Recently, I criticized Elena Kostyuchenko’s plaintive cry about a change in the Schengen visa regimen in the EU. (Unfortunately, since she’s blocked me on Facebook, I can’t link to this former friend’s page now, but you can look it up easily.)
Like many other Russian emigre public figures, she used her influential position as a popular independent Russian journalist and book author to shriek “Unfair” and “Harmful” and “Self-Defeating!” and “Duplicitous!” at various present and past EU officials.
I’ll post more of the back story when I have a chance, but the threads on Toomas Ilves’ misstatements about Russian activists on Bucha — which I dubbed “incorrect but true” are a starter.
In fact, the EU countries were rightly — and finally — compelled to adopt this more restrictive policy because of sabotage of their infrastructure, assassinations, including of people like these activists, poisonings — including women journalists like this activist — not to mention , massive propaganda campaigns and disinformation campaigns and more. Toomas listed all this in one of his long tweet interventions in this debate. The curious unwillingness of Russian emigres to grasp the scale and scope of all these attacks — which have included attacks on *them* above all — is one of the myopic marvels of our time.
I see regrettably yet another high-profile article has appeared — this times in the New York Times — taking only one perspective on this controversy and even citing the ill-founded lament of Elena Kostyuchenko, remarkably, with a link to her Facebook page, but not a link to a voice with the opposite oipnion, namelySergei Lagodinsky ( couldn’t find it on his page)
The solely emigre-based argument that “this only helps Putin” is hardly substantiated by the Times, nor is the greater context — having to find more ways of deterring Russia — is never explored.
For Americans observing this, it is particularly incredible as even under Biden, ALL visas from Russia were COMPLETELY STOPPED without even humanitarian considerations and now under Biden PLANELOADS of draft-dodgers and anti-war activists and other refugees are sent back to Russia.
So yeah. I rightly called this as selfish, myopic, and self-preocuppied attack on precisely those EU officials who have done the most to sympathize with Russian emigres over time. Ilves was even on the board of the emigre group Free Russia for a time, and for his trouble, is now chastized by the Russian emigre leader Natalia Arno for “not attending meetings.” Sigh. Bet you’ll never get this influential European politician to ever be on anybody’s board again!
When they weren’t bleating with “me-first” myopia, Russian emigres were bitching about how this EU visa change harmed “the movement inside Russia”. The movement that most of them do not bother with and do not support. Elena of course does, daily. But she’s in a minority. Emigres might buy her books — but they don’t donate to Memorial Society.
Some of the 4th wave Russians who are programmers and even shuttle back and forth between Russia and EU countries for their fantastically paid contracts in places like Portugal and even California aren’t complaining because “they already got theirs” but because they don’t care — they can go back to the VPK [military-industrial complex] that needs them and will always feed them. They could be dropping $25 on PayPal to antiwar groups but instead….
….We do. In the West.
INDEPENDENT RUSSIA EMIGRE MEDIA RELIES ON THE EXPOSURE TO DANGER OF STRINGERS
A development that has been particularly egregious about which no one will ever talk is that some rather highly compensated (compared to most emigre groups) independent media web sites and high-view/high-subscriber YouTube sites are able to make money and stay safe themselves while they maintain stringers inside Russia paid a fraction of a Western salary and now deliberately kept in harm’s way to maintain the high views/subscriptions of money-making sites. This gets to be sickening after awhile.
It would be one thing if people were on their own active in Russia, and emigres and we backed them up. They made their choice. They suffer the consequences. But it’s another if their suffering/exposure is MONETARIZED and certain groups of particularly young people are assured they will be “extracted” — they go back and forth and are assured everyone will “do” for them. They become heedless of the dangers and imagine that their bravery should have no consequences; they maintain fairly wealthy operations on their backs and without their wage slavery these operations would fail. Just as in the old days, some editors of a samizdat magazine would rat out the others under interrogation and go to exile and not the GULAG and live to become Kremlin advisors or MPs; others would do serious hard time and end up in obscurity.
These Russian emigre editors persist in this illusion because they think their audience is at home, not abroad, and that they don’t even need to educate their compatriots in basic values of European civilization as some of their angrier compatriots and “guides” insist on doing without ever really understanding what they claim to emulate. They think their one-time voters still care about them and will heed their call when they return, in a sealed or open train, with a German grant or not. Unlike past emigrations in history, they feel no need to adapt or learn languages — not on the Internet and not with AI to translate.
‘THEY LIVE WITHOUT FEELING THE GROUND BENEATH THEIR FEET”
They can live “without feeling the ground beneath their feet” indeed, and yet their voices are scarcely heard at 10 paces” — even with a million Youtubes. Russian is a big country, spanning multiple time zones. A Muscovite intelligent with a no-show job or even door-dashing can speak for a Yakut Shaman? A mechanic in Irkutsk? Anybody, outside their bubble? Yet those are primarily the people barking on the air waves — a barking I have supported for many years and translated in great reams and will likely go on translating, or rather doing AI janitorial work for. Not without criticism now.
But it’s ineffective. Russia is not changing. There isn’t even much real audience research done as states involved in projects like BBC or RFE/RL Russian-language broadcasting would be compelled to do to report to their parliaments or Congress. But the results are obvious, and spawn pessimistic academic reports like this one: the war is not stopped, and there is no visible, large demonstration as there is in Georgia. The only sustained, visible picket of sorts is the vakhta or vigil at the Nemtsov Bridge where the popular governor of Nizhny Novgorod was assassinated. Again, martyrdom.
The issue as some who should know better is NOT that there isn’t an audience or that people are “afraid” to tune in — when they use Telegram, riddled with intelligence scraping and VPNs when they can. it’s more than there is an orientation toward an audience that is already outdated and itself may not even fully realize how outdated it is. Russian society does enable the war in Ukraine, either by passiveness or its tax dollars or outright and aggressive support on social media. Not an awful lot is done to counter that — nor can be done. Yet it need not be accepted as the norm — and is, at Ukraine’s expense.
I don’t pretend that we can easily alleviate this toxic brew of 1) inward preoccupation with their own immediate survival problems, 2) a hazy grasp of EU challenges and tendency toward hatred and distrust to “foreigners” without sufficient awareness that the Russian emigre herself is now the foreigner; and 3) a zealous orientation toward “people inside” that external groups claim they know well “because of the Internet” or “because of our faithful stringers” which isn’t as robust as imagined.
Stringers upon which their operations depend — and the time to get them out was yesterday and may still be possible today, but for that, you will need to get to work and realize the greater consequences.
