Will Russia honour its former criminal leaders?

Who cares that Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin have committed crimes against humanity?

Vladimir Putin, their successor in the Kremlin, certainly doesn’t.

Talking to a Soviet war veteran during D-Day commemorations in Normandy, Putin said it would be a good idea to have a referendum to decide whether to rename Volgograd to its original historic name of Stalingrad. That it used to be Tsaritsyn before it would become Stalingrad never seemed to have crossed his mind.

The communists in St. Petersburg (or Petrograd in Russian) happily jumped on board. Vladimir Dmitriyev, their leader at St. Petersburg city hall, said it would be a splendid idea to rename his city, too. It would become Leningrad once again. Russia’s communit leader Gennadii Zyuganov agreed wholeheartedly.

The movement to name those cities after two of the three greatest war criminals (Adolf Hitler was the third one) of the 20^th century has begun gaining strength. The forthcoming celebrations of the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War II, coming next year, have given the plan yet another impetus.

“Two hero-cities, Leningrad and Stalingrad, aren’t on the maps of the world,” said Dmitriyev, the communist fraction chief in the St. Petersburg city hall. “It is necessary to renew the historical justice.”

Putin’s office would try to soften the impact Putin’s words had. His spokesman, Dmitriy Peskov, said Putin never said it was his wish to have those two cities renamed. This contradicted his chief’s outspoken statement to the effect that it would be worth the country’s while to put the question to the citizenry in a referendum. The backpedalling was understandable. Several influential parliamentarins in the Russian Duma expressed outrage over the idea. Except: some of the local politicians have already announced they were planning to use the “historic” names on some occasions, especially those that are linked to the war in one way or another.

It was Peter the Great, Russia’s Tsar at the time, who founded St. Petersburg in 1703. The name was translated into its Russian version (Petrograd) in 1914, and in 1924, following communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s passing, it became Leningrad. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the authorities of the day brought the original name back.

It would take several years for Stalingrad to become Volgograd. Then-Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, revealed that Stalin was a mass murderer in a then-secret speech at the communist party congress in 1956. Stalingrad, the place that saw one of the major battles waged during the World War II, became Volgograd only in 1961.

Why is this an important issue?

Vladimir Lenin brought the criminal ideology of Marxism to Russia and led the overthrow of a democratically elected government in October of 1917.

Some people believe to this day that he was a relatively benign ruler, that it was Stalin who turned the Soviet Union into one great death camp.

Not so.

It was Lenin who instituted state-sponsored terror in his country. In fact, Lenin said publicly he would do it. And he did. The so-called Extraordinary Commission to Fight the Counter-revolution was his invention. It was the infamous Cheka, that would develop into GPU (Glavnoie politicheskoie upravlenie – Main political administration), then NKVD (Narodnyi kommissariat vnutrennikh del – National commissariat of internal affairs), through the ministry of state security (MGB) all the way to the still-feared KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti – Committee for state security).

It was Lenin who personally ordered that his new government start building concentration camps all over the country. Under Lenin’s specific orders, they were supposed to deal with those who had the gall to look askance at the new rule and rulers. In fact, Lenin coined the name, too.

It was Lenin who personally ordered the massacre of the last Tsar’s entire family in what used to be Ekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk under the Soviet rule, and Ekaterinburg now again.

Stalin, Lenin’s successor, would oversee the deaths of more than 20 million people, most of them perfectly innocent of any crime.

Stalin was the guy who ordered that, in order to subdue Ukraine, the country be exposed to a famine that would kill millions.

The list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by these two would take volumes of historical data to describe. Suffice it to say that calling them criminals is the nicest thing one can say about them.

And yet, here come efforts to rehabilitate them, to make them look like great leaders whose lives’ deeds have put the world on the path to progress.

Progress, indeed.

The strangest thing about it all is that not many people elsewhere in the world would murmur a single word in protest. That is, if they even ever registered the strange goings on in Russia.

Just imagine the uproar if someone suggested that Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town that had the misfortune of being Hitler’s birthplace, be renamed into, say, Hitlerstadt.

