Posted on 09/16/2004 2:22:02 PM PDT by Lukasz
The European and Russian governments are living in two different worlds
"Business is politics in up-to-date Russia. The government controls all aspects of the nation's life and the commercial field is not an exception," the chairman of the committee "2008: Free Choice", Grand Master Garry Kasparov said on September 13th at the Baltic Forum of Development in Hamburg. Below you can find excerpts from the chess player's speech.
"We must draw a distinction between the current Russian leadership and the citizens of Russia. The rich culture, creativity, the knowledge and humanity of our nation is still alive and means a lot more to the world than the whole Russian oil," Kasparov said. "High oil prices make the only support for Putin's regime. Citizens of other oil-extracting countries do not derive profit from the oil wealth. Both oil and all other natural resources of Russia should have their own markets and open ways to reach those markets."
Garry Kasparov believes that Russia should unite with Europe. "This union would be important to the Russian nation for social and economic reasons. The traditions of the European democracy and the relative economic stability will help Russia become a modern state. However, Putin's regime mixes up the past and the present. A lot of Russia's neighbors are still being suspicious about Russia, and they have reasons for it. An order in the past is necessary for the future progress. The European and Russian governments are living in two different worlds," Kasparov stated in Hamburg.
"One of the examples to prove it is the fact how our media outlets defend the notorious pact of 1939 between Nazis and Soviets. The USSR attacked Finland because of the pact, it invaded the Baltic republics, occupied a part of Poland and assisted in unleashing WWII. Russia needs to acknowledge the crimes of its Soviet predecessors.
"The avowal of guilt is a good spiritual remedy, which also means the acknowledgement of universal moral values, which the Kremlin currently rejects. One of these values is the ability to find common language. Putin's administration does not know how to speak this language.
"The Soviet past still dominates the Russian reality and politics. Putin is aware of that. In his address to the nation after the hostage crisis in Beslan, the president said that the nation is living under the conditions, which have been created with the collapse of a great state, which proved to be helpless in the changing world. It would be the same to say that you have been living in a house without the water supply system," Kasparov said.
"The Soviet Union could not and cannot be a part of modern Europe. It could become a part of Europe only with its conquests. We must distinguish between modern Russia that we need and the Soviet past that Putin is trying to retrieve.
"There is no place for Committee 2008 and the real opposition in the Russian press. However, there is a place for nationalists and Stalinists, who grieve about that "great state." They decline basic democratic values. These talks about the return to the erstwhile glory are becoming more frequent now. The Nazi propaganda is prohibited in Germany, but not in Russia," Kasparov said.
"Unfortunately, this is not the only aspect, in which Putin exercises himself as a Stalinist. He talks about everything in the old Soviet language. He suppresses freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, he has led Russia astray.
"Putin announced that he would cancel elections of regional governors as a measure to struggle against terrorism. Local parliamentarians will have to approve the selected nominees. Putin is destroying democracy at the time when we need it most. Western politicians might say that the Russian Constitution technically allows it. However, if the West keeps silent, we will most likely witness similar changes happening in the presidential election procedure.
"Even the national lucrative oil market does not function according to the standards of the civilized world. The scandal with Yukos and its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has exerted a destructive influence on the economy.
"It is impossible for Europe to deal with the current Russian administration. Europe should press on Putin for changes. One should not let Putin mix the Soviet past with the Russian future in an attempt to keep the relations.
"Schroeder and Chirac are using double standards instead, which brings a lot of harm to the Russian nation. It is not time for Realpolitik. Each meeting of the Group of Seven with Putin's participation is perceived as the approval of Putin's home policy.
If the nature of the Soviet Union was one of brutality and oppression, it was only because it is in the nature of the Russian to be a brutal oppressor.
Putting arsenic in a Tylenol bottle doesn't change the nature of the poison.
Doubled headed eagle is the symbol of Orthodoxy, and comes from Constantinople, the seat of the Orthodox Church. It has been around much longer than the Soviet Union.
The Glinka music (have you ever listed to is until now? I doubt it!) is like a lullaby -- it puts you to sleep. Would you ever want your country to have music like that one for the national anthem? Oh, excuse me, you wouldn't know because you obviously never heard it before.
Marmema, Destro -- have you noticed the sentence "Garry Kasparov believes that Russia should unite with Europe. "This union [with Europe] would be important to the Russian nation for social and economic reasons. The traditions of the European democracy and the relative economic stability will help Russia become a modern state?"
This sounds like those idiots in Belgrade who think that if you dress like a German you must be German! Kind of scares you that this is coming from a champion chess player. That's why computer chess is so successful. No soul.
