Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in englishman in new york's LiveJournal:

Friday, May 15th, 2015
3:51 pm	Welcome to Anna Arutunyan's media blog. Because my book, the Media in Russia, goes through 2008 and early 2009, I want to use this as an opportunity to track media developments in Russia at what I think is a still pivotal point in history. The premise is that we still do not know where Russia's "fourth estate" is headed. We can only speculate, posting haphazard facts that point into this and that direction, much as in Russian politics. As such, I would like to focus not only on Russian journalism today, but on "second reality" as a generally powerful and unique force in Russia. A big part of this is political coverage, and I would like to track how journalists and media professionals - both in Russia and abroad - construct images of Russia's political space for domestic and foreign consumption. As a journalist working in Russia consuming Russian-language media products, and occasionally writing in Russian, I think "translating" this second reality for those on the outside will be useful. For this reason, this blog will be predominantly in English. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 27th, 2011
6:11 pm	I finally went to see Stoppard's Coast of Utopia at the RAMT on Saturday, sat through the whole ten hours of it. And I'm glad I went now instead of last year – the chatter of abstract revolutionaries like Bakunin looks particularly ill-boding. I finally understood what it is that bothers me about mass uprising so much – whatever they are, they are not rational events. These ideologues of revolution – and Stoppard exposes this hilariously – had the luxury of sitting around framing a whole system of governance while each had about 500 serfs slaving away to provide them with that luxury. When Bakunin starts crying to Belinsky about how his father doesn't dig the importance of his work because he's making him come to deal with his serfs and his debt pretty much explains everything that went wrong with the revolution that eventually unfurled in Russia. And I guess the main line – which Stoppard puts into the anarchist Bakunin's mouth – exposes what being a revolutionary is all about: “I want people to submit to my absolute power.” Everyone, including Gertsen, laughs, of course, but it's not funny. It's only towards the end that Gertsen – dissillusioned as he was with 1848 Paris and how it led to only more oppression against the working class – feels a forshadowing of the tyranny that he will help unfurl. For the next generation of revolutionaries that he “awakes” - and they include Lenin and Trotsky – have none of that vegetarian self-reflection that Gertsen and even Bakunin were capable of. Trotsky – writing in exile - couldn't even find the courage to draw a continuum between his great plans and Stalin's policy. Maybe he felt part of the blame, but he would not stoop to knowledge it. The tragedy, of course, is that revolutions lead to tyranny. And yet whenever people from comfortable western backgrounds, who don't have to think about how they will feed their children tomorrow, watch what goes down on Tahrir square or Tripoli they get all glorious. What no one considers is the minutiea. The effect that all of this will have on the mundane fabric of daily life, on infrastructure, on institutions. Think of a revolution from the perspective of a mother with five children, or a working mother, and the millions of little details that will start crumbling around her. They are too boring to make headlines or even matter in the glorious scheme of things – they are about shopping for daily products, about school, about taking your kids to the clinic that doesn't work because it's revolution time. They are about transportation, water supply, electricity and sanitation. And the millions of things that a serf thinks about and works on instead of reading Marx (or Max Weber, it doesn't matter). And the small, ambitious groups that inevitably take advantage of public unrest as they bring in regime change promise “change” as if it means the same thing for everyone. In the meantime, as infrastructure continues to crumble, as the people grow increasingly exhausted with chaos, they latch on to a strongman. If your plumbing doesn't work and you don't have the money to fix it, you're going to want “a man like Putin.” Everyone wants a man like Putin, whatever guise he takes. The go-to guy who will restore order. When your sophisicated social order breaks apart, society is willing to revert back in history and give up freedom for order. This is why I feel about the same towards any revolutionary-minded movement – whether it's socialism, free-market libertarianism or the Tea Party. (I don't mean smaller, specific protests, like union strikes or pickets linked to a specific aim other than deposing the government. These smaller movements actually tend to work in the long term, as long as they don't spill over into a mass revolution on Independence Square). They all go back to the fever started by the likes of Bakunin. What's really tragic is that over hundreds of years, people don't change. They get intoxicated by a picture of a fist against a red background and still think that there's a logical correlation between mass unrest, regime change, revolution, and social betterment. If some of these people actually stopped to wonder what they actually want I'd be willing to bet they'd opt out for a disco party. Or a swinger's club. Whatever rocks your boat, just don't rock mine. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
