Russofile007

New Russian Sci-Fi Movie Promises to be a Treat for Fans of the Genre

2008-12-05T12:32:00.001-08:00

The new big budget Russian sci-fi movie – “Inhabited Island” (Obitaemyi Ostrov) – promises to be a treat for fans of the genre.

Russia’s most expensive movie ever – production and promotional budget is nudging $40 million (£27 million) – is due to be released across the country on January 1st 2009.

Judging by the invitation-only preview I attended this afternoon at Moscow’s Oktyabr cinema, it is going to be hit in Russia, where many of the viewers will be familiar with the Strugatsky Brothers 1968 novel on which it is based.

Written at a time when science fiction offered an acceptable way of writing about subjects that could not be broached in more political ways, “Inhabited Island” imagined a far away world, far in the future where a dreadful junta of five sadistic and scheming leaders keep a planet’s population subjugated through fear and mind control.

A joy-riding young space traveler from earth crash lands on the planet and finds his fate intimately interwoven with the planet’s.

The movie – which will be released in two parts in Russia, although possibly a shorter single version internationally – is very dark, very Russian.

Without having seen a subtitled version, even though my Russian is good enough to follow much of the dialogue, it is not fair to give here more than a first impression.

Rich in detail, splendid sets, costumes and computer graphics, the film moves at a pace that leaves little time to fully appreciate the alternative world its makers have created.

With liberal nods to Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic classic “Metropolis” and Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner” (the crowded market scenes, drenching rain and heavy, dark sense of concrete and steel particularly), and the Wachowski Brother’s 1999 “The Matrix”, “Inhabited Island” is bound to create excitement well beyond the normal sci-fi fan niches.

With a world oligarchy cast in way that brings elements of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union – not to mention the current day intrigues of the Kremlin and other ‘real’ world powers – “Inhabited Island” is subtly subversive in a way that marks it as very different from other recent Russian sci-fi blockbusters, “Day Watch” and “Night Watch”.

Producer Alexander Rodnyansky – who joined the small crowd of a dozen or so Moscow film critics and agents today, along with director Fedor Bondarchuk – has taken a big, brave punt on a film that opens at a time when the current world climate does not always seem so far from that of the imagined far away world of 2157 in “Inhabited Island”.

Unique Account of Vlasov Army Veteran Published

2008-11-26T05:53:00.000-08:00

“The Russian Patriot – A Red Army Soldier’s Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism”.

A gripping wartime account of one man’s unique experience in the vast cauldron of conflict that was the Eastern Front.

Traitor or patriot? For Russian-born naturalized Australian Sigiamund Diczbalis the more than 60 years since the Second World War ended have done little to erase a question that has troubled him lifelong

A committed young Communist who joined the Red Army on the day Hitler’s Blitzkrieg tore across the Soviet Union’s borders in June 1941, Sigismund unquestioningly offered his life to the service of his motherland. Captured and thrown into a barbaric open-air prisoner of war camp by German conquerors fought for survival using all his cunning and intelligence. Fate offered him escape from certain death through service to the ‘new order’; chance made him a red partisan spy.

Ordered to infiltrate a German-run anti-partisan unit, Sigismund’s path to a new and radically different future began.

As Soviet armies turned to the offensive and swept westwards in 1944 Sigismund fled before them. Questioning Soviet orthodoxy, Sigismund’s conversion began and soon he was a committed anti-Bolshevik who joined an obscure new army – one devoted to toppling Stalin and bringing democracy to Russia.

It was all too little too late and when in the spring of 1945 Sigismund fell into the hands of Soviet spy-hunters death seemed a certainty…until fate once again played a part in giving him a new lease of life in a far away land.

Did Sigismund betray his motherland, or was his conversion to the anti-Bolshevik cause the act of a true patriot? That question is at the heart of this compelling account of one man’s tumultuous war.

Published by specialist Spellmount Books, a division of specialist British publisher The History Press, “The Russian Patriot” is the result of several years’ close collaboration between Moscow-based journalist and writer Nick Holdsworth and Brisbane, Australia-based Sigismund Diczbalis.

The two met when Nick was researching a film script about the life of General Andrei Vlasov, a former Red Army officer who founded the Russian Army of Liberation.

Working closely together via telephone, email and occasional meetings in Moscow and St Petersburg during Sigismund’s infrequent trips back to the land of his birth, they expanded and added new material to an earlier Russian language version of the memoirs.

The result is a detailed, lively and gripping read that is thought to be the first ever English-language publication of the memoirs of a rank and file member of the Russian Army of Liberation.

The book is available via Amazon, other internet booksellers and High Street bookstores in Britain, USA and Australia.

The Battle of the Somme - 92 years later

2008-11-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

Back in Britain earlier in the month it was fascinating to see how much interest there remains in the First World War.

The 90th anniversary of the end of what was known then as the Great War was marked in Britain on 11th November with memorials that included the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph in London with three of Britain's four surviving veterans of the conflict present.

A two minute silence was observed; I was driving to Oxford that day for a meeting with a historian at All Souls in connection with my previous posting on this blog. I pulled over into a lay-by and noticed that other drivers had done the same. Amazing.

Nearly 20 years ago I was fortunate enough to have met and become close friends with a veteran of the Great War; two years ago on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, (July 1st 1916) I retrieved the tape recordings I had made of conversations with Joe Corcoran and wrote a feature for specialist military history magazine The Armourer.

The following is based on that and may be of interest to readers of this blog.

Memories of a Somme Veteran, story drawn from interviews with Joe Corcoran (born 1897) conducted in Coventry in April 1989. Story based on tapes of interviews recorded at the time.

SOMME – Veteran

Joe Corcoran’s voice remains clear and strong as if we were sat across from one another at his old oak table in his Coventry home today and not nearly 20 years ago.

The veteran of the Battle of the Somme was approaching the end of a long life when we met in 1989 in response to a newspaper advertisement Joe had placed seeking Great War comrades from the ‘Cameronians’ – the Scottish Rifles.

It was a long shot and one that, sadly, did not find its mark: at 91 years of age Joe was one of a fast dwindling band of Great War survivors and none of his fellow Cameronians were to be found in Coventry, his home of 70 years.

As a young reporter on the city’s evening newspaper, I spotted the ad and, sensing a story, made contact. A keen student of the history of the Great War – my own grandfather who died long before I was born was also a veteran of battles ranging from Mons through the Somme and Ypres – I yearned to speak a man who had been there.

Joe had and his crystal clear memories spilled out in the stillness of his sitting room in Holbrooks, Coventry, like the unspooling of an old film.

“When I arrived in France in January 1916 at La Bassee and was sent up to my platoon I was not made welcome. I was not a Scot and had not taken part in the earlier battles these men had,” Joe says on the tape in his distinctive native Potteries accent.

“But after the fight at the Quincy Brickstacks I became a hardened soldier and was accepted as a fellow Cameronian.”

Joe had lied about his age when he signed up as a regular soldier in 1915 and was just 18 when he arrived in France – a year younger than regulations allowed men to serve at the front. His secret was discovered but his bravery and steadfastness in battle persuaded his commanding officer to make an exception and he was allowed to stay.

As the youngest solider in his platoon he soon became a popular figure and despite the hardships of frontline trench warfare life – the rats, the lice, the lethal artillery airbursts, the casual deaths of new friends and comrades – his recollections displayed a pride, if not joy, in having served on the Western Front.

“We continued with regular battalion discipline. Stand to at dawn before cleaning up the trenches, checking for casualties and repairing any damage done in the night.

“The German artillery was perfect. Their snipers were perfect. We didn’t even have any trench mortars and no steel helmets until April 1916,” Joe recalled.

When the first Mark 1 Brodie steel helmets were brought up to the front Joe’s platoon was issued with just one. As the youngest soldier he was given the helmet, but first one of the old hands propped it on the end of a rifle and bayonet to test its efficacy.

No sooner had the helmet been raised above the trench’s parapet than a German sniper put a bullet clean through its thin, barely shrapnel-proof, steel.

“I wore that helmet for the rest of my time at the front and was the butt of continual jokes – ‘he’s had a clean hair cut’; ‘it went right through his head’,” Joe said. On the tape there is a hint of a chuckle in Joe’s voice at this point. For a man who was eventually invalided out of the army in February 1917 with shell-shock so severe that he lost the ability to speak for months and left him subject to terrifyingly vivid nightmares for the rest of his life, his capacity to retain scraps of humour from hell was remarkable.

Dark humour was a thread that ran through all of Joe’s stories, told in a matter of fact way with little that could be construed as elaboration of self-glorification. Repeated visits to Joe’s modest home – and the occasional pint or so at his community club where he was considered a true local hero – demonstrated the the consistency of his memory. Months would go by, but when the same story cropped up again the details were always the same, the memory drawn from his own private reservoir of technicolour images as fresh as the days he had witnessed them so long before.

Around Givenchy, where constant shelling and the blowing by both sides of huge mines had turned the battlefield into a moonscape, Joe once got into a dark farce typical of the chaos of trench warfare.

Sent up a front-line sap to the edge of a massive mine crater one night to harass the Germans – whose lines fronted the fringes of the other side of the crater from the British – Joe was told to keep the enemy on his toes by lobbing a few Mills bombs into the crater. The Germans would do the same in retaliation. The explosions were enough to create a racket, but nothing more serious.

“I always thought this was a waste of ammunition and one night chucked a bomb a little too high and a little too far – it landed in the German frontline,” Joe said. “They must have thought a big attack was on and it started up a terrific firefight. Coming back to our lines I was collared by Captain McDonnell who gave me a right talking to, telling me that I wasn’t running the war!”

On another occasion, by now a Number One in a three-man Lewis Gun team after scoring top marks at a machine-gunners course behind the lines at Le Touquet, Joe and one of his gun-team were sent out into No Man’s Land after relieving the Welsh Fusiliers. In the stillness of the night his comrade insisted on chatting despite Joe’s exhortations to zip it.

“Of course the Germans heard his chit-chat and sent four air-burst shells over – two on top of us and two either side. We were buried in earth and when I dug my way out I found my comrade lying there with a big piece of shrapnel sticking out of his back. I carried him back to our lines but the only question the Sergeant-Major had was what had I done with the bolt from my Lewis Gun,” Joe said.

“King’s Regulations I was told – no gun can be left behind that the enemy may make use of. There was nothing for it, I had to go back over the top to collect the bolt.”

After half an hour of so of scrabbling around in the dark Joe found his gun and got back safely, bolt in hand. Other soldiers in similar situations – rescuing comrades under fire – were awarded medals, even Victoria Crosses, Joe said without malice. His reward was to avoid being put on a charge for breaching King’s Regulations.

The clarity and lack of egoistic or self-serving statements were the hallmark of Joe’s recollections. Listening to the tapes again after so many years it is this factual, unemotional retelling of events both horrific and miraculous that is so striking.

Joe had no time for self-pity or even bitterness, although he still held strong opinions.

