The Kremlin's Online Commentariat

Nearly a decade ago, the cover of the Atlantic Monthly featured a close-up of a gaunt Russian policeman, or was it a soldier, his eyes obscured by his cap, the words “Russia is finished” emblazoned around his waist.

Reading Jeffrey Tayler's unreflective, misguided, naive and offensive tirade at my home country, I felt angry and alone, like I was the only person on earth who sat hunched over the magazine with a red pen, futilely rebutting his facile middle-brow liberal orthodoxy and sneering orientalism, (regarding his notion of the Russians’ “oriental tradition of hospitality toward strangers”, I’d have liked to extend to Tayler the Russian hospitality of my pen towards his face!)

Of course, one glance at any issue of The Exile, or any article by Stephen Cohen, or, for that matter, one minute speaking with a genuine Russian person who had not been parachuted into the country in 1993 as had been the article's author, would have persuaded any sane reader of Tayler's inextricable troglodytism.

But what frustrated me was that the sane, educated, middle-brow liberal readers of The Atlantic, interested mainly in literary short stories but with an occasional taste for well written non-fiction exoticism, did not generally read the Exile or hang out with impoverished babushkas: the poor suckers would swallow Tayler's nonsense hook line and sinker!

So long as the Russian experience continued to be filtered for the West through the eyes of such eloquent morons, I fumed, there could be no hope of challenging their noxious paradigms except in the margins.

How times have changed!

Tayler's article was all about Russia spiraling into an abyss of organised crime and political authoritarianism (without ever acknowledging the true sources of this decline). So I was very curious to find a very similar article in yesterday's Boston Globe, an editorial entitled “Murder Incorporated in Russia”.

Except this time, the article about Russia as “a Mafia petrostate crouching behind a Potemkin democracy” featued a comments section, with 7 comments, each of them containing eerie Slavic grammatical idiosyncrasies.

For example, “Egorsha” writes:

Funny that you refer to Litvinenko case where the British, not Russian authorities simply refused to cooperate with the Russian investigation, refused to hold trial in Russia and instead absolutely impudently DEMANDED to change Russian Constitution prohibiting extradiction of Russian citizens.

Here is “1000119”:

The article is political manipulation on a murder. Well, what do you feel when children, young people kill other pupils and students in U.S. schools and universities? How can this country be called? I’m simply wondering..

and “Ragozzi”:

I’m not saying that human rights are crap in general, but I think that too much freedom is bad. It is the cause of degradation, demoralization and decadence. It's happening in America and I wouldn't want to see that in Russia. State controlled economics and politics is the only right way for Russia.

And last but not least, “Strukov”:

Who is the Boston Globe to judge anyone. The fact is that the media should report the facts, not try to sway public opinion with their biased version. You need only look at how the so called “free press” is in the tank for Obama. If Col. Budanov were a black guy on death row in Pennsylvania for killing a cop in Philly, the Globe would be leading the parade to get him out. I hope Russia gives America and Europe the big finger as much as possible.

These comments are very reminiscent of similar recent “pro-Russian” threads on The Guardian's articles about the Litvinenko case, and all feature the same hallmarks: virulent pro-Russia jingoism packaged in mostly-fluent right-wing and anti-West diatribes.

I should be happy to finally see “the Russian side” getting a voice in the Western media, finally doing what I longed to do in 2001, but the tone and content of it all make me a little queasy. I’m not saying that some sort of KGB ‘psy-ops’ team is trawling the internet for rebuttal opportunities, but maybe it is.

Whoever they are, the commenters are doing much more harm than good, and it is part of a trend. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin is not interested in true understanding with the west: why else would they have closed down the Exile, a paper consistently, compassionately and critically bringing the Russian side of the story as a powerful antidote to the Taylerian drivel in the Western press, a paper that has been the biggest ally of the ordinary Russian and the biggest critic of spineless US academic ‘Kremlinology’?

There are plenty of well-reasoned and compelling arguments with which to discredit the Western narratives about the new Russia, yet inexplicably, the very people engaged with that have been replaced with the likes of ‘Ragozzi’: authoritarian bullies who serve only to validate those flawed stereotypes.

Instead of an intelligent debate that could finally achieve understanding between Russia and the west, we seem to have leapt from the frying pan of Western journalistic malpractice into the fire of Russian state propaganda.