Via LJ user dolboeb (Anton Nossik, RUS), an 8-minute video posted on YouTube by the Nashi movement: an attempt to scare the young men of Russia into getting drafted - if you continue to hide from the Army in those useless universities and grad schools, the Fat Man USA is gonna show up here and devour all "our" riches.

Language: Russian
Viewed so far: 3,897 times
Puke factor: As high as it gets

I'm still reading about spetsnaz and guns and all that, and, as if by request, here's a New York Times piece on the Kalashnikov Museum in Izhevsk, by C.J. Chivers - AK-47 Museum: Homage to the Gun That Won the East:

On the surface, the museum, opened late in 2004, serves as Russia's monument to an infantry weapon and to the workers who have made it for almost 60 years. It presents the guns and their history with civic pride and a revived sense of national confidence. Think of Izhesvk as the Detroit of Slavic small arms. The exhibitions, ranging from static displays of weapons to plasma-screen video presentations showing the guns' use in recent decades, reflect a laborer's affection for what has long flowed from nearby foundries and assembly lines. Much of the material is also viewed through the life of Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the man credited with designing the weapon in secret trials in 1947, and who, at 87, still lives a few blocks away. Were you to substitute automobiles for firearms and add a bit of military decor, this might be a museum celebrating Henry Ford.

And three more, also by Chivers...

- Two Lives Entwined by War Enter a Long, Arduous Chapter Called Recovery

- Killed in Action, but Not by the Enemy

Anyone who has served in a modern combat unit has heard the deadpan warning. Friendly fire, it goes, is not.

- A Sampling From 6 Months’ Worth of Small-Arms Accidents in Vietnam

Here's the comment I've written as a guest blogger for PostGlobal's sidebar - a sort of a response to this week's questions by David Ignatius: "Russia's back with a vengeance. Is Putin justified in criticizing NATO expansion? Should Russia's neighbors worry?"

As a rather peaceful citizen of one of Russia's neighbors, I certainly hope that Putin's criticism of NATO expansion is nothing but tough talk. After all, business is going really great for Russia now (or so everyone says) - so why would Putin wish to reverse the trend?

For its neighbors, Russia is not back: it’s always been there.

In Ukraine, we've lived through the noise of the 2003 Tuzla crisis, Putin's repeated visits and misguided greetings of the 2004 election, the gas war of 2005. The tiny Crimea is bursting with geopolitical bitterness, and this diverts attention from vital tourism development efforts and forces way too many people to spend their vacation money in Turkey and Egypt. The Russian-vs-Ukrainian-language non-issue keeps metamorphosing into The Issue every time there is an election. Millions of Ukrainians work in Russia, legally and illegally - a "hands-of-gold drain" rather than brain drain, perhaps.

However, as the past two years have shown, Ukraine's priority should be to worry about its own politicians: they can do much more harm to the country than Russia seems capable of right now.

P.S. Oh, I've just noticed that they've edited out this paragraph:

Russia's famed hospitality has more or less turned into a myth, though, and even some of its own citizens are often forced to feel pretty alien. Perhaps shifting the focus from tough talk directed at outsiders to actually fighting poverty would help return the Russian people into their friendlier selves.

This is the reason I love blogging: I'm my own editor here. :)

From Kazachkov's spetsnaz book, I learn that what became known as zachistka (a mop-up) in Chechnya, used to be called prichyoska (a hair-do) in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

This just in (well, relatively just in - timeliness isn't my strong suit):

February 22, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Ukraine's parliament has rejected President Viktor Yushchenko's choices for foreign minister and security chief, RFE/RL's Ukraine Service reported.

Volodymyr Ohryzko -- a career diplomat and candidate for foreign minister -- had pledged to move Ukraine closer to the West.

Ohryzko received 196 of the 226 votes needed for confirmation.

Communists, Socialists and the Party of the Regions didn't cast a single vote for Ogryzko - which, I guess, characterizes him better than anything else would.

(And it's not about Ukrainian vs Russian, or West vs East. It's about thugs vs the intelligentsia, a dichotomy that exists everywhere, in varying proportions.)

Another hilarious - and untranslatable - "Kremlin postcard" from LJ users samka and superhero: this time, it's February 23 greetings, the Russian Army Day.

Among the featured "bloggers" are Yulia Tymoshenko (she calls Mitrofanov "a dick" - and he calls her "a dick" in response), Britney Spears (hairless), former defense minister Ivanov, Patriarch Aleksiy II, a few gay or gay-looking characters, and Konstantin Ernst, head of Channel 1, who is having this exchange with Putin:

ernst: Volodya! I was watching your Munich speech on TV! It rocked!

v_v_putin: Will you get me some more of that grass?))) ©

Next comment is from George W. Bush, who looks very stoned on his userpic and is appealing to Ernst:

busheg: Please!!!!!! Kostya, give me your ICQ, it's urgent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And there's also an off-topic comment from Onishchenko, the guy who became famous after he proclaimed Georgian Borjomi water and Georgian wine harmful and banned them in Russia last year: it is okay to eat chicken, he assures us now, referring to the avian flu outbreak in the Moscow region.