Even if by some miracle a ceasefire was signed today, that would not alleviate the plight of those still in Russia — if anything they may be MORE endangered. Emigre operations can’t go on exploiting their presence in Russia to continue their shows; they need to get people out and sturgle on or close. It’s not just to put people in harm’s way.
The tradecraft really needs to tighten up; the security measures need to be tripled; the concern for people has to increase. If you have a $100,000 grant that depends on its success on the work of some Ivan who doesn’t even get minimum wage, you are immoral.
Medicins san frontieres has a protocol — when their own people are killed as they attempt to deliver aid to a population, when their are too many obstacles, they declare a situation futile. And they leave. That has to be the attitude of Russian emigres abroad, and Russian activists now, and if you stay, you certainly can’t be squawking about the ways and means of how you get in and out. This is just basic, basic safety — not to mention human decency. Why do you lack it?
So many news and activism sites still have .ru addresses. Why? I have asked that question over and over again and I never get any answer. Why, indeed?
That the emigre lobby can reliably count on Kevin Rothrock to one-sidedly report on their cause is understood; he has spent most of his career criticizing other critics of Putin rather than directly criticizing Putin himself. We can never forget his anonymous blog with the collage of Putin as Bismark and the call for us all to engage in RealPolitik when he was at…the American Enterprise Institute.
Shaun Walker has far more credibility actually reporting on the ground about the war in Ukraine for years, but he took this story as it came without much questioning possibly to take a whack at reluctant Eurocrats unable to confront Putin.
I’m not sure what Neal Farqueson’s angle here is except to take a whack at Europeans who are all that is left to counter Russia after the US collapse under Trump — and to chastise them for still selling gas — when of course Germany famously did stop direct imports and is at least trying to diversify energy although of course it does still buy gas directly. Any of you Europeans and journalists reporting from Europe want to sit in the cold like I’m doing in my apartment now, with 3 layers? I invite you to do so.
MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION
This all came at a time when three important developments were under way which are now harmed by this emigre outcry and failure to grasp where the real problems are:
- Efforts by some emigre groups to form a delegation to dialogue with PACE with a long-term effort to create a government-in-exile or prepare a better government for Russia some day; they have had a great deal of trouble sorting themselves out and their failures only lead to creepy antisemitic AI art even spread by their own.
- Advocacy and planning for further more hard-hitting European broadcasting — which I had argued should include experienced Russians with a “ground game” will go ahead regardless, and whether it is with Czechs or Poles or only a few “good Russians” I don’t know, but this sure did not help.
- Stipends for some emigres in Germany ended September 30, and Germany in general seems to be rolling up the welcome mat, and some of us were talking to colleagues in and around Germany and its wealthy foundations, trying to convince them that a “Marshal Plan for the Russian Emigration” needed to be started now, and it was part of the alchemy of ending the war.
(I sure won’t be doing that any more but I’m nobody, no one needs me, I get nothing out of it, truly, I’m not a consultant or a NGO jet-setting around the world to “help” people — I will leave this to others to sort out.)
So the emigres chose a bad time to whine; their political skills despite their deep belief in their validity to constituents inside Russia are sorely lacking and if indeed they represent other myopic, self-preoccupied sufferers who can’t focus on Ukraine then…who needs them? They can roll their hoop.
‘THE EU IS HARMING MY RELATIVES AND FELLOW ACTIVISTS INSIDE RUSSIA”
The first — and least compelling — argument Elena and others made was was that ME AND MY RELATIVES ARE IN DANGER OH NOES!! This was their least compelling argument because…they were already outside, living in the EU or UK or US or Georgia or somewhere OUTSIDE OF RUSSIA even if not completely out of harm’s way FROM Russia, which goes all over the earth harming people. And if they had failed to save their relatives by now they were being irresponsible.
Invoking relatives — Elena referenced her sister — was the LEAST valid of their arguments because AS THEY MENTIONED THEM, they were getting a spotlight shone on them and a target on their backs. Hell of a way to protect your vulnerable family, advertising to the murderous but busy Russian regime — HEY, LOOK OVER THERE! I pointed this out after my initial scrap with Elena, and several people contacted me privately to say they also found it nonsensical — but of course deadly. The new rules involve still granting single-entry visas, but taking time to scrutinize them for security reasons. Multientry visas are NOT banned as some of the more shrill emigres are claiming falsely — in fact they are still discretionary and the EU statements on this even mentioned that journalists, antiwar activists, humanitarian cases would still be considered.
So obviously, if you’re yelling at the EU now that your sister or mother or cousin — an active anti-war demonstrator or an innocent bystander in harm’s way — is now going to suffer MORE harassment because they will suffer an 8-day wait for a Schengen visa (or longer) — all the while having what amounts to a “mark of the Beast” or a “wolf ticket” in their passport — the news of their application — I’m sorry, you have no case. Because YOUR OWN PUBLIC ACTIVISM DID THAT ALREADY. And your VERY PUBLIC complaint has now CLINCHED IT. And therefore you simply cannot be surprised if, merely days after all your public screaming…
…you are now declared “a foreign agent,” which is the tar and feathers the Russian regime pours on anyone who does anything, whether related to foreigners or their intelligence communities or not. Certainly Elena Kostuchenko, the quintessential Russian with even a book I Love Russia, is not working for the CIA or M16 or even for Soros and isn’t an actual “foreign agent” — but she got the badge just now which is supposed to be a mark of honour among the cognoscenti by in fact screaming at the EU — the purported hand that feeds her. Funny, that. Elena may be poor at timing, but the Kremlin isn’t! In fact, they’re getting a good laugh at the spectacle of labelling an independent journalist and writer as “a foreign agent” as she is caught in the very act of lambasting foreign supporters for not “getting it” and supposedly “not doing enough.”
We generally treat all of this “foreign agent” and “undesirable” stuff as an absurdity (I myself am an “undesirable” ) — and one that CANNOT be cured by changing your behaviour, as it can be random or targeted. If in this case it looks targeted, but no one should be surprised. The sister is now in more danger, but the EU is not to blame and the very active writer is. That is hard to accept — nobody wants to take responsible for their relatives being taken hostage by the Russian regime and punished for their much needed and righteous activism. But there it is. It’s a fact. Grow up. Plan accordingly. All of you.
POOR TRADECRAFT
I sometimes wonder if the real problem of the newest generation of political opposition and independent journalists and commentators and artists and writers isn’t just, well, poor or complete lack tradecraft, as we in the human rights movement called it, borrowing a term from espionage by states which in fact we were not related to (perhaps only a few were). And that is if you find the situation has worsened and you are concerned about your relatives — whom you should have gotten out YESTERDAY if not back in 2014, understood — then you need to pursue quiet diplomacy with the relevant EU offices in your relevant country and get off Facebook.
