Putin should shorten PR's sentences

"The band members were arrested in March after performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's main cathedral, pleading with the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from Vladimir Putin, who was elected to a third term as Russia's president weeks after the protest.

The Orthodox Church issued a statement Friday, calling on Russian authorities to show the women "mercy" within the framework of the law. 

The French news agency, AFP, reports that a telephone poll conducted by the Echo of Moscow radio station Saturday indicated 77 percent of listeners felt it was "impossible to agree with the verdict.""  VOA

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If Putin is clever he will seize the opportunity to demonstrate that he is no longer a Chekist..  pl

http://www.voanews.com/content/russia_facesa_criticism_over_band_sentence/1490646.html

Comments

[Walrus]

Fat chance of that.

[Tyler]

I'm not sure which is more amusing:

Whiny leftists finding out that actions indeed have consequences

OR

An impotent world body thinking for a moment that wearing a colored balaklava has any effect on a man who was once part of the First KGB Directorate.

[Jim Ticehurst]

"Chek"...They got "Putin" jail..those hooligans..He took this Personal..God knows what He really wanted to do with them...

[georgeg]

Colonel, for a minute I thought I was entering Huffington Post with their outward and blatant Russo-phobic headlines....are there not topics more relevant to discuss??...

[turcopolier]

gergeg

I choose the topics, not you. pl

[bth]

Does Putin prefers to be feared or loved? Feared I'd guess.

[The Twisted Genius]

If nothing else, Putin is clever. I remember reading early last week that Putin said something to the effect that the court shouldn't be too hard on the girls. (I can't find the reference.) He said this well prior to the verdict. At the time I thought that sly mudak was preparing the battlefield for a grand gesture. With the Orthodox Church's blessing, Putin can now arrive bare chested on his white horse and make his grand gesture. I'm sure Nashi will make the most of the event.

[optimax]

With a dead Bengal Tiger he killed with his bare hands draped over his shoulders.

[Paul Escobar]

TTG,

You are remembering Putin's words correctly.

Weeks before the verdict, Al-Jazeera English aired his exchange with reporters. In Russian, he did say that the verdict shouldn't be too hard. But in tone, he emphasized that there should be a verdict.

...

georgeg,

Two things can be true at one time.

To the MSM, Vlad Putin's the returning guest star on 'Two minutes of hate!". It's been tough, what with Osama being dead, Ahmadinejad in contract negotiations, and Hugo taking time off to fight cancer.

But to Russians, a three year prison-sentence is not the right way to deal with people who wake you up at church.

[b]

Only few Russians believe that Putin has a hand in this case. The Pussy Riots pissed off the Church and its believers, not Putin. Only 5% of the Russians are against punishing them.

Putin as well as the church have already asked the court to show some leniency.

The man has a 67% approval rating (July poll). Why then should he get involved in this case? Would the Washington Post editors and other anti-Russian talkers change their mind if he would?

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putins-popularity-on-the-rise-poll-says/462667.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/07/31/what-do-russians-think-about-pussy-riot-the-answer-might-surprise-you/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19104001

[CK]

The complete Machiavelli quote:
"This gives rise to an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the opposite. The answer is that one would like to be both, but since it is difficult to combine the two it is much SAFER to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to make way. For generally speaking, one can say the following about men: they are ungrateful, inconsistent, feigners and dissimulators, avoiders of danger, eager for gain, and whilst it profits them they are all yours. They will offer you their blood, their property, their life and their offspring when your need for them is remote. But when your needs are pressing, they turn away. The prince who depends entirely on their words perishes when he finds he has not taken any other precautions. This is because friendships purchased with money and not by greatness and nobility of spirit are paid for, but not collected, and when you need them they cannot be used. Men are less worried about harming somebody who makes himself loved than someone who makes himself feared, for love is held by a chain of obligation which, since men are bad, is broken at every opportunity for personal gain. Fear, on the other hand, is maintained by a dread of punishment which will never desert you."
Having a low opionion of most of man, Machiavelli counsels the safety of fear for the Prince's needs.

[Walrus]

Whiny leftists?

Does your hatred of the Left automatically make you approve of Putin?

[taras]

if nothing else, putin is never to be under-estimated in acting in the ultimate interests of the russian government.

[Basilisk]

As Felix Svetov once said of Chekists, "When the snow is falling, they will calmly tell you the sun is shining."

It was ever so, and nothing changes.

[Jose L Campos]

We Christians are fed up with the barrage of insults, offensive acts against our beliefs. Recently an Australian feminist group fed the Blessed Sacrament to a dog. There is in the Internet a video of a barebreasted Ukrainian woman sawing a crucifix that stood in a free space.
Yes I know we have to turn the other cheek but after many blows the cheeks disappear.
Putin ,I guess, correctly feels that he is surrounded by enemies, that all these manifestations of "free speech' are in reality tunnelings of the walls of the state in order to bring it down.
Putin has declared NGO's as foreign entities and has apparently forbidden 'gay pride" demonstrations for a number of years.
It is about time that reasonableness come to occupy the political space.

[turcopolier]

Jose L. Campos

"...all these manifestations of "free speech' are in reality tunnelings of the walls of the state in order to bring it down." You do realize that this blog can be interpreted in the same way? pl

[E L]

Cheka? I think Okhrana. Or its 17th century equivalent.