Steve Sharra wrote me a few months ago - he's a Malawian writer whose office was on the same floor as mine back in 1998 at the University of Iowa. What a weirdly small world: he now writes about the Malawian blogosphere at Global Voices (his personal blog is here).

In his email, Steve mentioned Aleksei Varlamov, a Russian writer who was at Iowa that same year and had an office somewhere downstairs at the International Center. I attended one of his readings once and really liked the story he was reading from, and we also smoked together outside a few times, under those beautiful oak trees that they have there.

I googled Aleksei up - and was happy to learn that he won an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Award a year ago. I read this interview (RUS) with him, and even though there are things I can't agree with him on, he seems like a wonderful person (and definitely doesn't deserve being cursed by some hateful morons in the comments).

At the time of the interview, he was working on an Aleksei Tolstoy's biography, and here's a passage I found quite interesting:

You're working on a book about the "Red Count" [the Comrade Count] Aleksei Tolstoy. How are you treating the negative aspects of his life story?

What exactly do you mean?

What do you mean, what exactly? Above all, his participation in the party life and literature. His feasts, during which he was totally getting out of control...

First of all, he wasn't a party member. He was not a member of VKP(b). Second, he was someone who knew how to achieve what he aspired to. A rare quality for a Russian. Aleksei Tolstoy was like a Russian American of sorts, someone like Scarlett O'Hara from "Gone With the Wind" - who promised: "My family will never go hungry." And Tolstoy, after starving through the revolution, had the same goal - his family and he himself should not be hungry. He emigrated, but when he realized that he'd do better in Russia, he returned to his motherland and continued to despise the Bolsheviks in his soul, though he was ready to become one himself if that meant he'd live a prosperous life. One can blame him for that. But this was his life position. As for the feasts during which he was getting out of control... In Valentin Berestov's memoirs, there's a wonderful episode. He asked Tolstoy's fourth wife, Lyudmila Ilyinichna: Why Aleksei Nikolaevich, such a clever person, says silly things all the time? It turned out that she herself had once asked him a similar question. And Tolstoy replied: "If I were in a creative state even at the parties, I'd be blown away." You could judge him for this, too. But it's more interesting to try to understand.

In a comment to this post on Michael Specter's piece on Russia, Jason wrote:

One thing that did bother me about the linked article, is that the author obviously knows nothing about firearms. There is no such thing as a plastic 9mm Makarov (they only make them in steel) and the 5.45mm bullet used in the standard AK74 is not illegal to use. It has a hollow space in the tip of the bullet that supposedly allows it to tumble more quickly in flesh, but all bullets either tumble or fragment (or both) when they hit a person.

(Thank you, Jason!)

One thing that needs to be added to this comment is that the passage about the 5.45mm bullets is actually a quote from Anna Politkovskaya, not Specter's words.

I myself probably wouldn't be able to tell a hunter's rifle from a Kalashnikov, but I realize that Makarov and 5.45mm are pretty basic stuff - and it's very upsetting that such errors do manage to slip into the texts of otherwise reputable reporters. Especially Politkovskaya.

***

So I decided to educate myself a little and bought a book on the Russian spetsnaz (special purpose units): Taktika spetsnaza, by Gennadiy Kazachkov. It's got pictures and descriptions of the most common guns and stuff in the appendix, which is useful, but it's also got some narrative, some analyses of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the Russian involvement in Chechnya - which should be interesting.

I'm still reading the intro, though - and am beginning to feel dirty. Here's one passage, the bullet statistics:

The emergence of more precise, complex and diverse weapons and ways to use them has changed the role of traditional firearms. This is a fact that can be confirmed statistically. In WWII, 25,000 bullets were spent on the average to kill one soldier, during the Korean War - 50,000, and in Vietnam - 200,000 bullets already. To compare: in Afghanistan, the Soviet troops were spending about 6,000 bullets on one killed enemy, and in Chechnya - about 7,500. [...]

Not that the Third World infant mortality figures are any less shocking, but, unlike here, we're used to that kind of stuff, I guess.

***

And here's what Kazachkov writes about 5.45mm bullets:

When the 5.45mm bullet hits the body, it may start moving chaotically, causing substantial damage. But it doesn't always happen like this. These qualities of the new bullet brought into existence legends about "a bullet with the displaced center of gravity that enters through an arm and exits through a leg." Amazing, but such an opinion is still popular among dilettantes.

A news item on today's Korrespondent.net: "A Radio Liberty Journalist Attacked in Rivne."

The piece is in Russian, but the town's name - Rivne - is Ukrainian (but spelled in Russian). It would be Rovno in Russian: v Rovno, not v Rivne. Or am I wrong? Do we have some new rules I'm not aware of? Someone please help. Also, in Ukrainian, it would be u Rivnomu, not v Rivne, right?

