The War in Abkhazia - Cyxymu Remembers

[Image source]

Blogger cyxymu spent last week marking the 14th anniversary of the storm of Sukhumi, which dealt a final defeat to the Georgian forces in their war with Abkhazia. As He has a lengthy post with his own interesting theory about why the conflict unfolded as it did - he thinks that the main motivating force behind the fighting was Russia's desire to get Georgia to join the CIS.

He has also posted recollections from a number of his readers about their experiences during their last days in Sukhumi. I was going to translate a couple of them, but some of the best ones are quite long...

The recollections culminated on the 27th with cyxymu's own thoughts about the significance of that date (which I did translate - the same post has a couple of difficult-to-watch videos):

Today marks 14 years since the day when I stepped on the earth of my homeland for the last time. On September 27, 1993, I left my hometown and have not been back since. That was the last day when Sukhumi existed. On that day, as the Abkhaz say, "they shot the 'i' off Sukhumi," and along with it they killed the city's soul. And if on other questions I can find points of agreement with my Abkhaz friends, that day remains for us a chasm which we can never cross. For us [Georgians], that day is a day of mourning, a day when hundreds and thousands of civilians died by the hands of the Abkhaz units who entered the city; tens of thousands of Georgians, saving themselves and their children, fled into the mountains; a day when children lost their parents and parents lost their children. But for the Abkhaz side it is a day of victory, the day when they took Sukhumi. And we'll never be able to arrive at a common denominator regarding that day.

I don't lose hope, and I believe that we will return to Sukhumi, that Abkhaz and Georgians will be able to live together, but in order for that to happen it's essential to punish the war criminals whose arms are covered up to their elbows in the blood of civilians.

Somewhat less emotionally, cyxymu posted last week about the Abkhazian special forces
troops captured after a skirmish with the Georgians, and how they were led by an
officer who had served in the Russian peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia before joining the Abkhazian
armed forces. The post is titled "вот такие у нас миротWARцы" - an impossible-to-translate pun meaning "these are the kind of peacekeepers we have," but substituting "WAR" for a phonetically similar syllable in the Russian word for "peacekeepers." He's also written recently about the firefight several days ago in South Ossetia.

[Update 10/1] I had the thought that I should temper the translated text above by noting that most neutral observers of the conflict believe that atrocities rising to the level of war crimes were committed on both sides (see, e.g., this Human Rights Watch report). For what it's worth, my opinion is that too much time has past and attitudes have become too entrenched for a tribunal or other attempt at post-conflict justice to be effective. On the other hand, I can't think of anything better, so maybe a low-impact "truth and reconciliation" process that doesn't necessarily hand down harsh sentences would be one way to go about starting to rebuild the bridges burnt back in 1993.

A very sad article from IWPR about relatives on both sides of the conflict still looking for the bodies of those officially declared missing.]

Memory lane - 4th of July in Moscow - 2006

The Independence Day celebration organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia (AmCham) is attended every year by thousands of expats and Muscovites. According to the AmCham website:

The AmCham festivities are considered to be the largest commemoration of Independence Day outside the United States. In addition to one of Moscow's most extravagant fireworks displays, the day features musical performances by some of Russia's best-known bands, traditional American fare on offer from a variety of food vendors, sports tournaments and a special children's play area with moonwalks.

The event's venue – the historic Kuskovo Estate - provides a scenic reminder of Russia's rich and graceful past. Kuskovo is the ideal location for a day of family fun and celebration.

The event is indeed a lot of fun, if you have a high tolerance for corporate-sponsored entertainment and especially you've been in Moscow for awhile, in which case you will inevitably run into people you know. The last time we attended was in 2006 (here is AmCham's photo collage from the 2006 party) - I thought about posting these photos on the 4th of July this year, but didn't get around to it, so here they are a few months late:

Long-lasting Kuskovo culture meets
American-style disposability.

A Moscow cop in an unfamiliar role
as a guardian of Liberty

OMON forces were on hand to guard the main stage.

The fireworks show at the end of the evening.

Virtual Reports from Virtual NGOs

Nicu Popescu had a post a few weeks ago about an entertaining development, if rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things, titled "Transnistria: a new virtual study."

