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.

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

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.

The Golden Youth

The title of this blog post is a cliche overused in Russian socio-political, youth-related or pop-culture-observational analyses. Leaking into common language, the notion of “golden youth” has long shifted from a set phrase or a group definition to an easily recognized social phenomenon with two definitions:

“Золотая молодёжь” /zolo-TAH-ya mah-lah-DYO-zh/ = “Golden Youth”
1. Outstandingly bright, goal- and career-oriented representatives of a promising young generation;
2. Children of successful, rich and prominent parents, who usually subsist on their wealth and connections.

Not to say the two cannot overlap, but in general the groups exist separately from each other.