freedom of press in Russia

[Olga Meerson]

All is correct except the sixties very much happened in Russia. Russians' true freeds of speech still feeds off the remnants of their table.

----- Original Message -----
From: John Dunn <J.Dunn at SLAVONIC.ARTS.GLA.AC.UK>
Date: Friday, June 13, 2008 9:08 am
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] freedom of press in Russia

> I think, with respect, that it may be going a little far to say 
> that the governemt effectively shut down The Exile.  I don't 
> imagine that we will ever know if that was the ultimate aim of the 
> exercise and whether the main target of the ????? [naezd] was 
> Limonov, in which case The Exile was, so to speak, collateral 
> damage, or the publication itself.
> 
> It would seem that Mr Ames and his colleagues have, to say the 
> least, been naive.   They appear to have misinterpreted the climate 
> of the 1990s as ushering in an era of ???????????????? 
> [vsedozvolennost'] and not to have realised that ?????? [èpatazh] 
> is a dangerous weapon to use, especially in someone else's country 
> and especially somewhere where the 1960s never happened.  It is on 
> thing to subvert established norms of public behaviour and 
> communication if your name is V.V. Zhirinovskii and you have 
> backers in the right places, but another if you are foreign 
> journalists.
> In this context I would agree that the question whether Russia 
> should have the same standards of freedom of speech as America (or 
> Britain or Italy – we all know that there things that can be said 
> in any one of these countries that cannot be said in the other two) 
> is not the point.  What can be argued, though, is that laws 
> limiting fredom of speech should be written with clarity and 
> precision and applied with consistency, and that is the issue with 
> the law on extremism.  It may also be a matter of concern that the 
> regulatory body on whose behalf the visitation was carried out is 
> part of the government appartus, which is not normally the case in 
> Western Europe.
> 
> We will presumably never know if this incident was inspired from on 
> high, though I would prefer to think that those whose job it is to 
> rule Russia had better things to do with their time than search 
> through scurrilous publications in foreign languages.  But if by 
> any chance it was, then the point is not whether Medvedev is more 
> or less 'liberal' than Putin, but that the current President of 
> Russia is, unlike his predecessor apparently, an avid user of the 
> Internet.
> John Dunn.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Leidy <leidy at STANFORD.EDU>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:12:56 -0700
> Subject: [SEELANGS] freedom of press in Russia
> 
> Dear SEELANG-ers,
> For those who haven't heard, the Russian government effectively 
> shut 
> down "The Exile," an English-language publication that has been a 
> fixture in Moscow for over 10 years. This is perhaps an 
> inauspicious 
> sign for those who were hoping for a "liberalizing" Medvedev.
> 
> The paper's editor-in-chief, Mark Ames, has written a couple of 
> blog 
> articles on how the process occurred, for those interested:
> http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/06/russian-government-press-
> feedom-putin-ames-medvedev.php
> http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/06/the-end-of-the-exile.php
> 
> There will also be an article tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal 
> about 
> the closure.
> 
> bill leidy
> 
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> 
> John Dunn
> Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
> University of Glasgow, Scotland
> 
> Address:
> Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
> 40137 Bologna
> Italy
> Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
> e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
> johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it
> 
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