Digenis.org

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been keeping Kremlinologists on their toes of late with the several surprises he’s pulled out of his bag. First, he dismissed his cabinet and appointed a relatively unknown technocrat, Vladimir Zubkov, as his new prime minister. Though unexpected, the procedure was in fact quite reminiscent of how Putin himself was appointed as prime minister by Yel’tsin in 1999. Lyndon has an incredibly detailed post on the Zubkov appointment over at his Scraps of Moscow site.

Not much later, when asked about successors to the Russian presidency at a retreat in Sochi, Putin first mentioned three possibilties: Zubkov, Grigory Yavlinsky (Yabloko leader), and Gennady Zyuganov (first secretary of the Russian Communist Party). Zubkov was a ‘given’ on that list, but mentioning Yavlinksky and Zyuganov seemed nothing but a joke. It was only after additional probing that Putin mentioned Sergei Ivanov or Dmitry Medvedev, the two first deputy prime ministers who have long been spoken of as serious presidential contenders. Putin’s been holding his cards closely and many are baffled as to what his real plan and strategy will turn out to be.

“Putin’s Plan - Russia’s Victory” (photo credit: MSLipsco)

Billboards praising ‘Putin’s Plan’ have been popping up all over the country since the end of August. According to an article in today’s Vedomosti newspaper, there are over 2,000 of them altogether. Interestingly enough, there seem to be two variations of the billboard: one features the United Russia logo and the other does not. Veronica has done a great job of rounding up some of the Russian LiveJournal commentary responding to the billboards in her Global Voices translation.

What’s most interesting, though perhaps not most surprising, about the billboards is that United Russia seems to be the only political party successful in installing their adverts nationwide. All other parties are being told to remove their advertising or they have been rejected by advertising agencies.
As the Vedomosti article explains, there are several explanations for this.

First, according to the Central Election Committee, until election campaign budgets are established, parties are prohibited from using outdoor advertisements to persuade the public to vote for or against a certain party or issue, nor to call on them to exercise their right to vote. United Russia spokesperson Viktor Tokarev argues, however, that the billboard does not break the law as it does not call on the citizen to vote one way or another.

Members of A Just Russia and the Russian Communist party say that they are being rejected by advertising agencies in Moscow and Rostov region. In Samara the Union of Right Forces (Союз Правых Сил) had their party’s signs removed due to ‘complaints’; no complaints were received about the United Russia billboards though, explained Valentina Kalgatina, a spokeswoman for the region’s administration. Tokarev himself claims that United Russia is asking the agency to temporarily take them down until election campaign budgets are established, but to this day the Putin’s Plan billboards are standing all around Russia.

By law, registered parties are supposed to be given the same media opportunities in preparation for the election.

The Putin’s Plan billboards were installed by News Outdoor Russia, the country’s largest outdoor advertising agency, which boasts more than 34,000 ad sites in 86 Russian cities and is run by Sergei Zheleznyak, who will more than likely be elected as a United Russia deputy in the December Duma elections. News Outdoor Russia says that they’ve had to turn away other political parties seeking ad placement due to the lack of ad space. “Autumn is the season with the highest demand and parties should have reserved advertising space in the spring, just as United Russia did,” says Natalya Semina.

The real question is, once election campaign budgets are set, will political parties other than Putin’s have an easier time gaining ad space?

From Kyle Spector at the Foreign Policy blog:

Instilling national pride is important for any country. It can be done through patriotic songs, the erection of monuments, or even fostering a great environment for foreign investment to boost the economy. But don’t tell Russia that. It has chosen a different path - fining officials for using the word “dollar” in any instance when they could have used “ruble” instead.

Earlier this month, the Duma approved (almost unanimously) a bill requiring Russian ministers to use the word rubles instead of foreign currency terms. Last Friday, Russia’s defense minister called the dollar “that thing you are not allowed to say” while discussing sales of military equipment to Venezuela. Today, the economy minister almost used the word dollar, corrected himself by announcing a statistic as “700 million rubles,” and then added “30 million not rubles” instead of 30 million dollars. The law also outlaws the use of “euro.” Some finance bureaucrats are certainly going to have their work cut out for them, given that customs duties in Russia are listed in euros, and the country’s foreign debt is counted in foreign currency.