Another Transnistrian propaganda report - published (according to the report) in Brussels, on the web page [created for the purpose of publishing this report] of a virtual institution called EODE ["Ngo European Observatory for Democracy and Elections"], in (rather broken) English and French, with the bombastic title "The ‘Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublika’: Building of an [sic!] European State and Experiment of Direct Democracy." In English this sounds sort of like "cultural leanings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan. The report's author, Luc Michel, is a marginal leftist, a self-declared fighter against American-Zionist imperialism. Apparently he was invited by "Nashi" to Lake Seliger. The other authors (if they even actually contributed anything) are just as bizarre.

This report is almost certainly intended as a counterweight to the fascinating and extensive report (prepared by actual legal specialists, including two professors at good law schools and a US Circuit Court judge) published last year by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and titled "Thawing a Frozen Conflict: Legal Aspects of the Separatist Crisis in Moldova." As such, it will likely be about as successful as the report promulgated last year about Transnistria by a fake NGO called "ICDISS" (a report which was disavowed by all of the academics and specialists it falsely cited as authors and contributors) which was exposed by Edward Lucas in a series of articles last year:

It seems more likely that the ICDISS is a bunch of lightweight opportunists in Washington DC, paid for by tycoons and goons in Transdniestria, perhaps with the encouragement of sympathisers in Moscow. The same money probably pays for the other websites [tiraspoltimes.com, pridnestrovie.net, visitpmr.com and transdniestria.com], and also subsidises ‘Breakthrough’ [Proryv], a local youth movement that apes similar pro-Kremlin efforts in Russia. Coincidentally or not, similar stunts are being pulled in the Caucasus and the Baltics.

Fake think-tanks, spurious reports and manufactured protest movements were common currency for both sides in the old Cold War; now they are popping up in the new one. Unprecedented money, effort and brainpower are now going into pro-Russian mischief-making in Europe’s backyard, to general indifference.

Whether you see it as merely entertaining, or outright sinister, the information war disguises hard questions for both sides.

Lucas himself posted an example of one of the other bits of disinformation floating around there which was likely organized in support of Russia - the spurious psychiatric assessment of Georgian President Saakashvili.

Of course, both de facto and real countries are capable of doing this without help from Russia or anyone else - all it takes is a bit of money and a good imagination - but more and more, such attempts are being outed, even when undertaken by real professionals.

Unfortunately for the PMR or whoever financed this "EODE" Report, it hardly looks like professionals of any sort were involved, and the final product doesn't pass the laugh test. For one thing (though I admit this is superficial), the organization's logo looks like it was designed by a 1970s-era 10-year-old - and whoever designed it doesn't know that NGOs don't usually include "Ngo" right at the front of their names.


It is littered with misspellings, and it cites publications and organizations that are impossible to take seriously, such as the Tiraspol Times and the "Community for Democracy and Human Rights." Sometimes the passages from the Tiraspol Times are just clumsily inserted without citation or editing, resulting in strange passages like "The outcome was seen on Wednesday in Tiraspol..." Fully half of the 150-page report is taken up by appendixes, which include two Tiraspol Times articles; the full text of the PMR's "Constitution"; two articles by and an interview with the Chairman of the PMR's "Constitutional Court"; and maps taken without citation from both the Economist and the CIA World Factbook.

Even better, two of the esteemed members of the bar who are listed in the report as having assisted in its preparation have bios that don't make them seem like they'd be particularly objective on questions involving the West's relationship with Russia (see page 12): one of them is listed as being "the legal consultant of Russian President Putin, of the State of Belarus and of the Government of Sudan"; another is "In particular lawyer of several Libyan State Bodies, he was also the legal consultant of the 'International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic' (Paris)."

Olympic dreams from the past

The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics will no doubt shower riches (and white elephants) upon the people - and especially the leaders - of Russia's Black Sea coast. However, I doubt they will have the far-reaching and long-lasting influence of the 1980 Moscow Olympics on fences and gates throughout the post-Soviet space:

Veterinary Pharmacy, Floresti, Moldova
Taken on Aug. 1, 2006

Alisher Usmanov - Богатые тоже плачут

The world's 142nd-richest person is wounded by a blog.

[Image source]

Thanks to a web host's fear of the UK's plaintiff-friendly libel laws, Uzbek/Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov was able to temporarily suppress some interesting material posted about him at Craig Murray's website. Notably, Usmanov has not taken Murray to court, presumably because his lawyers don't think he would win, even with the UK libel laws which put the burden of proof on the defendant. Based on material available elsewhere on the internet (for example, see Anticompromat's extensive bio and other information on Usmanov), it looks like at least some of what Murray claims may be true. More on Usmanov, including his interests in Transnistria (a topic not discussed by Murray), below the cut.

