October 30th, 2008 — news, uk
From the Times (UK):
With all the seriousness that it can muster, the Commmunist Party of St Petersburg has accused the new Bond girl of treachery. Its argument rests on two claims: that Bond films are Western propaganda, and that Olga Kurylenko - for that is her real name - was raised and educated free of charge by the Soviet Union, which she now implicitly attacks by appearing alongside a British spy so influential that his real-world status as the embodiment of a thousand escapist fantasies is immaterial.
Kurylenko is 28 and from Ukraine. This means that the Soviet Union actually relinquished her to free markets and democracy at the age of 11, having thoroughly oppressed, irradiated and impoverished her country first.
But the article takes an odd twist:
Still, the St Petersburg Communists have a point. How would we feel if Daniel Craig defected to Moscow to star in the new wave of patriotic Russian films that the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to fund? Or if John Cleese, nurtured and lionised by British audien- ces from the era of Monty Python to his accession to the mythic role of Q, signed on to the payroll of resurgent Russian nationalism and gloried in their gadgets?
Outraged, that’s how. But the St Petersburgers’ argument does have one serious catch. The Bond film franchise has never, in any of its forms, been anti-Russian. Even in the depths of the Cold War its chief villains were freelancers. When Smersh fielded an assassin to take out 007 once and for all, he was an Irishman. In another caper the KGB turned its top operative loose on him, but to little effect. Remember Agent XXX? Bond does. She was the spy who loved him.
Do the Communists in Russia really have a point? I commented on their page asking if the author felt that Bollywood (India’s Hollywood) had the right to exist after independence and their own Victorian Holocaust that killed between 12 and 29 million people, with a story very similar to the Holodomor:
These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought”. The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
I’m still waiting for my comment to be approved.
Edit: It got approved!
October 25th, 2008 — news, russia
Next month the National Day of Remembrance for the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor is approaching, and Russian media outlets are pushing a story about one of its researchers finding a ‘Holodomor’ in the USA at same time as it was happening in Ukraine! The article is full of US criticism:
While America lectures Russia on the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, Russian historian Boris Borisov asks what became of over seven million American citizens who is appeared from US population records in the 1930s.
…
The U.S. Congress added fuel to the fire by adopting resolutions nearly every year blaming the Soviet government for alleged staged famine in the 1930s in Ukraine. The first resolution came in 1988, 50 years after the events described. The current members of Congress wonder about the following, and I quote, “people in the government were aware of what was going on, but did not do anything to help the starving”.
Read more…
The article offers little to counter these claims - the only flimsy counter arguments are made second-hand through the researcher himself. Not surprisingly he can counter them! Few explanations are given for his methods, but attacks on American values dominate the article and another one it links to.
There are some major flaws in this research. Boris is making his facts, comparing 1990’s Russia with 1930’s USA:
As I was doing comparative research of the American Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Great Depression of the 1990s in Russia, I grew interested in the social dimension of the tragedy.
Let me quote some figures, if you don’t mind – demonstrating how other countries reacted to the similar situation. If you believe that four or six million people is a terrible number, let me quote this: male mortality rate in Russia: 810,000 in 1984; 1,226,000 in 1994 - whereas the population is the same. In other words, as compared with 1984, the year 1996 had an additional number of 416,000 dead males. You have to add females and children to that figure.
Nothing in the article says he’s taken into account the medical and technological advances that have occurred in the 60 years separating the two. Also noticeably absent is any set of credentials, besides ‘Russian historian’. Could he be just an actor? Has this tactic ever been used by Russians before?
October 25th, 2008 — canada, event
From the Ottawa Sun:
Traditional Ukrainian Dinner: With Ukrainian cuisine and music, 5-7 p.m. dinner, show at 7 p.m. tomorrow (Sunday) at Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral Auditorium, 1000 Byron Ave. Tickets $17, $15 students/seniors, $7 under 12, under six free. 613-722-1372.
October 24th, 2008 — news, ukraine
- “Either we get the money or hold onto the ship. And if attacked, we will fight back to the bitter end.” is the word coming from the Somali-hijacked Ukrainian ship. Russian warship, Neustrashimy, which is scheduled to arrive off the Somaliacoast any time now, and seeking approval to launch a strike to repossess the Ukrainian ship. Meanwhile relatives of the passengers on the ship are raising money to pay off the hijackers.
- A European Parliament resolution on Thursday called the Holodomor “cynically and cruelly planned” by Moscow but stopped short of calling it a “genocide”.
- Ukraine, already a destination for unconventional kinds of tourism like political and sexual (see how they’re tackling that now), now has a new tourist attraction - abortion.
- With the world facing an economic crisis, everyone has been coming out of the woodwork to blame Ukraine’s financial struggle on Yushchenko. The Hryvnia has sunk to a new low at approx $6 USD and inflation is up at 20%. Many Eastern European countries are on the verge of collapse.
