Russia’s Rodina (Motherland) TV series was meant to be a knock-off of the popular American TV series Homeland – the psychological drama about love, loyalty and betrayal featuring a CIA analyst and a treacherous US marine returning home after a horrific captivity (Homeland is in fact based on a lesser known Israeli series).
But the final product was neither here nor there. It has been mocked by critics for its failure to delve into the complex and unsavory aspects of hyper-patriotism, and it has been snubbed by nationalists for its portrayal of “traitors.”
The series, shown on Russian state television, transferred the plot to Russia in the late 1990s, with the hero/traitor returning home after several years in prison (in vaguely explained circumstances) in the North Caucasus. Director Pavel Lungin hired some of Russia’s top stars, including Vladimir Mashkov (as Major Alexei Bragin) and Sergei Makovetsky. In the finale of the first season, Bragin goes to a Kremlin event wearing a suicide belt.
“Can someone explain to me what this film is about?” wrote Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, a powerful man known for his anti-Western rants, on Twitter. “What does this have to do with that sacred word for every Russian, ‘Motherland’? Why take a plot so far removed from us… and try to fit it into our already complicated life?”
Independent critics scoffed: “Why does Russia carbon copy an American series after declaring it the devil incarnate?” wrote Irina Petrovskaya of Novaya Gazeta. In Moskovsky Komsomolets, Alexander Melman wrote that the series shows that “we don’t differ from them (the Americans) one bit: our security services are the same, our psychosis, and our motherland is mother one moment and stepmother the next.”
Proving the maxim that the only bad publicity is no publicity, the Rossiya channel is raking in profits from the series: it is the network’s biggest success of the past two years.
The Kremlin has ended its contract with its longtime US publicity firm Ketchum, which sought to embellish Putin’s (and Russia’s) image in the West. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was a cost-cutting measure in a time of economic crisis. He added, however, that “the de-facto information war against Russia is not conducive to the efforts of image-building,” suggesting that such efforts would be put on hold until the return of “an atmosphere that is more conducive.”
Ketchum enlisted Western journalists and EU officials in its image building efforts and worked to promote Russia at global forums like the G20, organizing interviews and meetings, as well as helping out during the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. But the PR firm found itself between a rock and a hard place as Russia’s relations with the West hit a post-Cold War low in the aftermath of the Crimea annexation.
Figure skater Elizaveta Tukta-mysheva, 18, has won Russia its first World Championship gold medal in a decade. Tuktamysheva, who hails from Udmurtia, wowed the judges in Shanghai, despite not making the Russian team for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (after a long absence from the ice due to injury and poor results last year).
Tuktamysheva has been skating since an early age and is one of the few women who can perform the challenging triple axel, giving her program greater scoring potential. Second place went to Japan’s Satoko Miyahara and the bronze to another Russian, Elena Radionova, 16.
All eyes were on riotous football fans this March after a flare thrown from the stands at a Euro 2016 qualifying match in Montenegro hit Russian goalie Igor Akinfeyev of CSKA Moscow. In footage from the match, Akinfeyev is seen falling to the ground after a blow to the back of the head. The game was suspended and the 28-year-old Akinfeyev was taken to the hospital. The match resumed later, but then was terminated when the crowd continued to cause trouble. Russia demanded in a complaint to UEFA that its team be awarded the win.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the football (soccer) front, thirteen US senators have signed a letter to FIFA calling for the 2018 World Cup to be taken away from Russia due to its “dismemberment” of Ukraine.
Less than a month after the one-year anniversary of the March 16, 2014 Crimean referendum on joining Russia, the peninsula’s authorities have overseen the shutdown of key media determined to be hostile to the new Russian government.
The ATR channel, which catered to the Crimean Tatar minority and was vehemently pro-Ukrainian during last year’s Maidan protests and the region’s annexation, was denied a Russian broadcasting license, while its old license expired on April 1. The channel, which of late toned down its coverage to adhere to Russian laws, has stopped broadcasting, despite numerous protests, including in Turkey, home to a sizeable Crimean Tatar diaspora.
The company that owns ATR was the main producer of media in the Crimean Tatar language, the language of 13 percent of the peninsula’s population. Crimean Tatars, like the indigenous, non-Russian peoples in the Caucasus, were brutally deported from their homeland in 1944, accused of collaborating with the Nazi occupiers. They were unable to return until the late 1980s, a return that was wrought with tensions because Russians had long since moved into their homes. The destruction of their primary media outlet is likely to make the Crimean Tatar community even less sympathetic to Russian rule.
A debate is raging in Moscow over whether the capital should erect a giant statue of Prince Vladimir in its picturesque Vorobyov Hills – a park in the southwest that affords a beautiful panoramic view of the city and the Moscow River.
The idea for the 25-meter-tall monument has been lobbied for by a group that includes clergy and the patriotic Night Wolves biker club, which is known to have close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The Moscow City Duma has already approved the monument, but local residents said they worry that the statue’s weight might disturb the hill’s unstable grounds and clash with the architecture of Moscow State University – the area’s major landmark.
