More from MosNews.com

Who knew this site had so much interesting content? Some of it is original, some appears to be translated from Russian publications. Here is a digest of sorts:

"Russian Orphans Sold to the Highest Bidder," Dmitri Butrin, Gazeta.ru, April 18, 2005.

Legal proceedings against Irma Pavlis, who a Chicago jury found guilty of involuntary manslaughter of her adopted son Alexei, was in the Russian headlines last week. In the United States, the case did not get as much publicity, with only the Chicago Tribune and the local media paying attention.

But in Russia, logically enough - after all, a six-year-old boy was killed nowhere else, but in the U.S. - the case received at least 50 publications a day. Most of them referred the reader to Chicago Tribune articles and to AP materials. News editors cynically call the Pavlis news "the anti-American sensation" and spent little time working on them: anti-Americanism sells well both in Russia and out of it.

But what's tragic is that behind the "Americans killing our children" speculations few people can see the real problems. [...]

I have a feeling that not only U.S. foster parents, but also Russian adoption officials bear responsibility for the hard lives many Russian children lead outside Russia. [...]

Let's be frank. Child export, a result of Russia's poverty, can be stopped, but there is no necessity to stop it. It will decline as soon as Russian foster parents' priority rights cease to be sold for hard currency. Anti-American invectives are beneficial for the child trade market dealers - they are bound to use them as a pretext to raise the bribe tariffs. [...]

I had a similar reaction to the anti-American tone of the Russian coverage of this case, and was surprised at how many people found their way onto my site using "Pavlis" as a search term - either there's a lot of interest out there, or not much coverage on the English-language internet.

Here's a somewhat interesting piece about the layers of meaning behind the impersonal constructions one often finds in news reports about Russian political events:

"The Unspoken: What a Russian Doesn’t Say," Rita Storm, MosNews, April 28, 2005.

[...] When hiring Russian-English translators, Russian news agency editors are often pressed to say, “But you have to understand — you can’t actually translate it the way it is, you have to reword and explain.” So many Russian news items employ the subjectless phrase — “It has been decided, that…” Or, “It has been decreed, that…” The average Russian doesn’t ask about who did the deciding and the decreeing — you just know it’s ’Them’. [...]

Depending on how informed (or misinformed) they are, and where their loyalties are, Russians remain free to blame whomever for a life they don’t like — because responsibility for decisions and changes is often slyly cast off, in the media descriptions. It floats in the air, appearing to settle on any convenient figure. Eskimos have thirty-seven words for “snow”, Russians have a zillion ways of describing something that was done without the slightest idea of who did the doing.

There are other things that can’t or won’t be said, but are meant to be understood. For example, it’s understood that police officials are, in most cases, to be bribed — but since you can’t actually talk about it, how do you do it? No one asks a Russian driver, why he has a small bill tucked into his car documents — just in case he has to present them to a traffic cop. No one asks, why you pin a couple of big foreign-currency bills to the second page of your driver’s license application. It’s understood.

Some things that are taken to be almost a fact of nature and unquestioned are bureaucratic procedures left in place after the Soviet era. For instance, the vast majority of office buildings one can’t get to without being on some list and having a pass. I don’t mean bank buildings or secret think-tank buildings. Ever have to display your passport and show proof of being worthy to get into a little room with three dilapidated computers and no A/C? Better yet, pass through a metal detector first. It might let you through with three kilos of metal on you (in which case you know it doesn’t work), or it might force you to stop and pile out even foil-wrapped chewing gum out of your pockets, but it’s the order of things.

Or what about “sanitary days”? When a big shopping mall/supermarket near my house shut down once a month for a whole day, it always sported a little note on the door, saying, “closed for sanitary day”. Ask any Russian if he or she knows what a sanitary day actually is, and they won’t be able tell you. But tell him or her that a store or an office was closed because of one, and they’ll nod understandingly. Things like that just are — like rain, or thunder.

Maybe it was never a Russian thing to question why things are the way they are. Maybe it’s a leftover from the days when asking innocent questions could ship you off to the Gulag. Just don’t get too frustrated when you don’t get an answer.

Good advice for any newcomer to Russia.

The last story I wanted to highlight is a month old but relevant because it talks about blogging, natch, specifically the blogger who spread the news of the Tulip Revolution and was covered in this space as a "Heroic Bishkek blogger." The MosNews article about this is headlined with a quote from Morrire herself, "My City Died Last Night."