Another "Sexy Russian Spy"? Exclusive photos here!

Regular readers of this blog know that I try to keep things classy here.  However, I've seen my esteemed Russia-blogger peers make hay on the Anna Chapman story and will not get scooped again! 

It seems that another young Russian lady has been detained on suspicion of espionage, and this one also seems to have enjoyed posting revealing photos of herself on the internet.  Never mind that she was apparently born in Latvia and is a U.S. citizen, Gawker already has the Facebook photos of our "New Sexy Russian Spy," Anna Fermanova.  But Gawker must not know about Odnoklassniki, which has this photo of the latest innocent-until-proven-guilty victim of spymania - and more!

After the jump are some more photos of Ms. Fermanova that Gawker couldn't show you.  As of now, they appear to be available online only here.  Ah, I knew I would be proud of this blog someday...

It's a well-known fact that alleged spies prefer bottle service.

Camo skirt = military background?

A Bond-worthy getaway vehicle.

License to kill.

They use benches like this for dead-drops, right?

Red Sea?

Military training...

Preparing to visit handlers in the Kremlin?

Showing some secret agent attitude.

Navel-gazing

This is the latest post in a highly infrequent series wherein I examine the contents of my server logs (yes, I know there are more important things I should be writing about...).

This time I will be brief and will simply say the following to the individual in Texas insistently searching for "ingredients in russian crepes teremok": what makes up the food of the gods is to be gratefully enjoyed but not to be known by us mere mortals. Please, do you really need to know? Isn't it likely that knowing would take away from the delight we experience while savoring a Teremok blin?

If you're worried about the nutritional value of the ingredients (and having perused the details, it's possible you should be - the mighty Ilya Muromets blin is over 1,000 calories!), check out this helpful chart. If you're trying to reverse-engineer Teremok blini and open up a stand in Texas (I confess I've had visions of exporting the blin-stand business model to the US), I suggest you propose a franchising arrangement - you can get in touch with the Teremok team through their customer forum. And you can read here about one of the visionary individuals who we all have to thank for the heavenly blini. Happily, I can confirm that Teremok appears to be going strong in spite of the crisis - I had the chance to enjoy one of my favorite outlets with friends (and, to be honest, a couple more times on my own) on recent trips to Moscow, and the place was packed.

"Putin goes to Pikalyovo"

This is kind of funny. One thing missing from the Reuters report (below) is that the video was apparently put together by LJ blogger Oleg Kozyrev. Oh, and for those of you who missed Putin's Pikalyovo "I'm-a-badass (-especially-when-dealing-with-my-pocket-oligarchs)" show the first time around, of course there is video.

Putin's hard man image targeted by spoof Web song
July 27, 2009

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A spoof song which makes fun of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's hard man image as the savior of Russia's battered economy has been winning fans on the Internet.

Public satire of Putin, who stepped down as president in 2008 to become prime minister, is rare and state media present the former KGB spy as the main figure handling the crisis.

Putin last month publicly humiliated factory owners in the town of Pikalyovo and forced them to reopen their plants after workers protested against unpaid wages.

"Putin, Putin goes to Pikalyovo. Putin, Putin will make it cool for us," the Russian lyrics say as a bearded man in a suit gyrates. "Putin, Putin is quick to do justice. Putin, Putin is our Prime Minister."

The Russian song, set to a popular 1970s Czech tune Jozin z Bazin, has had tens of thousands of clicks on the www.youtube.com website in recent days.

Putin is Russia's most popular politician and his influence has fueled speculation that he could seek to return to the Kremlin in the future.

The spoof song says an election is just around the corner and that the result will be clear to everyone. But the song ends by saying the next Russian president will be the monster who gives his name to the original Czech song.

That very popular song tells the story of a village monster which ate tourists.

"Jozin z Bazin is the people's choice ... oligarchs, miners and even cops know that Jozin z Bazin will be our new president."