Murray, of course, was the UK's Ambassador to Uzbekistan who was sacked, according to him for being an opponent of the West's policy of tolerating Uzbek President Islam Karimov's human rights abuses. Murray has now reposted the article that drew the letter from Usmanov's lawyers, which is titled "Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist," at a newly created Blogger blog - alisherusmanov.blogspot.com. The bit about Arsenal relates to Usmanov's ownership of a stake in the British football (soccer) club.

Usmanov may be learning a difficult lesson about using heavy-handed tactics to go after speech you don't like - often (at least in an open society), such tactics just get more people talking about the material you find offensive. Perhaps if Murray's blog was hosted in Russia, Usmanov would have had success getting his friends in the Kremlin (Usmanov, you'll recall, was the tycoon who recently pre-empted the auction of Rostropovich's art collection and declared his plans to donate the collection to the Russian state - he's identified by one study as belonging to the "liberal-technocratic" camp of Russian elites, as opposed to the siloviki - page 33 of this pdf) to deploy the new "anti-extremism" law against him. Another advantage he would have on his home-field media space is that he's the owner of the Kommersant publishing house.

But instead of anything resembling such a result, the case - well, actually, there's no legal case - the story has become a cause celebre for bloggers the world over, it appears. Nathan has an interesting post about the brouhaha at Registan, with interesting comments. The Moscow Times also had an article about the story yesterday, noting that part of the reason it's become such a big story is that the website of at least one other politician aside from Murray, hosted on the same server, was also shut down for "technical reasons." We'll see if Usmanov gets to be Arsenal Chairman, regardless of the size of his ownership stake. For the moment, it looks like he fought the blogs, and the blogs won.



Interestingly enough, I had been reading just a few days ago about Mr. Usmanov's ownership of a controlling stake in the crown jewel of Transdniester's industrial sector - Moldova Steel Works, better known as MMZ, which is the abbreviation its Russian name, Молдавский металлургический завод, at Rîbniţa (also spelled Râbniţa or Rybnitsa, or Рыбница in Russian):

The metallurgic production unit in Rabnita is by far one of the most important objectives in Transnistria. 4,000 people are employed in this factory and the whole Northern part of the separatist republic depends on this factory. At maximum capacity, the factory can produce up to one million tons of steel and one million tons of laminated products a year.

Several groups benefited of this production unit. First it was the Russian group Itera, which at the end of '98 bought 75% of the shares. Once the group fell into the disgrace of president Putin, Itera had to sell in 2004. The shares were bought by the companies from Liechtenstein , which at this moment control 90% of MMZ. The two companies are called Rumney Trust Reg and EIM Energy Investment & Management Corporation. Both companies used to belong to the Itera Group. The buyers hurried up to certify with documents the new property, while the only ones who admitted being part of the Itera group, were Youssouf Hares and Alisher Usmanov, a Syrian businessman also active in the Ukraine, and of Uzbek origin. [...] Hares declared to us that the factory cost 100 million dollars and that the exclusive manager of MMZ is Alisher Usmanov. [source]

Organizational chart compiled by the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism,
showing the ownership structure of the MMZ steel plant in Rybnitsa .
[image source]

According to a report published last year by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on various legal aspects of the situation in Transdniester (which the report refers to as "the TMR"), economic influence is one of the levers Russia uses to maintain its outsized role as a third party to the secessionist conflict between Moldova and the PMR authorities:

Besides direct economic assistance by Russia, the fortunes of Russian economic elites have become intertwined with a successful secession of the TMR. The TMR’s economy is highly reliant on Russia. “Just over 50% of [the TMR’s] officially registered exports are direct towards two key markets—Russia and Russian companies registered in North Cyprus.” To pick just one example, the ECHR found credible evidence that “from 1993 onwards Transdniestrian arms firms began to specialize in the production of high-tech weapons, using funds and orders from various Russian companies.”

More generally, though, the risk of the TMR’s privatizations—which were largely bought by Russian and Ukrainian companies—being unwound or otherwise jeopardized leads to a substantial interest on the part of some of Russia’s business elite. This is redoubled with the substantial interest that Gazprom now has in the proper transfer of shares in Moldova-Gas from the TMR to Gazprom as a valid means of paying off debt.