Vladimir is known as the leader who “baptized” ancient Rus in 988 (by converting to Christianity) and who ruled it from Kiev.
A viral YouTube video has stirred scandal by white-washing Russia’s occupation of the former Soviet Union. The slick film – about two and a half minutes long – shows a flickering set of graphic images with a confident deep male voice-over that begins with “Hello, I am a Russian occupier,” and proceeds to present Russia’s takeover of territories in centuries past as a quest for modernization.
As a result of this occupation, Siberia, for example, now produces oil and its women are no longer “sold for a bundle of furs.” The video claims Russian occupiers industrialized the Baltic nations, some of whose residents, after independence from Soviet rule, switched to “cleaning toilets in Europe.” At the end, the voice says he doesn’t need “rotten ‘democracy’” or “Western values.” “I have different interests,” the video says, showing Russian tanks and the symbol of the Russian military. “Last warning: don’t mess with me. I am building peace, but I can fight better than anyone else.”
While the video’s creators are a PR company, it was not clear who ordered its production. One of the creators, Yury Degtyarev, told the AFP news agency that his clients were “close to the ruling party.” Very quickly, it was retweeted by Russia’s deputy prime minister for defense, Dmitry Rogozin. It was also conspicuously timed to go viral on the one-year anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in late February, when heavily armed Special Forces contingents were brought to the peninsula and proceeded to raise Russian flags over key buildings. Later it was shown in its entirety on Russia’s Channel One during a talk show, with most guests lauding the video.
The propaganda war between Russia and Ukraine is a dynamic one, and so a video reply was released by Kiev’s “information troops” department ten days later. Featuring the same music and a similar husky voice, it offers an “uncensored” version, saying that the per capita GDP in the Baltics is higher than in Russia, that Siberia and Central Asia were killing fields, that the latter was used as a nuclear testing ground, anti-Soviet protests were brutally repressed, that Russia suffered devastating losses in WWII, and made an embarrassing pact with Hitler. “But you don’t know history, so I’ll keep talking about Russia’s victories,” the video says.
Watch both versions here:
Russian version (with subtitles):
bit.ly/occupant_rus
Ukrainian version (no subtitles):
bit.ly/occupant_ukr
Internet-savvy dog lovers in Russia have launched a project to connect lonely city residents with shelter dogs. Called “Dog Dating,” the start-up is like a dating website that has pictures of dogs and a description of their personality.
There are a great number of stray dogs in Russia and most shelters are understaffed, which means dogs sit by themselves and get lonely, the website’s creators say, so they are inviting visitors to take a couple of hours to walk a dog in the park, even if they can’t take the animal home. The project works with several shelters in Moscow, Moscow Oblast, and St. Petersburg.
VALENTIN RASPUTIN, one of Russia’s most famous modern writers of fiction and nonfiction, and a leader in the “village prose” movement, has passed away at 77. Born in a Siberian village to a peasant family, Rasputin graduated from Irkutsk University. His first break as a writer of fiction came when a short story published in the newspaper where he worked drew attention.
Rasputin wrote about Soviet Siberia and the strains Soviet industrialization put on rural Russia. His characters were often products of industrial change and urbanization, struggling after having been uprooted from their land, for instance after their villages were flooded by the creation an enormous Siberian dam.
Although he opposed large-scale projects like the damming of the Angara river or the diversion of Siberian rivers to Asia, he remained a committed Communist, opposing perestroika and later embracing the conservative values of Putin’s regime and the Orthodox Church. A recipient of top Soviet literary awards, Rasputin’s best known works are Farewell to Matyora and the short story French Lessons, both of which inspired movies.
BORIS NEMTSOV, a leading opposition figure, was murdered while walking across a bridge near the Kremlin in late February. Nemtsov’s brutal assassination, executed in a closely-monitored area, immediately evoked murmurs of a Kremlin conspiracy. While two suspects were arrested a few days after the killing, the masterminds behind the plot are still at large.
Nemtsov trained as a physicist in Nizhny Novgorod and wrote over two dozen papers, but he soon became a popular and effective politician, winning a seat to the 1989 Congress of People’s Deputies on a reformist platform, then serving as governor of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast from 1991-1997. He became a protégé of Boris Yeltsin and was a youthful, optimistic face of change. A young reformer with a quick smile, he was the polar opposite of the sort of staid bureaucrat Soviets were used to.
He moved to Moscow in 1997 to serve as deputy prime minister, and continued to enjoy popular support. At one point Yeltsin introduced Nemtsov to then President Bill Clinton as his chosen successor. But Nemtsov’s Kremlin career abruptly ended with the 1998 economic crash, as he was closely associated with the president’s reform team.
When the presidential nod went to Putin in 2000, Nemtsov became Putin’s arch foe, criticizing him in parliament, on television, and, when the opposition was denied access to those venues, on the streets and in pamphlets. At the time of his murder, he was working on a report about the involvement of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. His colleagues announced they would publish it in April.
He was 55 years old.
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