“Medals didn’t mean much to us then; it was survival. The conditions we lived under were terrible. The old soldiers had two enemies – the Germans and the Top Brass. Some of the orders we were given were ridiculous.”

Joe was a deeply religious young man who always carried a rosary given him by his devout Catholic aunt. Divine intervention saved his life on numerous occasions, he claimed.

He heard his name and as he was arguing with a group of soldiers who denied calling him over a shell dropped on the spot he had being occupying on the trench firing step; going over to a miraculously unscathed crucifix in the ruins of a shelled church, he avoided another blast; a spur of the moment decision to hop over a second-line trench to collect flowers from a field of poppies blooming there to decorate the grave of a friend killed bringing up rations attracted the attention of German artillery observers…the subsequent salvo missed Joe because he returned to the trench at a different spot from where he had left it.

Many veterans of combat have such stories to tell [nb Sigismund Diczbalis, with whom I worked on his Second World War memoirs "The Russian Patriot - A Red Army Soldier's Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism" just published by the History Press, tells of avoiding a shell burst during the Prague Uprising of May 1945, because, on a whim, he returned to a room to pick up a statue of the Virgin Mary]; Joe’s had the ring of contemporary conception, not post-war rationalisation.

Ninety years after the Somme among the handful of aged survivors of the Great War there are probably none who went through a battle that has become an icon for the terrible waste of young life.

Talking to Joe in 1989 – and on subsequent occasions up until his death in the summer of 1994 – I can only say that I was left in awe by what he went through as a lad of 18. Joe did not go over the top on July 1st, when 20,000 men died and more than 40,000 were left wounded or missing in action. He and his battalion came up through Albert and Beaumont Hamel on July 2nd, pulling the Lewis Gun along on an eight-feet long barrow mounted with bicycle wheels, passing Canadian artillery batteries and settling down in Death Valley to await their part in the action.

There had already been a lot of fighting by the time Joe went into action mid July around Mametz and High Wood.

“We were sent into Mametz Wood – two or three lines were sent in there to clear the Germans out, but nothing serious really,” Joe said with characteristic understatement.

By July 19th the fighting around High Wood was reaching a culmination and the once thick woods were now a death-strewn collection of skeletal shell-riddled stumps that had been taken and retaken four or five times.

“We of the 19th Brigade were supposed to be the last resort. On the 19th of July we went into the front lines opposite Mametz Wood. At the top of an incline sat High Wood and at the bottom there was a sunken road. We moved up and went over the top along with the Welsh Fusiliers. We went out in extended order and ran smack bang into two German machine guns using enfilade fire [firing from the sides] where one bullet can take out two or three men at a time. Enfilade fire was very unpopular.”

At this point Joe’s memories become a kaleidoscope of images: he found himself covered in mud along with his gun – “We must have had a shell under us” – but otherwise uninjured. He lost contact with his company but eventually, after dodging German artillery running and jumping from shell hole to shell hole, dropped into a hole holding 13 men and an officer from his regiment, to whom he could report.

With German shells falling all around and a fierce fight going on in and around High Wood, the officer said there was a desperate need to bring up ammunition from the sunken road behind them.

The artillery barrage was so intense that to minimise losses, the officer instructed the men to make the dash down the slope in groups of five at a time. The men did as told and began bringing up ammunition as the German shells did their dreadful work.

“We had lost seven and another five went out. We lost three out of that five. We did another run and did not lose so many that time. We had managed to bring up most of the ammo from where it had been stored in recesses of the sunken road. There were three of us left. The officer looked at us and said: ‘We had better go once more; we must do our best.’ We did a roll call back at the sunken road and it was just me and the officer,” Joe said.

“The officer looked at me and promised that if we got through this final run he would write up a report on the good job I had done. ‘You may be rewarded,’ he told me. The Germans put a curtain of fire across it and opened up with the heavy stuff. It was clear a counter-attack was coming. The officer said we may just get through the barrage during a lull. I was 18 and had a bit of running power in me; the officer was in his 30s and was lagging 10 yards behind me. Two shells dropped. One landed at the officer’s feet, so I knew I was alone. The other blew me over.”

When Joe came to he was shaking all over and his pockets had been rifled. He realised he must have been left for dead and eventually learned that he had been lying unconcious for two days. Wandering around a now silent battlefield, in the sunken road he found a corpse draped over a Lewis Gun, but from the brass buttons on the uniform knew it was not a Cameronian – which as a light infantry regiment wore black buttons. Shell-shocked and “one the point of tears” he eventually found a survivor of his regiment – from another gun team who was distraught after having lost a brother in the fight – and was sent back for a 48 hour rest after seeing a doctor.

The regiment and 19th Brigade were pulled out to be brought up to strength, such had been the casualties suffered during the battle, Joe recalled.

After a period behind the lines Joe was sent back to the front and served in France until December 1916 when another shell blast put him in hospital suffering shock so severe that he lost both his memory and ability to speak. Transferred to hospital in back home in ‘Blighty’ at the end of the month, Joe passed his 19th birthday on December 30 1916 fast asleep aboard a hospital train bound for Glasgow.

His shell-shock was so severe that doctors initially did not believe his symptoms and thought he was “swinging the lead” – as Joe put it – to avoid a return to active service. To test their theory the doctors pulled out three of his teeth without anaesthetic to see if he would scream. He did not. Joe was eventually given a medical discharge in February 1917 and although he eventually recovered both voice and memory, he remained subject withdrawn and subject to nervous episodes for many years.

Joe Corcoran became a engineering draughtsman and was involved in the early development of the Coventry car industry – working with many of the names that subsequently became famous inb the British car industry. Despite his severe shell-shock and a major stomach operation in his 40s, he outlived all of them and died in 1994 aged 96.

It was my privilege to have known Joe for the last five years of his life – during which time we became good friends. Shortly after his death I had a vivid dream in which I found him packing up boxes in the attic of his house. In the dream he turned to me and handed me a war-time searchlight, saying: ‘This is for you’. I like to think that this remarkable man’s spirit is still helping light my way.

Stalin Story – A Controversial Read

2008-10-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

News about Stalin still has the power to ignite interest and controversy.

A story I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph that was published a few days ago has elicited great interest in Britain, Russia and around the world.

Emails that have found their way to me have cast me both as a ‘bourgeois’ anti-communist representative of the Capitalist press and the story a ‘rehash’ of Stalinist propaganda.

Fascinating stuff for what I thought was just a good read….

First a couple of links to the story from the Russian press, followed by the story itself:

http://www.newsru.com/russia/20oct2008/stalinunedali.html

http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/32132

Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'

Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War'

By Nick Holdsworth in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:14AM BST 19 Oct 2008

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.

"This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.

"Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time," said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. "This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks."

When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain's lack of preparation for the looming conflict.

The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians.

"The detail of Stalin's offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance."

Professor Donald Cameron Watt, author of How War Came - widely seen as the definitive account of the last 12 months before war began - said the details were new, but said he was sceptical about the claim that they were spelled out during the meetings.

"There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French - including that of Drax," he said. "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."

The declassified archives - which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 - reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938.

"At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on," Gen Sotskov said.

"It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia's surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country."

Stalin's sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. "The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome."

Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 - in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annexe the Sudetenland - Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country's military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression.

"Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler's signature on it," Gen Sotksov said.

The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 - five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia - suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.

Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.

The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin's controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency.

"It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming," said Gen Sotskov.

A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.

It was only two years later, following Hitler's Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.

Rural Poverty Reduction Project in Kyrgyzstan

2008-10-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

Kyrgyzstan Documentary Film

The work of a cost-effective and innovative European Union-funded poverty reduction project in rural Kyrgyzstan is being turned into a film by the Turin, Italy-based European Training Foundation.

My involvement, as script-writer and location assistant, recently took me to Kochkor, a small village situated high on a narrow mountain plain, where the above photos were taken.

Here are a couple of stories I wrote for the ETF some months back about the project during an earlier visit:

CHOLPON, KYRGYZSTAN – Taalaikul Sadbakasova is equally at home milking her cows or teaching a class of sometimes boisterous little girls and boys at the village kindergarten she heads.

Today she is just as comfortable running a stall at the weekly market where she sells home-produced butter, yoghurt, sour cream, kefir, milk and other dairy products.

It was not always that way. Until last year Mrs Sadbakasova, a 42 year old graduate of Bishkek’s KZHPI women’s teaching college, was content to run the Cholpon village ‘Buchur’ pre-school and use the milk from her smallholding for family needs.

A native of what was in Soviet times a rural ‘kholkoz’ collective farm in Kyrgyzstan’s mountainous south-eastern Naryn region, where the majestic Tien Shan range rises like a massive edifice that divides the small central Asian state from China, Mrs Sadbakasova was interested in her professional development as a pre-school teacher but thought little about the family farm.

Then one day a publicity campaign offering free, European Training Foundation-backed agricultural business development training caught her eye.

The project – part of a poverty reduction project using skills upgrading to help the rural poor develop small businesses to improve their living standards – was run via a local vocational training school in district centre Kochkor.

Even better, the practically-based training was delivered not a long bus ride 25 kilometres eastwards on the old silk road in Kochkor but right on her doorstep: the project trainers would come to Cholpon.

“Straight away I knew that was what I wanted and signed up without a second thought,” Mrs Sadbakasova, a slender black-haired woman said, flashing a smile that lit up her face.

No stranger to western donor-backed programmes – she has benefited from several teacher-training projects over the past few years – Mrs Sadbakasova is clearly a self-motivated and energetic woman.

Married to farmer Talantbek Busurmankulov – who she also signed up for the ETF-initiative – she has two sons of 12 and 15 years old and has long been involved in village activities. Last year with regional government financial support, she founded a women and children’s educational NGO ‘Naristekyt’ to help improve the educational programme at her kindergarten.

Post-Soviet privatisation and agricultural reforms in Kyrgyzstan had given every rural resident of a collective farm a piece of land commensurate with the size of their ‘kholkoz’ and its population.

Although Soviet central planning allowed for a complex of agronomical, veterinary and technical support for farmers, division of labour and bureaucratic structures meant few people had the knowledge or skills required to run their own farms.

Market reforms meant they could buy those skills in – but cost and a rapid exodus of the best experts to better paid jobs, other regions or countries soon meant that even the most basic knowledge of good animal husbandry, crop development and product manufacturing and marketing were lost.

“I had been longing for such a course – I’d had ideas about doing more with our farm produce but didn’t know how to go about it. This course gave me that chance – I learned such a lot there,” said Mrs Sadbakasova, who like most farmers in the region speaks only Kyrgyz.

Although she grew up and went to college in Soviet times – she graduated in 1990 – her Russian language skills have atrophied through lack of use.

“We all took such a lot from this course – particularly veterinary knowledge,” Mr Sadbakasova said as we sat talking in a kindergarten classroom, the smell of freshly baked ‘lavash’ – flat unleavened bread – wafting through from the one-story building’s kitchen as the couple of dozen three and four-year olds played outside on the first warm day of March.