Physically joining European Union will not change Russian way of life any more than creating a North Atlantic alliance dominated by America made Europeans anything resembling Americans.
Traditions of the European democracy? What is a "tradition" nowadays? Anything older than you can remember I suppose? Kaspar must not remember that barely 50 years ago, democracy was all but alive in Europe and that even demcoracies were not as democratic as we think they ought to be. Why England of the 1930's and 1940's would be considered racist and prejudiced, sexist and colonialist to the degree that it would warrant sanctions to force it to change its evil ways! Spain, Italy, Germany, east European kingdoms and so on could hardly be considered democracies even if they had nominal parliaments. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was officially a royal dictatorship since 1929, yet many a Serb will tell you about the Serbian democratic 'tradition.'
It amazes me how many people just simply spew meaningless words and wrong information into the Internet and even have no shame to put their name behind it.
Starting from such a low level, Russia may need to follow the model of such countries as South Korea and Taiwan, which had authoritarian governments, but built up their economies. When the middle class was strong enough, they established democracies. A strong middle class is the only proven basis for stable democracy!
Russia today is NOT Soviet communist, but mainly Orthodox Christian!! And as with our country, it needs to fight islamoNazi terorists, in the form of the Chechen bandits allied with Al Qaeda and the other international jihadists. Russia represents one of the great cultures of the world. We need to work together!!
That might work, except MOST OF THEM were not Russians! LOL. You expose youtself more each minute.
Secondly those charts are democide figures. Democide is pseudoscience - false science - garbage.
Rummel's conclusions have been criticized for not considering the number of deaths due to anarchy and the lack of government, through mechanisms such as civil conflict, the breakdown of society, and foreign invasion. Some have found the data that he uses to be questionable.
Other people point out that his methods of calculation of the death toll are highly controversial. He compares the statistical data before and after a certain date and derives an estimate about the number of killings that occurred between. However, he fails to establish evidence of actual killing. Moreover, his results are based on an absolute trust in statitistical data and statistics are prone to errors.
However, he himself uses the wider sense of "killed by", including all kinds of "reason-result" relationships between acts of government and actual deaths. Moreover, in calculating the number of victims, he doesn't feel he needs evidence of a death; the result of statistical calculation is, for Rummel, effective proof that death occurred.
For an example of alleged manipulation: Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were transit camps for millions of German POWs after World War II. There were some deaths, with a few thousand German POWs dying from starvation and exposure.
R. J. Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager as between 4,500 and 56,000. Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The source of the high figure of 56,000 also reported the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts. Extremely high figures of up to a million are sometimes quoted, but these seem not to be based on any hard evidence, and are generally regarded as latter-day propaganda.
Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The high figure of 56,000 also merited the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts.
Another flaw in Rummel's statistical calculations is that he doesn't use error margins.
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Garbage in Garbage out, Luis.
Secondly those charts are democide figures. Democide is pseudoscience - false science - garbage.
Rummel's conclusions have been criticized for not considering the number of deaths due to anarchy and the lack of government, through mechanisms such as civil conflict, the breakdown of society, and foreign invasion. Some have found the data that he uses to be questionable.
Other people point out that his methods of calculation of the death toll are highly controversial. He compares the statistical data before and after a certain date and derives an estimate about the number of killings that occurred between. However, he fails to establish evidence of actual killing. Moreover, his results are based on an absolute trust in statitistical data and statistics are prone to errors.
However, he himself uses the wider sense of "killed by", including all kinds of "reason-result" relationships between acts of government and actual deaths. Moreover, in calculating the number of victims, he doesn't feel he needs evidence of a death; the result of statistical calculation is, for Rummel, effective proof that death occurred.
For an example of alleged manipulation: Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were transit camps for millions of German POWs after World War II. There were some deaths, with a few thousand German POWs dying from starvation and exposure.
R. J. Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager as between 4,500 and 56,000. Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The source of the high figure of 56,000 also reported the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts. Extremely high figures of up to a million are sometimes quoted, but these seem not to be based on any hard evidence, and are generally regarded as latter-day propaganda.
Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The high figure of 56,000 also merited the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts.
Another flaw in Rummel's statistical calculations is that he doesn't use error margins.
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Garbage in Garbage out, Luis.
LOL! Pure Pravda dramatics. First off, I don't support the killers, secondly your appetite doesn't seem to be upset by Putin so it must be very strong and tolerant.
Doesn't seem to slow down Putin's cheerleaders for a second.
Not surprising...the Soviets have never had a problem finding willing dupes.
And for this a sick man should go to jail? You sound like the Soviets to me.