Dilemma of Olympian proportions: run it as planned or scrap it altogether?

Russian police know the names of the two suicide bombers who exploded themselves and a number of innocent bystanders in Volgograd last December. They have also arrested two people who, they say, were accomplices.

Nothing is going to happen to Asker Samedov and Suleiman Magomedov any longer. These two have been having their fun with heaven-based virgins since last December.

The killers have allegedly come to Russia proper from the Caucasian republic of Dagestan.

But, here’s a twist. Dagestan just happens to be a member of the Russian Federation. Russian president Vladimir Putin can claim the law of retribution meted out to any and all perpetrators’ families is valid in Dagestan, too. Who cares that Dagestan is a republic, with its own government and its own parliament?

If the Russians send a group of highly-trained cutthroats in and we find out somewhat later that both families have been wiped out, and so has been everything they had ever owned, one can anticipate some kind of an international outcry.

Raise your hand if you think the Russians will care. After all, when Western governments were looking askance at atrocities committed by the Russians in Chechnya, they received a brief message from the Kremlin: we’re defending not only ourselves, but you, too, from the green danger. That danger, thus described, stands for Islam.

And that was the end of the rhetoric. From both sides. Embarrassed silence from the West, “I-told-you-so” silence from Moscow.

Brothers Magomednabi and Tagir Batirov, arrested (and described) by Russian security forces as accomplices, helped the now-late attackers of Volgograd with their travel plans. Thus reports from Russia. How they have done it, the reports do not say. But you can bet your last coin that Russian security interrogators will make these two sing. They will name people who have never heard of Volgograd or the militant Islamist group known as Shariat Jamaat. They will tell all within the first few days of captivity. Methods used against the Al-Quaeda or the Taliban in, say, Guantanamo, are kindergarten sports when compared to what Russian interrogators are capable of using (and perfectly willing to use).

Should anybody think people killing innocent civilian bystanders deserve humane treatment and mention an iota of concern, derision all the way from the Red Square will be the answer they’ll get.

But this is not the real topic.

Debate off the rails

The real topic is that, instead of debating potential winners and losers in individual sporting events, everybody and their dog has been debating terrorist dangers that hang over the Sochi games like the sword of Damocles.

The Russians have introduced security measures that, to some, border on the insane. Whether they succeed and the Olympic Games end without a hitch, well, let’s hope they do. Except: to arrive at the Adler International Airport and find you’ve landed in a region under siege, well, that does not enhance anybody’s celebratory mood.

Even that well-known optimist, Jaromír Jágr, has succumbed to fatalism. The Czech hockey star told Russian newspaper Sovetskii Sport in an interview that nobody has much control over their destiny. “We die when the time comes for us to die,” the paper quoted Jágr as saying.

“If they want to do something,” Jágr went on, speaking about the Islamist insurgents, “they will. There’s going to be many people in Sochi, journalists in particular, and they would write about the attack. Except, things like that can happen anywhere, at any Olympic Games, at any championships. Doesn’t matter if it’s Russia, the United States, or any other country,” he concluded.

Jágr didn’t mention the early September of 1972 and the Munich Olympic Games tragedy. Arab militants managed to get into Israeli athletes’ quarters in the Olympic village. What followed was mayhem and a number of deaths on both sides.

The Olympic village was supposed to be the best-guarded spot in the entire Olympic complex in Munich.

Still, Jágr is optimistic: “I think the entire Russia and Putin himself are so proud of their country, they’ll do whatever it takes to make the games secure. They’ve been waiting for these games since 1980, that’s long enough. I believe they’ll do their best.”

Nice of Jágr to remember the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Following Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter first said then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev must have misled him. Carter, you see, asked Brezhnev during a meeting in Vienna whether the Soviets would invade Afghanistan. Brezhnev put his most honest face on and said: What? We? Invade an independent country? Never!

