For
those in the Western MSM who try so hard to ignore, whitewash, or
pretend away who and what Alexei Navalny really is, just because he
is "anti-Putin" and "pro-Western":
A
violent racist xenophobic thieving fraudulent neoliberal gun-loving
wingnut ultranationalist - rebranded as an "anti-corruption
liberal".
The nationalists and fascists add violent muscle and numbers on the street that the figurehead and more media-presentable liberals/neoliberals have never had in either country.
---Mark Sleboda
Ethnic Slurs Haunt Alexey Navalny
Andrei Tselikov
25
July, 2013
Alexey
Navalny came under harsh criticism from Russian opposition movement
colleagues as soon as he was released from Kirov jail
on a“podpiska,”
(an agreement to stay at his current place of residence — the
Russian equivalent of making bail), and as soon as it became clear
that he would continue to run for mayor of Moscow throughout the
appeals process for his 5-year long prison sentence.
These
fair-weather enemies restrained from public disagreement while it
appeared that Navalny was getting the full brunt of government
persecution in a trial most view as unjust and political in nature.
However, now that Navalny stands a chance to keep himself out of
prison by garnering a critical mass of public support in the mayoral
elections against current mayor Sergey Sobyanin, the flood-gates
have opened. First, Evgenya Chirikova, environmental activist
and former opposition darling with her own mayoral
ambitions [GV],
wrote a harsh
blog post [ru]
attacking Navalny for skipping the environmental policy section in
his electoral
platform [GV].
Navalny
responded to Chirikova's criticism promising to include the
environment, but could not refrain from dismissively joking that her
and her supporters would be distributed propaganda materials made
out of “sticks,
moss and tree bark. [ru]”
It is partially his abrasive sense of humor and uneven tone that got
Navalny in the next bit of trouble. The same day that Chirikova
wrote her blog, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets
Ayder Muzhdabaev wrote
an open letter [ru]
in his Facebook asking questions about the opposition candidate's
perceived nationalist views.
Navalny
has never hid his sympathies for the Russian nationalist movement —
only a few weeks ago he co-authored
a statement on ethnic violence in Pugachev [ru]
with prominent nationalist opposition leaders. Muzhdabaev's
questions, however, were much more personal. In particular, he
addressed allegedly racist episodes in Navalny's biography — one
in which he reportedly called a female Azerbaijani co-worker a
“darkie” (“chernozhopaia,”
literally “black-assed”), and another in which he referred to
Georgians as “rodents” (a play on words: Gruziny (Georgians)
and gryzuny (rodents))
during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.
My staff demands that I answer some kind of disgusting open letter. I hate stuff like that. Total waste of time. It sickens me
With
a mindset like this, it's no wonder that Navalny ended
up with a letter [ru]
that can be described as patronizing. After prefacing with how much
he dislikes writing answers to such “pointed” [the scare-quotes
are Navalny's - A.T.] questions, and how he is going to do it anyway
because its his “duty,” Navalny petulantly wrote that he has
already answered them 138 times (later he upped that figure to
138,000). At one point he started an answer with an exasperated
“Hellloooowwww.” In fact, Navalny seemed so rude that some
people drew comparisons between him and President Putin. Olga
Allenova, a Kommersant journalist, wrote [ru]:
Does this boorish, condescending tone when answering a journalist remind you of anyone? I think the guy is a true successor to VVP [Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin]
Journalist
Stanislav Minin made
a similar connection [ru]
to Putin's patented “macho” style of answering questions.
Rudeness
aside, the biggest point of contention turned out to be the alleged
ethnic slur against Saadat Kadyrova, who worked for the Moscow
office of the opposition Yabloko party in the early 2000s together
with Navalny. While in the original letter Muzhdabaev referred
to statements that Kadyrova herself made about the incident
(probably this
November 2012 interview [ru]
with Kadyrova where she says that Navalny's behavior forced her to
leave the party), Navalny chose to interpret the question as
referring to a blog post by a different former party colleague. He
linked to a November
2011 post [ru]
by Engelina Tareeva, an 88 year old woman who briefly mentioned the
incident in her LiveJournal, but seems to have a generally positive
view of Navalny. In this way Navalny evaded answering “Yes” or
“No” to the original question, instead intimating that the
incident was simply imagined by a half-senile “grandma” who only
saw him a few times at the office.
