I am a friend of Yuri Mamchur, the publisher of Russia Blog and director of the Real Russia Project. Since he will not dignify some of the false things that have been said about him online and thus feed the trolls with a response, I will. I am using a pseudonym, as Pajamas Media blogger Wretchard once did, because I do not think real people using their real names should have to wrestle with anonymous cranks who deride and seek to ruin their good names online. For a real person using their real name to argue with an anonymous detractor is the Internet age equivalent of wrestling with a greasy pig.
Over at Little Green Footballs, they’re quoting “La Russophobe”, an anonymous troll that unfortunately is published on Pajamas Media, as an authority on Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project and its website, Russia Blog. Mr. Fernandez has permalinked to Russia Blog and has occasionally cited it here. The author of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, strongly dislikes the Discovery Institute, a small Seattle-based think tank, for its position advocating “intelligent design” as an alleged alternative to evolution. Regardless of how one feels about these scientific and culture war issues, they have nothing, zilch, to do with Russia or the Real Russia Project, except that Mr. Mamchur works in the same building as the ID folks and has the name of their think tank on his website. One would search Russia Blog in vain for the slightest mention of intelligent design or its advocates.
For the record, “La Russophobe” has never provided the slightest evidence that they have travelled to Russia or speak Russian. By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other sites. For her, if Yuri Mamchur of Discovery Institute claims to have a degree from the Russian Tax Academy of Law, and this university cannot be found using an ENGLISH language Google search, then Mr. Mamchur’s degree is presumably fake and this institution does not exist. Naturally, La Russophobe did not correct her false post about Mr. Mamchur upon being confronted with the Russian-language website of the Russian Tax Academy of Law, a Moscow institution that has existed for many decades. For La Russophobe, only a mailed diploma and dozens of other pieces of evidence would suffice, but alas, Mr. Mamchur did not care to send documentation to an anonymous troll who did not provide so much as a P.O. box. Would you?
La Russophobe’s pattern, like that of any troll, is to always put the burden of proof on real people using their real names and always ask “have you stopped beating your wife lately” type questions. This was one reason why after two posts on Russia Blog in 2006, “Kim Zigfield” was banned from the forum. Kim Zigfield and her sock puppets were also banned for demanding that the editors of Russia Blog fact check and rebut every single comment made toward her or against her, as well as engaging in schoolyard insults of anyone who disagreed with her. This is akin to demanding that Wretchard or any other blogger who gets hundreds of comments a week read and respond personally to every single one, a physical impossibility for any sane person with a life outside of blogging (even Charles Johnson). At the time that Kim Zigfield was banned, this person also claimed, to the great amusement of Russian readers of Russia Blog from Siberia to St. Petersburg, that she could not find powdered cane sugar in Russia and that it probably still did not exist in the country, along with many other basic consumer staples.
Little Green Footballs “lizardoids” have cited La Russophobe’s claim that the Real Russia Project, the program of Discovery Institute which publishes Russia Blog, is somehow affiliated with Russia Today TV, a Moscow-based, Russian government funded English language news channel that was launched in 2006 to give Russia its own equivalent of Al-Jazeera. Russia Blog has occasionally reposted Russia Today’s videos, but otherwise there is no evidence for this claim, and in fact, there is no affiliation. As for Russia Blog’s connections with David Johnson, a Maryland-based Russophile who maintains a very large email listserv on Russia, like Richard Fernandez, Mr. Johnson simply picks up Russia Blog content when he chooses to do so. There is no affiliation other than the occasional back and forth email, and Mr. Johnson often posts articles harshly critical of Russia and its present leadership. So has Mr. Mamchur, but like Time magazine, that other notorious pro-Kremlin publication, Mamchur has decided to give some credit where credit is due for the positive economic changes that have taken place in Russia these past few years.
La Russophobe implies that Russia Blog is part of a Kremlin-backed propaganda effort in the U.S., and Charles Johnson says its articles “read like a press release from the Kremlin”. But who backs La Russophobe? Obviously it is a fulltime job, and not just the hobby of someone living in New York City, a very expensive place to spend hours every day on a hobby.
While the Real Russia Project does not publish the names of its donors to prevent them from being harassed by the likes of La Russophobe, anyone can read their public list of fellows/advisors and see that it includes several Seattle-Tacoma U.S. citizens who happen to have longstanding business ties to Russia. George Russell, for example, has run one of the leading institutional money management firms in America since the 1960s and serves on the board of the East-West Institute. William T. Robinson, a Bellevue, WA-based attorney who advises the Real Russia program, has been travelling to Russia and advising Russian, American and third country clients operating in that country since 1989. Mr. Robinson’s portfolio includes extensive work in the Far East, and not just the elite hubs of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
On the academic side, Profs. Nicolai Petro and Herbert Ellison were advisors to the Bush 41 administration during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other advisors, contributors, and fellows are American or Russian businessmen currently doing business in that part of the world. These are the alleged backers of a sinister, pro-Kremlin agenda.
Or could it be…that maybe these people, most of whom have strong conservative or Republican credentials, simply want the U.S. to stop poking Russia in the eye with one hand while extending the other out for Russian capital? Could it be, that they view the Real Russia Project as basically one of the few voices of sanity in a landscape dominated by anti-Russian, knee-jerk, Cold War thinking? Is Russia Blog the only source out there questioning whether the U.S. needs to get involved in the Caucuses while fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it the only source saying that maybe a missile defense system designed to counter Iranian missiles would work better somewhere closer to Iran than Poland?
As for funding and what kind of PR is being bought by foreigners in the U.S. – why does no one ask about the Carnegie Endowment’s funding in recent years, which included Mr. Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank? Why did no one raise an eyebrow when Tom Lantos hosted a party on Capitol Hill in Khodorkovsky’s honor, at the same time that his chief of security, Oleg Pichugin, was being tried for contract killings in Russia? Is it or is not a problem that Randy Scheuneumann, McCain’s closest advisor on the Russia-Georgia conflict, until a few months ago, was a lobbyist for the Georgian government? And should the Obama campaign and former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson be denounced “as taking the Kremlin line” for bringing this up? Are we headed for a new round of McCarthyism in this country?
If you want to start a McCarthyite witch hunt against the U.S.-Russia Business Council, or anyone else who is doing business with Russia and perhaps might want to see us pursue a different foreign policy toward them – well – you’re going to have to invite the Secretary of Treasury and Deputy Secretary of Treasury to answer before Congress, since they have asked Russia to invest more of its sovereign wealth funds in the U.S., and $50 billion of that went into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If McCain wants to fire people for ties to Russia, how about the Pentagon procurement folks using Russian Antonovs to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? You see where this is going. Do you really want to know how deep our real ties go, while we play all these stupid Cold War BS games on the surface?
Finally, are the Lizardoids any better than the Krazy Kos Kidz they deride when it comes to spinning conspiracy theories and engaging in crazy speculation? My thought is no.
