"Think I'll lose my mind if I dont find something to pacify"*

I ran across this image while poking around on a website called Obkom.com:


The graphic was from an article about Solzhenitsyn going off on the US "encircling" or "surrounding" Russia.

It reminded me of a more primitive version of the "Russia is encircled by the US" graphic that Siberian Light posted earlier this year, which became so heavily viewed that it crashed the blog.

What's amazing to me is the amount of hubris which underlies such paranoia. Trust me, concerned Russians, encircling your country is the last thing - or close to it - on the US military's list of priorities. Can anyone who looks at how overcommitted our armed forces are really think we are somehow pursuing the additional clandestine goal of "encircling" Russia? A country which, to be honest, was a fairly low priority in US foreign policy circles for most of the years during which this "encirclement" was supposedly taking place? I guess if you're sitting in Moscow, it seems like it's all about Russia. But this just isn't the case.

Yes, there are still some unreconstructed Cold Warriors in Washington; however, when the Russian government publicly overestimates the degree to which the US "threatens" Russia it only plays into their hands by allowing them to justifiably point to increasing anti-Americanism in Russia.

*From Black Sabbath's classic, "Paranoid."

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."

The pulse of the blogs - from Yandex

Yandex has introduced a new feature called the "Pulse of the Blogosphere," which allows one to track the number of mentions of a term (and compare up to six terms at once) within the Russian blogosphere over time. On the FAQ page for this project, currently still in beta, Yandex explains why this might be of interest:

With the help of the Pulse of the Blogosphere you can see how internet public opinion on various events has changed over time and compare different items. Keep your hand on the pulse! [...]

The Pulse allows you to create charts of the frequency of mentions of words or phrases over various periods of time. You can see how public interest to various topics has changed dating back to the moment that the Russian-language blogosphere appeared.

Yandex seems to date this back to the middle of 2001, and they weight mentions based on the number of blogs to minimize distortion created by the explosion in the number of blogs:

Since the blogosphere is growing, a thousand entries five years ago was a bigger percentage of all blog entries than ten thousand today.

I decided to test out this new tool by comparing something the Russian government would rather have people blog about and something it perhaps would rather people blog less about. Looking at a comparison of nanotechnologies and Chechnya in the past year , it is apparent that Sergei Ivanov has achieved a great deal - nanotechnologies in the past month have been mentioned almost as often as Chechnya. Looking at the same search terms over the past several years shows what an accomplishment this is.

I then had to try this new tool out on one of my favorite topics - the unresolved post-Soviet conflicts. Russian bloggers seem much more interested in Abkhazia than in any of the other "unresolved conflict regions" (perhaps because Abkhazia is the only one of those regions where lots of Russians go on holiday):


Пульс блогосферы по запросам абхазия, приднестровье, нагорно карабах и южная осетия

Yes, Yandex allows you to pull html and use it in your blog.

Then I moved on to Putin vs. Bush - the Russian president gets about 4000 mentions a day; the US president, about 1500. Even factoring in Bush's 225 mentions to Putin's roughly 100 per day in English, unsurprisingly the Russian blogosphere is more interested in VVP than in Bush 43.

The flaws in a simple term-based search are obvious - e.g., blogs might refer to Putin as ВВП, and the same abbreviation refers to Gross Domestic Product; in trying to pinpoint Sergei Ivanov, a search for "Ivanov" will be too inclusive and a search for "Sergei Ivanov" not inclusive enough. Also, the interface doesn't seem to accept "or" queries.

Also, it's not clear what blogs it measures - "the Russian-language blogosphere" presumably includes all livejournal sites in Russian, but of course these may not all be based in Russia. For example, it's possible (though unlikely) that Abkhazia's more frequent mention in the tally above is due to a higher number of people blogging about the subject in Russian from Abkhazia and Georgia. And it does return some results for terms like "Bush" and "Putin" in English. But hey, it's still in beta. And I think it's going to be a fun tool to compare all sorts of things.

Immortal Sovok

The eXile reports on the resurgence of propaganda posters and billboards around Moscow:

Russian Propaganda Posters Are Back With A Vengeance
They also have the exact same design
By Alex Shifrin

It all started last year, with a heavier than usual smattering of non-profit and socially minded advertising appearing in the capital. The smattering soon became a deluge. The amount of public service announcement advertising has now increased to such a point that, last week, while driving on the embankment near the White House, it hit me: PSAs now outweigh regular product and service advertising.