This
claim forced several of Navalny and Tareeva's Yabloko colleagues to
chime in with their own recollections. Semyon Burd, former Deputy
Chairman of Moscow's Yabloko, wrote [ru]:
He's a bold-faced liar. I have on several occasions witnessed long conversations between Engelina Borisovna and Alexey in room 101. She worked a lot during the 2005 elections, worked on the phone, and gave weekly updates to Alexey about her results. [...] Engelina Borisovna was a member of the regional party council, where Alexey Navalny was deputy chairman. And now shes suddenly a grandma, who saw him in the office a few times.
the work spaces of the cute grandma and Alexey Navalny, on the first floor, during the election campaign, were about ten meters apart [...]
He
also recalled Kadyrova, as did Alexander Gnezdilov (Alexandra
Garmazhapova posted the following in a Facebook
comment [ru]):
Alexander Gnezdilov writes: “When in 2007 Navalny was being kicked out of the party for nationalism, during the working meeting [Party Chairman Grigory] Yavlinsky reminded Alexey about this episode in front of dozens of witnesses and he didn't even try to claim it was a lie [...]“
He shouldn't have denied a commonly known fact, I mean the incident with the Azerbaijani girl, which was recorded in party documents. It would have been better for him to say that it did take place, but what he said he said in the heat of passion, and not because he actually thinks like that, that he is sorry for it, and has asked for forgiveness.
The
preponderance of evidence seems to suggest that Navalny lied when
giving his answer — in her interview, Kadyrova mentions the
incident in passing, and does not appear to think that it's at all
controversial:
He started working at Yabloko when I did. And when I first heard Alexey Navalny say nationalist things like “you're darkies”, I told Grigory Alexeevich Yavlinsky about it.
Supporters were quick to defend Navalny, whose situation is still precarious, but who at the same time stands a slight chance of changing the balance of power in Russia. Afisha's Yury Saprykin, for example,thought [ru] that it doesn't matter what Navalny really thinks or how he would act when in office — to him, the situation is akin to Pascal's wager, i.e. the worst thing that could happen is that Navalny turns into another Putin, and Russia already has a Putin, so it can only get better. (Even Saprykin, however, thought that Navalny needs to dial down his haughtiness when talking to critics.)
Some,
like blogger Varvara Turova and LGBT-rights activist Maria Gessen,
disagreed. Turova wrote [ru]:
Imagine that Putin has a twin brother. And he is exactly the same kind of person. And he is fighting the real Putin. Will you vote for him?
For
some Navalny supporters his nationalism is a feature, not a bug. The
journalist Oleg Kashin made
this joke [ru]
(in somewhat poor taste), for instance:
The
publicist Dmitry Olshansky went
further [ru],
seeing a nationalist strategy as the only way forward for a
attracting the electorate:
If Navalny, in the mind of all the denizens of Russia who ever find out about him was clearly tied with the idea of, lets call it ethnocultural replacement – 50% of the victory would be a cinch. “Navalny will come – and kick all of these [people] out”
Perhaps
he is correct — people of all walks of life seem to be sounding
off about the “minority problem.” Former government adviser
Alfred Koch, for example, wrote
this [ru]
about Muzhdabaev (an ethnic minority), who started the ball
rolling with his questions:
This Ayder Muzhdabaev, is simply a provocateur. It's obvious. They took a natsmen [old Soviet abbreviation from "natsional'noemenshistvo", ethnic minority, mildly derogatory/dismissive - A.T.] and now he is asking “pointed” questions with ethnic color.
With
friends like this, who needs enemies? The satirical Twitter account
IgorSechinEvilTwin (parodying the former deputy chief of Putin's
administration, and current chairman of Rosneft) was
on the same page [ru]:
Sergey Semenovich [Sobyanin], you don't need to find money for the Navalny-walloping. His own fans will do it for free.
See
also -
Wikipedia article HERE
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