is being exposed as a barbaric nation which will not observe basic civilized standards of behavior, thus alienating everyone from political allies to foreign investors.  In the ECHR, Russia’s days are numbered.