Ukraine: Swine Flu (and Some Election Politics)

Global Voices Online
Saturday, October 31, 2009

The past three weeks in Ukraine have been very intense.

First, a child sex abuse scandal broke out on Oct. 13, involving, among others, three members of PM Yulia Tymoshenko's parliament faction (to learn more, read this article at Abdymok and this Kyiv Post editorial).

A week later, on Oct. 19, the presidential campaign officially kicked off, with the election scheduled to take place on Jan. 17, 2010. On Oct. 24, thousands of people from all over Ukraine were brought to Kyiv's Independence Square to cheer for PM Tymoshenko at a huge rally celebrating the official launch of her campaign (for photos, video and thoughts on the event, see this post at Ukrainiana).

On Oct. 26, Ukraine's interior minister Yuri Lutsenko announced that "a network of the extreme Islamic movement al-Takfir wal-Hijra, which is banned by many countries in the world, is spreading in the Crimean territory of Ukraine," and its members were planning to kill Mustafa Jemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars.

Finally, on Oct. 30, after a few days of alarming reports on an outbreak of respiratory illness in western Ukraine, the first swine flu-related death was confirmed, and PM Tymoshenko ordered Ukraine's schools closed and public gatherings - including election campaign rallies - banned for at least three weeks; restrictions on non-urgent travel inside Ukraine may also be imposed. According to WSJ.com, Ukraine's president Victor Yushchenko canceled his upcoming campaign rally "where he had been due to announce his election agenda, telling journalists that 11 people had died of H1N1, contradicting a Health Ministry report of only one fatality. An aide and a ministry official said Mr. Yushchenko may have made a mistake."

Below is what Anglophone bloggers are writing about this latest development - the flu outbreak.

Ukrainiana:

At least 61 people are in critical condition. H1N1 has been officially confirmed in seven cases. Schools and kindergartens in nine oblasts have been closed: Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Zakarpattya, Chernivtsi, Rivne, Volyn, Khmelnytsk and Vinnytsya.

“Ukraine has entered a flu epidemic, of the so-called California (swine) type. As of October 29, we have 951 people hospitalized. Unfortunately, we have to note 30 fatalities,” Minister of Healthсare Vasyl Knyazevych said at a briefing Friday.

More recent reports bring the death toll to 37. [...]

MoldovAnn:

The H1N1 virus has finally arrived in Ukraine, and along with it a big ole dose of overreaction and panic. Reports vary on the number of infected and number of deaths attributable to swine flu, but there seems to be clear consensus that those who have died waited too long to seek medical attention. Then again, knowing the medical care available in regional towns and villages, it’s hard to imagine how going to the clinic or hospital would have really helped many of them - sad to say.

Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, in an attempt to scare the living bejeezes out of people, oops, I mean protect the population, has extended the autumn school break for another 3 weeks and advised people to avoid public gatherings. Once the announcement hit the wires this afternoon, parents started panicking - the flu immediately forgotten as they tried to figure out what the hell to do about childcare for another 3 weeks. Ex-pats were openly hoping the “quarantine” wouldn’t affect the international schools.

I saw three people wearing masks today, and another half-dozen covering their noses and mouths with scarves. Igor went to several pharmacies to buy echinacea and flu medicine, but no luck. Every place around us was sold out of both. So he bought a dozen lemons and insisted I drink the “family recipe” for good health - a potent concoction of vodka, lemon juice and honey. [...]

Foreign Notes:

LEvko is astonished at the panic in Ukraine and the way over-the-top reaction from the government and politicians over the swine flu epidemic which has hit the country. There is even talk of the president establishing a state of emergency and possibly postponing the presidential elections.

[...]

Ukrainian politicians would do better to take a good look at Ukraine's appalling life expectancy figures. Major causes of premature deaths in the country are the smoking of cigarettes and excessive alcohol consumption. A ban on advertising these products and restricting their availability would help save countless lives, but it won't happen because there's too much money being to made from their sale. Much easier to show "decisive leadership" and determined action over the flu epidemic, and scare the the population out of its wits - no doubt increasing the sales of cure-all vodka even more...

p.s. I 'phoned the official goverment swine flu information hot-line today...all I heard was crackling..