The song can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Ho1H3HmzM

Blizzard and blame

CIMG2112, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

From yesterday's thelondonpaper:

Up to 7 in (17.5cm [sic]) of snow was dumped on London last night after a blast of wintry weather from Russia hit the capital. [...]

The conditions were blamed on snowstorms from Russia and cold air sweeping in from the North Sea.

It's almost enough to make one take a closer listen to those folks who moan about a Russophobic conspiracy within the British media.

Wordle breaks down "tandemocracy"

Now that Andy has introduced us to the wonders of Wordle, I figured I had to apply this fun tool to try to go at the differences between the members of Russia's current "duumvirate," or whatever you want to call it, amateur-Kremlinologist-style. Let's see what a word cloud based on the news feed from Putin's premier.gov.ru vanity site looks like:
The weighty abbreviation for "billions" takes pride of place, "dollars" is not far behind, and VVP's cloud is full of action verbs and meaty nouns.

Now let's compare the word cloud based on the RSS feed of Medvedev's speeches (granted, not a perfect comparison, because Medvedev is not referred to in the third person in any of these items as Putin is in some of the items used to form his word cloud)
Can you feel the difference? It looks like Medvedev really is more of a fluffy teddy bear, giving substantial weight to "cooperation" and talking a lot about being "happy." Obviously it would be foolish to give any weight to this overall, but I'll allow myself a moment of optimism that both Medvedev and his new counterpart in the White House will at least try to "think cooperation."

Synchronicity, intellectual goofiness and Google hits

The past couple of months' uprootings and putting down of roots will (perhaps) be explored in a later post. For now, Scraps returns to the virtual airwaves with a rather frivolous post in lieu of something more serious. After all, "a blog is...a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks."

Others who saw the video clip embedded below summed it up as follows:

In this awesome video for the song “Gorbachov” by Russian metal band ANJ, former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev is an axe-wielding barbarian, destroying zombies who attack the hard working big breasted women of Mother Russia. It really is a thing of beauty. Actually it’s more than that. It’s the best damn music video ever created.

Or, more succinctly:

Wow. Hot Russian women, Zombie Stalins, Gorbachov the barbarian, and erotic food innuendo. What else could you possibly need in a music video?

Indeed. Judge for yourselves (click here to see the HD version):

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

The video's director describes his opus as follows:

Suffice to say it's half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

This apparently made the rounds of RuNet a few months ago, and the link was emailed to me at that time by a fellow GVO Summit attendee. As I sifted through my neglected inbox today, I came upon this link and decided to check whether any of my fellow Russia bloggers have posted anything about this curious production. Apparently, no one did. Perhaps people found parts of it too tasteless, or the music accompanying the video too awful, to subject others to it; on the other hand, I would imagine that Sean could have a field day with some of the symbolism.

Imagine my surprise when, among the Technorati sightings of the video, I found an announcement that the band whose song inspired this crazy clip is performing tonight in my home town. Since we landed here in London exactly a month ago, this discovery tickled my homesickness bone and cemented my decision to post a video that would otherwise be out of character - not that there's anything NSFW, mind you, it's just rather... well, check it out yourself.


PS notwithstanding the potpourri of Google-friendly search terms appearing above, I should state quite clearly that this post was not authored with the intention of driving traffic...

Obligation runs into devotion

As some of my readers may be aware, I've been spending the summer preparing to take the New York Bar Exam. The stress and difficulty of this process is not a proper subject for a post on this blog, however I would like to share one sample multiple choice question which I encountered today in the course of my practice test-taking. This is a question that is supposed to prepare test-takers for the Multistate Bar Examination, or MBE, which is the second day of the bar exam in many states:

Gorby wanted to kill Yeltsin in the most horrible manner possible. He knew that Yeltsin had difficulty sleeping and took medication which nearly rendered him (Yeltsin) unconscious during the night. Gorby decided to burn down Yeltsin's house as Yeltsin slept, and seized his opportunity one night after they had finished playing chess. Yeltsin had taken his medication and was sleeping deeply.