“Our small farms were fine but we did not always know how to medically treat our cattle, horses and other livestock. We had no idea how to expand our businesses, to develop marketing to make knew products.”

An integral part of the modular five-month long course that piloted last year with 32 students from Cholpon divided into two groups, was the development of a business plan and provision of state bank loans of up to 20,000 Som (400 Euros).

Mrs Sadbakasova knew what she wanted to do: buy a cow so she could produce more milk for the various dairy lines she had in mind and – ultimately – move into the lucrative value-added ice-cream business.

The ETF scheme gave her the necessary know-how to manufacture dairy products on a small scale – and the contacts and backing to raise the necessary state food quality certificates and hygiene approvals.

Mother nature gave her the rest: she bought a pregnant heifer for 18,000 Som and spent the rest on top grade fodder.

The heifer gave birth to a female calf that within a year will be ready for mating and will become another source of milk.

“The first cow is already pregnant again and by the summer I should have plenty of milk and be ready to start producing ice-cream,” Mrs Sadbakasova said, her face aglow with her radiant smile.

A couple of minutes away from the kindergarten down on her family small-holding – the farmyard recently concreted to make it easier to keep clean and sanitary – Mrs Sadbakasova shows off her milking skills. No factory farming here – everything is still done by hand.

With just one more payment to go after a profitable year to repay the 20,000 Som credit she is confident she will raise the additional 100,000 (2,000 Euros) credit she needs to buy a 100 litre capacity electric powered ice-cream making machine from Bishkek.

The big capacity freezer is ready.

The 22% interest state Ail Bank now charges (up from 15% last year and a sign of the global credit crunch) does not worry her.

All that Mrs Sadbakasova needs is some warm sunshine, hungry customers and a business that promises to bring both profit and pleasure – the first local ice-cream maker in her village – will be ready for its grand opening.

KOCHKOR, KYRGYZSTAN – Bank manager Ulan Kydyraliev knows how to tackle rural poverty in this remote mountainous region four hours drive from Bishkek: give farmers small loans.

A key stakeholder in a pioneering European Training Foundation-backed poverty reduction scheme, Mr Kydyraliev, 44, understands that it is not as simple as merely throwing money at the problem.

His loans come with a catch – the farmers have to sign up to take short but intensive agricultural skills development courses that include drawing up business plans.

Taught through a novel outreach programme developed at a vocational education and training school, the five-month long courses are designed to equip small farmers to move beyond subsistence and into profit.

Teaching new veterinary techniques, optimum livestock feeding schedules, superior crop development or basic food processing and marketing techniques can bring swift and substantial benefits.

“The project helps these people improve their farming techniques and businesses,” Mr Kydyraliev, Kochor branch manager of state Ail Bank said.

“We now have very few good agricultural and veterinary specialists in this region – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘kholkoz’ collective farm system many of the best left,” he said.

“We need to create a new generation of experts. We are pleased with the results – the farmers have increased their profits and we have had no defaults in repayments.”

Providing credit lines to participants in the project – launched last year in a pilot involving 32 students divided into two training groups involved in arable and livestock farming – is a safe bet, he admitted.

The students were all farmers with some experience a bank consultant helped them created tailored business plans.

The loans were small – a maximum of 20,000 Som (400 Euro) – and although no special terms were given, the 15% interest charged compares very favourably with rates of up to 32% charged by commercial banks for similar unsecured credit.

As a stakeholder in an 80,000 Euro project that involved a foreign donor, regional administration officials, village government heads, adult learners and a key regional VET school, the bank role is probably the most traditional one.

Not so that of Kochkor’s VET school No 15, lead institution for the project.

Eduarda Castel Branco, the ETF’s Mozambique-born expert responsible for the three-country poverty reduction project – which has been running since early 2007 in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan – credits it with breaking the mould.

“VET schools have a very strange mission in post-Soviet countries,” Ms Castel Branco, a fluent Russian speaker, said.

“They are more about social assistance than education. Passive not participatory, their main function to train young people according to state orders under out-dated curricula with little or nothing for the wider population.”

At a time when demand for skills-based, flexible market responsive training has probably never been greater in emerging economies such as Kyrgyzstan’s VET schools are crying out to be used as open centres for learning.

Addressing that challenge – as a way to tackling the wider issues of rural poverty – is a key component of the ETF project.

“Responding to local needs and local questions cannot be done without changes in the VET school approach too,” said Ms Castel Branco, whose work has involved her in education and training projects in countries as diverse as Russia, Jordan, Benin, Angola and Togo.

In this the ETF was fortunate in finding a VET school head with the experience, drive and attitude that was an exact fit.

Although Mr Tilemishov, 62, formally retired as head of school No. 15 last December (2007), he continues to lead the poverty reduction project.

With 18 years experience at school principal – and before that as boss of a local state freight truck repair and maintenance depot and a stint as a regional Communist party political instructor to his credit – Mr Tilemishov, who also farms a three hectare plot of land himself, brings a wealth of experience and local connections to the job.

“Until this project came along we did not think about what professional skills might be needed beyond the training we provided. We did not think about whether they would be in demand,” he admitted.

All that changed when, with central government VET agency approval, school No. 15 began working with the ETF.

A student-centred approach meant that Mr Tilemishov and his staff had to design the modular-based curriculum around the demands of the students, not the school.

So they took the lessons to the learners and provided largely practical training down on the farm for their busy students. Traditional ‘talk and chalk’ classes were ditched in favour of group seminars run as question and answer and discussion sessions.

The learning curve was as steep – if not steeper – for the VET school teachers than for the small farmers.

“We took advice from the student group and changed the study plan accordingly. That had never happened before,” Mr Tilemishov said.

The course addressed crucial issues, such as how to swiftly run a blood test on an animal to determine its health, methods for growing top quality cereal crops, effective ways to fatten up livestock or produce rich, creamy milk.

The results are impressive. Average incomes have more than doubled to 70 Euro a month.

A few dozen better educated farmers earning more money in a region with a population of 59,000 – nearly half of which are involved in agricultural – may not sound like much, but the Kochkor scheme can become an agent for change.

Peer review seminars with the graduates of the Tajik and Kazakh projects and Kyrgyzstan’s still strong system of clan and village social assistance will help spread the new techniques.

And a further 60 students will be trained this year.

“We would like to see such training groups in every village,” said Roza Adysheva, deputy head of the regional administration

“This sort of training could be organised by our own government structures; if such an approach were applied across the country it would have a major impact on the Kyrgyz economy.”

South Ossetia and Russia: Marry In Haste, Repent At Leisure

2008-08-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

Moscow Friday August 29 2008

Russia’s future absorption of South Ossetia seems in little doubt if you watch the ‘body language’ following the Kremlin’s rapid recognition of independence of the Georgian secessionist area this week following the short and brutal war.

Take this outdoor placard that appeared this week on Ulitsa Bolshaya Gruzinskaya.
The poster, which shows intertwined South Ossetian and Russian flags
knotted togther in a flowing ribbon, carries the slogan ‘Tskhinval -
We're With You!’

Local Russians can’t fail to have noticed that the placard is situated on a street that is the main artery of Moscow’s historic Georgian quarter – the name means ‘Big Georgian Street’ and the poster is very close to Tishinskaya Ploschad (Tishinskaya Square) where a massive Georgian-Russian friendship monument, cast in bronze, is situated.

The designer of the monument is Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli – a favourite of Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov - who lives on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya just a few doors down from the old Georgian Orthodox church where Moscow's Georgian community still worships.

Surely no coincidence....

But study the design of the poster: South Ossetia’s colours are firmly knotted into Russia’s. Absorption of South Ossetia into Russia is surely the longer term objective of Kremlin policy.

Russia Goes to War After Georgian Attack on South Ossetia

2008-08-18T00:34:00.000-07:00

Moscow, Monday August 18 2008

The crisis between Russian and Georgia over the break-away region of South Ossetia – and riding on the back of that, Abkhazia – has dominated the world's attention in the past ten days.

Russian tanks and armour are deep inside Georgian territory proper and the Kremlin is dragging its heels over the withdrawal that western world leaders are demanding.

For readers of the western press the overriding impression is that Russia has attacked its small southern neighbour and ushered in the sort of brutal ethnic cleansing last seen in the separatist areas 15 years ago (see previous post from Abkhazia in June).

It seems that already most western leaders and opinion makers are overlooking the fact that it was Georgia’s military assault against South Ossetia – targeting both civilian areas and bases occupied by Russian peacekeepers who had been stationed there alongside Georgian peacekeeprs – that provoked Russia’s response.

Clearly Vladimir Putin – Russia’s former president, current prime minister but de facto leader – was delighted when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili gave him the accuse for ordering an armed incursion into Georgia.

That Russia has long been backing South Ossetian separatist provocations – roadside bombs, attacks on Georgian military installations etc – on Georgian territory around the separatist enclave, is not in doubt. That Saakashvili – renowned for his hot temper and less than mature emotional character – should respond in precisely the way that suited Russian foreign policy aims was, sadly, in little doubt either.

Russia has done itself a grave disservice by going well-beyond what might have been considered a proportionate response; by arming and encouraging groups of North Ossetian and other ‘irregulars’ who have reportedly been killing, looting and raping in the wake of the Russian military advance.

The Georgians are not innocent of similar horrors – although with a few notable exceptions this is largely unreported in the western press. For a fine example of balanced reporting on the conflict see Mark Franchetti’s story in the Sunday Times of August 17, link here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4545980.ece

For the majority of Russians – starved as they are of the full picture, with Kremlin-controlled national television concentrating on footage from South Ossetia and ignoring the Russian aerial attacks in Georgia – the story is one of a justified Russian response to a heavily armed attack on civilians in South Ossetia, many of whom hold Russian passports.

The attitude here can be summed up by the response of most ordinary Russians: “If the west backed independence in (Serb separatist area) Kosovo, why not South Ossetia?”

That there is little or no tension between Russians, Georgian and Ossetians in Moscow or elsewhere (where as the Moscow Times reports members of the different ethnic groups have been working together to put together aid shipments) reflects the political roots of the conflict: Saakashvili allowed himself to be pushed into starting the war and, unsurprisingly, the Kremlin leapt at the opportunity to pursue long-held ambitions to begin rolling back some of the territorial and egotistical setbacks Russia has suffered since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is also worth noting that Saakashvili by no means enjoys universal support in Georgia. When I was last there in December shortly before the presidential election and just after major disturbances on the streets of Tbilisi during a stand off between the opposition and the administration, many ordinary Georgian’s voiced their disdain for the American-educated lawyer. Some government employers spoke of the culture of fear that Saakashvili’s administration had installed in Georgia. Only last month I spoke to an academic from Tbilisi who fled to America with her husband after being harassed by Georgian security services for speaking out against Saakashvili.

Talk in the western media of a fledgling democracy being crushed by the hawks of the Kremlin fail to understand the nuances of this tragic story.