Doing by best Yakov Smirnoff impression (AGAIN!):
In Russia Chess master Kasporov is free to challenge the Kremlin without fear of jail....in America Chess Master Bobby Fischer hunted down around world and is to go to jail for defying State Dept travel policy.
WHAT A COUNTRY!!!
Kasparov doesn't live in the Soviet Union as far as I know, he's also not a Russian.
I didn't say anything other than "Fisher called Kasparov "Garry the Jew", everything else you surmised of your own volition.
YOU sound like the Soviets, making up accusations out of whole cloth.
Bull. Fischer is a wanted man for violating a travel ban by the State Dept. Fischer is also mentally ill. Why else bring up Fischer's "Jew" remark unless it is to show that Fischer has it comming to him? So don'tt ry and weasel your way out of it - your thinking is clearly Soviet.
I don't like anti-semites, Fisher is an anti-semite.
Fisher is also deranged, AND he violated a US law.
You don't like the law?
Work to change the law...but Fisher knew that he was violating the law, and he decided to play anyway.
Kasparov is outside of Russia exercising his freedom of speech.
If he were to do it inside Russia, there is a good possibility that he would be jailed as well.
You don't like the fact that I don't like Fisher?
That's just too damned bad.
Since when does UN law become American law?
And I thought we were a free country!
He violated a State Department order, he knew he was violating it.
Nothing wrong with civil disobedience, but expect to pay the price.
But especially not the Chechen fans who don't seem to know even basic facts, but rather embarrass themselves by posting historically incorrect blather.
Yes, we all know how inaccurate the Wall Street Journal, STRATFOR, the Christian Science Monitor and other publications like them are. Sure...and Dan Rather has integrity.
The Prime Minister has enjoined us to be ‘in complete solidarity with Russia and the Russian people’, and invites us to draw a parallel between the terrorist threat from al-Qa’eda and the threat posed by Chechen lunatics. I am not so sure about that. Is it not possible that if Osama bin Laden had never been born and there had been no attack on the World Trade Center, Russia would still be besieged by appallingly cruel home-grown terrorists? It is easy to feel a sense of solidarity with the people of Beslan, even of Russia, but impossible to identify with President Putin and his government. We do not share the same values. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Putin’s almost totalitarian treatment of the media.
When he became President four years ago, Russia had what approximated to an independent media. Now all television channels and nearly all newspapers are controlled directly or indirectly by the Kremlin. Putin nationalised the liberal NTV channel by putting it in the hands of Gazprom, a state-backed gas company. The country’s last independent television channel was shut down last year on the pretext of financial insolvency. A law passed last summer threatens newspapers with closure if, during an election period, they express any opinion about a politician’s policies, his campaign or his personality. Intimidated by these and other new laws, many newspaper journalists practise self-censorship. There has been very little critical coverage of Putin’s human rights abominations in Chechnya. Television cameras follow Putin slavishly around Russia, portraying him in a heroic light.
Nonetheless, the Kremlin has not totally succeeded in throttling the independent media, as was clear from the reaction of some newspapers to the Russian government’s amazingly inept handling of the crisis in Beslan. Izvestia published shocking pictures of the siege, and questioned the claim by officials that there had been only 350 hostages in the school. It also denounced the censored coverage of events on state-controlled television, though on one channel a commentator by the name of Sergei Brilyov was brave enough to call on the government to come clean about the ending of the siege. Another newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, brazenly accused the authorities of ‘lying to us all the time’. The government reacted by securing the dismissal of the editor of Izvestia, Raf Shakirov. Two Russian journalists with independent views on Chechnya were not even allowed to get to Beslan. Andrei Babitsky of Radio Liberty was arrested at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport last Thursday, and thrown in jail for five days. Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta, a fearless critic of Russian atrocities in Chechnya, was mysteriously taken ill on a plane to Rostov after drinking tea supplied by a stewardess.
The Russian government’s reaction shows how much it dislikes even an occasional expression of editorial freedom. Possibly there will be a further crackdown after Beslan, as previous crises have precipitated harsher laws against the media. Let us sympathise with the Russian people. Let us even have a pragmatic relationship with the Russian government where we do indeed share common interests. But I personally do not wish to be put by Tony Blair in the same boat as President Putin. The crisis in Chechnya extends much further than the so-called war against terror. Putin, like Yeltsin before him, has behaved like a butcher there. And his attitude towards his country’s media is barely more enlightened than that of the Soviet leaders who preceded him.
Col. Stanislav Lunev
Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2001
NEWSMAN
After signing a treaty of "friendship and cooperation" with communist China and a "breakthrough" agreement with President Bush, Russia's President Putin is preparing for a new summit. In the end of this week he will meet in Moscow with North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-Il, whose 21-car Japanese-built armored express train is traveling through Russian Siberia in great secrecy.