As I myself did, when I personally had to take initiative during a meeting about other cases and issues go to none other than George Shultz, at that time Secretary of State to President Ronald Reagan — a conservative leader famous for his anticommunism, for whom I did not vote — with a petition to get out my now ex-husband’s parents from the Soviet Union. They were not Jewish refuseniks; they were not dissidents of various kinds, and therefore not on the usual issue list lobbied by interest groups; the in-laws lived in Ukraine; the release of their son was achieved by one of those dramatic political prisoner releases of that era and even our era; when the American physicians who were the joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, which included Brezhnev’s personal physician Evgeny Chazov went to Russia, they carried a list of those imprisoned for resisting the draft, pacifists attempting conscientious objections, actively demonstrating against wars, and human rights activists.
It never occurred to me to wait one minute to get those parents out even as the times improved and my mother-in-law was let out with a temporary visa for a visit, but with her husband left as a hostage at home. They both had to be gotten out of that highly untrustworthy and awful place, Russia, as history warns us. George Schultz achieved this, interestingly, for which I am grateful but then, the entire game of hostage politique was a distasteful one you could never win.
WHAT ELENA HAS MEANT TO ME AND MY DEFENSE OF HER
I have always admired Elena since I first read her journalism and went to bat for her in 2013 during the events around the Zhanozen massacre in Kazakhstan. I don’t expect her to remember the epic online battles fought with a Central Asia Beltway Bandit contractors’ site known as Registan — or to remember how, after I stood up for her when men — some anonymous — heckled her, mocked her for being a lesbian, and claimed her facts found were false — then banned me from the site which was widely read in the small pond of Eurasis watchers. A shocked State Department area expert who questioned this action against me was also banned himself. Banning from a site — eh, that’s nothing — especially nothing like being poisoned or assaulted or targeted in harassment campaigns but eventually, my standing up to these creepy contractors pushing the State Department line and coddling Eurasian dictators and punishing too -public critics of them led me to leave a job I needed to support my children as a single mother. I don’t expect Elena or anyone to care about this; to contrast it to their immense suffering; or to do a damn thing.
Elena, a Russian independent reporter, took the trouble to care about oil workers massacred for their protests in Kazakhstan, where Chevron had interests. Very few Western environmentalists got involved (Crude Accountability did). Human rights groups took it up — but it was remote and difficult to gain access. Reporters there went on the regime’s five o’clock follies type bus tour and left their copy at the official number of those killed. Perhaps 8. OK, maybe 14, as finally acknowledged.
Elena went to the morgue — she is gutsy that way! — interviewed wives who said their husbands were missing and not in the morgue — and compiled a list that was several times more than the official number — for which she was mocked, scorned, ridiculed by American Eurasian specialists as whipping up hysteria and pushing falsehoods — because it was in their interests to downplay an atrocity to maintain good relations with this oil state. I came to her defense. I believed she had gotten the story right, and if not entirely correct, that was a problem of certain men having to go into hiding (they certainly didn’t try to free across the frozen tundra to get out of that location). There is maybe only one person today who remembers this Registan banning event and who was impressed with Elena — most never knew about it, or knew and mocked her. That’s how Sovietology/Russian Studies/Eurasian Studies work all too often. I respect Elena because she went there; all those highly-paid American experts did NOT.
I saw Elena speak at Columbia years ago, I went up and spoke to her, I don’t recall if we mentioned Kazakhstan, and then I friended her on Facebook. I always liked her posts. I posted a picture of her reading at Yasha Klots’ Tamizdat event. I don’t recall interacting with her any time except at last year’s Tamizdat conference at CUNY Graduate Center, where I asked her to sign a program for myself and my daughter — to whom I had already mailed Elena’s book as a present.
TAMIZDAT
In other words, I never had any reason to criticize or attack her — I generally see her as doing good in the world and as being accomplished as a writer. If anything, I felt a certain pity. There she was, at the Tamizdat auction event, in a crumpled dress, knee-high stockings, and sneakers — the kind of beat outfit you wear if you don’t give AF about any beauty contests (like me) — reading from her journals about the sheer hellscape she has covered over the years, whether Beslan, the terrorist attack that when countered by Russian special troops, only led to more children being killed in a school; the wars in Chechnya; and the wars in Georgia and of course Ukraine, where yes, she has probably covered fighting more than most Russian reporters and where she has “paid her dues” and “was just there” and — whatever you want to say in praise, genuflecting all the way, to all four points of the compass.
All this while her fellow emigres looked at their phones, wandered back to the wine bar, or went out for a smoke. If Elena thinks we American activists can never do enough or understand enough, wait til she sees her fellow Russian emigre writers.
In fact, my heart contracted for her standing up there on that stage in a church basement — a very modest and homey place that reminded me of my own church’s basement where my own children performed their Christmas pageant or where I go for suppers and a talk by the priest with a discussion afterwards. There was a feeling of the Bee Girl to it all, although of course some very high bidding was going on for some very fancy products and like the Bee Girl, Yasha’s Tamizdat is the center for the emigration now, and not only in NYC. But it was such a mix-up of genres — there was the pianist from the Samovar playing old tunes; there were the Yiddish songs; there was Matvei Yankelevich laying double entendres and Nabokovian stresses on his concrete poetry; there was a guy who had written a play about Sinyavsky for his 100th anniversary (which just passed, and I don’t think the play was ever performed). Forgive me if I didn’t collect all the details — go Google them.
Elena was the only person there doing war journalism which his risky, hard, thankless — and in fact addictive. Time and again, I’ve been told by other journalists (I’m not a war correspondent and not even much of a journalist, but a news writer and translator mainly sitting safe at home) that they find certain colleagues becoming completely obsessed with wars. I knew a war correspondent who said he would feel highly unsafe in a plane going to a war zone, but once there, feel a strange kind of calm and focus. Such correspondents keep seeking out the “high” of these experiences over and over — the feeling that you are writing something that matters terribly; that you will be that Biblical personage who cries, “and I alone escaped to tell you!” The Internet is likely full of stories of war correspondent addiction and PTSD. We all remember Marie Colvin and her eyepatch in Iraq. We all get it that without these brave individuals, we wouldn’t know about wars; we ourselves couldn’t protest them. They are necessary. But also not above criticism. And so I do. Criticize them. There are some that I recall obnoxiously parachuted in during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, hitting Belgrade for about 6 hours, writing their glib copy on the airplane for Time or the London Times and missing the demonstration where everyone’s heads were bashed in because they hadn’t learned yet, like intreped Maidan street demonstrators, to wear hardhats constantly. (Nor had the reporters learned to cover them.)