Gorby got a coffee cup, filled it with lighter fluid, lit a cigarette, and put the cup underneath Yeltsin's bed with the burning cigarette balanced on the cup's edge. Gorby knew that as the cigarette burned, it would tip and fall into the cup of lighter fluid, setting the bed on fire. Gorby then left the house. The igniter worked just as Gorby had planned, except that Yeltsin's housekeeper smelled the smoke and called for help before the bed could ignite.

Yeltsin was killed by the toxic fumes emitted by the burning lighter fluid, but there was no other damage to Yeltsin's home except the blackening of the ceiling of the bedroom from the dense smoke.

If Gorby is prosecuted for arson of Yeltsin's house, he should be found... [multiple choice options omitted]

(c) Kaplan / PMBR

Navel-gazing

I try to avoid self-referential posts and indeed have only done one such post dissecting the contents of my server logs in the past - over three years ago! - that I can recall, in which I wrote:

I know this is a sad excuse for a post - whenever weblogs resort to navel-gazing like this, I usually roll my eyes and navigate away. But I hope that my regular readers - all 5 of them - will indulge me just this once.

OK, twice. Anyway, I've noticed in perusing my server logs that people sometimes visit from interesting domains, and sometimes the search terms which lead those visitors here are illuminating. For example, just in the past week or so:

- A visitor from an IP address associated with Ketchum Communications - providers of "really smart PR" to the Russian government - arrived here based on a Google search for abkhazia map 2008

- A visitor from the socom.mil domain (that would be the US military's Southern Command) arrived here based on a Google search for Black Sea Caucasus blog

- A visitor from NATO's Allied Command Transformation (domain name act.nato.int - interestingly, Statcounter still identifies the IP address as associated with SACLANT, although the reorganization of SACLANT into ACT took place 8 years ago) arrived here based on a simple Google search for a not-so-simple guy: rogozin

- A visitor using a computer on the NY Times' network found us while googling first for nashi and mishki and then just for mishki - it also seems one NYT reporter, who shall remain nameless, found this blog while googling himself

- A visitor from Kansas State University found this old post while googling for resurgent russia

- Someone from the European Commission (psbru.cec.eu.int) landed here while looking for something related to Itera

- Visitors from imedia.ru - a domain associated with the publisher of the Moscow Times - arrived here recently searching for moscow blog and abkhazia cement

- And someone visiting from pentagon.mil liked the map of Achara that I posted so much that they checked out the blog's archives for the past three months.

[Update July 15]

One more interesting one from yesterday:

- Someone visiting from the aommz.com top-level domain, which belongs to the flagship of Transnistrian industry, the Moldovan Metallurgical Factory, searching for itera usmanov.

[Update July 23]

OK, I guess I'm going to use this post to catalog a couple more interesting hits from recent days:

- Someone visiting from house.gov, a.k.a. "Information Systems U.s. House Of Representatives," searching for russophobia

- Someone visiting from the State Department, searching for rumsfeld foundation four [sic] central asia

- And this interesting search conducted by someone visiting from Ireland (a bit of an inside joke for the family of SRB commenters)

Colbert: One dead Russian journalist = $571.43

American comedian Stephen Colbert had this reaction to a viewer informing him that his picture is being used on a billboard in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:

“Russians, you may not use my image until you have paid my fee - $20,000.
Which, I believe, in Russian currency, is 35 dead journalists.”

Looks like the country's image may need a little more "burnishing."

More video clips from Colbert Reports past involving Russia.

It's funny because it's true...

This video has over half a million views on YouTube (is that a lot? I confess I don't know...but it seems like a lot, so I apologize if this post is the equivalent of an email forwarding you a joke you've seen five times already) and has been up since last month, but I first saw it today thanks to someone emailing me the link. It is by a KVN team from the city of Perm'.