Had Saakashvili pursued a more clever policy over South Ossetia – relying more on European-backed diplomacy and less on a rush to join NATO, which has been read as an aggressive step by the Kremlin – the status of the separatist territory and that of Abkhazia may have been resolved peacefully.

The war was a tragedy. As ever, ordinary innocent people have died for the ambitions of politicians. And, as the following story on part of the Russian reaction to the war illustrates, their deaths as ever are used to forward those ambitions.

RUSSIA HONOURS DEAD HERO:

To his friends he was a brilliant young officer with a promising career
ahead of him. To his wife Ekaterina he was the father of a two year old daughter. To a group of civilians ambushed in South Ossetia on the day President Dmitry Medvedev ordered his troops to invade Georgia, he was a hero: Russian army Major Denis Vetchinov died saving their lives in a horrific ambush in Tskhinvali.

On Friday (Aug 15) the 32 year old Kazakhstan-born major from the 58th Army group was buried in accordance with his wife’s wishes with full military honours in Volgograd the Russian city that as Stalingrad came to symbolize heroism in war time – after President Dmitry Medvedev named him a Hero of the Russian Federation.

Russia’s highest award for bravery in wartime – equivalent to Britain’s Victoria Cross and formerly known as the Hero of the Soviet Union – is a rare award but
Major Vetchinov’s was one of two awarded for combat during brief but bitter war with Georgia.

The other recipient, Lt Colonel Konstantin Timerman, survived the war as did dozens of other soldiers who received lesser awards for distinguished service during the five days of combat.

But it was Major Vetchinov’s sacrifice that last week came to symbolize
Russia’s pride in what it sees as a heroic operation to restore peace and stability to South
Ossetia and Georgia’s other Russophile enclave Abkhazia in the face of what the Kremlin has portrayed as aggressive military adventurism by Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili.

“He was kind, gentle and fair and always wishes people to be better
than they are in reality and did everything to work for that,” his 25 year old widow Ekaterina told Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Still in shock at her husband’s sudden death Mrs Vetchinova who currently lives in Kazakhstan, is planning to move with her daughter Masha to Volgograd, where several close army friends live.

“She needs help and simple human warmth,” said one friend. “She is only 25 and it is very bitter to call her a widow. Her happiness has ended before it had really begun.”

Major Vetchinov, who army friends recall was always keen to be in the
thick of action, was due to enter Moscow’s prestigious joint staff college next year – a key step on the ladder to senior promotion in the Russian army.

“In combat conditions Denis proved to be a brave and courageous officer
capable in any conditions of executing a combat order and of making correct decisions
in critical situations,” said an army friend Alexander Borisenko.

The dead major was also a keen strategic thinker who wrote a brilliant
analysis on the lessons learned during the Russian army’s operation to free scores of patients taken hostage by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in 1995, he added.

Alexander Kots, a Russian war correspondent for popular tabloid Komsomolskay Pravda, whose life the major saved during an ambush in Tskhinvali, paid tribute
to the dead hero.

Speaking to Russian last week from his hospital bed, Mr Kots – an experienced
reporter who has covered Russia’s conflicts in Chechnya, Dagestan and elsewhere –
said the major had not hesitated to act when Georgian troops ambushed a Russian convoy entering the South Ossetia capital on the first day of the war.

“As we entered Tskhinvali on a back road through a wooded area I noticed
some Georgians hiding behind a couple of knocked out tanks. Suddenly we were under fire from all sides. In the scramble to get into our armoured vehicles fell between a troop carrier and an UAZ military jeep,” Mr Kots said.

“The windows of the jeep started shattering and I realized that they
were shooting at me and my colleagues. Shots were coming from everywhere and men – both theirs and ours – were falling all over the place. A couple of our armoured vehicles were hit and started to burn fiercely.”

Deciding to make a run for it Mr Kots came face to face with a Georgian
soldier as he rounded the corner of a burning armoured car.

“I shouted out that I was a journalist – he responded: ‘And I am a killer!’ and opened up on me from just a few yards away.”

Hit in the arm the reporter collapsed to the ground expecting to be finished
off in the next second.

“Nothing happened. I turned my head and saw the Georgian lying dead
and heavily wounded Russian major, blood flowing from wounds in the head and knee.”

Still not safe Mr Kots, the major and a several other Russian reporters
clung to the ground as grenades exploded all around them. Eventually in a lull in the fighting, the newspaper correspondent was able to make it to the safety of a Russian amoured car where he was treated for his wounds.

The major was not so lucky: he died before reaching medical help.

President Medvedev’s decision to award the dead major Russia’s highest
award for bravery reflects widespread support in Russia for what most people see as a heroic military operation to defend Russian passport holders in a region of Georgia that has long yearned for independence.

As the international community moves to find a way forward beyond the
conflict the mood in Russia is intransigent: Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly stated last week that Moscow no longer recognized Georgia’s territorial sovereignty, suggesting the Kremlin is prepared to absorb South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russian media reports from South Ossetia – which remains in Russian
hands despite international calls for the two sides to return to their pre-war positions
– pictured a major operation in full swing to normalize the region under Russian control,
with refugees being assisted to return home, help given for those without proper papers and the resumption of pension payments – in Russian roubles – to the neediest.

The prospect that Russia will simply turn around and leave South Ossetia
seems remote.

Mikhail Yuriev, a Russian business and former deputy parliamentary speaker,
whose book “The Third Empire” foresees the creation within the coming decades of a
Russian empire stretching across Europe from the Pacific in the east to the Atlantic in the west, said bringing the two breakaway regions of Georgia back into the Russian fold had long been an unspoken Kremlin priority.

“I predicted that sooner or later Russia would stop trying to be part of the so-called civilized, that is western world, and at that point start taking back its own territories.The only obstacle to that is the desire of the west – of America – to stop it. Apart from that there are no other obstacles.

“South Ossetia and Abhkezia will never be part of Georgia again. Russia may not annex them but instead will find it better to recognize their independence.”

Ordinary Russians agree: Valeri Buyenevich, 44, a hospital anaesthetist from Astrakhan, southern Russian said: “In Europe there is a precedent for separatist regions: Kosovo. If Kosovo can be independent then why not Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia?”

Major Vetchinkov’s bravery award comes at a time when Russia’s beleaguered
military sorely lacks such apparently unsullied heroes.

After the debacle in Afghanistan 20 years ago and the more recent moral and military minefield of the war in Chechnya, Russia’s army is a demoralized conscript mass.

The violent hazing of new conscripts – such as the notorious incident last year that left a young soldier castrated and a double amputee after a severe beating by more senior men – has stained the reputation of an army that still rests of the laurels of its World War Two victories.

Now flush with oil wealth the Kremlin is determined to put the military
back on its feet.

Last year then President Vladimir Putin announced plans for a £100 billion arms programme over the next seven years to pay for new, modern weapons and ordered military chiefs to ‘strengthen the battle-readiness of the army and navy’.

On a small scale last week’s war with Georgia has done just that.

A shorter version of this story was published in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2569650/Russian-soldiers-who-died-in-Georgia-conflict-hailed-as-heroes-by-Kremlin.html

Abkhazia - a hauntingly beautiful Caucasian time capsule

2008-06-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

Friday June 20 2008

Abkhazia is one of those anachronisms left over from the end of the Cold War.

The scene of a short and bitterly violent civil war between ethnic Abkhazians and their Georgian neighbours in 1992-93 that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union, the tiny Caucasian territory bordering the Black Sea remains technically part of Georgia.

Try telling that to the Abkhazian border guards when you enter what they consider a nation state. Under the control of what used to be the Abkhaz minority – 80% of the population, mostly Georgian, fled during the war – Abkhazia today boasts a president, a national flag, border controls and the protection of Russian military peace-keeping forces.

No-one other than Russia recognizes the breakaway region and that does not necessarily please the Abkhazians who want independence not annexation. That may explain the recent introduction of its own visas – which caught me and a colleague by surprise when we entered Abkhazia early one morning recently at the Adler border point, near Sochi.

Fortunately for us – and despite the region’s catalogue of distressing human rights abuses during the civil war, particularly the massacre of Georgian civilians in the capital, Sukhumi, in September 1993 - Abkhazian border officials seem a pretty reasonable bunch: it took an hour and a half, a change of shift and a call to Sukhumi to secure entry for the day.

Despite or perhaps because of its tragic recent history, Abkhazia is hauntingly beautiful. Half deserted with the crumbling ruins of grand old villas, once fashionable restaurants and hotels, the single major road runs along the coast before cutting inland around Gagra, the first sizeable town.

A drive up into the mountains, where a kilometre above sea level Lake Ritsa sits hemmed in by snow-topped peaks, is a stunningly beautiful excursion.

Gagra retains a grace and grandeur only a little diminished by its current shabbiness. Further east the monastery of Nova Athos and nearby caves are a magnet for Russian day trippers who come by the coachload from Sochi.

Few venture as far as Sukhumi where the ghosts of ’93 still linger. The city is virtually deserted with just a few souls swimming in the clear waters off its pebble beaches where rusting hulks of abandoned ships lie drunkenly and ruined restaurants subside into the sea.

There are signs that of some reconstruction and reports that property prices have begun to appreciate as speculators sense eventual international recognition – particularly since Kosovo gained world approval for its declaration of independence from Serbia. A two room flat that would have cost a couple of thousand US dollars three years ago now sells for $80,000.

But mostly Sukhumi is weed-strewn and sad: the government building that was at the centre of the murderous rampage in September 1993 remains gutted and empty, as do many buildings throughout the city.

The selection of photos above offer a glimpse of Abkhazia in June 2008.

Russian Newspaper Trashed in Toilet Paper Stunt

2008-03-06T11:02:00.000-08:00

Russia and Russians can be accused of many things - but boring just does not figure in their world.

Never a dull moment here - as the following gem illustrates....Dirty Protest on Moscow's streets...

In Soviet times Pravda – mouthpiece of the Communist Party – was the toilet paper of choice for millions denied more tender sanitary aid by the command economy’s endemic shortages.

Today business is no longer a dirty word.

But that didn't help one top Russian broadsheet this week.

Business newspaper Kommersant found itself at the centre of a farcical – and probably illegal – political prank when scores of young men and women across Moscow handed out rolls of cheap toilet paper printed with news stories from the daily and a top columnist Yulia Taratuta’s private mobile phone number.

Ms Taratuta told Radio Ekho Moskvy that she was angered and appalled at the stunt. Now "every dog in Moscow" was calling her on her private line, she complained.

To add insult to injury today hundreds of the Kommersant rolls mysteriously appeared in the public toilets in Russia’s parliament, the State Duma.

The agitprop action – thought to have been organized by members of Kremlin-backed pro-Putin youth group Nashi – is believed to be linked to a story Kommersant ran in January criticizing the group.

Youngsters handing out the toilet rolls – who occasionally demanded 30 roubles (UK pounds 0.60 or US$1.25) each for them – claimed they were part of a newspaper promotion.

Like many yesterday I was not sure at first what was going on and, assuming it was a legitimate advertising event, told the leather-jacketed young man that I'd only take it if it were free. He gave it to me without another word.