Elena went through some terrible personal experiences — assault, harassment, misunderstandings, periods of having to take time off to save her sanity, and her wife presumably helped and stood by her side then — thank God she has a partner to help her.
So now let me take on the rest of Elena’s screeching, which began about the Schengen visas, and then personally was directed to me, trying to strike to kill, because I dared to question her appalling self-entitlement:
We currently have 2,000 political prisoners — those we at least know about — but experts estimate the real number reaches 8,000.
Yes, I know. I work on their cases. Derp. And try to help those in exile. Do you? Or do you just spout nonsense? Do you grasp that 8,000 or even 20,000 or whatever number you want to pull out of your ass really is meaningless, compared to the suffering of Ukraine? I will always direct you back to Ukraine.
Say, why not claim the 11,000 that OVD invokes in this crazy debate, replicated all over Twitter ? Of course, I could point out, that some of those people have served time; many of them were tried in absentia; or the cases are hung on them to intimidate them and never closed. But that wouldn’t sound as much suffering then, would it?
Right now, 60 journalists are deprived of freedom: half are already in prisons, the other half are either in pre-trial detention or under house arrest — the investigation is still ongoing. Repression is very active. It’s still nowhere near as fucked up as in Belarus, and in no way comparable to life and death in Ukraine.
Right. You stay with that, girl. That is the reality and that’s why you need to take a seat, as they say in the Black Lives Matter movement. Take a seat. Your standing up and engaging in unconscionable attacks on Europeans or Americans really is unseemly. Sweep around your own door. Your country is terribly fucked up. I know because I’ve worked on cases and issues there for 50 years. And stop pretending you need to teach me about Russian suffering.
But look — when they come to search your home and, for the moment, don’t arrest you, you have a few hours to get the fuck out. Getting even a short-term tourist visa in that time is impossible.
That’s why a visa needed to be already glued into your passport — that’s a chance for you to continue your life and your work.
Sorry, but I am utterly hard-hearted here with this blatant mischaracterization or even eventual truth. This is really a caricature of what reeally happens — as you know, and as I know just as well as you because I really follow Russia and really work in organizations that try to help people. And honestly, THE LESS SAID about how escapes are done THE BETTER given the huge risks. Very few people — really none — find out merely with two hours to respond that they are being targeted by the regime — OMGOD what a surprise. They usually have made a conscious decision to oppose the regime in some big or small way; they know full well that even a Facebook post can get them 8 years. Few actual independent, working journalists would find it a shock to have their home searched. They would have taken precautions to encrypt their email, hide their files, and so on and get their escape planned. Or maybe not. Maybe, the goons come in the door, and their Chrome browser is opened with all its saved passwords and chats. Young people in particular are really stupid about what they imagine can protect them.
But not a soul can claim he only had 2 hours to respond to a regime that he himself provoked, knowingly. To claim that is infantile. To claim that shifts the burden wrongfully to others to fix. To claim that means you as an editor abroad don’t care about the people YOU left in harm’s way. Stop that.
Update: You can be damn sure that street singer Diana Loginova, age 18 (!) and her husband, Alexander Orlov, didn’t suddenly think they had 2 hours to get out of Russia after being unexpectedly released from their third 13-day jail sentence for “discrediting the army”. Of course they had helpers and of course they finally did the right and responsible thing to prevent themselves from becoming martyrs for other people’s optics: they fled Russia. Good!
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR PUTTING PEOPLE IN HARM’S WAY
Sorry, the time to get out of Russia was 2009. Or 2014. Or 2022. That is, if you are still in Russia now, you’ve made a conscious, deliberate decision to actively go into harm’s way; you no doubt have had endless lectures by your colleagues and family to get out; you have made your bed and have to lie in it. You are brave. We love you. But don’t let your fellow emigres already abroad turn you into fodder for the algorithm. Someone like Ilya Yashin was suddenly dragged out of a park when he didn’t expect it — no search, no warrant, no summons. But before that, he had FOR YEARS done things like write a report about the crimes against humanity in Chechnya —I know, because I translated it. He had done all kinds of oppositional activity — and when he did get on a district council, he worked on humanizing the draft (that wasn’t about killing more Ukrainians but keeping more Russians out of the war, also a worthy cause). Ilya could not have possibly be surprised at his arrest ultimately after all his opposition for years — and PS his Facebook post about Bucha that got him 8 years (but was certainly not the only reason for his arrest).
So please don’t cry the blues here. If you are active now, you have to accept that yes, there is not enough time to get a visa — a visa you should have gotten last month, last year, last decade. If you had such a visa with multientries, that was as much a factor in your oppression as your ability to get out, winning you a “foreign agent” moniker or a label of “undesirable” for your group. So stop with the endless weeping. I don’t buy it. Everyone knows what you have to do to get out of Russia if you are active. So do the things.
And someone half Ilya’s age or yours just starting out even if they are an 18-year-ld street singer singing the previous generation’s protest songs in Asesopian language knows too — and that’s why they’re not in Russia now. And if she didn’t know, YOU ALL are irresponsible for not telling her and helping her LEAVE instead of being another AVATAR FOR YOUR SUFFERING.
The EU has said they would provide multi-entry visas on discretion. So quietly make the case for your sister, and see how far you get. Maybe not far, after you’ve shrieked and hollered and accused EU officials, past and present, of being collaborationists with murderous Russia — or stood by while other armchair warriors claimed this argument — which ultimately falls apart upon scrutiny.
The funny thing is, EU was barely issuing those visas anyway.
Nonsense. I’m afraid I find that to be false, and I know it to be false by the hundreds — thousands — tens of thousands of Russian emigres in EU countries and the UK all visible to the naked eye.
In fact, in 2024, more than half a million Russians received Schengen visas, and approximately half of those were multiple-entry visas, according to Meduza and The New York Times. That means 250,000 multiple-entry visas were issued, many of them to direct advantage of media operations where your work appears. Have some humility.
The plethora of blogs, newspapers, and YouTube channels and views outside of Russia kind of give the lie to your claim if well-researched statistics will not. And if the EU didn’t give out visas, my God, they had good reason: poisoners on tourist visas — not diplomatic visas or even passports of EU nations — came to the EU to poison people like YOU. Do you really think your poisoners or the poisoners of other women journalists were all on diplomatic passports?! and not like those famous admirers of the cathedral?