So basically, a bunch of guys in Perm' got together and - using a comedy skit uploaded to YouTube - did a pretty good job of making the same basic point as Human Rights Watch did in its 2008 World Report about the problem of a "democracy charade" in many countries (see also here for a discussion putting Russia in the context of that report).

Uninspired and overcommitted

For some reason, 2008 hasn't inspired me to write about anything in this space. Oh, I've been following events and collecting links for posts, they just never get written. Sometimes my would-be posts end up as addenda (also known as comments) elsewhere. So, in lieu of a post requiring any thought or research, and in order to avoid having January pass without anything new here, I'm posting a few photos from our summer '06 sojourn to Odessa and points thereabout. The full photoset from that day can be seen here.

Guy selling every imaginable type of light bulb at the 7th Kilometer Market
(officially the Avangard Market - read a great NYT article about the market here).

Кафе-Бар "Ё-Моё," Privoz Market.
The name is a phrase which means something like "Aw, Shucks," in the sense
that it's a euphemism for a commonly used vulgar expression. The window advertises
"assorted ice cream," "cold beer" and "hot dogs." We did not sample the fare.

I don't pretend to know Ukrainian, but I'm guessing the truck is labeled "Live Fish."
Also from the Privoz market. Read more about the market here.

In the beach/resort area of Zatoka, near the Karolino-Bugaz and Limanskaya train stations.
The yellow posters are promoting some sort of adult entertainment -
the sign says "Happy Titties Await You."

Beach in the area of Zatoka. The sign says (in Russian),
"Do not swim past the place indicated by the buoys."

The bulletin board of a "база отдыха" (recreation center, lit. "base of rest") named Micron -
the name is no doubt a relic from the Soviet era when some Research Institute's
employees and their families enjoyed one free trip per year to the Black Sea.
Now anyone can book a vacation there!

Nash Feminizm?

OK, so this is quite visually arresting:

[image source]

The young lady - or at least part of her - is proclaiming, "VOVA! I am with you!" This was part of a Nashi-sponsored fashion-show-cum-rally (at least, that's what it looked like, judging from other pictures, which are replete with Nashi's alarm-clock logo, something the Nashisti casually appropriated from their ostensible ideological opponents, Ukraine's Pora). Commenters on the post where I saw the picture above had a variety of reactions, including:

Is MTS rebranding again? (in reference to the red-and-white color scheme shared by Nashi and a major Russian mobile telephony provider);

I get it, I get it! They're a mixture of pioneers and cheerleaders.

Nice panties, what does Putin's wife think of this?

Our answer to Uggs. (in reference to the young lady's striped valenki)

Other commenters noted that it's time to change the label - to Dima, or to Medved - or responded with variations on the olbansky word песдец - and one noted that the placement of the label was "If we consider the symbolism....not very proper."

The antics of Nashi can hardly startle one anymore, but this is sort of a new level of tastelessness, fetching though the ladies involved may be. It got me thinking about feminism, truly a dangerous road for me to go down, so I'll admit right away that I'm out of my depth in such topics and apologize ahead of time in case I offend anyone.

The thing is, feminism is one of those "Western" ideas that many Russians condemn based on a flawed understanding of the concept. The Russian stereotype of feminists can probably be summed up as "manly-dressing, unattractive women who get offended when you try to open doors for them." Now, much of this has to do with the wonderful fact that Russian women are brilliant at maintaining dignity and power even while observing certain gender roles and playing along as though they really believed it were a man's world.

But I would venture to say that at least some of it has to do with the fact that many people are uncomfortable with this "foreign" idea - feminism and female empowerment - and the changes it might represent, the aspects of essential "Russian-ness" it might leave behind, and therefore feel the need to discredit such a threatening, new, "Western" idea. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the idea of feminism* in Russia may even be as discredited as the idea of democracy.

Thus, while "feminism" in Russia conjures up (false) images of militant, asexual shrews, who in actuality represent an extreme and perhaps imaginary fringe of the movement, "democracy" also conjures up (false) images of people who mainstream Russians have been taught by the mainstream Putin-era political discourse to refer to as the "demshiza" (democratic schizos), "dermokraty" (shitocrats), or "demokrady" (demo-thieves) - in other words, the people who allegedly** brought the country the collapse and poverty of the 1990s.