Kommersant’s editor Andrey Vasilev insisted the incident was nothing but “hooliganism” and is considering legal action for breach of copyright, although Nashi denies any link with it.

Russia – No Noticeable Change

2008-03-03T08:44:00.001-08:00

Monday March 3 2008

Beneath grey skies and slicing cold sleet the few dozen Russian neo-dissidents that gathered for an unsanctioned ‘Dissenters March’ at Moscow’s Chisty Prudi metro station late this afternoon were easily outnumbered by a couple of hundred interior ministry troops and OMON riot squad police.

Russia today is pretty much exactly the same country as it was yesterday morning. Dmitry Medvedev may have been elected president but there is precious little sign that his recent assertions over ensuring freedom of expression are more than liberal sound bites aimed at assuaging public opinion.

Moscow’s dissident rally had been specifically banned by city authorities and the police viewed any attempt at unfurling an Other Russia flag – or lighting a flare – as a provocation and arrested around 30 of the protestors within minutes of the 5pm start.

Plain-clothes officers identified key people before the OMON men moved in. Veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomarev and Marina Litvinovich, ‘The Other Russia’ leader Garry Kasparov’s deputy, were among those hauled away.

One plainclothes man asked by western reporters why he was identifying activists muttered, “it’s my job,” before moving away.

Kasparov was not there. He chose to lead a march in St Petersburg that had been allowed. Evening newscasts in Moscow devoted a few seconds to both the Moscow and St Petersburg events after lengthy reports of Sunday’s election. Medvedev and Putin were shown beaming and waving to supporters at a Red Square rally last night and joking with staff at Expedition, an exclusive Moscow arctic sea food restaurant, where they celebrated Medvedev’s win yesterday afternoon.

The evening news also reported on Gazprom’s decision to restrict supplies of natural gas to Ukraine by 25% in a payment dispute. Turning off the gas to Ukraine seems to be an annual event these days, although the European Union was today keen to downplay it as “a business dispute”.

The few protestors left under the sleet at Chisty Prudi (which means ‘pure ponds’ although the square looked more likely a dirty sink today) expressed their weary anger at the Kremlin.

Nothing had changed with Medvedev’s election, said bearded Jakov Kornev, a retired builder aged 59 but who looked more like 80.

Holding aloft a copy of the Russian constitution he declared: “I came here today because I am tired of being scared. Russia today is a mafia state. The regime is purely criminal.”

Tatar pensioner, Asnisan Neftakova, 60, said she and other dissenters had been “denied the chance to vote for our people.”

“I am here today to show my support for democracy,” she said. Gesturing with contempt towards the lines of steel-helmeted interior ministry troops, she added: “These police here live fully on Putin’s pay.”

Bookseller Alexander Khatov, 54, who said his dissent dated back to his support for the Prague Spring Communist thaw of 1968 – after which he was denied access to university education – said the show of force demonstrated that the Kremlin was “scared of people expressing their constitutional rights.”

Medvedev has insisted he wants to tackle Russia’s endemic corruption and what he calls the country’s “legal nihilism”. But since he also insists he will not deviate from the path establish his predecessor, Putin – who will remain on the scene as Prime Minister – it looks like there will be a role to play for the dissenters for a long time to come.

Russia's Medvedev in Entirely Predictable Victory

2008-03-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

Sunday March 2 2008

MOSCOW – There was precious little evidence of enthusiasm for the Russian presidential elections today in Moscow.

A cold day that dawned to a steady drizzle of wet snow that soon turned to rain, there was no apparent rush for the polling stations in an election that is more Czarist-style succession than democratic choice.

Dubbed the “dreary” election by many Western journalists – as Luke Harding of The Guardian was quoted by yesterday’s Moscow Times – Russians seem to share that view.

A straw poll of Russian acquaintances from a wide social spectrum today elicited not one Medvedev voter. Most were not going to vote at all. One, an educated English-speaking man in his 50s, spoke for many when he remarked acidly: “They really think we are going to going along and legitimize something that has already been long decided?”

Another, less well educated but nonetheless a shrewd and affable man, said he would far rather have a few beers and relax with friends but since his wife worked for the local administration the entire family had been mobilized to vote. Such is choice in today’s Russia.

Even this evening's election broadcasts on the state channels have an air of forced interest about them. A live broadcast just after 10pm tonight showed the reporter doing a stand-up from the Central Elections Commission hq in Moscow with all the enthusiasm of a Christmas pantomime star in mid January.

Mr Medvedev’s results are coming in right on target – 65%-70% across Russia’s regions, making his landslide victory the most one-sided in the country’s post-Soviet history.

Russia’s opposition coalition, The Other Russia, headed by former chess grandmaster turned political activist, Garry Kasparov, is urging world leaders to send Mr Medvedev to Coventry and refuse to congratulate him on the heavily massaged victory being delivered tonight.

Yesterday Mr Kasparov dubbed the elections a “farce” as he delivered a 5,500 name protest petition to the body overseeing today’s vote, the central election commission.

“The world should not recognize the election results. This election is the imposition of Putin’s successor. It is one hand-picked candidate replacing another.

“If the leaders of the free world accept Medvedev they will be approving and giving credibility to this farce,” he told the crowds of foreign reporters and news crews that turned up to witness the event.

He added that he feared a violent crackdown on an unsanctioned “dissenters march” planned in Moscow tomorrow.

There were few signs of dissent in Moscow this evening when I spent an hour or so strolling through the tipping rain on a route that took me past four different polling stations before I reached Red Square, where young pro-Kremlin kids from Molodaya Rossiya (Young Russia) hung forlornly about with flags and leaflets getting sodden as a van with speakers attached blared out bad Russian pop music.

But close inspection of election poster, contained within an illuminated advertising hoarding box near Okhotny Ryad metro station, just across the road from the Kremlin, offered some hope.

Stuck to the glass were stickers advertising tomorrow’s officially banned dissenters march in Moscow and a picture of a goat with the slogan: “This goat is our candidate! Is our goat any worse than the others?”

Perhaps the country has come full circle – and has returned as a Soviet simulacrum? It’s worse, said one Russian acquaintance today. Back in the old days the General Secretary of the Party ran everything. Sure he had access to nice government cars and dachas, but essentially he was no better off than anyone else. Today the new Politburo chiefs run everything and enjoy vast private wealth too. “It is definitely worse today than in the old days,” he declared gloomily.

Readers of the western press could be forgiven for sometimes thinking that the vast majority of Russians are dupes of this new so-called managed democracy.

From my experience, Russians are very critical but both understand that there is little they can do against such a monolithic and powerful system and also deeply feel that stability is more important right now than upsetting the apple cart.

Here’s what a neighbour’s mother told me:

….On eve of a poll that many Russians have described as the most boring – because predictable – since Soviet times, Nina Nikolaievna last night had still not made up her mind who she would vote for today.

“It’s a choice between Zyuganov and Medvedev but I won’t decide until I have the ballot paper in my hand,” the 68 year old Moscow physics teacher said.

A former member of the Soviet Communist Party - she still has her old party card – and a teacher with 45 years service behind her, Nina believes firmly in a great future for Russia.

“This is a rich country. We have many talented people. We sincerely hope and wish that Russia will reach the top intellectually and economically,” she declaimed as she stood in the “podyezd” communal stairwell outside her daughter’s apartment in a central Moscow apartment .

She laughed when told she should run for president herself with such a knack for political sound-bites.

But despite the image of political apathy, like many Russians Nina is critical of the country Vladimir Putin is passing over to Dmitry Medvedev today.

“Russia has many problems today and the country has lost a lot, particularly with regard to the upbringing of children. We’ve lost the entire system we had for years – the youth groups and activities,” she said.

Education and health services operated in a grey free-market with quality services available only to those able and willing to pay. Economic growth was restricted to Russia and a few other large cities while many of the new jobs were unskilled.

But she conceded that life today was certainly better than the 1990s – a time of hyper-inflation, mafia turf wars, rampant corruption and financial collapse that many shudder to recall.

“Teachers in Moscow earn twice more than those outside the capital – an average of 20,000 roubles (UK Pounds 400) a month – but that’s thanks to our Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.”

Unwilling to give Mr Putin much, if any, credit for restoring Russia’s economic and geopolitical status, Nina softened when talking about Mr Medvedev.

“He’s young, cultured, active and works hard. We could do with more open political debate about who our next president may be – but at least we have stability which is the main thing in Russia today,” she said as two of her granddaughters emerged from the apartment behind her go outside to play on one of the first bright afternoons in Moscow for weeks.

Finally, for the record I'm noting below the opposition field that Mr Medvedev was running against today – a pretty dour bunch.

I’ll wrap today’s blog with an entertaining interview I took with the outsider, Andrei Bogdanov, some weeks back. The piece was intended for publication elsewhere but sadly ended up being spiked.

And then I’ll provide a link for the story that did run in today’s Sunday Telegraph – mostly about the influence Svetlana Medvedeva, Russia’s First Lady in waiting, seems to have on her husband, the new president elect Dmitry Medvedev.

Here's the opposition field:

…..MOSCOW - Small but vocal anti-Kremlin coalition The Other Russia plan post-election protest marches tomorrow in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities across the country.

A loosely knit group that brings together figures that include eccentric writer and National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov and Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovksy under the leadership of chess grandmaster turned political activist Garry Kasparov, the ‘dissenters’ actions face a riot police crackdown in Moscow, where the march has been banned.

Mr Kasparov, who was beaten and arrested during a similar unsanctioned protest in Moscow on the eve of last December’s parliamentary elections, says that won’t deter activists who have dubbed the presidential elections a “farce” and Dmitry Medvedev as “false Dmitry” – a reference to a 17^th century pretender to the Czar’s throne.

The opposition coalition also plans to set up an alternative parliament, called the National Assembly, which they will use as a base for continuing to criticize the Kremlin.

The brainchild of President Vladimir Putin’s former economic advisor Andrei Illarionov, it’s first session is due to take place late March.

Opposition claims that today’s presidential elections are merely a lavish rubber stamping for a pre-approved transfer of power are given weight by the flimsy opposition candidates the Kremlin allowed to be registered.

The only serious contender is Communist leader Gennady Zyganov, a 63 year old former physics teacher who can expect 15-20% of the vote.

Jew-baiting nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 61, head of the ill-named Liberal
Democratic Party of Russia, is a Kremlin-loyalist whose job is to take second place to Mr Zyganov, He can expect some 10% of the votes.

Rank outsider and Russia’s most bizarre presidential candidate is Andrei Bogdanov, a 38 year old professional politician who has never held high public office but doubles as the grand master of Russia’s Masonic lodge.

Head of the Democractic Party of Russia, the father of three is campaigning on a ticket that includes Russian membership of the European Union and NATO. He is likely to poll less than 2%.

Dismissed as a job by most political observers, Mr Bogdanov denies that he is the Kremlin’s “insurance candidate” – designed to legitimize elections that demand at least two candidates lest Mr Zyuganov and Mr Zhirinovsky try to gain political advantage by pulling out.