Read on...

Global Voices Online recently reported on some old-school billboards ("Putin's Plan - Russia's Victory!") which are apparently more of a nationwide phenomenon than the Moscow PSA inundation that the eXile's article discusses. Not that such billboards are particularly new - I seem to recall seeing ones a few years ago, ahead of the 2003-04 election cycle, that had a photo of Putin (also on the background of the flag) and a quotation of his, something like "Together we will make Russia united and strong." I have a photo of such a billboard across the street from the central market in Kaluga, but it's on an external hard drive somewhere...

Unknown Petersburg

The deadline for submitting photos to this contest has passed (and I'm sad to say that I missed it, too - but at least I can share a few of my SPB photos on Flickr - most of them pretentiously but non-optionally black-and-whitened for purposes of submission elsewhere), but you should still go to the contest information page to see the dozens of pages of submissions that follow (click on the numbers at the bottom), some of which are really amazing work and all of which make me want to go back to SPB with nothing but a camera and a lot of time on my hands. Alas, that's not likely to happen soon.

Rumsfeld in retirement - looking out for Central Asia

WaPo's interview with the departed SecDef leads with his comments about the tempest in a teapot surrounding MoveOn's Petraeus ad (don't our leaders and newspapers have more important things to be discussing?). What I found more interesting was Rummy's apparent commitment to microfinance and to bolstering Central Asia's image and perhaps its lobbying clout in the US.

Rumsfeld Foundation to Encourage Public Service
Fellowships Planned; Group Also Aims to Support Micro-Enterprise, Central Asia
By Bradley Graham
Monday, September 17, 2007; Page A06

[...]Now that he is out of office, he has devised a foundation with this concern in mind. The foundation's general goal, he said, is to "encourage reasoned and civil debate" about a range of global challenges. A major feature will be student fellowships to promote study after college in fields related to public policy, with the hope of encouraging young people to go into government.

Word that Rumsfeld is developing a fellowship programsurfaced in news reports several months ago. But in the interview -- his first detailed discussion of the foundation -- Rumsfeld described a broader mission, saying the foundation will also help finance loans to "micro-enterprises" in developing countries and try to generate support for Central Asian republics. Additionally, it will fund lectures on various topics. [...]

Rumsfeld became wealthy during a 24-year business career between stints in government. A family foundation, set up in 1985 by him and his wife, Joyce, is now valued at about $20 million and makes charitable contributions to dozens of groups a year. [...]

Details about the number and size of the Rumsfeld fellowships have yet to be worked out. But they will not be attached to a particular school, going instead to individuals for study in foreign and national security affairs, economics, and other public policy fields. [...]

Rumsfeld has long spoken of the need to encourage government service. The other main aims of his foundation -- loans to micro-enterprises and help for Central Asian republics -- reflect more recent interests.

Micro-enterprise is a burgeoning global phenomenon in which people who lack access to normal credit receive financing to operate small businesses. It has proved to be an economic boon to some poor regions. Rumsfeld noted that the repayment rates have been high, and he said such loans have the advantage of bypassing sometimes corrupt governments and landing directly in the hands of beneficiaries.

His focus on Central Asian republics such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan stems from a concern that they lack the U.S.-based support groups that benefited the Eastern European states in their transition from communist rule. "We don't have, in Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh, Uzbeks or Tajiks or Kazakhs," Rumsfeld said. "I think that we need to have people who understand what's going on in Central Asia . . . and the difficulty of that transition."

This is intriguing on a couple of levels. Rumsfeld likes microfinance because it bypasses corrupt governments, but he seems to want to support image-buffing and profile-raising efforts for a region that has a reputation for some of the most corrupt governments in the post-Soviet space.

Furthermore, while it's true that Central Asian countries have lacked the strong US lobbies enjoyed by countries like Poland, the Baltics, Armenia and Ukraine, they certainly haven't been without their voices of support in Washington - who needs a diaspora when you have professional lobbyists and James Giffen? And does the comparison to East European ethnic lobbies mean that Rumsfeld's goal for the Central Asian countries would be the same as what seemed to be the number-one US-related goal for the Poles and the Balts - NATO membership? Actually, I doubt it. But if anyone in the conspiracy-osphere notices this, expect comments about how Rummy's support is gravitating towards where the hydrocarbons are.