Weird.

Now, here's the story itself:

According to the journalist, the incident occurred in the elevator of her apartment building. When it stopped and the lights went off unexpectedly, a young man [yunets in the original, of all things...], aged 18-20, attacked her, demanding that she took off her golden jewelry.

Romanyuk started screaming and hit the guy on the head with her handbag. When the light reappeared, the woman saw a knife in the attacker's hands, and after the doors opened [dvertsy, not dveri, for some reason, as if they were struggling inside a cupboard, not elevator], he escaped.

How can one not notice an adult man inside an elevator that's, like, 90x90 cm?

This should be the story's main angle, not the fact that she's a journalist. Something like, "Woman Steps On Man Inside Elevator, Ends Up Getting Assaulted."

It's the funniest piece I've seen in along time.

Arbat, earlier today:

Novodevichiy Monastery a few days ago:

It took Taras Ratushnyi a few weeks and two articles in Ukrainska Pravda (UKR, here and here) to have his TV station, NTN, finally air this story (RUS) on land theft by Kyiv City Council's majority deputies:

Kyiv City Council deputy Volodymyr Bondarenko recalls last year's Pushcha Vodytsya land scandal and says that the practice of giving out land plots by ex-mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko now looks like an innocent joke.

Volodymyr Bondarenko, Kyiv City Council deputy: "Deputies gather, divide what's available among themselves, and go back home... Hence such desperateness, sessions held at night, barricades - all this is caused by the desire to present themselves with New Year's gifts."

Mikhail Brodsky, Kyiv City Council deputy: "Why aren't you voting? I haven't been given a land plot. Okay, we're giving it to you - vote. And this is how they get more votes. And all this is taking place in the session hall."

[...]

Representatives of the Voice of Kyiv's Community [NGO] claim that deputies from [mayor] Chernovetsky's Bloc and those from the Party of the Regions have received nearly the same amounts of land. Lytvyn's Bloc and [Kyiv's Communal Active] have gotten somewhat less. Plus, there are deputies who don't belong to any faction - they leave the oppositional parties and receive land plots right away. Mainly for construction of residential buildings, but also for shopping centers, hotels and restaurants.

A heartbreaking photo story (RUS) by LJ user drugoi about the kind man Ilya and his 44 dogs, many of them legless or otherwise disabled, living in a house outside Moscow:

For almost 20 years already he's been adopting these street dogs, treating them and leaving them to live with him. Half of those who live in Ilya's big house are ordinary mutts, and the rest are also mutts - but they have managed to learn what human being are like: they are invalids. Beaten, maimed, half-alive, they show up here and get their treatment, housing, food and the human warmth that they missed while living in the big city.

A postscript to Tuesday's circus:

Later that night, a friend sent us a link to an item on the Russian online news site, Newsru.com - here (RUS).

It's a translation of the Slate piece, with a few minor changes. First, there's this headline:

The reaction of the Western bloggers to Putin's speech: "He has inherited his speechwriters from Brezhnev."

Mishah and I, Western bloggers :)))

Then, they translate my quote - with my name and all - but fail to translate the word "chutzpah." Their take on it:

When will they ask him about Anna Politkovskaya and about Chechnya directly?

In the morning, though, I received an email from a dear Kyiv friend: she attached a Feb. 13 Wall Street Journal piece by Bret Stephens - titled "Russian for Chutzpah" :)))

Here's the first paragraph:

The nearest equivalent the Russian language has for the word chutzpah is naglost. In you, Vladimir Putin, the Russian nation has found the embodiment of naglost.

I didn't have the time to read the piece to the end, but I love this "lost and found in translation" twist...

***

Oh, okay, here's one thing. This part did catch my eye:

Naglost: Speaking of feeling unsafe, a recent item in the Daily Telegraph reports that a Russian court in the southern city of Novorossiysk condemned nine members of the ethnic minorities-rights group Froda for having an "unsanctioned" tea with two German students.

"We were told that, under the new law [on NGOs], any meeting of two or more
people with the purpose of discussing publicly important issues had to be
sanctioned by the local administration three days in advance," Froda
director Tamara Karastelyova told the Telegraph. New legislation also
requires NGOs to receive official clearance for any planned events months in
advance.

At Munich, you airily dismissed any suggestion that Russian NGOs operate
under repressive conditions by claiming your registration requirements are
"not that different from registration systems in other countries." Just what
other countries did you have in mind?

I just feel that Munich would've been a good place to ask Putin directly/with chutzpah about this particular case: after all, those NGO people allegedly got busted for their contacts with Germans, not just some abstract foreigners...

For those who read Russian - Kremlin Valentine, by LJ users samka and supehero.

Be sure to scroll down past the postcard that doesn't seem to load.

To those who don't read Russian: imagine all Russia's politicians and other notorious personas had blogs: Putin, Surkov, Medvedev, Zhirik, Yeltsin, Berezovsky, FSB, etc. Very funny, but untranslatable.