Or consider as another example the story of the Moldovan Metallurgical Plant (MMZ) in Ribnita. The Ribnita plant was built in 1984 using German technology and is widely considered to still be the most advanced steel works in the former Soviet Union. The Ribnita plant also generates between 40 percent and 66 percent of the TMR’s tax revenues. The TMR sold the Ribnita plant, despite the protests of the government of Moldova, to the Russian company Itera.

Then, in April 2004, Itera sold 75 percent of the plant to the Hares Group, an Austrian company, which purchased another 15 percent from other co-owners. Some have argued that the Hares Group is a “political buffer” which purchases assets in former Soviet republics and then re-sells them to the actual intended owners. In the summer of 2004, Hares allegedly sold 30 percent of the MMZ shares to Alisher Usmanov, one of the “metal tycoons” of Russia, who then announced a plan to consolidate MMZ with five other enterprises from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan making the new enterprise the fourth largest ore mining and processing company in the world. Such high economic stakes may well play a part in driving Russia’s political agenda, regardless of the requirements of international law.

[source: pp. 292-293 in this pdf (footnotes omitted)]

"Conditional recognition of privatizations" in Transdniester has been proposed as part of one potential settlement plan, but this doesn't seem to have made a critical difference in resolving the conflict just yet.



A few years ago, Usmanov seemed confident that there would be no unwinding of MMZ's privatization, or at least that he'd be able to "take steps" to avoid losing control of the enterprise:

Moscow 19 October 2004 14:56 Alisher Usmanov’s holdings in Moldovan Steel Works (MMZ) should not be jeopardised by the recent decision of the Moldovan parliament that cancelled all privatisation deals in the breakaway region of Transdniestr, the Russian businessman said last week. “I believe that the privatisation of MMZ was done under the legislation effective at that moment and that my subsequent participation in the acquisition of a share package in a company that owns MMZ stock was in good faith and should not be cancelled,” said Usmanov, who controls Urals Steel in Russia and holds a substantial minority stake in Corus Group. Usmanov said that he is planning no immediate action. “However, if [the recent developments] infringe the interests of the mill’s owners in any way, we will take steps aimed at the preservation of the mill’s uninterrupted operation, jobs and corporate ownership structure,” he added.

More recently, earlier this year there was speculation that Gazprom would give its right to receive Transdniester's extensive natural gas debts to Usmanov's holding company, Metalloinvest, which would then take payment of the debts from Transdniester in the form of the portion of MMZ shares that remained in control of the de facto state. However, all of the parties supposedly involved denied that a deal had taken place. Quite a tangled web, and I'm not sure of the situation as it stands today.

[Image source for all images of MMZ]

[Update - according to this multipart investigative report on the sale of Moldovan assets to Gazprom, what happened this March was the following:

“Gazprom” assigned Transnistria’s gas debts, in the amount of USD 1.3 billion, to the “Metalloinvest” Holding, which is also co-owner of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant and Cement Factory. When informing the local media about the transaction, Anatolii Belitcenco, President of the Board of Administration of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant specified that he did know the debt assignment conditions but that, thanks to them, Transnistria obtained a deferral for a few decades. Igor Smirnov, the leader of the self-proclaimed Transnistrian republic, responded to Belitcenco’s statement with as surprising as cynical a declaration: “Transnistria does not have legal gas debts because it did not sign any contracts with ‘Gazprom’. And so, Transnistria will not pay anything to “Metalloinvest”. Moldova must come to an agreement with Usmanov (Holding’s leader, who holds 30 percent of the shares of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant), it is the one that has debts.”]

[Update Oct 10: IHT has an article about the brouhaha surrounding Murray's blogging about Usmanov, which is titled "Bloggers beware when you criticize the rich and powerful" and describes the initial shutting down of Murray's site as "the Internet equivalent of a smackdown." Via Registan.]

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.

The end of the Putin Era (?) in posters

The folks at Grani.ru, who brought us the Free Khodorkovsky! poster contest a few years ago, have updated the contest concept for the 2007-08 political season. This time, the theme of the contest is "The End of the Putin Era." The contest asked artists to respond to a few questions:

What awaits the country in 2008? When and how will the ruling regime in Russia change? What are the results of Putin's rule? Where will the new leaders take Russia?

I've decided to post a few of these posters here and will even attempt (no doubt futilely, in some cases) to explain the humor or multiple meanings behind some of them.