Windows to Russia!:

[...] Think maybe this has to do more with control of people at election time than the flu? [...]

Twitter user Victor Kotusenko/roxolanus:

ok, now we are getting this h1n1, it's coming. oxoline ointment in my nose every day, washing my hands often, what else? I guess sleep more)

***

mild panic in Kyiv today as h1n1 cases officially confirmed

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I would call it concern rather than panic in Ukraine, although people are scared by media. but medical services seem to react. we'll c [...]

Russia: Soviet Legacy and Street Names

Global Voices Online
Friday, October 23, 2009

It is, of course, an exaggeration, but back in September and early October, it seemed as if every single Russian blogger took the time to write something about the re-naming of Anti-Soviet Shish Kebab Restaurant in Moscow, dissident journalist Aleksandr Podrabinek's protest article (RUS, Kerkko Paananen's English translation is posted at A Step At A Time) and Nashi youth movement's counter-protest activities.

In the English-language blogosphere, Sean Guillory of Sean's Russia Blog took the time to summarize the ordeal:

[...] Long story short: After a summer of renovations, the owner of kebab restaurant on Leningradskii prospekt decided to call his place “Anti-Soviet” to poke fun at the Soviet Hotel across the street. The name went well the the restaurant’s dissident theme of photos of “anti-Soviet” figures of the past. [...] Vets, however, didn’t see the humor and complained to the local district administration, demanding the restaurant be renamed. The “anti-” in Anti-Soviet Kebab House, they said, hurt their feelings and denigrated their sacrifice in saving Russia from Nazism. Within days, the district’s “crusading environmental inspector,” Oleg Mitvol, paid the Anti-Soviet Kebab House a visit ordering the “anti-” be removed. The owners begrudgingly complied. [...]

[...]

Enter Alexander Podrabinek, the famous Soviet dissident and now Putin foe. Having had enough of the “restoration of the Soviet past,” Podrabinek pounded out a diatribe “Letter to Soviet Veterans,” where he called the name change as “great pity” and lambasted the complaining veterans as “idiotic, base, and stupid.” He then went on to charge the vets as “the ones who served as whipmasters in labour camps and prisons, political commissars of anti-retreat units, and executioners at firing grounds.” According to Podrabinek, he and others who defied the Soviet regime are the country’s real heroes. The letter was published on Podrabinek’s blog and on the website of the liberal rag Ezhednevnyi zhurnal.

[...]

Enter Nashi. Nashi has been aimless since the election of Dmitry Medvedev. With “colored revolution” vanquished, a number of its chapters liquidated, and little need for mass street protests, the kids in Nashi don’t know what to do with themselves. [...]

[...] Soon after Podrabinek’s diatribe hit runet, Nashi began mobilizing its apparatus of outrage. Members began pickets outside of Podrabinek’s apartment, released his phone number and address on the internet, and vowed to run him out of the country. According to Nashi’s GenSek, Nikita Borovikov, all these actions are “of the most democratic in nature.”

Fearing for his life, Podrabinek went into hiding. Not because of Nashi, whose actions he considers a “propaganda stunt” and an “imitation of public outrage” (which it is), but because of “information from reliable sources” that “serious people” want him taken care of. That is “taking care of” in the bullet-in-head sense of the phrase.

More outrage ensued. Ezhednevnyi zhurnal began an online petition in support of Podrabinek, which now sports over 3000 signatures, a virtual who’s who of the Russian liberal intelligentsia. Not to be outdone, Nashi claims to have over 5000 signatures against Podrabinek. [...]

On Oct. 8, LJ user mrfilin wrote a post (RUS) on how the questionable Soviet legacy kept on surviving in street names in his native city of Tula, alluding to the shish kebab restaurant scandal that has caused such an avalanche of online and offline response:

Why isn't there a central street named after Adolf Hitler in Berlin, or a square named after [SS], an avenue named after [Paulus], or, at least, a dead-end street named after [Goebbels]? Perhaps, because it's not appropriate for a bürger to walk down a street named after murderers of the people, ruthless bandits, who only valued power and whose favorite pastime was bloodthirsty fighting for it. An anti-fascist shish kebab restaurant wouldn't be subjected to persecutions by municipal authorities.