This unmitigated skulduggery would upset Carter no end. In a voice dripping with solemnity, he would order a U.S. boycott of the Moscow games and impose an embargo on U.S. wheat exports to the Soviet Union. Most western countries would toe the line so far as the Olympic boycott was concerned. So far as the wheat exports went, not only would it not have an immediate impact on Soviet economy (the embargo held for future trades), but other countries, Canada chief among them, would pick up the slack. For the record, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada’s prime minister at the time.

And the Soviets retaliated in kind: they (and their allies) would boycott the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

That’s as close as politics would publicly get to the Olympic Games. That the entire business case a.k.a. Olympic Games is as political as anything can get is another issue for another day.

But now, we have politics out in the open. And politics of violence, at that.

When muses speak, weapons fall silent?

Or is it the other way ’round? The original words by Cicero himself say so: Silent enim leges inter arma. Meaning laws are suspended in the clatter of weapons.

Those who love the idea of Olympism are wont to quote the perfectly and innocently naive idea that there should be peace in the valley while the games are on.

Fine. Just imagine: the Sochi zone has been cordoned off from the rest of Russia by now. The demarcation line extends 100 kilometres from the Black Sea coast and a further 40 kilometres into Russian mainland. No vehicles other than those with special permits (local residents require permits, too) are allowed in. Numerous checkpoints throughout the city and its environs will be making sure that only authorized passengers (that is: passengers with another set of proper permits) are sitting in cars they will be letting through. The border with the neighbouring Georgian region of Abkhasia has been closed. Of course, it depends on whom you’re listening to. The Russians claim they’ve sealed Abkhasia off completely. The Abkhasians only smirk and shrug, hinting nobody can seal them off behind an invisible line in the Caucasian mountains.

But who’s the foe, anyway?

One of the main issues: the Russians do not know whom to lash at first. Most of the people in the entire region hate them profoundly. The Russians are now harvesting what they’d been sowing for a few centuries. Locals are now pushing back. And it doesn’t matter at all whether the area around the main hockey arena in Sochi used to be a burial ground for the proudly dead Muslim soldiers or not. It doesn’t matter, even, whether those of today’s insurgents’ leaders who claim it for a fact, believe in it themselves. It just happens to be one more neuralgic point.

What should the Russians do? Yield to the Islamist insurgents? Or should the Islamist insurgents accept that they’d lost their war a couple of centuries ago, nothing doing?

Neither scenario is viable. You just can’t re-write history. If you tried to, it would logically take you to the question of who’d been in Canada BEFORE the arrival of the First Nations on the scene, a question not many have dared ask, and even fewer attempted to answer.

The easiest and fairest solution would have been for the international community to admit that Olympic Games as a celebration of sports is a sham, and has been a sham all along. Except, it has become a business that helps line way too many pockets of the mighty.

And, besides, in the situation of Sochi, scrapping the Olympic Games would have meant surrender, nay, capitulation.

We can only cross our fingers now for the security of the Olympic Games and ignore the challenge for Team Canada to repeat as gold medal winners.

In fact, this is the only thing we can do.

As it is, it’s 1 for the Islamist insurgents of all stripes and colours, and 0 for the rest of the world.

Dagestani insurgents claim responsibility for Volgograd attacks, vow to disrupt Olympics

One day before the Olympic torch was to arrive at Volgograd Monday, two Russian-speaking men, machine guns at hand, appeared in a video on the Internet, claiming responsibility for recent suicide attacks in Volgograd and promising that there were more assaults to come in Sochi during the Olympic games.

Last December’s terrorist atacks at Volgograd cost at least 34 innocent lives.

Now, it is the Vilayat Dagestan group that says its members carried out the attacks.

Vilayat Dagestan has been trying to establish a Muslim state in the northern part of the Caucasus mountains.

The two men in the video present so much detail from the two attacks, it leaves Russian investigators with two options. Either somebody leaked the details, an option they consider implausible, or the Dagestani movement has been indeed involved right from the start and its two spokesmen know exactly whereof they speak.

In any case, what the two men had to say contradicts what the Russian police probe has considered the most probable course of events.

