I’m pretty shy; and it’s rare I feel compelled to get up in front of a room of people to ask a question. But yesterday I attended a panel on Russia at the CWA and found myself desperate to challenge one of the panelists. Unfortunately, too many other people were similarly inspired, and I never got the chance. Jennifer Trelewicz didn’t come across as a thoughtful scholar or an objective expert, but more of a Russian nationalist, an emissary straight from the Kremlin hoping to convince us that Russia - contrary to everything we read in the American and Western European media – is really an orderly, free and wholly democratic country.
Trelewicz and her co-panelist, Olessia Smotrova-Taylor, spent their presentations trying to convince a skeptical audience that the Russian system of checks and balances tops that of the U.S. and that there are better laws, more stringent regulation, and that the enormous gap between the rich and the poor in Russia is filling up with a prosperous and contented middle class.
“We feel it is a very free country, a very free place to live,” Trelewicz said.
Her comment rung in my ears, for it seemed to contradict most all the news coming out of Russia recently. It’s none too free for homosexual people who wanted to hold a pride parade in Moscow but were scorned and laughed at by the city’s mayor. It’s also not free for journalists – every one of them who dared to speak the truth about Russia’s involvement in Chechnya has been murdered, most recently Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in the atrium of her Moscow apartment building last fall. President Vladimir Putin has cracked down on dissent in the broadcast media, causing alarm among defenders of the free press. In order to maintain an aura of democracy, Putin has largely left the print media alone, preferring to focus TV, which is probably more effective in reaching the masses.
Russia probably doesn’t seem like a very free place to people of color either. That country has a real problem with skinheads and anti-Semites who regularly attack immigrants and dark-skinned Russians, whose motto is “Russia for the Russians.” One particularly horrific example occurred in 2003 when over 40 foreign students died in a dormitory fire at a university in Moscow. Although no investigation was ever launched, arson is suspected as the cause of the fire. Before the fatal blaze, black and Asian students had been the subjects of violent racist attacks, perpetrated by skinheads – two of whom were chased out of the dormitory the night before it burned to the ground. And the stringent safety regulations the panelists boasted didn’t seem to help the 63 people who burned to death in their sleep last month when their retirement home in southern Russia caught fire. The 45 women who died in a fire at a hospital in Moscow last December also saw little benefit from the Russian regulations boasted about by Trelewicz.
So, I guess my question is, for whom is Russia free? When I was there for a few weeks on 2005, I found it to be a beautiful and complex nation, but one riddled with corruption (we were shaken down three times by the police), and serious social problems including rampant alcoholism, widespread poverty and a low standard of living for many people. It seemed to me the two panelists I mentioned gave the audience the broad strokes in bright colors, but their comments didn’t reflect the complexity of the Russia I experienced or the social turmoil in that country we read about in the news.