6 ????, ????? ????????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????????????? ???????, ???????? ??????? “?????????????”. ??? ???????? ?? ??????? ???????, ???? 16 ????? ?? ??????????? ???????, ????? ???? ????? ? 16:00 ??????????? ??????????? ???? ?????? (?????????? - ?????? ??????), ????? ???????? ?? ??? ?????, ?????? ? ????, ????? ???? ??????????? ? ?????? ??????? - ?????????? ???????????????? ??????. ???? ??????? ???????? ???? ?? ???? ????. ???????????? ?????????? ???? ????? ??????! ??? ?????? ??? ?????, ??? ?????? ???!

????? ? ?????? ???????. ??????, ??? ?????… ???? ??????? ??????? ???…

President Bush sings Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Absolutely amazing editing work.

Peter Savodnik asks if Westerners can understand the Russian people’s love of strong leaders in his article at Slate:

For 15 years, at least, a cultural-cognitive gap has been growing between the people and the state. That space is a manifestation of the public’s alienation from its government. Attempts to paper over that alienation, to foist a new solidarity on an old people, are absurd. The people, especially the young people who are impervious to the old dogma, know this.

So, too, does the president, who’s not a Soviet premier so much as a tsar, dispensing with ideology and reappropriating the powers of 19th-century imperialism. Whether it’s single-handedly rerouting massive oil pipelines or reorganizing the federal bureaucracy, Putin has not so much resurrected a dead superstate as responded to Russians’ long-festering desire for a “strong hand.”

And I myself have been surprised how many Russian desire a strong autocratic leader. Perhaps Russia will always need a tsar.

About two years ago I was scolded by one of my Russian readers for posting a simple Cheburashka joke here on my site. Apparently they’d come to expect something more hard-hitting and inquisitive from Digenis.org.

In the comments to that post I admitted that I like to read Russian jokes. With each anekdot I feel I take a baby-step down the long, winding road toward understanding the culture of this country and the enigmatic Russian Soul. I still have a long way to go, let there be no doubt about it… ???? ?????? ?? ??????.

I don’t think I’ve written anything on Russian humor since then, but I stumbled across a really interesting article today at Prospect Magazine and I can’t help but pass it on. The article is titled ‘Hammer and Tickle’ and in it Ben Lewis writes about the unique brand of humor that came out of communism.

Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.

But, of course, don’t think that by ‘laugh-a-minute reality’ he means to paint Eastern Europe’s period of communism as a Robin Williams flick. Lewis also takes a few paragraphs to tell of a few stories of arrests for the crime of joke-telling:

Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.
…
The joke wasn’t very funny—the implication is that since there is no meat in the shops, Sunday roasts have been replaced by lard sandwiches. But the real story produces its own punchline.

While joke-telling gave the people a way to ridicule the elite, make light of waiting forever in lines to get to empty shelves in shops, and commiserate with their tovarishi about the failings of communism, there was much more to it than just subversion and dissidence. Lewis often quotes Stanford anthropologist Seth Benedict Graham and his PhD dissertation, A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot.

In other words, jokes could aid the system as well as undermine it. This, it seems, is what Graham’s thesis on the meaning of the anekdot was grasping for when it described a “spectrum from resistance to complicity.” A joke could be told about Stalin, or by Stalin; it could mock both the makers of the system and its victims. A joke could be an act of rebellion or a safety valve, an expression of revulsion against the system or of familiarity, even warmth towards it.

Ah, Russian humor. More than meets the eye. Read the whole article if you have the time; there’s a lot to be learned there.

So my question to any Russians who may read this is:

How have Russian political jokes changed since the collapse of communism? Has political satire, just like so many other things, come to resemble it’s Western counterpart?

Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.