Dmitry Medvedev, President Putin’s anointed successor, is a 42 year old St Petersburg-educated lawyer and chairman of Gazprom, Russia’s state-run natural gas giant.

Putting himself above the political fray, Mr Medvedev refused to campaign or debate his opponents.

Seen as Putin’s puppet, he had recently adopted many of his predecessor’s mannerisms and also lashed out at the British Council as a “nest of spies.”

But he has also said he will return press freedom to Russia, crack down on corruption and create a modern transport infrastructure.

He is expected to win between 60-65% of the vote.

And now here is some more on the bizarre Mr Bogdanov:

MOSCOW - He has never held high publicly elected office, he is pro-European Union membership, is the grand master of his country’s Masonic lodge, his party scored just 0.1% of the vote at the last elections and he cheerfully admits he does not have a hope of winning the next.

Meet Andrei Bogdanov – Vladimir Putin’s insurance policy for legally legitimate presidential elections.

Mr Bogdanov, a 38 year old father of three of mixed Russian-Crimean Tatar descent, has spent the past 15 years working as a ‘political consultant’ and with the Democratic Party of Russia.

He saw off a challenge for the obscure party’s leadership last year from former prime minister turned Putin critic Mikhail Kasyanov – who went to the same Moscow secondary school as Mr Bogdanov and claims he stands to win up to 15% of the popular vote when he runs against Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s anointed successor.

Mr Medvedev is expected to win a landslide victory in a country where both the Kremlin and the population at large fear any change of political course could be disastrous.

Mr Bogdanov dismisses notions he is an insurance candidate to ensure at least two contenders run in the election as the Russian constitution demands, saying the Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant head of nationalists LDPR, performs that role perfectly well.

But observers say without Mr Bogdanov the Kremlin fears that Zhirinovsky and Communist leader Gennady Zuganov could exert powerful leverage by threatening to both pull out of the election unless they were given key political concessions.

“The role of Bogdanov in this election is very important. By law there must be at least two candidates,” said Nikolai Petrov, of Moscow’s Carnegie Centre think tank.

“If the only opposition parties are the LDPR and the Communists they could blackmail the Kremlin by dropping out of the elections and not taking part. In order to ensure the elections take place the Kremlin registered Bogdanov.”

It also helps explain why the Kremlin dismissed ex prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov’s bid to run against Medvedev – claiming he had forged thousands of signatures out of the two million required from supporters – but did not scrutinise Mr Bogdanov’s lists.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a Kremlin correspondent and columnist for Russian daily newspaper Kommersant agrees.

“Bogdanov looks like a joke. He is just a guarantee – an ordered opposition candidate.”

Mr Bogdanov dismisses these suggestions as nonsense, insisting that the flamboyant but obsequiously loyal Zhirinovsky is the insurance candidate.

“Zhirinovsky criticizes a lot and makes a lot of noise but always votes for the Kremlin line. Better insurance than Zhirinovsky I cannot imagine,” he says adding that with 15 years of party organization across Russia and experience of regional and national elections behind him, gathering two million signatures was “not a problem.”

Mr Bogdanov – who bullishly predicts he will attract a minimum of 3.5% - two million votes - with possibly as much as 10-15% - has been taking part in the televised election debates that Mr Medvedev has pointedly boycotted.

“We were the first anti-Communist party in Russia and have always been pro-democracy and pro-European Union. I remember the 1990s when many people laughed as Zhirinovksy – and then he went on to get 22% in a general election,” Mr Bogdanov said.

But when pressed his assertive position soon crumbles.

“I shouldn’t really say this, but of course I don’t have a hope of becoming president,” he admitted.

And here is the link to the Sunday Telegraph story that ran today: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/01/wrussia101.xml

Back in the Caucasus, Tbilisi Eight Years On

2007-12-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

Tuesday December 11 2007

TBILISI, GEORGIA – The Caucasus has a charm both readily definable and elusive. Last time I was in Tbilisi, in January 2000 for an international donor conference, the bitter cold, lack of heating and intermittent electricity did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for the place.

Overwhelmed by the history – the conference took place in an old palace where an independent democratic republic was declared in 1918, only to be crushed by the Red Army in the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution – I vowed to return.

Back then my thoughts were very much of spring; walking in the mountains, visiting vineyards and wine tasting.

As chance would have it, my return was again a winter one; this time for the 8^th Tbilisi Film Festival – which did not even exist when I was last in town.

Much has changed and much somehow stayed the same, as ever in the Caucasus.

Gone are the bonfires in the streets, groups of cold and miserable people huddled around trying to keep warm.

Gone is the corrupt regime of President Eduard Shevardnadze (a former Soviet foreign minister) that in January 2000 was already tottering.

Gone are the blackouts and chaos that best the grand and beautiful old city, a huddle of terraced, balconied old houses and ancient Christian churches that sits astride the river Mtkvari.

Largely gone are mass unemployment, rampant crime and corruption, at least lower down the political feeding chain.

Much has changed in eight years.

Shevardnadze’s regime was swept away on the back of a popular and remarkably bloodless ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003, ushering into power American educated charismatic leader Mikhail Saakashvili.

He won a landslide election as president in 2004.

The Tbilisi International Film Festival, represents the fresh face of a country moving towards a modern, European-style democracy.

Launched late 2000 as part of another cultural festival, ‘Gift’, TIFF went independent in 2002.

Today it screens more than a 100 films, attracts a strong field of entries for its competition focused on first or second features and this year for the first time gave cash prizes worth a total of $12,000 for its Golden and Silver Prometheus awards.

Veteran US director Bob Raefelson showed up to give a masterclass and present a screening of his 1970 classic “Five Easy Pieces”.

Based at the city centre Rustaveli Cinema, one of the few modern multiplexes in Georgia, it was thronged everyday with youngsters, families and kids.

International brands compete for shop window space and the city is peppered with new monuments, including a much criticized statue of St George slaying the dragon by Moscow-resident Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli rumoured to have cost $4 million.

Everything looks so much cleaner and brighter – at least on the main roads. Wander off down the side streets and nothing much has changed. Rubbish and debris, half demolished buildings. Squalor.

The spirit of the people remains strong: in a post office on the main Rustaveli Avenue last Thursday (December 6) I got chatting with an elderly man. Asked if I spoke French, I replied in my worst schoolboy French, as only an Englishman could: Je parle Francaise comme un vache Espanol. (Apologies for bad spelling etc, it’s been donkey’s years since I scraped a miserable pass at O level….)

Given his chance, he opened up like a true Caucasian troubadour poet, and recited for a full five minutes a passage from Victor Hugo, word perfect in a beautiful authentic French accent. A performance that won applause from me and the two ladies sitting behind the post office counter. Remember, this is a part of the world where poets used to meet to do battle with verse. Beautiful.

Politically things seem to be back where they were, after a fashion.

President Saakashvili is accused by a growing opposition of resorting to the sort of authoritarianism that made Shevardnadze such a hate figure.

They accuse him of failing to tackle corruption at the top and lack of action over stubbornly high rates of unemployment. Popular discontent spilled over into street protests early November.

Fearing Russian involvement in a perceived coup attempt, Saakashvili sent out the riot police to use tear gas, water cannon and baton rounds against tens of thousands of protestors.

He declared a state of emergency and took two national TV stations Rustavi 2 and Imedi off air.

Imedi – jointly owned by opposition figure Badri Patarkatsishvili and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – was kept off air for a month until pressure from western governments brought about a lifting of a banning order.

A snap election Saakashvili has called for January 5 now looks like becoming a referendum on his presidential style, with opposition figures variously calling for scrapping the office altogether or reintroducing a constitutional monarchy not seen here for more than 200 years.

Saakashvili stepped down as president to run for re-election. You would not know it: he is ubiquitous on television news and travels with a full state security apparatus.

Last Saturday (December 8) he was due to give the awards at the closing of the Tbilisi film festival. Security was ultra-tight with masses of uniformed and plainclothes men checking all guests at the cinema.

Saakashvili failed to show up. No reason given. It’s the sort of behaviour many in Georgia say has turned the people against him.

Victory in the elections for Saakashvili is by no means certain and there are dark warnings of recriminations whoever wins.

It looks like I may be back in Tbilisi sooner rather than later and before the warm breezes of a Caucasian spring come.

Ends

Russia's elections - opposition call foul

2007-12-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

Here's today's (London) Sunday Telegraph story topline... see link below for full story

Stop Vladimir Putin by spoiling vote, say rivals

By Colin Freeman and Nick Holdsworth in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:56am GMT 02/12/2007

Russia's beleaguered opposition parties have urged their supporters to spoil their ballots in the country's parliamentary elections as a protest against Kremlin moves to stop them winning seats.

LINK TO FULL STORY: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=TV3YLHNROI4HLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/02/wrussia102.xml

Russia's Parliamentary Elections - a Referendum on Putin

2007-12-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

President Putin pictured, hand on heart, in free weekly government newspaper "Moscow Centre" under a headline reading "Time for Real Business"

Saturday December 1st 2007 Moscow

Snow-bound Moscow frosty and quiet on eve of parliamentary elections the Kremlin has cast as a referendum on President Vladimir Putin’s rule…

The Russian capital is all snow-dusted frosty calm and quiet tonight on the eve of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections.

If you didn’t listen to the radio, watch television or read newspapers here you could be forgiven for thinking that tomorrow was nothing more than a normal Sunday, with half population of Moscow apparently gone to their dachas (weekend cottages).

Under Russian electoral rules no last minute electioneering is allowed and apart from the red, white and blue striped national flags fluttering from flagpoles on apartment blocks and buildings in the centre of town, alongside those of Moscow’s patron saint, St George against a red background, there’s precious little sign that the country is on the eve of a potentially historic turning point.

The massive and ubiquitous United Russia billboards that had dominated street advertising until recently declaring ‘Putin’s Plan – Russia’s Victory’ were taken down more than a week ago, leaving only isolated posters for the Communists or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist Liberal Democrat Party of Russia.

By this evening even those have gone.

Russia’s last independent radio station, Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) just reported (10pm Moscow time) on the official ‘den politicheskoi tishini’ – day of political silence - when all campaigning is forbidden before tomorrow’s elections. The news then went straight into a report about the mass arrests across Russia of opposition activists who intended to act as electoral observers tomorrow.

Since opposition coalition The Other Russia failed to be officially registered as a party for the election – it could not get the necessary 50,000 signatures in time – its activists, as group leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov told me last night, have been signing up to work alongside opposition parties that include the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Communists who are on the ballot.

Their aim is to guard against anticipated widespread vote rigging that they fear the Kremlin is engaged in to boost the vote for President Putin’s power vehicle, United Russia.

The arrests across the country last night and today – in Samara, Tula, Irkutsk and other cities - will have come as no surprise.

Talking by phone to Kasparov last night here in Moscow, he said that an Interior Ministry order had gone out warning police in the provinces that “under SPS disguise extremists will try to squeeze into polling stations” on Sunday.

