Tag Archives: mike averko

The 5 Types of Russian American

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In my nearly 20 years experience as a Russian living in the West, I have found that almost all my fellows can be reduced to five basic types: 1) The White Russian; 2) The Sovok Jew; 3) The Egghead Emigre; 4) Natasha Gold-Digger; 5) Putin’s Expat.

My background and qualifications to write on this topic? My dad is an academic who moved to the UK with his family in 1994, i.e. an Egghead Emigre. Later on, I moved to California. Much of the Russian community in the Bay Area (though not Sacramento!) are in fact Russian Jews, who are culturally distinct from Russians, albeit the boundaries are blurred and there’s lots of intermingling though Russian cultural events. Topping off the cake, I have some White Russian ancestors, and am familiar with many of them as well as more recent expats via my hobby of Russia punditry.

I hope this guide will entertain American and Russian (and Jewish) readers interested in what happens when their cultures interact and fuse, as well as those very Russian Americans who will doubtless see traces of themselves in at least one of the five main archetypes.

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Arrived in: 1917-1920′s, 1945
Social origins: Clerks, Tsarist officials, aristocrats, White Army officers, philosophers.
Culturally related to: Earlier Orthodox Slavic migrants from the Russian Empire who came from 1880-1914, though White Russians proper are more sophisticated than them as they tended to be high class whereas former were peasants.
Political sympathies (US): Moderate conservatism
Political sympathies (Russia): Putin, Prokhorov

No, I’m not talking about Jeff Lebowski’s favorite cocktail. The White Russians (or “White emigres”) are the officers, officials, and intellectuals who fled their country after the Russian Revolution. Prominent examples included Zworykin (TV), Sikorsky (helicopters), and Nabokov (writer). They did not necessarily come to the US straight away: Many came via the great European cities, like Berlin, or Paris, where in the 1920′s, old White Army officers sat around dinghy bars, drowning their sorrows in drink and spending what remained of their money on cockroach racing. Some took more roundabout ways. One girl I know originated from Russian exiles in Harbin, Manchuria (mother’s side) and Brazil (father’s side) who met up and stayed in the US.

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Best Designed Russia Blogs

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Here is a 100% subjective list of the best (and worst) designed blogs in the Russia-watching blogosphere.

My main criteria for a well-designed blog include: ergonomics (fast load, little clutter, efficient search and archives); utility (easy navigation, explanatory information, contact, social network integration) and aesthetics. I will do my best to discount ideological bias.

This is a celebration of the efforts of individual bloggers, or at most small groups of bloggers, and as such I am excluding bigger organizations, or their affiliates, like Russia Today, Other Russia and The Power Vertical. Though they do not have to focus exclusively on Russia, it certainly must figure prominently – this is after all about the Best Designed Russia Blogs. Sorry, Registan. Finally, they must be alive and contain a substantial body of work, which rules out blogs like The Parallax Brief with its minimalist elegance.

That is all. Now clear the catwalk for the beauties…

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Twitter Terror: Unraveling the Unrest in Moldova

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Riding on the apathy of the masses, crony Communists rig the elections in a small, corrupt post-Soviet backwater to retain their iron grip on power. But their dastardly plans to crush democracy and draw benighted Moldova back into the Eurasian darkness are foiled by the heroic students of Chisinau.

Inspired by their boudiccan (and photogenic) figurehead Natalia Morari, heroine of past struggles against corrupt authoritarianism, they flutter out into the city center and Tweet their nation back into the light of Western iCivilization, toppling the old guard under a colorful cascade of fruits and flowers.

This is the kitschy Western narrative of color revolutions, in which electronic networking technologies marry the springtime national aspirations of peoples suppressed by corrupt satraps from Muscovy to produce a verdant and fertile liberal democracy – Atlantean outpost and bulwark against Eastern tyranny.

Yet one would have to wear rose-tinted spectacles (or read fantastic literature to excess) to subscribe to this interpretation. The Rose Revolution in Georgia withered away and died under the chill of Saakashvili’s quasi-authoritarian rule and the heat of aggressive war against Russia in summer 2008. Meanwhile, the Orange Revolution putrefied into mush, succumbing to the sickly moist of endemic chaos, corruption and economic decline that characterized Ukraine after 2005.

A dispassionate analysis of the “Grape Revolution” in Moldova reveals that its fruit was rotten from the beginning.

The Centrality of Romanian Nationalism in the Moldovan Opposition

Although it is true that many of the protesters were genuinely disaffected university students and migrants, it is also clear that certain elements were Romanian nationalists, liberast provocateurs and common hooligans.

The three parties which won 35% of the vote have a “distinct nationalistic flavor”, according to Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska writing in Moldova: Torn between the Communists and the far right1. The nationalists criticize the Communist plans to revise ethnic Romanian-centered history textbooks to better reflect Moldova’s multi-ethnic identity and extend the Holocaust interpretations taught in schools to include the role of Romanian collaboration, from its current limitation to the “German extermination of Jews and Roma”. They favor closer ties to and reunification with Romania.

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Russophile Core Articles

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This is a (continuously expanding) list of the articles that any serious Russia-watcher has to read if they wish to become acquainted with the Russophile worldview. I have hi-lighted the most important ones.

But first, the sources of reality-based, high quality information about Russia. Sublime Oblivion, by yours truly. And now, in no particular order… Eugene Ivanov runs a deeply informed, incisive and humorous political blog on Russia and the US at The Ivanov Report. Another excellent blog is Sean’s Russia Blog written by Sean Guillory – humorous, wide selection and eminently readable. He is an academic currently researching Soviet era youth groups.

Konstantin at Russian Blog and Fedia Krikov at Russia in the Media ran entertaining blogs dedicated to debunking Russophobic drivel, but unfortunately both seem to have died out due to ennui. Investor and published on the Truth and Beauty (…and Russian Finance) newsletter, Eric Kraus, is THE guy at economic and financial ground zero. Timothy Post is an American entrepreneur in Krasnodar, the Russian Riviera.

Nicolai Petro is a very insightful academic who sees evidence that Russia is forging its own democratic culture. Robert Hanh and the other folks who run Russia: Other Points of View make heroic efforts to, well, make other points of view available on Russia in the Western media’s culture of manufactured consent. Peter Lavelle is a highly original and eloquent journalist (not to mention a high paid propaganda master) working for Russia Today. The President of the Russian Federation, or False Dmitri as I like to call him, has a really cool motorcycle on his blog’s header. Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic who is published on numerous blogs.

The eXiled Online is extremely funny and irreverent in a wet fish around the face fashion, but aren’t focused on Russia like the old eXile. In La Russophobe Exposed, Steve J. Nelson explores the murky connections and financing deep within that hate blog’s reptilian layers. Stanislav Mishin’s blog Mat Rodina is a bit too hardcore Orthodox for me, but there is no doubt he is a great Russian-American patriot. Winthrop360 is a fine blog.

That’s it for the blogs. Now for the articles…

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