I wasn’t going to enter the discussion about the accusations of Putin plagiarizing his PhD thesis seeing as the Accidental Russophile has already blogged it and some great commentary has followed over there. Plus, I like to keep any Putin-related rants on this site to a bare minimum, just for my own sake as a foreigner living in Russia…

However, even though I wrote about my observations on plagiarism in Russia back in 2004, the topic keeps coming up and I’ve decided to enter the fray. But instead of delving into my own feelings on this, I thought it would be a bit more interesting to see what the Russian blogosphere and Рунет had to say about it.

I began over at Technorati, a weblog search engine which claims to keep track of what’s happening on 33.4 million blogs. Though it doesn’t yet have too many Russian-language blogs in its database, I was able to find 82 entries with a “??????? ?????” query.

I was disappointed to find that most people were merely posting links to articles and not offering commentary, but I’ve still managed to skim through many and cull some sound-bites:

LJ user Elephleo:
Моя позиция по данному вопросу следующая: есть в тексте диссера куски чужой книги или нет - не так важно, как то - ссылается диссертант на первоисточник или нет. Если нет - однозначно плагиат, если да…все претензии к ученому совету, пропустившему фуфел горбатый (малоинтересную работу). С другой же стороны, поскольку ученый совет в данном вопросе изрекает истину в последней инстанции, всем прочим остается только принять решение высокоученой коллегии.

My position on this subject is as follows: Whether or not this dissertation contains excerpts from some other book is not as important as whether or not the author cites the original sources. If there’s no citation, it’s simply plagiarism. If there are… then all claims should be directed to the academic council which passed this piece of deranged rubbish (uninteresting paper). On the other hand, seeing as that academic council has failed to make the right decision in the past case, all other decisions should be made by a highly scholarly board.

Also a comment that follows LJ user sdanilov’s post:

Ammosov writes:
Думаю, что списывал, своими словами или нет, не знаю. Но квалифицирующие признаки плагиата - это не только неоргинальность, но и попытка выдать чужие мысли за свои. А тут налицо только неоригинальность, но не отрицание авторства. Вот будь у нас такая дефиниция, было б проще - “четыре слова в ряд не закавычены - виновен”.

I think that he copied (from Gaddy), but I don’t know if he paraphrased it or not. The defining characteristic of plagiarism is not just unoriginality, but also the attempt to pass off another’s thoughts as one’s own. Here we have unoriginality, but no denial of authorship. It would be simpler for us if we accept this definition of plagiarism: “…four consecutive words without quotation marks.”

At Nika Dubrovsky’s LJ, a commenter sees it all as a political and psychological attack on Putin:

salnikov_vova said:
Это просто очерендная акция против Путина. Психологическая война… Поручили несколькоим информагенствам и они теперь тщательно копаются во всех обстоятельствах жизни Путина, придумывая компромат. …Кто слышал, как Путин по три часа общается в эфире с населнием, отвечая на совершенно разные вопросы и разбирая очень разные проблемы, понимает, что президент совершенно адекватен.
Ждите завтра информацию, что Путин антисемит…
This is just the usual anti-Putin cause. It’s psychological warfare…They pass on this info to a few news agencies and now they’ll go digging deep into every aspect of Putin’s life, thinking up compromising material along the way. Anyone who’s heard him speak on the air for 3 hours at a time with the Russian public, answering all different kinds of questions and solving all types of problens, knows that the president is totally competent.

Just wait until tomorrow when they announce that Putin is an anti-semite…

The discussion at LJ user group ru_politics quickly devolved into ethnic insults and vulgarity.

Still, I think the best discussion on this topic has taken place on a few forums, namely Alex Exler’s Forum (8 pages and counting) and the Canada.ru boards.

I suppose what it might come down to is that there seems to be fundamental differences in how Westerners and Russians define and academic plagiarism and to what extent they feel citations are necessary.

Oh, and as this post was all about rounding up people’s views on plagiarism, comments are more welcome than ever.

Suddenly, due to the elections in Ukraine, my site is getting hundreds of hits per day from people searching for Tymoshenko images. They’re ending up at my January 31, 2005 post, where I point out the former prime minister’s resemblance to a certain Hollywood heroine:

And it seems I’m the #10 search result at Google Images for “tymoshenko”. Not sure how that happened.

For real news on the election, check out Neeka’s Backlog.