4:00 pm	free and fair Feb. 25: leading pollster shows Russians favor Ded Moroz, the Dolphin and the Bear for the Sochi Olympic mascot. Leopard is the LEAST favored, according to VTSIOM Feb. 26, 12:54 p.m. Vladimir Putin says he likes the leopard. But of course, people should choose “not based on my opinion.” Feb. 26, 23:24 p.m. Channel One announces three mascots, with the Leopard in the lead. And the funny thing is, they don't really have to "rig" any of this. It's all about "his master's voice." (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 7th, 2009
5:58 pm	Nearly every time an artist, filmmaker or historian tackles Ivan the Terrible, the result frequently serves as a litmus test of where exactly the current Russian regime headed. And Pavel Lungin’s Tsar, I’m happy to say, made no attempt to portray Ivan IV favorably. But inevitably comparing it to Eisenstein’s masterpiece, the film’s Western viewers will have missed the point completely, however. That, I’m afraid, is Lungin’s fault, because the wider historical point he seems to be making is not evident in the film at all. To understand it, you would need to read the screenplay, written by the novelist Alexei Ivanov, who spells out exactly what Ivan was grappling with – the Tsar believed that he was Christ, come to save them at the Last Judgment. And he wanted his people to believe that too, even if he would have to torture every last one of them to save their souls. “The idea of Tsarist power manifested in Ivan’s personality – that’s the kind of tsarist power we have to this day,” Pavel Lungin said in a recent interview. “And what is not terrible does not appear to be power.” But for those that viewed the film, that power is manifested in torture, hysterical praying sessions, more torture and a few generals who lost a battle with the Livonians having their guts torn out by a bear. Without any cathartic assessment in the end, that kind of raw history is pretty difficult to watch. There is one line spoken by Ivan in which he seems to equate himself with God, but in general the film doesn’t seem to get the whole Tsar-as-God point across. And since Lungin is correctly trying to identify the continuity of power in Russian history, he would have done well to emphasize that point more vividly. It is indeed very much present in historical literature on Ivan, and it is present today. In Alexei Ivanov’s adapted screenplay of Tsar, which Lungin apparently based his screenplay on, Ivan convinces himself by the middle of the story that he is Christ. His objective is to have the Church recognize what he himself has come to understand. That seems to be his whole motivation in bringing his childhood friend Fyodor (Father Filip) head the Church (that motivating aspect also seems to be absent from the film). And that is the whole point of the character Masha, the little girl who believes she is the daughter of the Virgin Mary, and that Christ is her brother. Ivan’s conviction develops further in the book, but that unraveling is also absent from the film. There is a point in the movie when one of Ivan’s men asks him to make lightening strike – and lo, lightening does strike. What is missing is the following tell-tale line, a description of what is literally going on in Ivan’s head: “He wanted his people to believe in him. Not to obey, or like, or love him, but to believe in him.” If the whole Tsar project is an attempt to assess the meaning of the Russian monarch and the origins of that meaning (and Lungin argues in his interview that since Ivan, Russian history has been going in circles, a view shared by a number of Russian historians, most notably Vladimir Sharov), then it’s a shame that the line, and numerous others like it, are missing from the film and Western audiences will not be able to hear them. That quote resonates with so much in contemporary Russian literature about power, reflecting the cult phenomenon of any Russian government. In his recent novel, Brand, Oleg Sivun wrote: “Putin is a product that cannot be bought, an idea that cannot be understood. I have no reason to like Putin, nor do I have reason to dislike him. It is a question of faith, not love. It is more correct to ask, do you believe in Putin?” Lungin was obviously tackling the relationship between Church and State in Russia; his project was