In Russia, on the other hand, since ancient times, people have had tender feelings towards tyrants and sadists. An individual sense of identity of a poor wife tortured by her despotic drunkard of a husband has transformed into a mass consciousness: if he beats me, it means he loves me. And when this alcoholic chokes on his own filth and dies, his widow will carefully preserve all kinds of memory of him, posting his photographs all over the apartment. The ones on which he is portrayed wearing his only suit and being his normal self for once.

In the same manner, in every remote place there'll always be a Lenin street, a Red Army avenue or a [Dzerzhinsky] street. And in bigger towns, there'd be a couple of these. But if in Moscow you may get lucky and settle on a street named after a decent person, in the provinces street names carry nothing but the communist heritage. Here, for example, are streets I'm familiar with in Tula:

1. [...] My grandmother lives on a street named after the unknown to me Zhabrov Brothers. I've failed in my attempt to find out who they were, but the street perpendicular to theirs is named after an unprincipled loser-terrorist [Khalturin], who [caused deaths] of 11 heroes of the Russo-Turkish campaign.

2. Grandmother #2, together with grandfather, live on an avenue named after the army that has killed more decent Russian people than any other army in the world, except for the [Nazi German army].

3. Not far from here is a hospital named after informer [Semashko] and General [Frunze], who caused deaths of tens of thousands Red Army soldiers during the fight against the remains of the [White Army]. Frunze used his people as cannon fodder, and was ruthless towards the Whites, too, of course. The general's army liked to rape Russian women, while the general himself preferred to attend theater premieres in Moscow. Only, for some reason, not the pro-Soviet nonsense, but the half-legal [Meyerhold].

4. My parents are somewhat luckier - they live on [Perekop] street - [Crimea]'s edge where the same Frunze and [Denikin] fought one another.

5. Et cetera.

And who is the street you live on named after?

Below are some of the comments to this post:

gogol1:

My street is named after painter [Vasnetsov].

mrfilin:

lucky you

***

tanis_konig:

[Gorky] street probably exists in every city except for the Default City [Moscow]. And the name of our city - '[Kaliningrad]' - is a bit too much [named after Mikhail Kalinin]. Though the German '[Königsberg]' isn't nice, either.

***

cakcon:

Syromolotov street - named after a local Bolshevik :(( [in Yekaterinburg]

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amidala_rainy:

I've been lucky in this sense - I've nothing against Turgenev, after whom my street is named :)

But there's a neighborhood in our city [Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine] where the following streets cross with one another: Communist, Bolshevik, Proletarian, Lenin, [Sovnarkom] lane, [Rosa Luxemburg], Karl Marx, [Kirov] and [Karl Liebknecht]. All this within one square kilometer (

***

ka_lan:

I've been sort of lucky. In [Krasnoyarsk], it was [Tchaikovsky] street, here [in Moscow] (temporarily) - [Lomonosov] avenue.

Of the relatives who live on streets named after Soviet activists, I only recall grandmother and grandfather - Vodopyanov street in Krasnoyarsk. But I don't think I have anything bad to say about him.

In general, my native city has somehow been lucky with this - the whole sovok is limited to the standard package of "Lenin-Peace-Marx" (three main streets in the center). Bad toponyms don't stick here, and that's it.

***

steelberry:

Coppistrasse. Hans and Hilde Coppi were some fighters against the Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda, who were murdered by the fascists. A friend lives on Karl-Marx-Allee )))

mrfilin:

Berlin?

steelberry:

jawohl!

***

josefreicher:

I live on Lake street, in Ochakov. This used to be the village of Ochakov in Moscow region, with many lakes and swamps, on which they were building houses for those exiled from Moscow after serving sentences for murder and rape. Now this is a residential district of the capital with some really tough - iron - gene pool =)

Russia: Election Fraud and Blogging

Global Voices Online
Monday, October 19, 2009

Reports of vote-rigging in the local elections, which took place in 75 of Russia’s 83 regions on Oct. 11, spurred protests by citizens and politicians in the Russian capital - and quite an outrage among some of the country's bloggers.