First, a few of my favorites:

This one I love because it's a photo that anyone in Moscow could have taken - a photo of
an ad for Putinka vodka's toast hotline underneath the sign for the Lubyanka metro station.

This one positions a glass in front of a bunch of bottles of
Putinka in such a way that letters spelling "Kaput" are hightlighted.

Self-explanatory.

This one I liked because it represents the role of broadcast media in inflating
the popularity ratings or visibility of various public figures in Russia (the 1 on the
pump is the logo of the state-run Channel 1 network, also known as ORT).

Represented are Putin, Ivanov and Medvedev, and also, among others, Ksenia Sobchak
(who's sort of like Russia's answer to Paris Hilton) and ORT political commentator
Mikhail Leont'ev, who was already delivering blisteringly anti-American monologues a
few years ago, so I can only imagine what he's progressed to lately.

"A king is made by his retinue," reads the poster, which has the king surrounded by
sixes ("шестёрки") of various suits. In Russian slang, to be someone's "шестёрка"
means to be their "flunky" or "gofer" (according to Multitran), but to give the word its
proper prison slang meaning (since VVP likes to throw around a bit of prison slang
himself now and again), it's best translated in this context as being someone's bitch.

A number of the posters dealt with the possibility that Putin might stay in power or continue to run things from behind the scenes, and with the Russian electorate's lack of choices:

This is another great play on an image from pop-culture: "лохотрон" means any kind
of a scam designed to ensnare suckers or "лохи." The smaller text reads "the future does
not depend on you." The reference is to an ad campaign by mobile telephony provider
Megafon, which had the tag line "the future depends on you." Megafon was originally a
St. Petersburg-based company (Northwest GSM) which exploded onto the national scene
in the early years of Putin's rule, allegedly thanks to help from Putins telecoms minister
Leonid Reiman, who supposedly has an interest in the company.

The lenses of the glasses read "the end of the Putin era," and the
text below reads "visible only through rose-colored glasses."

Pretty much self-explanatory; the small print
reads, "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse..."

The hand is making the "fig," a hand gesture sort of (though not entirely) like giving
someone the finger in the US. The gesture can be used in Russia to signify refusal
when asked to do something, as if to say, "like hell I will." The creative tilting of
the 8 in 2008 to make the infinity symbol suggests who is telling whom to go нафиг.

Another frequently recurring theme in the posters submitted for the contest was Russia's oil wealth, and all of its consequences - from international braggadocio to domestic dependency to good old-fashioned class struggle:

Self-explanatory.

"We are sitting well!"
This expression can mean "everyone's having a good time" when used in the
context of a social gathering; but "to sit on the needle" or "become seated on the
needle" is Russian slang for becoming hooked on intravenous drugs.

"The Chekists are on duty until the last drop..."

This one may be my very favorite, because it incorporates themes of both oil
wealth and the power of the broadcast media. The figure with its feet propped
up on the barrel of oil is labeled "the authorities" (власть can be a difficult word to
translate), and the submissive figure watching TV is labeled "the people."
The caption below reads "an earth-shaking (or 'epochal') age."

Traffic

Graphic from the "Tu nu esti marfa" ("You are not chattel") ad campaign,
developed by IOM and sponsored by, among others, USAID

A friend emailed me this link to a rather moving slideshow with audio about women who have been trafficked into prostitution from Moldova. This made me think about doing a more comprehensive post on the subject, but what I've wound up with is more like just a collection of links.

Natalia Antonova had a post recently dealing with some of the issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution in the former Soviet space.

The movie Lilya 4-ever does not deal specifically with Moldova but is about the trafficking of women from post-Soviet countries and is so good that it's even been screened by NGOs in an effort to deter young women from naively going abroad with perfect strangers. I've seen it and can recommend it.

This page appears to summarize much of the information about trafficking and anti-trafficking activity in Moldova, though it doesn't appear to have been updated for a couple of years. In 2003, this BBC article described Moldova as "Europe's human trafficking hub," and in 2004 RFE/RL wrote about young rural women being "vulnerable to human trafficking." Organizations that work on this issue (among others) are the Polaris Project and La Strada.