More seriously, since it's impossible to create a committed and cohesive ethnic diaspora from scratch (and since many of the immigrants to the US from Central Asia are not representatives of indigenous ethnic groups - for example, the infamous Alexey Vayner), it will be interesting to see what Rummy's foundation's approach will be to creating US-based "support groups" for the Central Asian countries. Actually, it will be interesting to see whether anything comes of this at all.

From one unknown to another

Farewell, Mr. Fradkov - we hardly knew ye. In 2004, when Mikhail Fradkov ascended to the Prime Minister's chair, it seemed as though he was selected for his greyness, his unspectacular neutrality and inability to compete with Putin for the spotlight - he was the perfect antidote to the man he replaced, Mikhail Kasyanov, who was by then one of the final remnants of the Yeltsin years and was increasingly at odds with Putin. Consider this humorous portrayal of the general perception of Fradkov. Ever the loyal servant, Fradkov has now tendered his resignation, linking it to "upcoming large political events in the country."

Immediate speculation (reported by the BBC, among others) was that Sergei Ivanov would become Prime Minister, and that this would be the revelation that everyone's been waiting for of Putin's choice of successor. In an early version of its story about Fradkov's resignation (no longer linkable, and it may just be a story they picked up from the RIAN wire), speculating about Ivanov's coming promotion, Vedomosti even had the following paragraph, which bears the familiar musk of Kremlinological tea-leaf-reading:

Since the beginning of the summer Ivanov has been prominent on the domestic political scene: he has been influencing policy related to the creation of state corporations in the areas of nanotechnologies, united aircraft- and ship-building, and others, says Troika Dialog chief economist Evgenii Gavrilenkov. The President often appears in public next to Ivanov. At the end of June, Putin and Ivanov inspected military hardware in Rostov-on-Don, sampled the local bread and took a ride on a combine; in August, they participated in a meeting of the State Council in Astrakhan' and visited a sturgeon-breeding center; more recently they watched flight shows at the MAKS airshow together.

There was also this bylined Vedomosti piece today headlined "Medvedev Awaits the Reshuffle," discussing rumors that Ivanov would be tapped for the PM job and suggesting that Dmitry Medvedev's chances in the 2008 succession battle may be waning (Medvedev and Ivanov, of course, have been set up by Putin and the media as the two main contenders to take over the presidency in 2008). That article added to the list of Sergei and Vladimir's recent dates:

Putin and Ivanov were also together at City Day celebrations in Moscow and arrived in Kamchatka together on September 5.

Medvedev appeared with Putin only on Moscow's City Day.

This tendency [of Ivanov appearing more with Putin] is apparent in the media as well: Putin and Ivanov appeared in the same news stories one and a half times more often than Putin and Medvedev (see graphic on page A1 [sadly, I can't find this online]), according to research from Medialogiia, and the difference is especially great on television: in August, the score was 33 to 8 in Ivanov's favor; in September, 42 to 26. [translations of these Vedomosti excerpts are by me]

It seems, however, that in spite of all the tea-leaf-reading by the media and all the time spent with his bff Seryoga, VVP is not ready to tip his hand regarding the 2008 question. So, according to RIAN and to the updated Vedomosti story, his nominee for the position of Prime Minister will be (like his nominee to replace Sergei Ivanov as Defense Minister) a taxman, Viktor Zubakov. According to his RIA Novosti bio, Zubakov spent most of the '90s as the head of the St. Petersburg tax inspectorate. He had a long career in agricultural management during the Soviet era, but it took him only a brief period as the deputy head of the St. Petersburg Mayor's committee on external relations (1992-93) to step into the lakomyi (sweet) job of the city's chief taxman, which he held from 1993 to 1998. Fradkov, it's worth noting, had also been involved with tax enforcement before becoming PM, as head of the Tax Police from 2001-03.

He stayed in the tax service until 2001, when he became head of the Finance Ministry's committee on financial monitoring; he has headed the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (RosFinMonitoring) since it was created in 2004 (their website seems to be down, but Rambler has it cached). Interestingly, RIAN refers to Zubkov's current position as being head of "finrazvedka," which I guess is what you could call a financial monitoring service, but it sort of seems like they're saying - don't worry, he's another paren' iz razvedki - from Piter, no less - so he'll take care of things just like VVP et al. Approval by the Duma will likely be pro forma and swift, some of the procedural aspects are discussed briefly in this RIAN explanatory note to this article about the changes.