As I said at the outset, I'm out of my depth here, and perhaps it's a fool's errand to try to turn a T&A pic with a suggestively placed label into some kind of pseudo-thoughtful discussion. But I figured I'd give it a shot.


*Not that there's just one "idea of feminism" in the rest of the world. Actually, this Nashistka's choice of outfits, which might get her blackballed from some feminist circles in the US as a traitor to the sisterhood who allowed herself to be objectified in the service of a male-dominated political system (I mean, talk about "the personal is political"!), might also be hailed by "stripper feminists" - no doubt this Putinista was thinking, while freezing onstage in that bikini, "By deploying femininity as a tool I [am] exposing it as a construction."

Seriously, though, I have no idea about these ideologies, and probably not much room to speculate on as a guy, even as a "sensitive, caring, romantic 90s kind of guy" (anyone else remember that funny turn of phrase?). So I decided to ask Natalia Antonova, the first person I thought of when I pondered who a reliable source about post-Soviet feminism might be. I've emailed her and asked her to respond in the comments here. We'll see if she can take time away from her own writing, commenting, and general saving of the world with the written word to pontificate in this space.


**I say allegedly because in fact the initial collapse and poverty of the 1990s was largely a carryover from the overprinting of rubles and price controls which were in effect in the USSR right up until 1991. What happened later in that decade is often blamed on people like Chubais, but why then is someone like Medvedev - who policy-wise seems like basically a market liberal like Chubais (actually, an ultraliberal like Chubais, according to Maxim Kalashnikov :-) ) - being designated Putin's heir?

Seriously, is it just me or is it kind of funny to hear Gryzlov talk about the Chairman of Gazprom being the "most socially oriented candidate" (I wonder if he meant, "from among the group acceptable to Putin"?) leading a government focused on raising people's quality of life. It's almost as funny as the idea of that famous "statist with a US passport" (and founder of a "youth movement" that's both less famous and less Soviet than Nashi, one with pre-Soviet roots) Boris Jordan "consider[ing] the life of an average citizen" from his near-oligarchic height.

Tongue in cheek

Apropos of the latest gas beef, I can't resist posting this image. It's from a book I bought at a used bookstore that is a Georgetown institution - and that is having a half-price sale this weekend. I bought it partially for the title page you see above and partially with an eye towards dropping a see generally cite to the book in a paper I'm writing this semester about the various types of force Russia uses in the "near abroad" - seems like it might be worthwhile to mention that some of the moves used by Putin & Co. are from an old-school playbook. On the other hand, I still hew to the belief that market pricing for gas will only hasten CIS countries' departure from Russia's orbit. Once the leverage of subsidized gas is gone, Russia has much less to offer.

Ad gone wrong

I took this image from an online ad for AT&T. They are running a similar TV campaign advertising seamless worldwide service for people who straddle places like "Philawarapragacago." The TV spots were directed by Wes Anderson, are quite watchable and get a thumbs-up from Adweek.

But whoever designed the online image above needs to take another look at a globe (a real one, not one with the AT&T logo providing the latitude lines). As someone who has looked at many maps in my life and actually had to consider the relative merits of living in China (well, Hong Kong), London and Moscow, I found it disturbing that AT&T apparently thinks London is closer to China than to Moscow. Hey AT&T guys - London to Moscow is about a three-and-a-half-hour flight; flying on to China from Moscow will take you at least twice as long. Not to mention that anyone operating between London, Moscow and China would have to be crazy to use AT&T for mobile or other telephony.

Random

A few interesting links that I've run across in the past few days:

- Belarusian bloggers present President Lukashenko with his very own "LuNet."