It’s uncanny how you cannot connect up the dots here. Toomas Ilves gave a long list of all the sabotage going on by Russians in Europe — hardly with only EU national/diplomatic passports — you can’t take hundreds of violent soccer fans in on anything other than a tourist visa. Those Ukrainians who set fire to Starmer’s home — who the hell are they and on what visas? We have yet to find out. If they turn out to be landed immigrants — why are *they* in particular recruited by the GRU who are often discovered to be behind these incidents. Do you REALLY think those Ukrainian were on Zelenskyy’s side of the war if they were trying to torch Starmer, who supports Ukraine? I mean, get a grip.
But the EU apparently needed to make this public gesture — and right fucking now.
Yeah they did. At a time when sabotage of Polish railroad tracks; the torching of the British Prime Minister’s home; the assassinations of Chechens and others; the poisonings of Skripal and others; the invasion of air space and ships — all increasing
And instead of asking who exactly made this decision and why, you decided to lecture me on my shitty ethics.
Yeah, you got that right, sweetcakes. I will be doing that. You should be ashamed. I don’t care what media you get on your side. I will be the still small voice of conscience that continues to point out that a) you are safe b) you fed your sister to the dogs and didn’t get her out; c) better get busy calling up an EU office and getting her out now.
It doesn’t matter who/how got this decision going in the EU; I wholeheartedly support former Amb. Michael McFaul’s one-word comment on the decision: “Good!”
Well then. Listen to me for a change.
You sure came to the wrong address with this self-centered and self-entitled remark!
I’ve been listening to you and people like you for literally 50 years. I am serious as a heart attack: you cannot shame me or make me feel inadequate because I have paid all my dues with your sick fuck of a country.
Despite all your wonderful activism, you have no idea what it means to work when your freedom and your life are at stake. You think you know it because you’re emphasizing all the victims of the world. But the truth is you have no fucking idea.
Yes, my activism has been wonderful. Thank you for noticing — not. I do have a fucking idea, and I will go on comparing your suffering to Ukrainians because any 7-year-old — especially the ones dead like in the past week — can explain to you what is worse: losing your exit visa and having to STFU; having to go to jail for your blog; or losing your life or limb or family members in a direct deliberate attack as in Kyiv. Sure can do this, and will go on doing it.
Your other argument is essentially morally bankrupt and encourages quietism.
If only people who have suffered as you have could help, then no one would help. No one could justify it because they could never understand. People would have to be in perpetual abject servitude — bowing and scraping before your magnificent suffering and could never have dignity — and equality in solidarity. They would be your wenches. So they would not even try.
The old time Soviet dissidents appealed “to people of good will” and we responded, without a suffering quotient test from them. We could never understand the fathomless sorrow of Russia but we could also call its bullshit — as they did. They wrote their samizdat on the “library days” off from their jobs at state institutes. What happened that your martyrdom had to grow SO exclusively special in its equisite suffering that two of your leaders had to go back to Russia deliberately to be poisoned — one twice! — and to certain death?! And you think this is something we should only honour, and bow before, and not question?
Yet it is the suicide bombing of your movement. It is a form of terrorism. I personally will not stand for it.
We are supposed to empathize and never criticize this sort of behaviour?
If no one can ever adequately understand your experience — no one could ever emphasize — then they would not try. You’d be quite alone, more alone than you are now in your ineffective and even destructive victimhood.
Example: If only LGBT people could help other LGBT to gain their rights and marry and adopt children and achieve equality — because only they could ever understand — why, they never needed allies, and they never had to fight at the statehouse for a law — why, they would fail.
The idea that “only our comrades who suffered” can properly understand the mystique of Russia is utter bullshit, and we all call that.
I never hear Columbians or Darfurians or Azerbaijanis or hundreds of other people in other places sometimes way worse than Russia say “You are no good. You didn’t suffer. You can’t understand.” Instead — hey, like the Soviet dissidents of old who were better than you and your entitlement-happy generation in this regard — appealled to people of good will. When they found a sympathetic person, they explained what needed to be done. They didn’t greet them with hostility as “not getting it.” All the social movements of the world that have succeeded at least in part, whether Tibetan independent advocates or the Black civil rights movement or Black Lives Matter have succeeded by finding allies, building bridges, sometimes having to take unappealing bedfellows who would have to learn to “check your privilege.” But to disqualify everyone as “never getting it enough” is to be in a cult, not a movement, and it will fail.
Check your privilege, Elena. You are safe now. Thanks to the EU and other Western powers. Yes, you suffered. Your sister is not yet in jail so don’t hysterially look for trouble. Quietly seek to get her out.
You’ve lost one person willing to work on her case (me) but who cares? There are a lot of others.
When you’re tortured with electricity.
When you’re raped on daily basis by inmates in prison — this is the fate of all Russian LGBTQ activists and they know it but they keep working.
NO NEED TO EXAGERATE
I never think it is good to exaggerate in human rights work — but then, human rights documentation is not what you are doing, you are instead weaponizing suffering and exaggerating it to win political and even literary accolades and sorry, no sale. Not buying. It’s like the problem in tackling the problem of violence against transgender people in America, a very real problem even in our supposedly progressive NYC. You encounter really rabid activists from a few extreme groups who want only one number to be used — an amalgam of cases. But you can’t include deaths from partner violence if the partner is also transgender now, can you? You can be concerned about what suicide is in the transgender world and how it comes about, but honestly, if you want to measure attacks by the community at large on transgender people, and you want to be effective in court, in Congress, at the UN, you have to be accurate. The numbers are always bad enough without exaggerating it.
EVERYONE KNOWS what happens to LGBT in the Russian prison system — it is gruesome and as much a function of backward, violent Russian society as the horrific Russian prison system — they are symbiotic as they are PS in New York State, only not as terrible here. Torture with electric shock in Chechnya and Dagestan are particularly notorious — because of the nature of those societies as well as their horrific prison systems –but they are not only of LGBT. You run the risk of some persecuted LGBT stepping forward, amplified by the regime or animosity against you just out of spite, and saying “But I wasn’t electrocuted, just beaten or starved.” You’re leaving out lots of non-LGBT who were ALSO electrocuted, and run the risk of resentment of other victims because you can’t be inclusive. Be precise. It’s important.
But at what point will you realize that there are Egyptians? Palestinians? Sudanese? Even people in Tennesse who have suffered just as much if not more than you from torture and stop feeling as if you are a Tragically Misunderstood Artist? At what point can we get you to stop enabling your horrifically violent country’s past and present be the basis of your special pleading?
It’s not a good look. It’s not effective.
That’s about as far from your reality as it gets — even now, when there’s a fascist in power in your own country. Your passport is still strong enough to be able to escape almost anywhere if things go South for you.
People being dragged off the streets to ICE dungeons are suffering as much as migrant laborers from Central Asia in Russia. Why this creepy Suffering Olympics? Do you really think you can somehow shame someone like me because I didn’t suffer? Especially when you willingly chose to suffer.
