The Historical Political Development
of Soviet Rock Music
By Tracy Donovan DrakeUniversity of California, Santa Cruz
Anti-Gay Law Used for 1st Time Against Protesters | The St. Petersburg Times | The leading English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg
ANTI-GAY LAW USED FOR 1ST TIME AGAINST PROTESTERS
Published: April 11, 2012 (Issue # 1703)
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP A rights activist holds a poster reading ‘In this library are books by gay and lesbian writers. Their works are part of world culture.’ |
St. Petersburg’s notorious anti-gay law was put into practice for the first time last week, when two men arrested Saturday during a demo near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall were charged with “promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism among minors.”
Out of eight protesters, two were detained because the policemen found their posters to be illegal under the new law, in force since March 17. They were also charged with failing to obey a police officer’s lawful orders — an offense punishable by up to 15 days in prison.
Igor Kochetkov, chair of the LGBT rights group Vykhod (Coming Out), held a poster reading “No to hushing up hate crimes against gays and lesbians,” while Sergei Kondrashov’s placard read “Our family friend is a lesbian, my wife and I love and respect her. Her way of life is normal, just like ours, and her family is socially equal to ours.”
Amnesty urges Russia to release feminist punks
Amnesty International has called for the immediate release of three members of a Russian feminist punk band who face up to seven years in prison for performing in a church.
The global human rights watchdog said it did not know if the detained women were in fact members of the Pussy Riot band because the group performed all its protest songs wearing balaclavas.
“Even if the three arrested women did take part in the protest, the severity of the response of the Russian authorities… would not be a justifiable response to the peaceful — if, to many, offensive — expression of their political beliefs,” Amnesty International said in a statement on Tuesday.
“They would therefore be prisoners of conscience.”
Five members of the radical group climbed on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral — the country’s central place of worship — on February 21 and sang a song they called a “Punk Prayer” before being seized by guards.
The song’s lyrics called for the Virgin Mary to “drive out (president-elect Vladimir) Putin” and to “become a feminist”.
The three women have been charged with hooliganism committed by an organised group — an unusually harsh charge for protesters.
They are being held in pre-trial detention until late April even though two of them have small children.
Kremlin rights council head Mikhail Fedotov said it was “premature” to label the women prisoners of conscience, but added that he saw no grounds for a conviction.
Emails give insight into Kremlin youth group’s priorities, means and concerns | World news | The Guardian
Hacked emails that are believed to show correspondence between Nashi’s first leader, Vasily Yakemenko, its spokesperson Kristina Potupchik and other activists and bloggers, appear to reveal the notorious Kremlin youth group’s goals, priorities, means and concerns.
Many of the emails concern how to boost positive coverage on the internet. One includes payments, noting that 200 pro-Putin online comments left on 60 articles cost 600,000 roubles (£12,555). It also details paid-for coverage.
Two posts about Nashi’s annual summer camps that appeared on one of Russia’s most popular blogs, run by photographer Ilya Varlamov, received 300,000 hits and cost R400,000, according to the email said. Contacted by the Guardian, Varlamov denied being paid by Nashi to cover pro-Putin events. Another email showed that Nashi doled out more than R10m (£210,000) to buy a series of articles about the Seliger summer camp in the popular Russian tabloids Moskovsky Komsomolets, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta denied that its journalists took money for articles.
Nashi has long targeted people it considers “enemies”, such as Russian journalists and foreign ambassadors. In an email to Potupchik on 27 October one Nashi activist attached a list of 168 well-known human rights activists, writers, journalists, bloggers, film directors, poets and others. “These are the most vile enemies,” the activist writes. “Because they have personally gone after us or V.” It is unclear to whom the V refers: Putin, Yakemenko or Vladislav Surkov, the recently deposed ideologue who dreamed up Nashi.
One of the group’s top concerns is the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In an email sent on 11 November, another Nashi activist writes to Yakemenko with a plan for “a series of 40- to 50-second cartoons of a day in the life of the fascist Navalny”, comparing him to Hitler, showing him making uncontrollable Nazi salutes and forming swastikas. “Let’s do it, make it funny,” Yakemenko replies, with a smiling emoticon. A similar video went viral in December.
Several other activists write to Yakemenko with ideas on discrediting Navalny: from having “10 to 15 people change their first and last names to Alexei Navalny and start doing lots of things, joining every party and movement, talking at protests and in the press, so in this mess people stop reacting to news about him”, to a suggestion to dress people up like him to beg for money outside the US embassy. Most of those suggestions are declined.
BBC News – Profile: Russian blogger Alexei Navalny
Anti-corruption campaigner and top blogger Alexei Navalny is one of the pivotal figures leading protests and activism to challenge the results of Russia’s 4 December parliamentary elections.
He is also arguably the only major opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the past five years. And he owes his political prominence almost exclusively to his activity as blogger.
Mr Navalny’s rise as a force in Russian politics began in 2008 when he started blogging about allegations of malpractice and corruption at some of Russia’s big state-controlled corporations, such as energy giants Gazprom, Rosneft and Transneft, and VTB bank.
Previously, he had been a relatively minor figure involved in various opposition groups. He was also involved in nationalist politics and has taken part in a number of the annual nationalist shows of strength, known as the Russian Marches.
via BBC News – Profile: Russian blogger Alexei Navalny.
The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)
Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s Negatives – The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii PhotographicRecord Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)
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Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s Negatives
From the Archives
ART OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN RUSSIA: SELECTIONS FROM THE GEORGE COSTAKIS COLLECTION
Contributions by Margit Rowell and Angelica Zander Rudenstine
Published in 1981
320 pages, fully illustrated
Documenting the first exhibition of Russian collector George Costakis’s holdings of early 20th-century Russian artists in the United States, the catalogue Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection is an invaluable resource for scholars of art of the avant-garde in Russia. Art historian Angelica Zander Rudenstine’s introduction describes the Costakis Collection’s formation and important details from George Costakis’s biography. Margit Rowell reexamines certain premises about Russian and Soviet avant-garde art in the essay, “New Insights into Soviet Constructivism: Painting, Constructivists, Production Art.” The publication also includes color and black-and-white reproductions of selected works with entries and biographies of the 39 artists in the exhibition.
