Russian law to ban 'foreign' words

So lemme get this straight:  It's not okay when Ukraine, the only country in the world where Ukrainian is spoken, wants to protect its national language -- in fact it's "Fascism;" but it's just dandy when Russia discriminates against other languages -- going so far as to exorcise "foreign words" from public speech and writing!

This is worse than days of the Soviet Union, folks.  

Looking deeper, the fact that many commonly used terms simply don't exist in Russian reflects that the world's cultural, scientific and commercial dynamism is centered in the West... and eventually makes its way to Russia, where it is transliterated naturally by Russian first adopters who find it simpler to use the original word than invent a tongue-twisting Russian equivalent.  

Indeed, the casual use of foreign words is a status symbol among Russians; it implies the speaker is cosmopolitan, liberally educated, well-read and -traveled.  However, these are not the kind of folks the Kremlin likes: it wants Russians (minus the very elite, of course) to be parochial, state-educated, monolingual and stay at home.

Russia's Cultural Committee Wants to Ban 'Foreign' Words

June 19, 2014 | Moscow Times

URL: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russias-cultural-committee-wants-to-ban-foreign-words/502202.html

Yakov Smirnoff: Putin bringing back bad old Soviet days

No, Yakov Smirnoff is not dead, he's still doing comedy. And thanks to neo-Soviet autocrat Vladimir Putin, Smirnoff is making a comeback:

It's funny but the truth. It is an old, proven formula that dictators use: divide and conquer. It gets rid of all the things that might influence people. Then you're the sole source of information, and that's the key part of the plan. Putin is like a chess player. He understands that there are strategic moves he has to make and certain elements he needs to be able to control to have ultimate power, and the media is one of them. That's how the old Russian regimes -- Lenin, Stalin and all those guys with a unibrow -- were functioning at the time. 

I see the same thing that I grew up with starting to happen again in Russia. 

What a country!

How Putin's Russia Reminds Me of When I Was Censored by the Department of Jokes

By Yakov Smirnoff

June 10, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1kiojA3

Putin's blogger law to fight 'CIA project' known as 'the Internet'

Mr. Putin, calm down: everybody knows Al Gore invented the Internet, not the CIA!

Seriously though, the widely-made prediction is coming true that Russian militarism abroad will be accompanied by even more draconian, oppressive rule at home in the Motherland.

Viktor V. Yerofeyev, a Russian writer, told the New York Times, "On the one hand, the Russian government says the Russian people are the best. On the other hand, it doesn’t trust the people."

I can clarify. There's no contradiction. Putin trusts Russians in the abstract, collectively; he just doesn't trust them as individuals. Understand?  Similarly, Putin trusts Ukrainians, er, Novorrossiyans, but he's got 40,000 Russian troops on the border just to make sure no jackrabbits from Pravy Sector or Svoboda try to cross over and rape, pillage and burn their way to Moscow.

Seriously, it makes me sick that Putin is a guy many on the knee-jerk Left in the U.S. and Europe admire, simply because he stands up to Western "imperialism." If these outspoken lefties lived in Russia, Putin would have them breaking rocks and eating snow in Magadan.

P.S. -- My readership in Russia is second only to that in the U.S.  Does that mean I should register with the Russian gov't.?  Nah, I'm gonna stay anonymous.

Russia's New “Blogger Law” Forces Writers to Register With Government

By Taylor Berman

May 7, 2014 | Gawker

First curse words, now bloggers: On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law—referred to as the "blogger's law"—that will require online writers with more than 3,000 daily readers to register with the Roskomnadzor, Russia's media oversight agency.

Under the new law, which also affects microblogs and social networks, popular bloggers will no longer be able to remain anonymous and will be required to publish their names and email addresses.

From Reporters Without Borders:

[Bloggers] will be required to confirm the accuracy of the information they post, to respect the electoral law and to refrain from using swearwords. Using blogs and social networks to "hide or falsify information of general interest" or bring a citizen or group into disrepute will be forbidden. Such vaguely-worded bans are open to every kind of interpretation.

"This law will cut the number of critical voices and opposition voices on the Internet," Galina Arapova, director of the Mass Media Defense Center and an expert on Russian media law, told the New York Times. "The whole package seems quite restrictive and might affect harshly those who disseminate critical information about the state, about authorities, about public figures."

Putin signed the new law just weeks after denouncing the internet as a "CIA project."