Your martyrdom has to be endlessly compared to my privilege? Why? I am completely unmoved.
Actually, I don’t have a passport, and not because I’m a yahoo who never looks abroad or travels there and doesn’t know how to read a map. Back in Trump 1, I took part in writing a four-part series on Trump’s ties with Russia which was carefully researched and made the point that you don’t have to be outed as an actual agent or asset on the payroll, or even be a primed agent of influence, to do a lot of damage when skilled agitpropsters prey on your vanity and set you up with the right meetings. At the interpretermag.com, we lost our funding from RFE/RL after that series (and a long read on the Steele Dossier) even though Trump was not yet in office, because the handwriting was on the wall.
I then personally experienced some wild IRS mailings, tax liens, and attempts to collect taxes I had been paying installment on — and then *the loss of my passport*. That’s what happens usually only to people who own huge amounts of taxes — wealthy individuals — — even though I didn’t, this tactic was used against me. To get myself out of this morass, I’d need lawyers, money, time, and effort. At the very least, I’d have to get journalists to examine it. But why distract from our real cause at hand? I have a sense of proportion — I invite you to have one, too.
Since I have lived with a rare and incurable immune disease since 2014 when it was first diagnosed, and am immunocompromised by the medicines to treat it, I can’t travel even to Bayonne without getting an infection of some time. I stayed home completely in the first years of COVID. Yes, it is still possible to walk into Canada and I know where. I studed in Canada for 4 years; we used to own a lakeside camp site in Nova Scotia years ago but we sold it after hard times following 9/11 and because I couldn’t travel. I don’t need to run to Canada for my blog — and I really need to stay here for lots of reason.
I never have complained about this; I’ve never amplified my suffering over it; I’ve never done a damn thing. You happened to be wrong in my case. Yes, Americans could go to Canada or elsewhere. They fought for a country to be made this way; I suggest you do the same and start with Ukraine, which is already succeeding even in wartime in making a better country than Russia has ever known even in reform times.
But just wait a while and you’ll see.
If you think you’re going to stop what’s coming for your country with “No King” protests — believe me you won’t.
Now here, you sound truly like a whiny, petulant little child. OK, Lenochka, I’m good. I’ll wait. Not going anywhere fast. I’m a grandma and a retiree and chronically ill. With any luck on your part, I’ll be dead sooner rather than later.
I’ve been in LOTS of marches. The “No Kings” had a lot wrong with it as the result of a compromise among various groups, newer activists and hardened cadres. The chief purpose of this march was to create a single-issue type platform with even humorous slogans and a safer form of activism to grow the movement for future confrontations. Can you think through strategies like this, any of you, or do you all have your heads up your ass preoccupied with your own grants, your own conferences, your own speaking engagements, your own books coming out? Well?
What are YOU doing in Russia to create a broad-based safe-space like that? What have you EVER done? To be sure, last time somebody tried to lead a big economic march with the war in Ukraine added one — he was assassinated (Boris Nemtsov).
So it’s always martyrdom, martydom, martyrdom — and your Russian Orthodox Church never recognizes you as saints!
I had a sign at “No Kings” that said STOP ILLEGAL DEPORTATIONS. You’ve fixed yourself up with the papelas. What are you actually doing to help even one other person do the same, as I have?
I’m no naive fucking bunny. I first became exposed to the horrors of prisons in my own state, when after the prison riots in Attica, I came in to visit the prisoners on a delegation. The prisoners had demanded that a group of citizens be allowed in to hear their plight. So there was an essay contest in schools and I happened to win it.
Everyone should have the experience of a big, iron door closing behind them, and they might make prisons in their society more humane. I did that for many years regarding the USSR and then Russia and Central Asia. I recall now going into The Crosses in St. Petersburg of Requiem fame with a CBC camera crew, and being told by the guard, when I asked about the “telephone booths” in the corridors, with no phones, what they were. He said the razminniye budki were only temporary holding boxes for prisoners passing each other in the corridor so they wouldn’t talk to each other.
I sat in one of the booths and gazed at the walls and then pointed out to our minders that the very elaborate etchings of faces and hearts and arrows and women’s names there meant that the prisoners must have sat in these boxes for a very long time (and indeed that was the testimony we had from Russian human rights groups at the time, that prisoners were kept in these phone booths for long periods although they were not intended for that purpose).
Why would I go half-way around the world with a news crew to make a film (“Crime and Punishment” on CBC)? Why would I read Anna Akhmatova’s famous epitaph to Requiem? If I can *never understand suffering enough*, why try? It would be futile, right? And never appreciated.
In the past it took for you and your fellow society 8 years to stop war in Iraq — having fully functioning democratic infrastructure. Now it’s being demolished every day. Let’s say, I’m not impressed with your antiwar activism either.
This is one of the weakest points of your argument against me personally, or against the larger antiwar movement which was way more active than me. I marched against the war in Iraq, taking my little daughter so she might remember it. I spent years opposing the war in Iraq at the UN with the US and allies, as my colleagues know. I didn’t do any sit-ins to get arrested as a mother of two — I don’t do martydom like you guys do, seriously. Blame the US all you like for this unnecessary and misdirected war, but you could also do some blaming of Saddam and his ally — Russia. And really, zoom out, and have a little more humility when you get started on wars that you think the Western movements were slow on.
The bomb that killed our dear colleagues in Canal House — including Arthur Helton, who was next door to me in the HRW office at the Bar Building for years, and who was there on behalf of Soros to inquire about help to refugees, was made in Russia.
Made in Russia.
Don’t you DARE talk to me about Iraq, Elena. Ever. Sergio de Mello and others all lost their lives while doing good to a bomb made in YOUR country. Not America. Wielded by allies of YOUR country hostile to the UN presence. Be ashamed. Be deeply ashamed over a bomb you are related to, that killed our friends.
Think of the Euromissiles and the European peace movement that protested only Pershing and Cruise missiles — except for a tiny number of us in Europe and the US who also protested the SS20s — which, after all, were the justification for US missiles — along with PS Sakharov’s exile and the war against Afghanistan — hello. Don’t talk to me about one-sided, ineffective peace movements in the world Elena, you will lose the debate fast. There are a lot of them. Who is in Barcelona now, besides shoppers from your country which really is a problem? “Stop NATO” marchers fueled by your country’s propagandists who wouldn’t know the war in Ukraine if it bit them in the ass.
Have some fucking humility if you can’t have any perspective.