Shortly after the train station attack, police were convinced a so-called “Black Widow” named Oksana Aslanov was the culprit. The 26-year-old had been married twice, in both cases to Caucasian separatists, and both of her husbands died in battles with Russian security forces. Russian police found Aslanov’s body parts close to the spot where the bomb had gone off. They hypothesized Aslanov was stopped by security at the train station entrance and seeing she wouldn’t be able to get through, she exploded the bomb she was trying to carry into the station. If she managed to get any further, they said, the toll would have been much higher.

Russian investigators also suspected another person, a 32-year-old former nurse Pavel Pechonkin. The Central Russia native has been suspected of being a part of a terrorist group in Dagestan. According to this theory, an officer stopped him by the security gate at the station, whereupon Pechonkin pulled the trigger.

The two Vilayat Dagestan spokesmen wouldn’t say specifically who the suicide murderers were. They would limit themselves to saying two basic things: it was their group that masterminded the attacks, and it was their group that has a few surprise gifts in store for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In an almost hour-long video, they said (in verbatim translation from the Russian language): “If you stage this Olympiad, we shall give you a present for all that innocent Muslim blood shed all over the world, in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. … And we will have presents for tourists who come there, too.”

The two Dagestani spokesmen also said their attacks heeded earlier calls by Doku Umarov, the self-proclaimed Emir (Prince) of the Northern Caucasus region. Russians have considered Umarov a major threat the last 15 years but, according to Chechen president Razym Kadyrov, Umarov was killed recently by what he termed were “Russian agents.”

Kadyrov said he based his statement on intercepted communications between two North Caucasian insurgents who had been debating Umarov’s succession.

Quite understandably, Russian government officials would neither confirm nor deny Kadyrov’s revelation.

Precautions galore

Russian authorities would not, again, very understandably, comment on what security measures they are introducing (or have already introduced)n in Sochi and its environs. Of course, some of them have become obvious right from the start. Thorough searches of anyone entering the area, including whatever they happen to be carrying along, have become regular occurrence. And Russian government’s official newspaper, Rossiyskaia gazeta, has published a few edicts that seem to show the authorities’ ways of thinking.

For example: whoever happens to see anything that seems to look suspicious (no matter how) must inform the nearest security authorities immediately. No face covers are allowed, either.

If you wish to distribute any political or religious literature anywhere, including the venues, you’re out of luck. It’s forbidden.

If you wish to display banners or flags, there is no political or extremist propaganda, commercial advertising or foul language allowed. Who decides what is extremist or foul? Why, government officials, that’s who.

If you are a fan who comes from abroad to cheer her or his country’s athletes on, and intend to use a banner or a flag to do so, you will require a notarized translation into the Russian language to get permission to display your signs of allegiance anywhere. Not only that: a fire department’s certificate confirming your signs of fandom aren’t flammable will be a must, too.

Remember the vuvuzelas (a.k.a. lepatata Mambu in its original Tswana language)? Those were the 65-centimere-long horns used during the recent world cup of soccer in South Africa. Emitting a pretty loud sound (it would be difficult to say it was music), the vuvuzelas will not be allowed in the Sochi Olympic venues. Also off-limits: banners bigger than two metres by a meter-and-a-half. Speaking of which: rods to carry the flags or banners on are limited to 150 centimetres in length.

If you want an exception, you’ve got to ask for it at least two days ahead of the date you want to use it, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to get it. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed you won’t.

Beverage containers that hold more than half a litre of beverage are banned. And security will check whether the fluid contained in the bottle is potable or not. How? We’re supposed to wait and see.

Another couple of hints: there’s no need to carry too much cash on you. In fact, it’s outright dangerous to carry much (never mind too much) cash around. Also, just as they like to say in the airports: keep a constant and vigilant eye on all your belongings. And avoid photographing military or otherwise strategic sites. Based on personal experience, don’t expect warning signs telling you this is a military or otherwise strategic site, either.

The Olympic Games must succeed without a hitch, president Putin has decreed.

Whether the Northern Caucasian Muslim insurgents will obey, now, that’s another matter altogether.