As The Other Russia said in a press release tonight, “it is obvious to us that the scale of falsifications in the forthcoming elections will be unprecedented,” calling into question the legitimacy of the future State Duma.

It all chimes with what other Russian observers have been saying about these elections: that given that “the end of the political cycle in Russia is always dangerous” elections that are seen by the current power elite as a litmus test of their ability to hang onto power after Putin steps down as president next March – as is he is constitutionally bound to – are inevitably a time for desperate measures.

The Kremlin and its chosen electoral vector, United Russia, are desperate to get a huge turnout and massive landslide tomorrow. Only with at least 66% of the seats in the Duma will United Russia be able to push ahead its next apparent project: changing the constitution to either allow Putin a third term, or appointing him to a new role as national leader and weakening the practically autocratic powers that are vested in the presidency now.

A change as massive as that would be problematic in any country.

In one with Russia’s turbulent political history that sort of change could be dangerous.

As one political observer told me this afternoon in a reference to President Boris Yeltsin’s violent stand off with an unruly parliament that ended with tanks shelling the Moscow White House: “The last time something similar happened was in 1993 – and we all know how that ended.”

Today’s winter quietude could be the calm before the storm.

More tomorrow, when I’ll post a link to the London Sunday Telegraph story on which I was working the past few days.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=TV3YLHNROI4HLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/02/wrussia102.xml

Moscow's Dissenters March ends in Arrests

2007-11-24T06:38:00.000-08:00

Well, an absence of some months from this blog… mea culpa: been rather busy running here and there…

Back in Moscow now following events in the run up to next Sunday’s (December 2nd) parliamentary elections, which will see a landslide victory for the party that most slavishly supports President Vladimir Putin – United Russia. They’ll poll 70% or 80%.

Russia’s tiny dissident opposition are mostly not even running in the election – either they have been prevented from doing so, are banned (in the case of Eddie Limonov’s bizarre black-dressed anarchists the National Bolsheviks) or have too little support to meet election commission requirements.

What they lack for in size they make up for in street presence and sheer braggadocio. There were a series of ‘dissenters marches’ across Russia today and I went down to take a look at Moscow’s, where a couple of thousand people had gathered on a cordoned off section of Prospekt Akademika Sakharov (known as Novokirovksy Prospekt in Soviet times) to hold an officially-sanctioned rally before handing in a protest letter to the nearby Central Election Commission.

Speakers at the rally early this afternoon had to shout above a very loud and unpleasant screeching that was emitting from a hidden loudspeaker somewhere nearby – some in the crowd suggested it could be the work of pro-Kremlin elements, but was unable to verify that after failing to find the source of the sound, when I and a couple of colleagues left the rally to try to track it down. As we returned to the main inner ring road to find a group of several hundred flag waving National Bolsheviks had meanwhile broken out of the cordon and fled onto the ring road, where cars came to an abrupt halt, to try to take their protest direct to the election commission building. It was obvious what was going to happen next and no sooner than they had headed down a side street did scores of very tall and mean looking OMON riot police in their distinctive blue camo fatigues, bone-dome helmets and long stiff rubber batons, stream after them, massive paddy wagons following behind. They trapped the protestors in the street and although it looked more like street theatre than really rough stuff, scuffles were soon breaking out.

The OMON officers were clearly using plainclothes helpers – one OMON officer warmly greeted a bunch of tough looking young skinheads dressed in the ubiquitous Russian ‘gopnik’ (slang for any rough looking young guy) uniform of jeans, short coats and small tight woolen hats. Some of these plainclothes guys had walkie-talkies and wired ear-pieces.

There were some scuffles and arrests – including of leaders of the anti-Putin dissidents Garry Kasparov, Lev Ponomarev and Eddie Limonov – but nothing I saw that would count as heavy violence. As we left a group of other young and middle aged toughs in plainclothes were walking down the street alongside uniformed cops pulling on red armbands that identified them as members of a pro-Kremlin civilian group.

Here’s a news piece I filed as a contribution to a wider ‘Russia on the eve of elections’ that one of the London Sunday papers is running tomorrow.

Saturday November 24 2007

MOSCOW – Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion turned leader United Civil Front Group, part of the anti-Putin coalition The Other Russia, was arrested by riot police in Moscow Saturday (Nov 24) along with around a dozen other activists following a protest rally.

Kasparov was arrested by members of Russia’s camouflage-uniformed OMON riot police after a group of several hundred mostly young anti-Kremlin protestors broke away from a government-sanctioned demonstration.

Lev Ponomarev, a Soviet-era dissident who heads Moscow-based NGO “For Human Rights”, Eduard Limonov, leader of banned anarchist group the National Bolsheviks (Natsbols) and Ilya Yashin, head of the youth wing of western-oriented social democrat party Yabloko were also detained in scuffles with police near the city’s Chistyi Prudi metro station.

Kasparov was taken to Moscow’s Basmanny police station and the others to the nearby Taganksky police station, The Other Russia said in a statement later.

Kasparov was last arrested during an anti-Putin protest in Moscow in April. He was briefly detained before being released after paying a small fine for public order offences.

The arrests came after an officially-sanctioned gathering of some 2,000 flag-waving anti-Putin activists broke up and a large group of mostly younger members of the ‘Natsbols’ – waving trade-mark black hammer and sickle festooned flags – burst beyond a police cordon.

A ragged column of noisy protesters brought traffic to a halt as they streamed onto Moscow’s busy five-lane inner ring road before pouring down a side street headed towards the nearby headquarters of the Central Election Commission.

“We are the dissenters march!” the protestors shouted as they were pursued by OMON riot police armed with long rubber batons and wearing helmets with darkened visors and body armour.

None of the anti-government groups at Saturday’s rally – with the exception of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces – which had been represented at the sanctioned rally by its leader Boris Nemtsov – have been permitted to stand in next week’s parliamentary elections, due to take place on Sunday December 2.

Authorities had earlier allowed a small group from the official rally to hand a protest petition in to the electoral commission.

Earlier Kasparov had told supporters at the rally that Putin was using “fear to maintain authority.”

Straining to be heard above a loud screeching directed towards the demonstrators from hidden loudspeakers nearby that demonstrators blamed on pro-Putin youth group Nashi, Kasparov said: “We need to understand that if we are not afraid and keep on the streets, the regime will itself be scared and will be unable to maintain its repression on society. Either we maintain a criminal regime or we save our country.”

He added that despite record oil prices the standard of living for ordinary Russians had not improved and the cost of living was rising sharply.

“Our aim is to dismantle a dishonorable regime that is ruining our country. We know they have no aversion to spilling blood – Beslan demonstrated that. But we can win if we remain united,” Kasparov added to cheers.

The Moscow demonstration was one of a series of national ‘dissenters marches’ that took places in cities across Russia that included Voronezh in central Russia, Irkutsk in Sibera, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, Murmansk, Rostov-on-Don, Tomsk, Tula, Ekaterinburg and Kaliningrad.

Here's a link to the story that was published in the Sunday Telegraph - a joint effort between myself and my London-based colleague Colin Freeman.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/25/wmoscow125.xml

Photos from West Bank struggle over Israel's Security Wall

2007-08-20T01:58:00.000-07:00

All photos are copyright Rani Burnat, Bil'in. Available via Shai Carmeli-Pollak on kshai@o23.net

The West Bank comes to Sarajevo

2007-08-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

Sarajevo, Monday August 20 2007

Israeli political activist Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s immensely moving and explosively emotional feature length documentary “Bil’in My Love” rightly deserves the description the man responsible for inviting it to Sarajevo gave it as “the discovery of the festival”.

Howard Feinstein, the former film editor of the Village Voice, New York, who programmes Sarajevo’s fabulous Panorama sidebar, used that description when he introduced the 84 minute film at Sunday’s screening here in Sarajevo.

An uncompromising expose of the brutal and aggressive tactics the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) troops use against the largely peaceful protests of Palestinian villagers, Israeli and international human rights activists in their fight to prevent the construction of the 28 foot tall section of the controversial Israeli state security wall that slices the village of Bil’in in half, the film won a five minutes standing ovation when it ended at Sarajevo’s capacityu packed Meeting Point cinema, with many in the audience wiping tears of empathy from their eyes.

The director has brought three of the Palestinian villagers with him – including farmer ‘Wagee’ Abdelfatah Burnat and his adult son Rani, wheelchair bound since an Israeli sniper’s bullet clipped his spinal chord at a protest demonstration in Jerusalem some years ago.

As Wagee, whose heartbreak over the loss of family olive groves dating back centuries is a key focus of the film, remarked in a reference to the difficulty of obtaining visas, “for a Palestinian to get out of Palestine is almost impossible.”

“We are so happy to meet with you in Sarajevo today,” he said. “Believe me, it is much easer for me to come to Sarajevo than to go to Jerusalem which is only 30km from Bil’in,” he said.

With 11 deaths directly associated with the fight against the building of the wall – declared illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice in the Hague but continued regardless by the Israeli government – and the thousands of injured - the weekly Friday protests of one tiny West Bank village against the local IDF troops is but a microcosm of the wider tragedy playing out there.

Some 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israelis had died since 2000 when the second Palestinian Infitada – uprising – began.

“The film shows just a glimpse of what is happening in our village,” Wagee said.

“It is one small, poor village but it is very, very rich with hope and believe and very strong and powerful with the will to struggle and fight hard against injustice and for good.”

Hundreds of villagers have been imprisoned or fined and many hit by rubber bullets or gassed with tear gas and percussion grenades fired at them by the IDF troops – mostly without any provocation, the film shows.

In one telling incident recorded by 39 year old activist-filmmaker Shai, a non-violent demonstration organized by the village committee disintegrates into violence when some Palestinian youths begin stoning the Israeli soldiers.

At first the demonstrators appeal for calm, believing the boys to be from another village. It turns out they are actually Israeli agent provocateurs sent there to deliberately foment trouble.
It is the intimacy of Shai’s filmmaking – where he is both participant and observer and has no pretension to objectivity in what is a thoroughly partisan film - that is incredible for a film made in the often dangerous situations in the midst of such a bitter and intractable conflict. Some might call in propaganda, but it does not flinch from showing that some Palestinian youngsters do – of course – stone Israel soldiers. One IDF soldier loses his eye in an incident, sparking fears in the village that they may face live ammunition in revenge. It is, however, quite clear that the aggression virtually always comes first from the IDF side and that their commander, an otherwise thoughtful man who actually lives not far from the village – on the other side of the wall – does sometimes reach for tear gas, rubber bullerts and percussion grenades when his frustration at the myriad creative protests he faces gets the better of him.

The villagers of Bil’in are determined to resist with dignity, come what may.

“The villagers are fighting for their rights and for the rights of the whole world for all people to live with dignity,” Wagee noted of a conflict that has already taken 60% of the village’s historic lands, ripping out the olive groves on which the farmers depend for their livelihoods and stealing huge swathes of land for the illegal expansion of a nearby new Israeli settlement that will be protected by the massive barrier.

