Posted on 12/11/2014 5:20:43 PM PST by Greetings_Puny_Humans
The Land of Magical Thinking: Inside Putin’s Russia
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In Russia, “corrupt” is not an adjective. Corrupt is a noun, a proper noun, the word for the name and nature of the place.
Corrupt crony capitalism is familiar everywhere. But in Russia the corruption is so pervasive that even the cronies have to pay bribes, not just to the higher-ups but to the lower-downs.
Pomerantsev visits a TV studio owned by Kremlin-connected moguls. It’s in a shabby warehouse on the wrong side of town. There’s no sign or address on the metal door. Inside is a dirty little room with a drunk guard.
Pomerantsev goes down a dark corridor and up two flights of dingy stairs to another unmarked metal door. Behind that is a modern, well-lit, busy Western-style production facility. But there’s an inconspicuous door here as well, with a secret code pad. And behind thatis a more modern, better-lit, even busier production facility with an even less conspicuous door with an even more secret code leading to the real offices of the moguls, where the real business accounts are kept.
All this is to foil the tax police. Who come anyway. One of the moguls tells Pomerantsev that “the tax police were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion.”
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In Russia, small town girls go to the big city and get ruined, but that’s what they’re trying to do. Really trying. They go to school for it.
The students take notes in neat writing. They have paid a thousand dollars for each week of the course. There are dozens of such “academies” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with names such as “Geisha School” or “How To Be a Real Woman.”
If a girl with potential studies hard, “she earns the basic Moscow mistress rate: the apartment, $4,000 a month, a car, and a weeklong holiday in Turkey or Egypt twice a year.”
In return, she’s available to her “sponsor,” as he’s called, any time, any day.
Nice girls, of course, don’t do this. They go to the big city and become supermodels. Like Ruslana did. She was an ethnic Russian from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Ruslana was “discovered” at sixteen, world-famous at nineteen, and two days before her twenty-first birthday she jumped off a roof in New York. Pomerantsev gives us (although, in a way, he almost doesn’t need to) the heart-breaking particulars in between.
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Pomerantsev recounts the ordeals of dodging the draft in Russia. And it must be dodged.
Where he will be sent depends on the bribe the soldier pays. Some will go to Chechnya, to Ossetia, to the death zones . . . But if you pay in time, you’ll avoid those. What no one will be safe from is hazing . . . dozens of conscripts are killed every year, hundreds commit suicide, and thousands are abused. (Those are just the official statistics.)
There’s the “most desperate and most expensive remedy: the bribe to the military command.” Or a week every year pretending to be sick or injured. “Annually the hospitals fill up with pimply youths simulating illness.” But you have to pick the right disease or disability “because the ailments that can get you off change all the time.” Alternatively, you can stay in college until you’re too old for the draft. “Russian males take on endless master’s degree programs until their late twenties.” Not a good student? There are schools for that as well as for mistresses. “Dozens of new universities that have opened . . . to service the need to avoid the draft.” You can even spend a month in a psychiatric clinic. “But you will also have a certificate of mental illness hanging over you for the rest of your career.”
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Anyway, this brings us to the frightening question posed by Pomerantsev’s book, a question he only implicitly asks.
What do we do about a gigantic, depraved, immoral, lunatic country armed with nuclear warheads?
More at link above. It only gets worse and worse the more you read.
The revival of the Orthodox faith is gradually reversing the damage but you cannot fix what was laid waste in only a generation.
With all the problems Russia has, its nothing short of a miracle its functioning at all after emerging from the Soviet collapse.
In Russia, small town girls go to the big city and get ruined, but that’s what they’re trying to do. Really trying. They go to school for it.
Among that everything is PR used to promote cults.
These statements about Russia sound like they're talking about the US. We are a lot closer to a corrupt, crony-capitalist authoritarian state than some would like to believe.
The Russians make all perverts and all thieves and corrupt people everywhere else in the world look like pikers. There is no comparison.
The ROC reversing the damage? You’re joking. The current “patriarch” of the ROC is a “former” KGB agent who airbrushes 10 thousand dollar watches off his wrists in publicity photos. The ROC is a church filled with KGB-approved priests who sell alchohol and tobacco to a faithful already notoriously addicted to both. Furthermore, they’re killing people in the name of God and Joseph Stalin (see the reference to those bikers who, apparently, ride around with images of Mary and Joseph Stalin, that the link has)! Here is an article discussing protestants being targeted and slaughtered in East Ukraine (the Catholics are also being victimized as well, but this article doesn’t mention it):
EASTERN UKRAINE — Ukraine’s evangelical Christians are bearing the brunt of the country’s conflict, often with deadly consequences.
It’s a scene that has played in Elena Velichko’s head over and over. Pro-Russian rebels took over her hometown in early April. Her husband Vladimir told her to take the kids and leave the city.
