The Peak of Russian Counterintelligence Agents

Walking into the J-School to finish a project or two, I got glued to the screen: Vladimir Putin announced a new name for a previously unnamed mountain in the Caucases region: Peak of Russian Counterintelligence Agents.

Wow.

The peak is in North Ossetia, right around Georgia and its nifamous breakaway region of South Ossetia. Gazeta.Ru reports the idea has been around since last October, when the named agents celebrated the 90th birthday of the ancestor agency. As a celebratory act, a few agents went climbing in the mountains together with local alpinists, right in the area where the new Peak of THEM now lies. Local authorities requested the naming.

None of this is reported in the U.S. media, but makes a bit more sense of the act.

Putin’s conversations, cont.

Callers raised a few issues in their questions to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Here are a few hot-topic ones and the summary of Putin’s answers:

Economy

Putin said the crisis spread

Putin continues a presidential tradition as PM

He started doing this in December of 2001. Then continued in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Today he did it again.

Vladimir Putin held his seventh live television call-in show today, the first prime minister to do so in the history of Russia.

Live “conversations” with Putin, now leader of the United Russia party, has become a tradition during his presidency. Live TV time allocated to the occasion has been growing with every year and more questions have been coming in. People can submit their questions through political public consultation offices, the Internet or a free phone line. Last year, according to BBC, more than a million questions came in, of which Putin answered approximately 70.

According to the Russian Newspaper, the number of questions answered last year was 72. His 2007 call-in time lasted three hours and five minutes. This year he answered 80 questions in three hours and eight minutes. The questions came from 13 cities as well as other towns in eight regions of Russia.

Discussions of the topics to be addressed in the live show floated around the media days before the show itself. Even though most of them were the general ever-green, ever-important issues of economy, demographics and education, some specific details mentioned in a few stories seemed to show at least a few questions were known ahead of time. Yet, Putin’s elloquancy and knowledge of detailed data about various areas of Russia’s development have also long become a characteristic recognized by many political scientists and observers.

I will discuss specific problems mentioned during the live call-in show in my next blog.

Money Watch

My father owns a medium-sized business in Samara, Russia, (some sort of an industrial technological company… I’ve been so detached from his development that I am no more up-to-date on his business ventures) and whenever I ask him about the current economic crisis, he gets confused and confuses everybody.

At first he says the crisis is drastic. Two weeks ago he canceled my parents’ long-planned trip to Cuba, because he “only had theoretical money.” Basically, he’d started a few projects and had to halt them, because no down payments were coming in. Last week he scrambled and did find money for the vacation, saying the crisis is really blown out of proportion by the media – just like it was some time earlier in the U.S. Yesterday, however, I sensed fright and despair in his voice again.

After my first conversation with dad, I called my friend Mike in Moscow. He’s an American citizen, working for a U.S. company in Russia’s capital. I asked him how bad the crisis in Russia really was. Mike said

Estranged “Strangers”

A Russian movie got a “not recommended for showing” label in the American market.

A new movie by a Russian director Yuri Grymov, “Strangers,” will not be on the screens in the USA because of its “anti-American appeal,” online newspaper Dni.Ru reports. The movie’s Web site says Grymov wanted to shoot a movie about “the collision of cultures.”

Set in a Middle-Eastern internal conflict zone, “Strangers” is a story about a U.S. charity group of doctors who come to the area to vaccinate children. Dni.Ru reports, in the film, the doctors fail to establish a good relationship with the locals yet continue to believe they are “bringing a third-world country to their own, progressive, level.” In the end, they are revealed as testing new vaccines on the local population.

Quoting the official synopsis:

“Viewers will see how American nation tries to instill its morals in another world but at the same time it doesn’t understand one simple thing – there is no such thing as one’s “own” morals”

“Strangers” cast is a combination of Russian and American actors. The plot includes several Russian soldiers, working to neutralize mines in the surrounding territory. In one of the scenes, according to Dni.Ru, a POW Russian military doctor saves one of the Americans and ends up killed by the local rebels.