Speaking of wars that lasted “too long.” The war in Afghanistan by the Soviets lasted *9 years*. In that time, the Soviets killed one million villagers — and nobody even believes the Soviet claim of “only” 15,000 of their own men dying in combat. The West did what it could to counter the Soviets and for its trouble got the false claim of having “created bin Ladn” pinned on them. You didn’t live through this era; you didn’t pay attention to it; you gave yourself to other wars of more interest to you, but try to zoom out and get a little perspective on yourself and your country.
There were countless refugees created by Soviet warfare in Afghanistan– leading to bin Ladn. Thanks, Elena! Because people are always accountable for their countries wars and bad behaviour, right? Collective responsibility and all that? If we’re going to play that game. I’m happy to assume rsponsibility for my country’s bad behaviour but I also distinguish the individual from his nation. Do you? Or do you try to win a cat fight by indulging in collective guilt triping? It just does not work on me.
You were not born yet for the war in Afghanistan or still watching “Nu, Pogodi!” but your compatriots writing or protesting this war were few in number, and not only because it was risky. After all, Nobel Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov spent 8 long years in exile in Gorky for his protest against this invasion and not an awful lot of people protested even if safely abroad. We had to do the protesting. But as a Russian, you are really in no position to cast stones, when the later American war in Afghanistan had a tiny fraction of the villagers killed by contrast with the Soviet. In “our” Afghan war, the Taliban and their allies own the lion’s share of the murderous attacks on civlians, including even horrors like the bombing of a women’s birth clinic with numerous casualties. What Russia did all during this period — and still — is meddle, play active measures, and generally cause mayhem, as always.
Where did Saddam’s weapons go, Elena? Saddam was propped by who? The Soviets. Do you really have that lack of awareness that you can scream at an American activist over the war in Iraq without any awareness of this? Could we get started then on Russia’s propping up and arming of Iran? Could we note the utter destructiveness of first Soviet support of the PLO, then Russian support of Palestinians; the heinous “Zionism=Racism” lie engineered by the Soviets at the UN to try to harness the Third World; (it was repudiated in 1995 by Secretary General Kofi Annan in a resolution — but the Kremlin still animates this agitprop through groups like DSA and the harnesting of social media active measures and influencing.
The Soviet Union is the gift that keeps on giving and you never seem to care. You think the EU is the problem because maybe some official’s husband might have worked in a company that maybe sold tear gas to Russia. We get it, truly we do. But the problem isn’t the weak or contradictory or the corrupt or selfinterested EU in its dealings with murderous Russia which the US and social movements dealt with before you were born and will deal with long after. It’s you. You Russians. And your martyrdom. And your selfishness and self-preoccupation. It’s wrong. Morally and politically. Get over it. You are ineffective and even complicit in your own countries murderousness otherwise, and have no moral grounds to accuse others of inactivism or collusion until you do.
Are you really that fucking stupid? Or are you just horribly self-centered and hysterially preoccupied? I’m familiar with how people get, especially torture victims. Don’t I know! People never get better from suffering and few are enobled by it. Don’t keep proving that reality by hollering at Westerners you think “didn’t suffer enough” or “didn’t stop a war” enough when….Iraq was a Soviet and still is a Russian ally. When YOUR COUNTRY that Russia you love enabled that war to happen.
What about Syria? Could Saddam have brought his chemical weapons there? (One theory but not important now) Syria had plenty of its own chemical weapons, and Russia propped up this regime and enabled and increased this war killing hundreds of thousands. What did you do to end the war in Syria? I think there probably are hardly any Russian journalists who have even written about it critically , unless they were covering Wagner, as we did. At least I can say I had close colleagues that covered it for years and still do.
Your sad child as a country? Show me on the doll where the Mongolian Horde touched your country, Elena, and start the goddamn healing process, please. It’s long overdue. The world is bone-tired of your tortured and mystical soul stalking and killing beyond its borders in misbegotten revenge for centuries’ old hurts. NATO “puts its bases by your borders” not as an aggressor, but as a defender — because HELLO your country crosses its borders and invades other people’s countries, kills them, and even hauls some back to sit in your GULAG.
Become part of what stops this murderous mayhem by at least becoming more self-aware.
Do you really hallucinate that you can somehow shame me or any American about antiwar activism? Who has wars outside their country now, Elena? Whose country provides arms to the most *conflict areas* of the world while Amnesty (who admits this) gripes about the US selling arms to…Australia or Fiji?
I work in US this year, and I’m watching and documenting your resistance from the inside. But I also create some common resistance knowledge and transnational connections in Academia while doing my advocacy and volunteering for Ukrainian and Russian political prisoners.
If for even a second you think you have the right to preach to me or my sister — you’re mistaken.
Another grant-o-sos! Good! I’m happy America still has something to offer foreigners as we have become so horrible under Trump and Musk. You can learn something here? Oh wow, that’s terrific.But… I’m not at all impressed with anything that happens in academia. Are you daft? Did you have a conference on “war reporting” in a Slavic Department where the paint on the “decolonization process” isn’t even dry? Who were fanning the war against Ukraine five minutes before February 2022, ranting about “RealPolitik” with Putin and “Azov Battalion”? Who never heard of Milchakov (we reported on him). Aademic communities??? Transnational connections??? These are all contingent on funding which is dwindling horribly, or haven’t you noticed?
Пошла на хуй
Nope, won’t be doing anything so crude nor will I wish such crudeness on you since you don’t like dicks anyway — and that’s fine with me.
Instead, I’ll tell you to take this ridiculous, whiny, hysterical road show of yours off the road and get to work. You’ve been in Ukraine. Aquire more humility. Talk about Ukraine more than yourself, even for a day. Their suffering absolutely dwarfs anything you can invoke of electrocuted Chechnya LGBT, even. They’ve been electrocuted MORE. Please, don’t play the Suffering Olympics where you will only lose. You are safe, nothing bad has happened to you. Your sister isn’t a case even so try to be effective. Urge others to be effective with actual diplomacy with diplomats who can actually work on your case, and work — instead of rantings. The rants shold be saved for direct screams against your own countryfor mass murdering Ukrainians. That is the only rant we should hear from you now. That you can cross the street to punch out someone like me who has always been a supporter and then block me only shows your weakness and the paucity of your arguments. It only makes YOU look bad.
Stop being a martyr. Grow up. Become an effective activist, if not a writer, by putting the focus where it belongs – Ukraine.