The North Korean leader, who is never known to have taken an airplane, is riding the Trans-Siberian railway to the Russian capital, where he reportedly expects to arrive Saturday or Sunday for talks with Putin.
Kim's visit has been shrouded in secrecy, and Kremlin authorities didn't officially announce he was coming until just minutes before his train crossed border between the two countries.
According to Kremlin officials, Russian and North Korean leaders will discuss the situation between the two Koreas, which remain technically at war under a 1953 armed truce still in effect, as well as industrial cooperation, railway modernization and the construction of a gas pipeline from Russia to North Korea.
Kremlin officials especially emphasized the fact that Russia will not demand that North Korean leader stop work on his country's ballistic missile program.
However, as Russian state-run national TV reported on July 27, the major topic of negotiations between Moscow and Pyongyang will be in connection with military cooperation between two countries. Background preparation for this cooperation was made when a high-level North Korean military delegation visited Moscow last spring.
This delegation was headed by Kim Il-Chol, vice chairman of the North Korea's National Defense Commission and the Minister of the People's Armed Forces, and included Pak Kil-Yong, vice-minister of foreign affairs, among other officials. As the Russian press reported, the North Koreans had talks with their Russian defense counterpart aimed at winning a new deal for weapons assistance for Pyongyang.
On April 27, Kim signed a new military cooperation agreement with Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, but it remains unclear whether a specific arms trade or supply agreement was signed. Currently, more than half of the North Korean air force - most of it supplied by former Soviet Union - is in urgent need of updates and repairs, while its ground forces need massive supplies of new tanks and other weapons.
According to tradition, Moscow and Pyongyang keep secret any military cooperation between two countries, including Russia's participation in North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, the creation of an air defense system for Pyongyang by deploying Russia's modern air and missile defense complexes S-300, and its last modification S-400 around North Korea's capital, among other weapons.
Russia's deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who signed the deal for Moscow last April, told the Russian media that he did not expect the arms agreement to harm Kremlin relations with South Korea. However, the "framework agreement on cooperation in the defense industry and military equipment" could become a part of Moscow's broader strategy of regaining markets it once dominated but had to abandon after the 1991 collapse of former Soviet Union.
Russia's state-run press highly praised Putin's cooperation with the North Korean dictator and underscored the fact that last year Putin became the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit Pyongyang and "disclosed" the high-human qualities of the North Korean dictator, his level of education and humor. However, the same media doesn't explain the reason for cancellation of Kim's visit to Moscow last September and several delays for his re-scheduled visits to Russia during both this and last year.
As NewsMax.com reported on May 2, the changes in the time of the visit's arose because of the unpredictable behavior of Pyongyang's dictator, who at the time of his first meeting with Russian President Putin in May 2000, promised to drop his country's missile program if the Western nations will assist North Korea to launch a few space satellites a year at their expense.
Mr. Kim also promised his strong support to Russian and Chinese opposition to U.S. plans to build a nuclear missile defense system (NMD), which was originated as a defense against possible missile attack from North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and other such rogue nations.
In an attempt to make political capital out of Kim's promise to drop his missile program, Putin promoted the North Korean dictator's pledge very actively in his meeting with Western leaders until Mr. Kim made an official statement that his promise was nothing more than a "joke".
It would be very difficult to call this statement a "joke" as well as to characterize the North Korean dictator as a predictable politician, and President Bush was absolutely right when he recently questioned North Korea's reliability in any negotiations.
The dictator's regime has to be treated accordingly, and it could be absolutely unrealistic to believe in the so-called peaceful intentions of Pyongyang's leaders, as well as those of their dear friends such as allegedly "democratic" Russia and totalitarian Communist China.
Actually, there is some common ground between unpredictable Mr. Kim and his Russian counterpart President Putin who last week signed an agreement with President Bush over the 1972 ABM Treaty's negotiations linked to the reduction of nuclear arsenals of both countries.
But on July 27, the Kremlin said in a statement that President Putin had "underlined the immutable nature of Russia's principled position on ABM" treaty in a telephone conversations with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Isn't that a reiteration of North Korean dictator's "joke"?
There is no doubt, that the new summit between Russian and North Korean leaders will not bring real peace and cooperation to the Korean peninsula, or will not stabilize the strategic situation in the Western Pacific. However, the Moscow summit could be a big step toward creation of the coalition of rogue nations built on the basis of the Russian-Chinese axis, which according to officials from Moscow and Beijing "is open" for any country whose leaders oppose the alleged U.S. world "domination".
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