Responding to the ban in the U.S., Yuri Grymov told Dni.Ru:

“…the USA has recently been taking any form of criticism very painfully. And I have expressed my position about the U.S. politics of supremacy very clearly in the movie.”

The movie should be a limited release in the U.S. in the beginning of 2009.

Putin Avenue

Chechnya is puttin’ Putin back on its streets.

A person who was Prime Minister of Russia when its troops crushed a separatist rebellion in the republic (a region of Russia technically) in 1999, is now on the Chechen map permanently.

Almost a mile-long central street of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, now holds the name of Putin Avenue, or Проспект Путина (pros-PEKT Putina) in Russian.

The street used to be the Victory Street, a very common Soviet-era name in memory of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) victory. Now, according to Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov (rahm-ZAHN kah-DI-rof), it commemorates the “person, who’s done so much for the country and all of us.”

The street’s re-opening after reconstruction began a month-long celebration of 420 years since the “establishment of a good-neighborly relationship between the people of Russia and Chechnya,” RIA Novosti reports.

The New York Times article on the event (interestingly enough) omits this fact, but briefly outlines the latest events in the “good-neighborly relationship.”

One thing I’m sure you’ve all been wondering about

Being a journalism student with a whole lot of curious journalism students around me, I often hear questions about the freedom of speech in Russia. Just a few minutes ago I submitted an essay to a study/internship program about the issue. And I thought this blog would be a nice new home for the piece.

2×2 Saga. Curtain call.

The Federal Commission unanimously voted to prolong the channel’s license.
2×2 is keeping its frequency and, according to their Web site, their policy.
“We only show what we watch ourselves,” that is.

Around 35,000 people submitted their signatures in the past week to support the cartoon channel.
The channel’s Web site was down a lot, with hundreds of visitors hitting links from on-line news stories and blogs, trying to jump onto 2×2’s page.

Federal Contest Commission on Frequencies bows.
Youth channel advocates gloomily wander off stage to search for another funding source.
Heads of Protestant Churches of Russia think of a different way to attract attention to their organization
Prosecutors and investigators close the case and go home…quite possibly to watch “The Simpsons”
2×2 celebrates, tosses hats up in the air, high-fives its supporters…
…and probably disappears from the public eye again into its television cartoon world.

2×2 Saga, cont.

What I read today on Gazeta.ru made me realize the future of the cartoon channel 2×2 really might already be pre-determined, but not by the Christian groups.

While the Federal Commission on Frequencies decides today what to do with 2×2 (“Hmmm..do we take away their licence or not yet?..”), several “youth channel” projects are already on their tables. Pavel Tarakanov of the Federal Committee on Youth Issues decided not to wait until the Commission’s decision and mentioned that the channel’s frequences might be given to a youth television channel instead. He said that in a radio show this weekend. Several crews from Samara and Ulyanovsk jumped at the idea and contacted him immediately. No wonder: Any independent (especially regional) youth project is highly underfinanced in Russia. These guys couldn’t even dream of an opportunity to broadcast to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

With everyone in the government and regions and cultural circles excited about a potential youth-oriented educational channel, I wonder whether this is the real reason why the prosecution was so quick to come out with warnings to the contraversial cartoon network.

The 2×2 Saga: Updated

Around 300 people in Saint-Petersburg and another 200 in Moscow took their support of the Channel 2×2 to the streets Sept. 21 (barely yesterday), information agency Interfax reports.

The St.Pete’s crowd gathered in one of the gardens, carrying posters and banners depicting South Park, the Simpsons and other cartoon caracters. They set up four televisions around the central flower bed and started playing those cartoons. Later, four guys in black (supposed to represent federal agents) showed up and covered the screens with signs “Signal Coded.” A dozen of police quietly observed the unfolding protest.

Protesters also call to make April 2 the day of adult cartoons.

Channel’s administration says they had nothing to do with the action.

2×2 has appealed both the warning General Prosecutor issued to the channel and the current lawsuit against South Park’s episode it ran.