literally blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church, and one cleric went as far as to say that Filip’s dilemma was possibly the same one that Russia’s Patriarch Kirill may have to deal with. But without revealing Ivan’s real motivation, his confusion that he was God, Lungin didn’t end up making that point at all. Russia imported Christianity and its idea of the monarch from Byzantium; as a result, the Russian monarch dominated the Church until the Great Schism. The identity of the Russian monarch, meanwhile, came to a head in the 15th century, and Ivan’s confusion appears to be a direct consequence of several key events. First this was 1453, the fall of Constantinople. Nominally, the Russian Monarch had answered to the Byzantine Emperor; the fall of Byzantiam, thus, would undermine the Russian government. Then, Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan III, marries the Greek Sophie Paleolog; he becomes a full-fledged “autocrat” in the Greek-Byzantine tradition, and the whole idea of Russia as Third Rome, of Russia as inheriting the whole Byzantine doctrine, is born. The other important determinant, of course, is the whole Tartar business – but I’ll get to that sometime separately, if it’s not too much history. That’s the context of Ivan’s confusion about being God. It’s no trivial question in Russian history, and that’s what the movie seems to be about. Except it’s not. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 4th, 2009
5:20 pm	Writes the Guardian: Vladimir Putin as given his clearest hint yet that he is preparing to get back his old job as president during a masterful performance at his annual question and answer session with the Russian public...."I will think about it," adding "There's still plenty of time." Hmmm. Forget that he's been saying "I will think about it" for the last two years, and each time he says it it's the "clearest indication/hint/signal yet" depending on what daily you write for. But more to the point: Putin is proving that he is a perfectly crafted horoscope: his words conform to whatver the viewer/pundit/journalists wants to make of them. Jouranlists want to hear about a rift in the tandem - and it's "the clearest indication yet." Average Russians want to hear that everything's ok - and that's exactly what they hear. Each year, his "performance" is a little longer than the previous, kind of like a mitochondrial mutation. When the anchor said "it's been three hours already," Putin replied, "and thank God." (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
7:35 pm	Empty words Regarding editorial independence: I spoke to Vitaly Korotich (who I hope will forgive me if I draw the wrong conclusions from what he told me), who was the editor of Ogonek magazine between 1986 and 1991. Like many in his generation, his accounts are populated by specific people whom he refers to by their first names. Suddenly, in the middle of our interview, in this matter of fact voice, he says that around 1989Yeltsin asked him to print something to “smear” Gorbachev - while Gorbachev had done the same just days before. Pardon my naivete, but this STUNNED me. On the one hand, we are talking about an era when Russian journalists were more free than they had ever been or would ever be (formally, this period lasted from 1991 – 1993, by the strictest account, but many mark the actual fall from grace as 1996, the year of Yeltsin’s second presidential campaign). On the other, in 1989 (as opposed to the end of 1991), Gorbachev the only man standing between journalists and aging party bureaucrats with calcified brains (as Yevgeny Kiselyov put it). This was the extent to which perestroika journalism was free and independent. More on this in the third and last MN history installment. (The second is here). Somehow, I was less surprised when Moscow bureau chiefs of the world’s leading Western news agencies told me on two different occasions how a lot of what they print has to pass through the London or New York desks, and not all of it is approved – and this was BEFORE the war in South Ossetia.    (Comment on this)
Friday, May 15th, 2009
4:58 pm	Novaya Gazeta Lenta.ru reports that Novaya Gazeta, which was granted an interview with Medvedev last month, got more citations in the press. Of course, this depends on how you look at it - Novaya Gazeta got more citations ever since February, when editor Muratov met with Medvedev after the murder of journalist Anastasia Baburova. Then last month's interview. It's tempting to look at it as a case of other media getting a "signal" to cite the paper now that it's become "kosher" - but that just doesn't appear to be the case. Otherwise, the Kommersant business daily still tops the list of most-cited print media; the state-controlled Vesti - the most cited TV program. Novaya Gazeta jumped from the 9th spot to the fifth spot. Does this mean anything in particular? Maybe yes, maybe no. I have yet to see reports of regional officials acting any differently in response to these various "signals" from Medvedev. Except, of course, Belykh, which wasn't a signal but an appointment. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
