"What we are seeing is the most repressive and aggressive part of the bureaucracy in its dying throes," Mr. Khodorkovsky said in an interview. "We got over communism in 1996. Now the last sickness is the absolute power of the bureaucratic system."Sabrina Tavernise is either lying or stupid. Khodorkovsky, Abramovitch, Berezovksy, Chernoy, Gusinsky, Smolensky and Zuganov are supporting Communists, not fighting the old system.
I vote for both... she seems to have an unhealthy admiration for communism.
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Racy New Russia Forgets The "Women's Rights" Of The Communist Era
In an apparent effort to tart up its front section, the Times put a story in its International section whose subject wouldn't have been out of place in a tabloid: A profile of the racy Russian pop duo TATU.
Yulia Volkova and Elena Katina are two 18-year-old girls who dress up in schoolgirl outfits and mimic lesbianism in their videos and on stage. Their act has caused controversy in Britain, where they've hit the top of the pop charts.
Sabrina Tavernise's piece from Moscow uses the TATU titillation to claim a "cultural divide between Russia and the United States" on issues of sex-and to express a yearning for the security of the old Soviet Union.
To Tavernise, it seems the Iron Curtain of Soviet Communism was nothing more than a constricting blanket to be tossed off a bed, good for sexual freedom and perversion but disastrous for people's pocketbooks. "The group is the product of the sexual free-for-all that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union. After the strait-laced Soviet state collapsed in 1991, sex exploded onto city streets, television shows and advertisements," she writes. "But the new freedoms that brought openness in sexual relations also carried economic woes. The Soviet economy collapsed and a raw, new capitalism emerged, plunging millions of Russians into poverty. In the scramble to survive, prostitution and human trafficking jumped, as did production of child pornography."
The phrase "strait-laced Soviet state" seems to praise by faint damn the Soviet dictatorship, and one can hardly credit the idea that "poverty' emerged in Russia only after the Communist regime of bread lines and rationing had collapsed.
Tavernise also includes this ahistorical howler: "Most Russians see the West as sexually repressed. During President Bill Clinton's impeachment, Russians admired his manliness instead of judging his morals. In Russia, feminism is a dirty word, despite the Soviet era's emphasis on women's rights."
Women's rights? Tavernise seems to forget that under Soviet Communism, neither men nor women had any rights at all.
http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2003/0304.asp