Travelling,
While trying to supress the immediate suspicion that you are one of Kim Zigfeld’s own minions if not Kim herself, let me attempt to address the causes of your dumbstruck awe.
Zigfeld maintains that the Moscow Times has buried its op-ed content. It has not. How do I know this? Because, unlike her, I pick up the newspaper daily and see perfectly well that it has done no thing. I can do that because I actually live in Moscow. She bases her flimsy argument exclusively on the piss-poor quality of the MT’s site, on which we are principally in some area of agreement.
Zigfeld also relates with wince-inducing glee that a small and scurrilous tabloid magazine in Moscow has been shut down. I say that she does so only out of personal animus for the eXile. She claims ridiculously that the eXile’s outrageous style is conducive to censorship and that it’s existence was therefore regrettable. If you are convinced by that logic, by all means stick to your line. You have to do so at the cost of any credibility, of course, but that’s a choice you seem to have made already on several fronts.
More generally, Zigfeld not living in Russia is by no means a cardinal sin, but it does mean that her understanding of contemporary developments in the country are grievously deficient. My point, one that I could illustrate fully only in an encyclopaedic post, is that she is anyway interested not in reporting reality but further persuading herself of her horrendously jingoistic and offensive views. I have no interest in your views on Iraq, but if they as preconceived and ill-informed as Zigfeld’s are about Russia, then you are quite welcome to them.