So, much like Fradkov, who came pretty much out of nowhere, at first glance it seems Zubakov may be another technocratic placeholder in the PM's seat, a way for VVP to continue deferring a final decision on the all-important 2008 question. On the other hand, Zubakov appears to be from the St. Petersburg team and therefore cannot be considered an outsider, as Fradkov was in 2004 - and perhaps I'm out of the loop and Zubkov is actually weighty enough to be considered a darkhorse to take over from Putin next year. Anyway, I'll leave the analyzing to the professionals - no doubt the speculation will come fast and furious in the next few days.

[image sources - Fradkov, BBC; Zubkov, Vedomosti]

Post-colonial healthcare worker migration patterns

IWPR has a piece on the impact of labor migration on the healthcare system in Kyrgyzstan. Reading it, I couldn't help but think of the controversy caused by healthcare workers emigrating en masse from Africa to the UK. This was a much-discussed topic in a very interesting course I took last fall on "international migration and development." The reasons for migration from rural regions of Central Asia to urban areas of Kazakhstan and Russia are similar to the reasons for migration from Africa to the UK - money is the main reason, of course, and a common language smooths the path of migration, although there are some interesting wrinkles along the way. For example, according to this article on "Doctors and Soccer Players - African Professionals on the Move," in Ghana, the dearth of native professionals is made up in part by reinforcements from Cuba.

One of the things mentioned in the IWPR story is that Russians are coming down to Kyrgyzstan to recruit healthcare workers. The UK and South Africa apparently reached an agreement to reduce such "poaching" several years ago, but I doubt such agreements will be in the offing between former Soviet republics in the near future. Russia needs the professionals and can pay them, and given relatively low barriers to migration labor will flow to where it gets paid most.

On the validity of comparisons, Russo-British relations, and history

I feel sort of funny using new media to post photos of old media, but this book - bought in the book-buying binge attending the closure of a nearby used bookstore - is too good not to share.

Often in debates over at Sean's Russia Blog, commenters (one in particular) will begin to address criticisms of Russia by criticising other countries and finding that Russia compares favorably or that there is an injustice in criticizing Russia while failing to criticize the other countries mentioned. Sometimes this is relevant - often, it's not. Anyway, this book - Two Commonwealths, by K.E. Holme - published back in 1945 when the Allies were still all friends, shows the extent to which agenda-driven comparisons can be taken. It's also interesting in light of the recent tensions in the Russo-British relationship, although of course it's nothing new that the Allies - US & USSR included - all published "friendly" materials about their soon-to-be Cold-War foes.

Two Commonwealths can be yours on abebooks (see link above) for $30-50, but in the miracle of this going-out-of-business sale I got it for $5 - and my copy included some bookseller's pencil notation on the first page (where the price goes): "A regular Grimm's fairytale." Indeed.

Check out the cool skyline graphics, and the other books in the series (on the back inside flap of the dust jacket) - especially Volume III, which is to be titled How Do You Do, Tovarish? (it was actually published in 1947) and promises to be

A description of daily life, work, and leisure. There are at least two very significant things which the Russian and the British people have in common. They are a warm human sympathy for the oppressed and the unfortunate, and a passionate love of
freedom.

These two photos equate "local government in the Gold Coast" with "local government in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic." The first paragraph of text reads as follows:

Since 1917 Russia has been trying to cram into one generation political changes which have taken three hundred years in Great Britain, and economic changes which have occupied the best part of two centuries.

Translation: they may be backward, but at least they're trying real hard! And the direct comparison of the "two commonwealths'" policies toward their respective subject peoples is relevant to portions of this recent SRB discussion.

Photo captions:

"Indian contingent at the Coronation of H.M. King George VI. The British Commonwealth is united by the allegiance of all its members to the Crown."

"Parade on the twenty-first anniversary of the October Revolution, which ended Russian domination over the formerly subject peoples. Now they all serve in the Red Army."

And the visuals created by the Isotype Institute (credited on the book's front cover above - apparently this institute was a design innovator) are priceless and require no commentary - just click on the images to see them expanded:

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.