Excerpt
Costakis naturally tried to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of the avant-garde. While he feels strongly that he missed collecting the work of many artists—through bad luck, unfortunate timing or lack of knowledge—his overriding principle was always to fill in the picture with more and more artists, and to show them in the various stages of their stylistic developments.
via From the Archives.
via From the Archives.
Holodomor (Голодомор) -Killing by Hunger- (Морити голодом)
1) Gareth Jones – A Manchukuo Incident
In celebration of his life, Gareth’s niece, Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley and his great nephew, Nigel Linsan Colley have written & published a critically acclaimed bookGareth Jones – A Manchukuo Incident – which investigates the political intrigue surrounding Gareth’s murder by Chinese bandits in 1935.
2) Gareth Jones’ Published Articles
As a prolific writer, Gareth left a legacy of articles published in many British newspapers including The Western Mail, The Times and the Manchester Guardian, in Germany in the Berliner Tageblatt and in American newspapers through the International News Service. These articles are a graphic and historic portrayal of the critical events of the early thirties and are worthy of an in-depth study in themselves
From below, links can be discovered to some of Gareth’s historically most noteworthy articles::
- CLICK HERE to view Nigel Colley’s 2.30 minute extended Interview on BBC News
- CLICK HERE for the edited broadcast of BBC Look East on Friday 13th November.
- CLICK HERE for The Guardian’s account by Mark Brown entitled; ‘1930s journalist Gareth Jones to have story retold.’
- CLICK HERE for The Times Online account by Jack Malvern entitled; ” True extent of Ukraine famine revealed in British journalist’s diaries ‘.
- CLICK HERE for the Daily Telegraph
- CLICK HERE for Tomos Livingstone’s article entitled; ‘Trail-blazing journalist was the history man’.
- CLICK HERE for the widely syndicated article by Associated Press’ Raphael G. Satter as published in the Moscow Times.. Or CLICK HERE for the same article in The Washington Post.
- CLICK HERE for Ihor Siundiukov’s article in The Day, published in Kyiv & entitled; ‘ The Confessions of a Truth-Seeker’.
- For ALL 179 (and counting) articles from Google News CLICK HERE
- CLICK HERE for Alex Donahue’s 3-page extended feature in The Big Issue (Welsh edition)
- CLICK HERE for Barry & District’s call for the diaries to come ‘home to Wales’.
- CLICK HERE for an interview with Rory Finnin of Cambridge University Ukrainian Sudies Dept. in The Day entitled; ‘Peturbing Truth in Cambridge’. .
- For political comment by James Marson of the Guardian entitled; ‘Ukraine’s Forgotten Famine’ on 18th November, then please CLICK HERE
- CLICK HERE for the original full page article in the Ukrainian-Community weekly-newpaper, Nasze Slowo on 6/12/09 by Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun entitled (in English) ‘Gareth Jones – the Conscience of the World’.
- And Finally CLICK HERE to see Nigel Colley’s speech delivered at the opening of a United Nations’ Holodomor exhibition in New York on 23rd November 2009 entitled; ‘ Are You Listening, New York Times?’
Holodomor (English) The Original Holocaust *Ukraine 1932 - 1933
The Making of 1989:
Few people remember Günter Schabowski. Schabowski, the spokesman for the East German Communist Party Politburo, played a vital role in the toppling of the East German Communist government in the fall of 1989. During a press conference on November 9, 1989, a reporter asked him about new travel regulations issued by the government that seemed to indicate the possibility of easier travel into West Berlin through the Berlin Wall. Schabowski had only recently received a copy of the new regulations and had not yet read them carefully. The reporter asked when, exactly, East German citizens could begin to take advantage of these new travel rules. Schabowski shrugged and responded, “from now.” See video clip Here
That evening Reuters reported (incorrectly) that East German citizens could cross into West Germany by any border crossing and West German television news programs reported that the Berlin Wall was opening. Within minutes, thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of Berliners, both East and West, began converging on the Berlin Wall. Without orders for how to handle the surging crowds, the East German border guards simply opened the gates. Crowds poured through in both directions and within minutes began tearing down the wall that had for so long symbolized the division of Europe into a Communist East and a non-Communist West.
The night that the Berlin Wall collapsed was certainly one of the most dramatic moments in the cascading events of 1989, events that brought the era of Communist rule in Eastern Europe to a close. Textbooks often describe the events of that year as the inevitable collapse of a repressive system in favor of a freer democratic form of government. But the reality is much more complex. Many forces, both internal and external, conspired to bring down the Communist regimes, and not every government that replaced them could be described as fully democratic.
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Catholic Church in Poland: The Catholic Church, Solidarity, and the 1987 Papal visit to Poland.
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Everyday Life in Eastern Europe: A wide range of sources analyzing “everyday life” in Eastern Europe.
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Nationalities in the USSR: Nationalism and its role in the end of the Soviet Union.
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Solidarity Comes to Power: The 1989 Polish election that brought Solidarity to power.
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Economies in Transition: The role that economic factors made in the events of 1989.
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The Unique Experience of Romania: Romania’s Communist Regime was removed by popular revolt.
THE RESOURCES OF THIS ARCHIVE:
Do You Know This Woman?
Throughout the Cold War both sides regularly sent agents across the border, both to gather information that might be useful and to test the ability of the guardians of the border to catch agents of the other side.