In Moscow, the United Russia party, led by PM Vladimir Putin, took 32 of 35 seats in the city legislature; the only other party to make it to the Moscow Duma is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. There are documents and reports that have been circling the Russian blogosphere this past week, however, which suggest that the results of the election could have been different.

One day after the election, LJ user yakovlev_igor - Igor Yakovlev, press secretary of the Yabloko party, which did not pass the 7 percent threshold of votes necessary to win a seat - performed a simple math exercise on his blog, comparing the numbers (RUS) entered on one polling station's vote returns protocol (RUS) and on the summary table (RUS) posted on the Moscow City Election Commission's website later. Here's what he found (translation of the post and of the tables' content - from the English-language section of Yabloko's site):

[...] Electoral district No 1702, Danilovsky district, Moscow.

All who has seen election campaigns of the recent years mark an unbelievable scope of fraud at yesterday’s election (Moscow City Duma election on October 11, 2009).

Here comes only one example of election fraud:

Protocol of the local electoral commission published at the web-site of the Moscow Electoral Commission


[...] 14 3. Moscow regional branch of the UNITED RUSSIA party 742 [...]

Protocol of the local electoral commission given by the commission to YABLOKO’s observer

[...] 14 3. Moscow regional branch of the UNITED RUSSIA party 192 [...]

United Russia simply “got” 550 additional votes from nowhere. 550 is a beautiful figure. [...]

On Oct. 16, things turned even more "beautiful": the protocol and the summary table from another polling station in Moscow showed that Yabloko did not receive a single vote there - even though Yabloko's leader Sergei Mitrokhin and his family cast their votes at that very location, polling station #192. LJ user yakovlev_igor reported on this development (RUS), too, posting both the voting data and photos of Mitrokhin inside and outside the polling station. Two days later, the Moscow City Election Commission ordered an investigation into this episode, and LJ user yakovlev_igor wrote (RUS):

[...] Not all the mass media wrote about it, but on blogs this has been one of the most discussed topics of the past three days.

Long live the bloggers!

LJ user avmalgin wrote (RUS) about the impact of bloggers, too:

In the Soviet times, there used to be the so-called [Samizdat]. Bulletins on human rights violations were being issued - a certain number of copies printed on a typewriter and distributed mainly among foreign correspondents. Of course, the bulletins were quoted on Radio Liberty, which increased the number of consumers of this info to the maximum. But let us not forget that Radio Liberty was being jammed. And the authors of the bulletins were severely persecuted. [Natalya Gorbanevskaya] - [LJ user] ng68, the first editor of the [Chronicle of Current Events] - would be better at telling this story. [Sergei Kovalyov], who had edited exactly seven issues of the bulletin, was imprisoned for exactly seven years - a year for each issue; [Ilya Gabay] was sentenced to three years; [Gabriel Superfin] [was imprisoned] for five years; [Aleksandr Lavut] - for three years. Et cetera. [LJ user] ng68 herself was dragged away from her typewriter, dressed in a straitjacket and taken to a mental asylum, after which [Joan Baez] wrote a song about her, [Natalia].

What was the Chronicle's circulation? Thirty copies. Well, maybe 50.

Right now in the LiveJournal our, so to say, Chronicle of Current Events has a circulation that the [anti-Soviet dissidents] of the 1970s couldn't dream about. I don't know the general statistics, but my posts are sometimes read by 10,000 people a day. The post about cheating in favor of the United Russia has been read by 45,000 people. Not bad. And this is not the only "chronicle" out there - not one, not two, but thousands. Of course, they are dreaming of plugging this fountain. Not my blog, of course, but LJ in general. I'm sure that they are thinking about it.

And here is what the same blogger wrote (RUS) about the results of the election:

[...] But United Russia doesn't want any competition, it is not used to discussions ("Duma isn't a place for discussions"), it does not understand what a multi-party system is about. United Russia wants to be the only party out there, it want to be the new [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. By now, even a fool understands that the strategic goal of the current regime has been the restoration of the Soviet regime. And so it is nothing but surprising that Russian parliamentary delegations are welcomed abroad, that the impostors are getting invited to international forums, etc. [...]