5:37 pm	Early history of The Moscow News I must admit, I am part of a very strange journalistic tradition. First, editorial rows get resolved by Stalin, then the paper is revamped at the behest of Putin (who visited the place to make sure it was money well-spent). Researching the history of The Moscow News, you see how everything changes - and everything remains the same. It's one thing when you are on the outside, researching what a majority of Russian newspapers went through during the 20th century. It's quite another when you work in one. To learn how to write the truth first you have to learn how to lie. More on this later. But this first historic installment was more than a little scary to write. The origins of Russia's oldest English-language newspaper go back into such dark recesses of the 20th century that one often shudders, turning its yellowing pages in the archives. As a Soviet newspaper launched in 1930, it was no innocent bystander dutifully writing the first draft of history and objectively reporting on the often bloody events of the day. It quickly became Stalin's mouthpiece, and as such, its mission was not reflecting reality but helping to mould an alternative one. Over the next half-century and more, that reality would replace the one that The Moscow News took great pains to ignore. (Read More) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
4:44 pm	Government coverage The press pool of the prime minister, journalists are telling me, has changed – there is much less access, they say. At the meeting with the Mongolian prime minister yesterday, there was a 15-minute “press statement” but a spokeswoman warned us that there would be no questions, so it was, essentially, a photo-op. A few cameramen were allowed in for preliminary statements; the rest waited about three hours in the hall. One journalist started complaining why they were called to this assignment in the first place, if the only access is briefly at the end – and then just snuck out with a few others. Personally, it was what I had expected – the wait and the security measures – “pretty standard,” as Dr. Evil would say. What struck me were different levels of access – state TV journalists were handed a press release at least an hour before I got access to it. Right after the press statement, we were told not to leave the room for another 15 minutes, until Putin successfully left the building. I have never been on the Washington pool; I wonder if it’s any different. There was talk about journalists standing for Obama and not standing for Bush – but in reality, they stood for Bush as well. We never stood for Putin after he was prime minister. I have not seen Medvedev. Anyone hear what it’s like in the Washington pool? Another story about Putin coverage here. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
4:50 pm	Medvedev's reaction to the latest journalist death has been meeting with the editor of the paper she worked for, Dmitry Muratov. Critics claim Medvedev is all words and little action - in the case of his taking a liking to Novaya Gazeta, words become the actions - in some cases, the only actions towards what is widely seen as his liberal streak. Meeting with the editor of an opposition newspaper - one Putin famously characterized as insignificant in the larger Russian context - will send a very powerful signal to officials with medieval attitudes about the media. The editorial office of beleaguered opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta - five of whose staff members and journalists have been killed or died in mysterious circumstances in the last eight years - nestles in one of central Moscow's oldest districts, on Potapovsky Pereulok, where its cosy, Stalin-era building seems to extol the same perseverance with which Soviet dissidents fortified themselves. The paper's editor, Dmitry Muratov, thought hard about closing the paper in 2006, when its most prominent investigative reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was gunned down outside her apartment. He thought about it some more, colleagues say, after the brutal slaying in Moscow last month of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta junior reporter Anas­tasia Baburova. Now, three weeks later, the newspaper is grimly soldiering on, continuing the work of Politkovskaya and other slain reporters. One source of hope for editors and journalists came last week, when President Dmitry Medvedev spent an hour talking with Muratov and Novaya Gazeta co-owner Mikhail Gorbachev about the security problems journalists face. When Muratov brought up the issue of shutting down the paper because working there was so dangerous, Medvedev reportedly told him that it was out of the question. (Read More) (1 Comment |Comment on this)