[Charles I]

And that Church has not been wholly the creature of the State & Security Services for the last century?

[Charles I]

We humans are fed up with the never ending barrage of believers demanding state sanction against those who don't believe twitting some of the ludicrous excrescences accumulated during their development is hate, or meriting state sanction, any more than it is rational for the state to impute religious motive to civil protest, and punish some mischief actus reus by incorporating religious parameters into offense and sentence.

It is about time that law and politics come to be the political space, while religion occupies your mind and sanctuaries.

[Charles I]

You're kidding, right? I mean, maybe he should, from here, But surely his pre-verdict comments are in fact his reduction of their sentences, from the maximum 7 years, to, as TTG notes, not to hard.

[Jose L Campos]

Well I hadn't thought about that because this blog has seemed to me to be respectful.

[David Habakkuk]

Basilisk,

It has sometimes been prudent to believe that – at other times not.

It certainly was, in relation to collectivisation. In early 1933, the journalist Gareth Jones came to my father’s chapel in Barry in South Wales – he was the son of the headmaster of the grammar school there – and gave an eyewitness account of the famine in the Ukraine. His reporting, which played a significant role in curing many in Britain of delusions about Stalinism, and shaped my father’s attitude to communism and thus my own, is now available on the web.

(See http://www.garethjones.org/ )

Reading it, I was fascinated to learn that when in an interview Maxim Litvinov denied the existence of the famine, Gareth Jones jotted down the single word ‘prevarication’ in his notebook.

Later the same decade, when Litvinov was the principal Soviet advocate of the strategy of ‘collective security’ against Hitler, many in the Western democracies – notably Neville Chamberlain and George Kennan – thought this was ‘prevarication’. In their view, opponents of appeasement, like the great American foreign correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who argued that only alliance between the democracies and the Soviet Union had any hope of ‘deterring’ Hitler, were seen by the Soviets as ‘useful idiots’.

In this reading of the Thirties – set out in detail in Kennan’s post-war writings – Litvinov was engaged in a cunning divide-and-rule strategy, whose objective was to exploit the naivety of people like Mowrer – and my father – to finesse Germany and the Western democracies into a fratricidal war. It was of course precisely this interpretation of Soviet diplomacy which underpinned the Munich agreement, and the subsequent unilateral British guarantee to Poland, which destroyed the last chance of averting the Second World War.

Half a century later, it was generally assumed that professed Soviet interest in nuclear disarmament was also a strategy of deception. After all, had not the eminent historian Richard Pipes of Harvard demonstrated that, although they had ceased to say so publicly, the Soviets continued to believe they could fight and win a nuclear war?

Among notable dissenters were the American scholar-diplomat Raymond Garthoff, and – to give him his service title – Commander Michael MccGwire, RN: probably the last representative, and certainly one of the more distinguished of a tradition in British naval intelligence which goes back to Room 40 in the Admiralty in 1914-18.

Precisely because they knew that Pipes was a charlatan who was out of his depth, from mid-1987 Garthoff and MccGwire were explaining that the so-called ‘new thinking’ introduced in the wake of Gorbachev’s accession was not a strategy of deception at all.

And they turned out to be absolutely right. Despite all the billions invested, the mainstream in American and British intelligence hadn’t a clue what was happening. A conspicuous exception, as to my regret I only learned years later, was a very fine scholar by the name of Dr Joseph W. Kipp, who did open source intelligence at the U.S. Army’s Soviet Army Studies Office, and later headed its successor, the Foreign Military Studies Office.

Perhaps if he had been at Harvard, rather than Pipes, much confusion would have been averted.

[turcopolier]

Jose L. Campos

I am by rearing a person who tries to be respectful, but if you are a neocon, a Zionist, an Islamist, a communist (there are a few left), then there is nothing respectful about this blog or me. This is in the eye of the beholder. Only the constitution protects me. pl

[turcopolier]

Charles I

Say what? No. It is one thing to compprehend the societal and political situations of others and to learn to deal with them on the basis of the possible. It is another to acquiesce and make excuses for tyranny and bigotry. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

I think that the forced collectivization of Soviet Agriculture was the most significant decision in defeating Axis Powers.

Without forced capital accumulation extracted from unwilling Soveit Peasants, the very rapid industrialization of Soveit Union would not have been possible. And without that industrial base, the Third Reich would have been with us today without any doubt.

One has to judge, as a humn being, the Lives of Soviet Pesants (and later the 25 million dead of USSR) againt the Defeat of the Axis in World War II.

Would surrender have been a better choice?

In regards to Litvinov's mission; the French Government was definietly interested. It was the English that did their best to make it fail. The English leaders, in my opinion, was in fact angling for a war between USSR and the Third Reich. And indeed until late Fall of 1939, the Imperial General Staff's war plans was for a war with USSR and not Germany.

There is a saying in Persian: "A heretic thinks everyone else is of his creed."

That explain why the English leaders read a mission of "Divide and Conquer" in Litvinov's project; in my opinion.

In an alternate Universe, World War II would not have occured.

But would in that alternte Universe the European people still be lording over the rest of mankind in East Asia, in India, in the Middle East, an in Africa?

"The moving hand writes, and having writ moves on..."