The OSCE Mission to Moldova's website has a page which includes pdfs of major anti-trafficking legislation and other reports on the issue. Jonathan at The Head Heeb has also blogged about some of the legal efforts to combat trafficking. The OSCE's page on trafficking also links to the Moldovan anti-trafficking and gender network, which has a page with a number of reports on the subject and has a profile of the problem in Moldova:

Poverty, inadequate public services, high levels of unemployment, discrimination against women, and domestic violence are among the main factors making Moldova a major country of origin for trafficking in human beings. According to recent data, around 420,000 Moldovans are currently abroad, primarily prompted to leave the country due to economic decline. However, of the Moldovans living abroad, no reliable data on the total number of trafficked persons is available given the multi-faceted nature of the crime and the absence of a standard identification procedure. None the less, information from countries of destination confirms a prominent number of Moldovan citizens among the identified trafficked persons.

From January 2000 to 31 December 2004, the total number of Moldovan nationals assisted as victims of trafficking by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was 1633. Most Moldovan victims are women and children trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation, although a number of men have also been trafficked for forced labour and begging. Children are trafficked for sexual exploitation and begging.

The IOM reports that Moldovan victims have been trafficked to some 32 destination countries in Western Europe, South Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, including primarily Russia, and the United States. In 2004, the destination countries included Turkey (45%), South Eastern Europe (18%), the Middle East (15%), Russia (11%), and Western Europe (8%). Thus, the number of trafficked persons returning to Moldova, especially from the Western Balkans, is slowly declining, whilst the number of trafficked women returning from Turkey and Russia is increasing. There is also more information about trafficking from Moldova to Israel and the Middle East, as well as more evidence of children being trafficked to Russia.

Here's another older article from a Moldovan newspaper (in Russian), which purports to be based on an interview with a woman who was trafficked to Israel - the story is interesting because it goes into some detail about the long and winding path that groups of women often take to get to their destination abroad.

Blogger Mihai Moscovici wrote about the "Tu Nu Esti Marfa" anti-trafficking ad campaign in section 4.1 of his university thesis (in Romanian); the campaign was also covered by Newsweek at its peak back in 2002.

Dossiers on Transdniester

While mining the research riches of the internet, I happened upon the English-language website of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI). They have a couple of sets of stories which touch on Transdniester. The first, called "The Final Frontier," is from December 2003 and is actually about the EU's expansion. It includes only one article on Transdniester, titled "Transdnister [sic] - the kolkhoz of smugglers." While the English translation leaves something to be desired (from the first sentence: "A modern sports complex erects downtown."), and observers have toned down some of the smuggling allegations in recent years, it may be an interesting read anyway.

The second folder I wanted to mention is titled "Pridnestrovskaya Moldavskaya Respublika – Terra Incognita" and contains a number of articles dating from 2006. The following description is offered of the project:

The project "Transdniester - Revealing Europe's black hole" is an investigation of CRJI, financed by SCOOP in Danemark and SAS in Switzerland. The participants in this project are the following journalists: Vitalie Calugareanu (Chisinau), Vlad Lavrov (Kiev), Igor Boldyrev (Odessa), Alexander Bratersky (Moscova) and foto Robert Ghement.

The journalistic investigation was financed by the Scoop project (through the Danish Investigative Journalists Association – FUJ) and by the organization Small Arms Survey from Geneva.

I've become much more skeptical of internet news sources since seeing how slick propaganda sites can be made to look. As with any previously unknown source that one has only seen on the internet, I feel the need to offer some sort of disclaimer. On the other hand, far from looking like something set up just to criticize the de facto Transnistrian authorities, this organization appears to target all of the classic targets you would expect good investigative journalists in the region to go after - corrupt Romanian officials, organized crime, problems in Moldova (including a feature with video - in Romanian only - on the recent scandal about alleged visa-selling at the Romanian embassy in Chisinau) and even Romania's alleged discrimination against Muslims "in its zeal to please the US." So I'm pretty comfortable recommending its fairly recent, firsthand reporting from the PMR. Or how about this - as comfortable as I would be recommending the work of any other equal-opportunity-muckraking outlet. Anyway, I hadn't seen this before, so I wanted to share it.

Russian TV online

For those of you no longer in Russia who miss Russian TV, it looks like there's a new service called WebTelek which might satisfy your longings. They offer a subscription, but at the same time it's possible to view many Russian channels live for free on their website (at least for some amount of time - maybe they cut you off eventually). The channels are sorted by country of origin using the pull-down menu in the top right corner. So whether it's AZTV, Romania's Antena 3, or even Belarus TV, if it's post-Soviet or in the neighborhood (or not - they also have Chinese and
channels), they've got your fix. Enjoy!