Dubbed an ‘apartheid barrier’ by opponents, director Shai – who grew up in a Zionist household, served in the Israeli army and worked in television before becoming politicized by a desire to understand why the Palestinians had risen up again in 2000 – says the film exposes the essential racism of a state that claims to be a democracy.

“The wall allows for new communities – mostly settlements of ultra orthodox right wingers – to spring up. I did not want to show these people in the film because that is not the true story. The story is that the government is sending these poor people to these new settlements – where apartments are cheap. Those living their do not have enough knowledge really about what is going on. They listen to what their Rabbis tell them and go there,” Shai remarked.

Asked how he was able to film so closely and intimately – often standing filming besides Israeli troops as they fired at Palestinians – Shai said that initially the troops assumed that as an Israeli he was on their side.

Later when they understood he was implacably opposed to the wall they continued to let him film because they thought what they “think what they are doing is OK” Shai said. “The attitude is ‘I am doing an important job, defending my country.”

That attitude to filmmakers and photographers has shifted now, Shai said and the IDF are a lot more sensitive about being filmed as they go about the brutal business of defending a barrier that is illegal under the Olso accords of the early 1990s and most international observers agree will make the job of creating Palestinian statehood and a lasting, peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict near impossible.

If you get a chance to see this film, don’t hesitate for a second: as Shai noted, it covers a conflict that many in Sarejevo can identify with from their own personal experience in the recent past.

Photographs from the struggle in Bil’in, taken by Rani Bornat – who was a ubiquitous presence on the front lines in his electric powered wheelchair – can be purchased on CD.

As Rani said – talking through Shai as the bullet that clipped his spine entered through his neck and affected his ability to speak clearly – “the other young people in the village told me I had already paid the price, but when I join the protests I feel young and proud and not just a disabled person but someone protecting his land.”

Basman Yasin, a member of the village committee that organizes the protests, noted that although the wall is now complete the fight goes on. A third international conference on the problem will take place at Bil’in in April 2008, he said.

For further information you can go to: www.Bilin-village.org and also to Israeil group Anarchists Against the Wall site www.awalls.org

Rani Burnat’s photographs of the protest can be obtained on cd-rom from Shai Carmeli-Pollak via email: kshai@o23.net

Two final little observations in today’s entry: Sarajevo is a joy of a festival, small enough to be intimate, big enough to be truly international.

Last night’s open air screening of Anton Corbjin’s beautiful shot black and white film “Control” – about the short, highly creative but ultimately tragic life of Ian Curtis, lead singer in iconoclastic late 1970s British band “Joy Division” – was simply superb.

Evocative and moving, Sam Riley who plays Curtis cut exactly the right note and had the perfect face for the role and the period. Alexandra Maria Lara, a rising young German-Romanian actress, who played his Belgian girlfriend (and is in real life his partner) was a striking screen presence. Samantha Morton who played Curtis’ much neglected wife Deborah was also spot on.

I never saw Joy Division play live – they were a Manchester band that played a few London gigs that were about to go on their first US tour in May 1980 when Curtis, suffering from epilepsy and marital despair uncompromisingly depicted in the movie, killed himself.

But that summer of 1980 has for me its own traumatic memories – my dear friend Debbie Young died in a car crash June 26 1980 at the age of 17 – and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, released just a month before Curtis’ death – is part of the background track for my own life from that summer.

On a different tack, returning to my hotel yesterday afternoon I ran into feature competition jury president British actor Jeremy Irons as he arrived from the airport.

I’d last seen him some 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of writing about prison reform in the UK and was involved with the Prison Phoenix Trust, an Oxford-based organization that works with prisoners to encourage them to use their time inside to learn and practice yoga and meditation. One of its organizers, Sandy Chubb, had introduced me to Irons, one of the charity’s patrons, at a function held in St James Church, Piccadilly. My life and travels took my off to Russia soon after and I lost touch with the Prison Phoenix Trust, although I still read and refer to US writer Bo Lozoff’s excellent book on the theme, “We’re All Doing Time”, published by his US-based Prison Ashram Project and distributed free to prisoners by the British group.

There was not enough time for a lengthy conversation but Irons clearly recollected Sandy’s surname – which I could not – and is still involved in supporting the group’s work.

For more information see: http://www.philanthropycapital.org/Newsletter/Summer07/jeremy_irons.html and http://www.prisonphoenix.org.uk/why1.shtml and also http://www.humankindness.org/project.html

Sarajevo Film Festival Opens with a Bang

2007-08-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

Sarajevo Film Festival Opens with a Bang

Sarajevo, Saturday August 18 2007

Flying into Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina last night from Moscow via Vienna I expected to experience a little déjà vu. I was last here two years ago, for the 11th Sarajevo Film Festival and arrived on another inky dark Balkans summer night on a turboprop from Belgrade.

My overriding impressions then, in 2005, as we drove into the city was of the war-torn buildings still in evidence everywhere. During the festival I stayed at the Holiday Inn – the hotel where the international press had lived during the siege of Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s. Ten years after the Daytona Peace Accords brought Sarajevo piece, the area around the Holiday Inn was still dominated by shrapnel and shell scarred homes and offices. A nearby ten or fifteen story office block was a window-less concrete shell peppered on the side that faced towards the old Serb positions across the river with massive star-shaped shell holes.

Last night as the taxi drove me down along the same street – the old suicide alley where during the siege drivers raced at high speed aware that they were within sight and ranger of the besieging Serb gunners – I searched for the scarred tower block in vain: it is now a sleek tinted-glass covered corporate building of the sort one can find in any European capital.

Sarajevo has become a building site. In the old town of area of Bascarsilja – which last night was buzzing with masses of young and fashionable Sarajevans enjoying the special late opening of cafes and restaurants put on to celebrate the opening of this year’s 13th film festival – shops and bars have appeared where two years ago there were only dusty and damaged pock-marked facades.

The crumbling concrete and dirt alleys of the crowded and narrow streets of this charming part of the city are being replaced with gleaming slabs of limestone paving and scaffolding is everywhere.

It’s a clear sign that the city is moving beyond its post-war hiatus.

Even last night’s opening party – held inside the impressive ruins of the old Sarajevo town hall, which was left an empty shell after being targeted by Serb forces in 1992 – an act decried at the time as a war crime against a building that also housed the literary treasures of the Bosnian national library – was a surreal experience.

The building is under reconstruction and its interior is only partially restored – guests entered from the riverside street through an opening in the steel construction site barrier before ascending stone stairs to the airy hexagonal interior. Inside lights lit up the first floor balcony that skirts the six-sided interior, crowded temporary bars dispensed beer, wine and spirits and a Bosnian folk singer performed on a small carpeted stage set up in the centre of the ground floor.

The place was packed. To go to the upper floor one had to struggle up a temporary wooden plank staircase past grubby bare brick walls still peppered with graffiti and stained black and green from the conflagration of 15 years ago.

Some of the old Islamic-style stone arches had been restored and the balustrades on the balcony were mostly now gleaming white limestone. Looking up to the rooftop atrium a maze of decorative iron girders are already in place. Two years ago when I walked past the building I could only imagination how it looked inside; there were no signs then of imminent reconstruction.

On the open first floor terrace overlooking the river guests crowded to look out over the nighttime city as uniformed guards warned them not to go too close to the stone parapet, taped off with red and white security tape indicating it was not considered safe.

At midnight a firework display to mark the opening of the film festival sent blasts and echoed resounding from across the other side of the river.

It was all rather surreal: 15 years ago other kinds of explosives were raining down upon the city from positions across the same river. The crowds watched and the camera crews filmed as music from another, much deeper in the past time, started up: a Viennese waltz of the sort that the old Austro-Hungarian functionaries of the pre-First World War era might have listened to in this very same building back when Sarajevo was a far flung provincial capital of that now long dead empire. German “oompah” music was next prompting different associations from another time and another war when Sarajevo was occupied by Hitler’s hordes.

If the idea was to prompt thoughts of war and peace it seemed to work, at least for this guest.

The city seems to be reclaiming its identity and re-staking its claim as a tourist destination: my father-in-law Vyacheslav still proudly recalls his visit when Sarajevo hosted the winter Olympics back in 1984. Roadside placards reminding guests and visitors that Sarajevo is an ‘Olympic’ city has sprouted anew.

And Sarajevo long had a claim to fame as the city where ‘the first shot of the First World War was fired’ when on June 28 1914 Serb nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Austro-Hungarian crown prince Franz Ferdinand sparking the rapid succession of events that lead up to the outbreak of world war by early August. (Ironically Princip – chosen for the mission because he had tuberculosis and was not expected to live long – actually outlived many of the poor souls the Great War eventually consumed. Sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, he died from tuberculosis in April 1918.)

Two years ago I was disappointed to find that the museum commemorating this event was closed. Last night as I walked back from the opening party I was delighted to find it now open and functioning: there on the very corner where Princip squeezed his trigger the museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918 is lit up with street side photographic and video displays. It’s on the top of my list of ‘must do’ visits this weekend.

Sarajevo is truly moving forward, but not so fast that is forgets its past. As film festival head Mirsad Purivatra reminded guests last night, the closing of the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival takes place on Saturday August 25 – exactly 15 years to the day since the building’s historic library was blitzed by the Serb gunners from their positions high up in the hills across the river.

In my next posting I shall attempt to draw together some reflections from films playing at the festival that further help elucidate the spirit and character of today’s Sarajevo and the Balkans.

NOTE: All material copyright 2007 Nick Holdsworth.

If any readers out there want to license this material (or offer me writing or journalistic commissions) please email me at: holdsworth.nick@gmail.com)

First Missive

2007-08-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

Tuesday August 14 2007

Welcome to Russofile007. This will be an occasional record of thoughts, opinions, responses to experiences and- perhaps - comments on newsworthy topics emanating from events mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe (where I spend much of my time), and my own personal interests and opinions.

As someone who writes for a living I may be disinclined to post frequent or regular comments or items but I shall aspire to post on such subjects as news and current affairs, social and political matters, film and education, Russian and Eastern European affairs and other passing interests as they flit across my attention span and enthusiasm radar.

This is an experiment and no doubt shall evolve and change as we go along.

For those interested in reading earlier professional writing I can suggest checking out my book about Russia during Yeltsin's years: "Moscow The Beautiful and the Damned - Life in Russia in Transition" (publisher: Andre Deutsch, London 2000 & second edition 2003) or Googling stories I have written over the years in papers that include the Sunday Telegraph, the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Hollywood Reporter and many others.

For those interested the following link will take yo to the Amazon uk listing for my book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moscow-Beautiful-Damned-Russia-Transition/dp/0233996796/ref=sr_1_2/202-3015045-6848601?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187120122&sr=8-2

I'll be in Sarajevo this coming weekend for the first few days of the Sarajevo Film Festival and shall try to find time to post a blog or two from there.

Cheers for now - Nick Holdsworth blogger of 'Russofile007'