And now for a bit more of back story…
MY SUFFERING FROM RUSSIA
I sympathize, because I, too, have been harassed and vilified and mocked; I’ve even been allegedly poisoned (and have to continue to say “allegedly” because nowhere near the resources existed in the 1980s that exist now to detect and out these attacks); I’ve been strip-searched and interrogated; I can remember a creepy KGB tail literally stepping hard on the back of my heels to show me he was going po pyatkam in Leningrad — my rooms have been searched and my belongings stolen; I’ve been assaulted; I have been detained both inside Moscow (at Novodvorskaya’s house, where else!) and at the border departing; I’ve lost my visa and not been able to go back; restored it; and lost it again. None of this comes anywhere close to Elena’s suffering or the suffering of other activists but since I spent my entire life defending them, sympathizing with them, standing up for them, and advocating for them all over the place, I get to say: stop whining. Stop being martyrs. Act like you got some sense.
I don’t need to validate my experience with anyone and don’t proclaim it; there used to be a sign on the wall in Robert Bernstein’s office at Random House (he was also the chair of Human Rights Watch): There is No Limit to the Good You Can Do If You Are Willing Not to Get the Credit.
DEAD ROACH IN THE MAIL
The bad behaviour I’ve experienced from Russians over my career in various human rights and news organizations is pretty staggering and I won’t retail it all here but I’ll always remember one special insult — a supposed pacifist and antiwar activist in the Moscow Trust Group named Nina Kovaleva, a poet but an unknown one still living in obscurity, who had been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, which was wrongful even if she might suffer from some mental imbalance, sent me a letter in an envelope.
In it, she put a giant, dead grandaddy cockroach. This was to protest against…I’m not sure what. Insufficient care to her needs? She lived along with other emigres from her group who were all driving taxis in a somewhat dilapidated Brooklyn walk-up apartment and she was unhappy with her housing and blamed me? You would find that sometimes with emigres — they couldn’t grasp what human rights organizations were and thought they were social care organizations or socialist-style offices to hand out free things as they were used to in Russia. But her case was taken by IRC or some other resettlement organization, not the burden of Human Rights Watch.
It was actually under the liberal Clinton that cuts were made in budgets to help refugees, that’s my recollection. I’m sorry if an emigre has a roach in their apartment but you know what? I’ve always had them too and have always had to cope in crappy walkups and HUD housing.
I actually think there was something more sinister and wierd in her strange mailing to me — that kind of sums up all the attacks I’ve suffered from Russians over 50 years on one particular strange lament of theirs — that I have gained some advantage by working on their issues — this goes hand-in-hand with the dysfunctional rant that we can “never understand enough.”
And that was the note Nina put in with the dead grandpa water roach: “My name is Sasha. Katya killed me.” This was a reference to the fact that I befriended, and later dated and married her fellow Trust Group member Alexander Shatravka. Perhaps she imagined that in caring for people, I stifled them in some way or took advantage of them? That you shouldn’t date someone whose case you worked on, that this is somehow unethical? There was no such rule — and PS, a Soviet would not have a work ethics of that nature so surely that can’t be the issue. I have always struggled to understand this. Or perhaps it’s that I “made a career” off them and exploited them?!
“MAKING A CAREER OFF’ RUSSIAN EMIGRES
This theme of human rights activists in nonprofits such as where I worked “making a career” off the sufferers of Russia was a theme I would encounter over and over again and still do to this day. That is, when Soviet and Russians amplify and become preoccupied with their own martydrom, it seems easy to segue into a belief that others will exploit this vulnerable state even as they help them.
Natasha Batovrin, the ex-wife of Sergei Batovrin, head of the Moscow Trust Group, who dumped her husband in his hour of need and married a Dutch peace activist (and remains in Holland AFAIK), accused me weirdly a number of times on Facebook of somehow “exploiting” this topic of the peace group or “making a career.” She imagined that I travelled all over the world on fabulous per diems like USAID contractors or something, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
This would always astound me because the last thing you do in a nonprofit is make a career. In fact, after I left HRW, the next jobs I had were only downwardly mobile in terms of salary as I had two babies to take care of — and then became a single mom. I had a pretty good salary while at the International League for Human Rights — but half of it went to day care for my children. After 9/11 destroyed two of my jobs, I never really really got back ever to full-time, benefited work and had to make do often working even two jobs at a time of the contractor/gig-worker 1099 sort where you never build up equity. So be it.
This was my choice. I am really glad that over the years, especially the last 13 since I ceased working for, or receiving any grant from, the Soros foundations, that I can speak my mind and don’t have to hold back on criticism of anyone or anything. It really is a blessing.
I suggest some of you consider taking the same kind of vow of poverty and vocation of service so that you can speak more freely as well as your voices can be terribly muted on certain subjects.
I hear this “career” lament directed to their leaders all the time — Leonid Volkov lives in a townhouse and has a car, or whatever. I’ve never had a townhouse and a car, and I don’t have to agree with either Navalny’s staff, his widow, him, or their ideological prescriptions for Russia — which are not mine at all — to point out that there is nothing intrinsically evil in owning a townhouse and a car.
In fact, you’d want a leader of a movement to be living better off than me, who after all these years, lives in a tiny apartment in HUD housing without heat much of the time, unlike the people I helped over the years, some of who live in suburban homes with swimming pools. This was my choice; this was my vocation; I don’t have to defend it to anyone nor do I feel any resentment if somebody I helped over the years, even someone who has turned on me like a junkyard dog like quite a few of them have, has gotten ahead. Good! This is America! Go for it! Stop whining.
“YOU ARE A FAILURE”
So here’s where some Russian emigres, having failed to make the argument “you can never understand our suffering or the “career” argument and you “benefited from our suffering” gambit then turn….to shameless efforts to humiliate.
Once they’ve failed at the “you haven’t suffered like we did” or “you made a career out of suffering” gambits, the Russian emigres try a new tack: you must be imcompetent, you are a failure, you aren’t an academic, you don’t have a full-time job, you are a loser, your blog has low traffic and — you’re fat. PS you must be a cat lady.
Yes, I have one cat. But honestly, the rest of the insults, I don’t care about. I would not join the academia of the 1980s for moral reasons — it never reformed as I’ve explained in recent long Facebook threads — nor would I join the opportunistic corporations and government programs of the 1990s for moral reasons — and I really did not care for work at the UN (where I represented three different groups for some 15 years). I’m never going to be an academic, don’t have much regard for most of the academics in this field even now, and I’m fine with this “plight.”
Don’t think I didn’t notice what Elena wrote on the programs I asked her to sign at the Tamizdat Conference — on mine, “We will prevail!” and on my daughter’s “We will prevail in our lifetimes”. Buckle up, because you are not going to prevail in any of these lifetimes, until YOU change from martyrdom to selfless ervice. There is a difference. Some people in Russia who never get into the media know it well; some people in Russia who will never, ever benefit from a Schengen visa know it even better.
