Blogs don't burn

I remember when Luke Harding, then The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, was kicked out of Russia (his articles for the paper were particularly hard-hitting). I can remember reading that the officer at the airport told him, “For you, Russia is closed.” I know that Luke Harding no longer lives or works in Russia. 

And yet, as in Romeo and Juliet, knowing the ending doesn’t make Mafia State, the story of how and Harding all of the above happened, any less compelling or interesting. This is, of course, largely because Harding doesn’t make his story all about him. He is a journalist, and the book is a report on Russian affairs as much as it is his personal narrative. 

And, while one cannot help but notice that the book is, in some ways, already a bit outdated (it’s a book about modern Russia, but it doesn’t, and couldn’t have, included the most up to the minute modern Russia), it—that is, both the story of “how one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia,” and the story of what, exactly, that brutal new Russia is—is essential reading for anyone interested in today’s (or practically today’s) Russia.

broletariat:

Has Beyonce completely given up on utopianism? Are there any dreamers left in Russia?!!

Generation P

“Do you think it was really the Chechens?”

I was in a car in Copenhagen on my way to a Russian dinner party and poetry reading. I was in the city to interview Lyudmila Weil, widow of Russian dissident Boris Weil, and had been invited to this salon of sorts the night before. As students of Russian literature dream of one day attending a Russian salon/soirée (that is, at least, what this student of Russian literature has done), I accepted. I did not, however, go so far as to accept the invitation to stay overnight with my interviewee, which is how I found myself in a car driven by an old friend of Weil’s, accompanied by his wife and poet son. The latter was, in heavily accented English, expressing disbelief that Chechnya would attack America.

“I don’t think it was Chechnya,” I tried to explain. 

We were not the first to arrive at the dinner. A professor of chemistry/poet and his two children (one my age, a student of America pedagogy who had never been to America, and one a teenager) had already arrived. His very young wife was still on her way. But, eventually, all nine of us were at the table, eating and drinking and discussing (in Russian, which the poet son, who spoke like a character in a Chekhov play, and who had stubbornly spoken English in the car, now said I should speak). They read Brodsky and Akhmatova and Pasternak out loud and debated the various merits of each. They toasted to the memory of Boris Weil. They argued over whether or not Obama is a Muslim (I was of some help on this one). They talked about the Navalny case. And, after someone read this poem, Brodsky’s mournful love letter to his nation, aloud, they discussed what it meant to love a nation, or a people. 

“Do you think,” I asked, “that a person can love or understand a nation that isn’t his own?”

They thought for a moment.

“Of course,” the poet son declared. “I love America.”

And I, who had come six hours by train to interview a Russian and attend her rapturous salon, smiled and agreed.

I returned the next day to interview (and then have tea with) Lyudmila Weil. We spoke of her distance from Russia, and of what it was like to emigrate, and of life in Copenhagen versus life there. Of her sister, who lives in a Russian village and loves Putin. And of her husband, who brought her into his world, one in which only the very best people lived, and who did not do all that he wanted, but managed what he could, and what he thought was right.

I asked her what today’s dissidents in Russia could learn from their Soviet counterparts. She told me that she thought they’d all been forgotten. But they hadn’t, I assured her. Pussy Riot mentioned them in court. Navalny mentioned them in an interview with The New York Times.

“Well,” she said, smiling. “Слава богу.”

Thank God, indeed.

ircats:

From Reuters:

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - The Russian-installed leader of Chechnya criticized U.S. police on Friday for killing an ethnic Chechen suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing and blamed the violence on his upbringing in the United States.

“The root of evil should be looked for in the United States,” Ramzan Kadyrov said in comments posted online after the police shot dead Tamerlan Tsarnaev and hunted for his brother Dzhokhar, his suspected accomplice.

“They (the brothers) grew up and studied in the United States and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there,” Kadyrov said. “Any attempt to make a connection between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs is in vain.”

Kadyrov, a tough pro-Kremlin leader whose security services have been accused of human rights abuses such as kidnappings and torture, questioned why the U.S. police had not been able to arrest Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

“Apparently the special services needed a result by whatever means to appease society,” he said.

Just to be clear, Ramzan Kadyrov is largely believed to be responsible for the murders of journalists and human rights activists alike, as well as for the general, oh, I don’t know, general state of Chechnya, lousy as it is with human rights violations and terror, all while kowtowing to Putin (please see two posts down on Kadyrov’s almost-inclusion on the Magnitsky List).

To be clearer still—the two were not born in Chechnya. They had not been living in Chechnya. And, despite what Fox News is proclaiming, it is unclear if this was a Chechen project or the project of, as their uncle called them, “losers who were jealous of people who could settle.” (Aside: who, exactly, at Fox is deeming himself qualified to write long analyses of Chechnya? Like, no, Fox, you do not have a Chechnya expert on hand. Do not lie to us. Or to yourselves.) But, as their uncle also said, they came to America as war refugees. That has more than a little bit to do with Chechnya.