- News.ru's roundup of Russian and foreign media coverage of Patriarch Alexey's speech at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

- Dmitri Minaev, who blogs at De Rebus Antiquis Et Novus, has a series of posts summarizing Yegor Gaidar's recent book about the collapse of the USSR. Well worth a look.

- Popular Mechanics magazine encourages Russians to vote for a Russian mission to Mars:

Архипелаг СОЧИ - or, "Dubai on the Black Sea"

The BBC's Russian website has an intriguing article about a project so crazy it just might come to fruition. A Dutch architect has proposed to create "Federation Island," a 9 billion Euro project that has been signed off on by Krasnodar Krai governor Tkachev, although German Gref said, after the project was presented at the Sochi-2007 forum, that money hadn't been allocated for it just yet.

This idea is, of course, an obvious crib from Dubai's "World" project, which at 300 man-made islands is much bigger than the 15-20 which seem to be involved in the proposal for Sochi. Anyway, it will be intriguing to see whether this project moves forward - if it does, count on Western journalists making (not entirely unwarranted) comparisons between Dubai and Russia - petrostates on the move, shaping the environment to meet the needs of their highest-end real estate buyers.

More fun with Yandex's Pulse of the Blogosphere

Even when his era had ended relatively recently, way back in 2001, Yeltsin was a less popular topic for Russian-language bloggers than Gorbachev:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам ельцын , путин и горбачев


A few of the Kremlin's less favorite people (any other recommendations to add to the list? I have a feeling I'm leaving someone out):


Пульс блогосферы по запросам литвиненко , политковская, закаев и пасько


Oligarchs - fallen and otherwise:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам гусинский, березовский, ходорковский и абрамович

It appears that MBKh is no longer a blogger cause celebre - after some impressive spikes in 2003 and 2005 (corresponding roughly to his arrest and trial), he's received less attention this year than Abramovich or Berezovsky.

A typo about trust

In keeping with our intermittent tradition of highlighting unintentionally amusing statistical typos, here's a recent example from a recent article by news agency Moldova Azi (Moldova Today), which is often plagued by poor English translations:

Among politicians, incumbent Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin is still enjoying the highest trust among compatriots, though his popularity rating is only 15.9%. Following far behind him are the new Chisinau Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca (5.6%), Parliament Chairman Marian Lupu (3.3%), Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev (2.7%). Over 387% respondents stated they did not trust anybody, and 22.4% preferred to mention no names at all.

Putin vs. Porno (and other things)!

OK, my first forays into the pulse of the Russian blogosphere are turning out to be kind of frivolous. But I think this is interesting. Consider this - the Russian blogosphere has consistently mentioned "porno" and "pornography" fewer times than it has mentioned Putin for most of the Putin era. But lately, it looks like Russian bloggers have grown bored with the President and are writing about more...exciting things:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам порно, путин и порнография

On the other hand, this is an especially flawed comparison, because (as I've been told by others) there may of course be other terms people use when blogging about smut, but still...

Moving on, I'm sure the powers-that-be behind the Day of Conception - and indeed Putin himself, who is of course concerned about Russia's demographic crisis - will be pleased to know that Russian bloggers write about sex more often than they write about their president:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам путин и секс

Of course, this probably just means that Russians (like Americans and all other bloggers) tend to blog more about their personal lives than about politics. Here's a more surprising result:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам путин, секс и бог

Yes, it appears Russians blog about God (or at least "god") twice as much as about sex, and roughly five times as much as about Putin. So much for "наш царь и бог."

Putin ancestor unearthed!

It's true - apparently VVP's ancestor was a "sour-lipped" goddess of weaving:



The untranslated part of the caption (after "Auntie Anya") reads "sour-lipped lady," or something like that (кислогубая баба).

Am I wrong about the family resemblance? I saw this in a book I picked up the other day (Russian Wooden Sculpture by N. Pomerantsev) - R.I.P., Second Story of Bethesda - and couldn't resist posting it. Must be the close-set eyes and, um, expressive (not to say pouty) lips.