- With Russia gaining a naval fleet in Georgian territory (Ochamchire base on the Abkhazia) after their conflict, they are looking yet again to extend their other Naval fleet lease in the Crimea.
- A Ukrainian warship, the Ternopil, will join the NATO-led Operation Active Endeavor naval antiterrorism exercise in November.
- A new Ukrainian government must be formed before January 1,2009, President Viktor Yushchenko. This was said after Tymoshenko supporters blocked a parliamentary session on the president called on economic crisis funding.
October 18th, 2008 — holodomor, news
From Newswire:
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) condemns the recent and blatant abuse of human rights by the Russian government which has banned events planned in Russia to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor - famine genocide in Ukraine of 1932-33.
Prior to the arrival of the International Remembrance Flame in Russia, the Ukrainian Embassy received notice on October 6 from Russia’s Foreign Ministry that ommemorative events must fall in line with the Russian position on the famine or be cancelled. Russia continues to claim that the Holodomor was not a genocide and that Ukraine’s effort to secure such recognition is “a political matter that is aimed against Russian interests.”
It has been confirmed by the Ukrainian World Congress that Ukrainian community activists in Orenburg, Tumen, Ufa, St. Petersburg and Krasnodar have been subjected to undue pressure and scare tactics by government officials in the region resulting in the cancellation of planned events.
Read more
October 16th, 2008 — Uncategorized
From the Barrie Examiner:
Barrie will be caught up in a whirlwind of festivity and entertainment at the ninth annual Ukrainian Festival.
The festival, which began in 1999, began with just 100 people crowded into St. Mary’s Church and has grown in size in recent years. This year, the festival takes place on Oct. 19 at the W. A. Fisher Auditorium in Barrie Central Collegiate.
“Every year the crowd gets bigger and people from all over Ontario attend,” says Diane Lubinski, festival co-ordinator.
The festival is the largest indoor Ukrainian festival in Ontario. It will include numerous kiosks filled with various items, including embroideries and pysanky. Pysanky is the traditional name for decorated eggs. The meal will have many favourite dishes, including perogies and kapusta, which is like Kraut, yet very Ukrainian.
The 9th Annual Ukrainian Festival of Barrie, Ontario:
Sunday, October 19th, 2008 - 11:30 am to 4:30 pm.
Barrie Central Collegiate at 125 Dunlop St. W - Barrie, Ontario.
October 16th, 2008 — news, ukraine
October 15th, 2008 — canada, politics
October 14th, 2008 — canada, politics
From the Toronto Star:
OTTAWA – A Toronto Liberal incumbent has won a court injunction ordering his Conservative rival to yank a defamatory campaign flyer that alleges he has a poor attendance record.
Ontario Superior Court Justice George Strathy has ruled that Tory hopeful Axel Kuhn and his staff must stop publishing and distributing a brochure that makes false claims about Borys Wrzesnewskyj.
The pamphlet claims Wrzesnewskyj skipped dozens of parliamentary committee meetings, but the Liberal says he’s only a full-time member of one of the six committees listed in the brochure.
In his Sunday ruling, the judge wrote that the words in Kuhn’s flyer are “clearly defamatory.”
October 14th, 2008 — canada, politics
From the Toronto Star:
Some Tory campaign workers say privately that Etobicoke-Lakeshore is one of the party’s best chances at making inroads into the 416 area. In the 2006 federal election Ignatieff defeated his Tory rival by fewer than 5,000 votes.
Boyer, who represented the riding for two terms during the Mulroney years, likes to emphasize his local roots, pointing out that he lives on the lakeshore and runs a publishing house nearby.
Ignatieff, Liberal deputy leader, likes to emphasize that he is often seen on television holding the Tories to account in the House of Commons, but it’s constituency work that he finds rewarding, such as helping a voter with an immigration problem.
Also running are Liam McHugh-Russell for the NDP, Dave Corail for the Green party and Janice Murray for the Marxist-Leninist Party.
While Etobicoke-Lakeshore is a Liberal stronghold, Ignatieff was parachuted in to replace a popular Jean Augustine amidst controversy when others trying to apply for the seat were locked out. Augustine defended the action, from the same article:
She told The Hill Times that the takeover was orchestrated by “a group of individuals who are from the Ukrainian community” who wanted to ensure that the next MP was Ukrainian. Etobicoke-Lakeshore has one of the largest Ukrainian-Canadian populations in Canada.
Ignatieff has gained heat in his own riding, for starters living in Boston most of his life and currently not even residing in the riding he is to represent. Also some choice words from his book Blood and Belonging:
My difficulty in taking Ukraine seriously goes deeper than just my cosmopolitan suspicion of nationalists everywhere. Somewhere inside I’m also what Ukrainians would call a great Russian and there is just a trace of old Russian disdain for these little Russians.
The Liberals are losing their hold on this riding, and I’m glad to see this group is also losing voters.
