AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
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It’s been another bumper week for great blog posts about Russia. No more introduction needed. Just make yourself a cup of coffee, click on the links, and read.
- Sean’s brilliant history of Lenin’s Suit.
- Mike Averko’sCommentary on the Former Moldavian SSR appears at Russia Blog.
- Soviet Russia tells the tale of three Soviet sailors, stranded at sea for 49 days, only to be rescued by their Cold War enemies. The post is in Spanish – here’s an English translation.
- Josefina is a published author. In Russian!
- Russia Blog has hit an impressive 1,050 blog posts and promise that: “After a brief break in posting new articles, were back to offer you unique and exciting commentary on Russias politics, economy, and culture.”
- In a post picked up by Johnson’s Russia List, Anatoly argues that Russia’s demographic resurgence is going to weather the current economic storm.
- Kyle writes of the many, many emails he gets from expat Russians wanting to return home.
- The Eagle and the Bear reviews “Inhabited Island 2”. Star Wars, it ain’t.
- Robert Amsterdam profiles the Russian internet entrepreneurs who have just bought a 2% stake in Facebook for a cool $200 million.
- Russian Roulette in the medical literature from Mind Hacks. Did you know that the more tatoos and body piercings you have, the greater the chance that you will someday take part in a game of Russian Roulette?
- How the economic crisis has hit the St Petersburg suburb of Pikalevo.
- Does modern Russia’s diplomacy suffer from 19th Century imperial hangups? The Streetwise Professor certainly thinks so.
- The FCPA (that’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to you and me) blog considers corruption in Russia.
- Rose Gottemoeller is going to run rings around Russia in the forthcoming arms control negotiations.
- Meet the Gopniks. Reminds me somewhat of Meet the Feebles.
- Otto is redoing his blogroll – if you link to him and want a link back, let him know.
- Is the Pravda forum really filled with “demonic anti-Semites and anti-Zionists”? I don’t know any more – it’s been a while since I visited the dark side.
- Russia! magazine are offering free advertising. Quick! Join the stampede!
- It’s not often I agree with La Russophobe, but it’s difficult to argue with her response to Russia’s decision to ban women from driving subway trains: Russia, Nation of Pigs.
- The Power Vertical finds green shoots of democracy “so miniscule that you need a magnifying glass to find them.”
- Award for most bonkers approach to democracy goes to Viewpoint Russia. “The recent ban of Gay parades in Moscow is a great example of democracy in practice. Why because the majority of people in Moscow, over 80%, (source institute Levada) oppose Gay rights on moral grounds, therefore to allow a gay parade in Moscow would be at total odds with the majority view and therefore would be totally and utterly undemocratic.” Presumably, more than 50% of Russians also oppose free speech.
- Misha points out that Russian equities are surging. Upwards.
- Did you know that the Soviet Union had an award for Growing Cannabis? This being the Soviet Union, there was even a natty little badge.
Phew. That’s it for this week. I’m off to practice my Soviet breakdancing skillz.
I think labeling a country a “nation of pigs” is out of order whatever its level of gender-equality development, and especially considering that Russian sexism is objectively much less prevalent than in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa – in other words, much of the non-Western world. And even speaking of the latter it gives the likes of Korea, Japan, Italy, Poland or France a run for their money.
Source: WEF Gender Gap Report 2007
Sublime Oblivion´s last blog post..Translation: The Case of the Stalinist Textbook
Russia is considerably better than many countries of the world in this regard, and in other regards.
But is the abysmally low standard of other countries any reason not to be critical of Russia for its merely low standards?
(By the way – although Russia is way ahead of most of Africa, there are still five African countries on the WEF Gender Gap report that score higher than Russia. Seven of the post-Soviet states also score higher than Russia – including, interestingly, Belarus, Kazakhstan Moldova and Uzbekistan. And, looking at the table, Russia isn’t actually all that far behind the United States, that well known home of chauvinist pigs!)
No Andy – but I do object to the tone in which LR presents it, on the basis of which one might think it is Saudi Arabia with permafrost.
That is in fact the problem I have with LR on all things.
Russia’s not-high status on the WEF actually mostly derives from the poor political representation women have – at the time it was published, IIRC, there were no female Cabinet Ministers (now there are 2) and 15% of the Duma were female.
Sublime Oblivion´s last blog post..Translation: The Case of the Stalinist Textbook
I’ve read that the issue with representation is a result of the fact that the Soviet Union had guaranteed quotas for females in political office, but when that system was chucked and replaced with democracy, they simply were not being elected. And this at a very difficult economic time too, when women were also bearing the brunt of the social-economic collapse. Putin in fact made a big deal about getting more women into the government. Which was duly poked fun of as he specifically wanted “beautiful” women in the Duma. Anyway, yes, there has been improvement on that front.
Also, I get heat for saying this, but while Russia is no feminist utopia, I, as a woman, never got the impression it was a terribly misogynist country either. There is in fact a long history of women having more rights and a broader range of roles in Russia than in a lot of the West, both in the 19th Century and under Communism.
Anyone who have ever been yelled at by a babushka knows which sex is in charge. Few things terrify me more than that. 🙂
ANDY:
When mentioning the Russia Blog post, you fail to note that it claims to have received 7,000 comments on those 1,050 posts, a statement that is either highly misleading or a shameless lie. It means Mamchur is claiming Russia Blog collects an average 6.7 comments each. Yet, on May 28th there were 30 posts displayed on RB’s home page and they had collected only 56 comments — an average of just 1.9 comments per most, THREE TIMES fewer than Mamchur claimed. At that rate, less than 2,500 comments would have been generated by RB’s 1,050 posts. Nine of the 30 posts, nearly a third of the total, had zero comments. So either Mamchur was lying or Russia Blog is dramatically deterioriating in terms of reader interest from the level it once had. Either way, it’s epic failure, made even more humiliating by comparing RB to LR. On that same date of comparison, our home page displayed 21 posts and they had collected a whopping 565 comments, an average of 30 comments each, 15 times higher than RB’s average. Not a single one of them had zero comments. In other words, Russia Blog’s comment tally is laughable even as stated, and plummeting into the absurd. But as stated it can’t be correct, and in fact is just another one of their silly propagandistic lies.
La Russophobe´s last blog post..June 3, 2009 Contents
Clearly some empirical research is required. Care to pop over and do a detailed count of the comments on all 1,050 posts for us?
@poemless,
Good point. Historically speaking, Russian women had a good status even in Kievan Rus (relative to other civilizations that is).
@LR,
You fail to note that 95% of your comments are either from a) the LR collective (or yourself) and b) enraged Russian patriots / Russophiles.
Sublime Oblivion´s last blog post..Kremlin Dreams Sometimes Come True