“He took us to the train station and we said goodbye. He said, ‘I love you.’ He kissed me and kissed the children and left,” Elena said.
Several days later, her life and that of her eight children, ages 2 to 16, suddenly turned upside down.
Surreal Reality
It was June 8, Pentecost Sunday. The church was half empty. That’s because the city was under tremendous assault by both the pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army.
Once the church service ended everybody made their way to the front of the church to go home.
But then the unimaginable happened.
“The church called and said my husband, along with three other believers, had been taken by men who were waiting outside the church,” Elena said.
Alexander Gayvoronski, a church deacon, was there that Sunday morning.
“The men wore masks and had machine guns. They told the four Christian men to get into their cars,” Gayvoronsi said.
The rebels took the pastor’s sons, Ruvim and Albert Pavenko, Victor Brodarsky, and Elena’s husband, Vladimir.
Multiple sources told CBN News what then happened to the four Christian captives.
First rebels took them outside the city and tortured them. The next day the men were put in car and told to drive away.
Then, minutes later they were recaptured and shot multiple times. Elena’s husband was burned in the car.
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That same day rebels burned down the largest furniture factory that belonged to Ruvim and Albert Pavenko’s father.
It had become clear rebels were targeting the city’s evangelical community.
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Sergey Demidovich, a top evangelical leader in Slavyansk, said Christians face constant threat.
“I never thought in the 21st century, in [a] free country as Ukraine, it was possible to experience this level of persecution,” Demidovich said. “The separatists saw Protestant Christians as enemies. They viewed us as cults.”
But the persecution was just getting started.
“All the Protestant churches in the city were either taken over by rebels or forced to close. We were forbidden to meet for services and the leadership forced to leave or be under risk of arrest,” Demidovich said.
And the persecution is spreading far beyond just this city. Throughout the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as rebels gain more territory, assaults against evangelicals are growing.
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“When I was in prison, a rebel soldier told me they have an order to kill all the Christian pastors who are not part of the Russian Orthodox Church,” Anatoly, a pastor from Luhansk, said.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3234770/posts
Sorry, but Russia is a hell hole from top to bottom.
“What do we do about a gigantic, depraved, immoral, lunatic country armed with nuclear warheads? “
I read the article, but why did the writer drag us into it at the end?
Let me know the next time you see someone here selling somebody's daughter into the sex trade and then bribe a Texan judge and the police force to help him imprison one of their Mafioso rivals. When that happens, you can claim the article is talking about the United States.
Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless (the social and spiritual consequences of socialism)
“The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” Havel warns that socialist regimes create and enforce their own truth to maintain power. As time goes on, this truth diverges from factual truth and it increasingly forces those who support and depend upon the power of the regime to corrupt themselves to sustain the artificial truth.
In the end, people not only lie to each other, but they start to lie to themselves.
see:
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML
Great link! Thanks!
Russian Fight Club?
All cultures are equal, right?
And why should be assume the State church is not or will not become an arm of the KBG, in addition to preaching much the same dead gospel and errors of Rome ?
No. A kind of private army for members of the Duma.
From the article....”In Russia, “corrupt” is not an adjective. Corrupt is a noun, a proper noun, the word for the name and nature of the place.”
Sounds like Ukraine and our country too....
Maybe you'd like us to believe there is a moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, primarily since it supports your rather notorious job here on FR to get people on this forum to either support Russia wholeheartedly or else be too confused to come to our own opinion (the two classic objectives of Soviet propaganda). But when it comes down to it, indeed, not every culture is equal. Russia is an example of a state that has been thoroughly deprived of God's grace, unfortunately. It is Romans 3, the whole list down, a living testimony of what happens to the human soul when it is abandoned by God.
The issues in the world are not black and white andymore than they are in the US or Russia.... There’s a great deal of complexity, and you accomplish nothing good by insulting people who are trying to make sense of that complexity.
"Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.
As head of the church’s department of foreign church relations, Kirill gained the reputation of a relatively enlightened church leader. He met with Pope Benedict, and he has been attacked by church conservatives for “ecumenism.”
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After the fall of the Soviet Union, the church received official privileges including the right to import duty-free alcohol and tobacco. In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchate’s department of foreign church relations, which Kirill ran, earned $75 million from the sale of tobacco. But the patriarchate reported an annual budget in 1995-1996 of only $2 million. Kirill’s personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.
During this period, the church has been silent about genuine moral issues, such as Russia’s pervasive corruption and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants in Chechnya. As Kirill begins his reign as patriarch, there is little reason to expect this to change."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/putin-solzhenitsyn-kirill-russia-opinions-contributors_orthodox_church.html
This is just the tip of the iceberg revealing the true face of this "church." See my other post that has a link on the targeting of Protestant pastors in East Ukraine by Russia's "Orthodox" thugs.
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