#russian emigration

[russianreader]

Alexander Podrabinek: Opposition Politicians Must Live in Russia to Do Their Jobs

Alexander Podrabinek in 1980 The recent prisoner swap has suddenly and quite vividly clarified the emotions and motives of the militant segment of the Russian emigration. Those who did photography in the old days will remember how you would dip a blank sheet of photographic paper into developer and gradually an image would appear on it. At first, the image would be vague, just outlines, but then…

[thoughtlessarse]

Russia is an anomaly when it comes to migration. The typical pattern for migrants is to leave their home country in search of a wealthier landing spot to move up the prosperity ladder. The opposite has occurred in Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the country has lost a stream of its best and brightest, who fled to poorer states in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In yet another anomalous twist, Russia of late has been pushing out Central Asian labor migrants that it badly needs. The deportation of Tajiks picked up pace in the aftermath of the March concert hall terrorist attack. The forced departure of guest workers, along with the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians since 2022, hits Russia where it hurts most: the tight labor market. Russia has too few workers. While Central Asian muscle builds houses, many Russian emigrants were IT workers or entrepreneurs that powered Russia’s knowledge economy. It is the skill set of these departed Russians, and where they moved, that makes this exit so shocking from an international perspective. According to a 2020 IMF report, most migrants leave a developing or emerging economy for a better life in an advanced one. Refugees generally do not have jobs and flee conflict or war at home to find haven in a (usually) poor neighbor. In contrast, it is rare to see highly skilled workers leave en masse from advanced to less developed economies. This is one reason why the self-designation of relokanty, or relocated people, as the latest wave of Russian emigres are called, is apt. They do not fit the classic definition of migrant or refugee. Many in the first wave in February-June 2022 objected to the Ukraine War and expected to return soon, leaving pets behind. The second wave, after the partial mobilization in September 2022, was comprised mostly of men who did not want to fight in Ukraine. The first port of entry was mainly Georgia and Kazakhstan, which share a border with Russia and lack visa or passport requirements. Compared to the diverse background of 1990s Russian migrants, both waves of relokanty were comprised of highly educated urban youth, mostly male. To paraphrase sociologist Cynthia Buckley, bad politics today makes for bad demographics tomorrow. Both the battlefield loss of young men and their flight from Russia has created a ticking demographic time bomb.   

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[dogandcatcomics]

New Yorker cover, February 12, 1966, by Anatol Kovarsky (New York City, USA, b. Russia, 1919-2016). I appreciate the illustrations of many varieties of dogs.

[the-first-man-is-a-cat]

Emigrant family to the United States from Russia at Ellis Island, 1905. Photographed by Lewis Hine.

[meyerlansky]

it does make me laugh seeing film bros (gn) get their feathers ruffled over literally any part of goncharov because like

for all that people are complaining that it doesn't make sense as a scorsese work, as a product of the given time frame, as a cohesive piece of [fake] media, no one involved in any of this understands how organized crime itself works, MUCH LESS the specific flavors involved in cross-ethnic organized crime a la a russian gangster in naples would work in the first place

but you don't see me with my masters degree in inter-ethnic cooperation in organized crime tearing that shit apart, because i know how to have fun

[3cosmicfrogs]

our beloved northern accent vs. their disgusting Standard Literary

[hotgirllectorium]

imagine waking up and seeing news that owner of a private war company (WHICH ARE ILLEGAL, BTW) seized two cities in your country and demands your minister of defence in exchange for the cities. fuck me, man

[sunw00d]

heiy hi it is beny but im from my main blog to send images and like . stay Safe w the russia things ya ??? queer ppl so hot we r never going anywhere and things will get better and ya :-) im asumign ur in russia mabey ur not STAY SAFE ANYWAY that is a direvt Threat

im being fuckign threatened !!!!!!!!!! runs Away

[ocean-sailor]

Ray Dalio on the rise and fall of nations and the changing world order.

There is hope imo but only if we work together and become more aware of malicious disinformation.

[yugotrash]

dont cancel me for it but i think i like this current wave of russian émigrés in belgrade even less than the previous one

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

”VERIGIN DECIDES TO LEAVE CANADA,” Kingston Whig-Standard. February 27, 1933. Page 10. ---- Will Not Say in Which Country He Intends to Settle ---- HALIFAX, Feb, 27 - "I am starting Just one month in Canada to finish up my affairs: then I am leaving." Peter Verigin said last night in an interview with the Canadian Press, the first he has been permitted to give since his release from prison a month ago. His English vocabulary limited to a few terse phrases, the spiritual leader of Canada's Doukhobor colonies spoke through an interpreter, S. F. Reiben, his personal secretary.

Verigin, free for the first time since he entered Prince Albert Prison more than nine months ago to serve a sentence for perjury, revealed his intended departure as he considered his next move following his discharge by Mr. Justice Humphrey Mellish in Supreme Court Saturday. He had been under a deportation order to Russia which was declared Invalid.

The Doukhobor monarch will not return to Canada. He possesses passports to Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina and Uruguay. He was going, he said, to "look for land" for his people, but he would not say in which of these countries, if any, he proposed to settle. Nor would he state whether he would take his 16,000 followers with him. This information he held as a "secret between himself and God."

[russianreader]

They Don't Stay in Their Lane

Bizarre Beasts, “Tenrecs Will Not Stay in Their Lane” If all crustaceans “want” to look like crabs, then tenrecs “want” to look like basically any other small mammal. These weird little guys are endemic to Madagascar—they’re native to nowhere else on Earth. Source: Bizarre Beasts (YouTube), 7 April 2023. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the link and the BBC Radio 4 programme “Nature Table” for…

[trendynewsnow]

Polling Day in Moldova: A Critical Choice for EU Membership and Leadership

Polling Day in Moldova: A Pivotal Moment for the Nation Polls have officially opened across Moldova, as voters face two critical choices: selecting their next president and deciding whether the country should pursue membership in the European Union. Regardless of their political affiliations, most Moldovans share a common desire for improved wages and a higher quality of life. However, public…

[jovialbasementbouquetblr]

2023: A Russian Perspective on China-Russia Relations

Sampling domestic opinion pieces in foreign language press is interesting since you get an internal perspective rather than the foreign propaganda bias in pieces intended for a foreign audience. Recent improvements in machine translation — the DeepL Chrome browser plugin/extension, DeepL, ChatGPT or Google Translate are all useful tools — make it much easier to do extensive reading in foreign…

[fdelopera]

Yo Goyim! Looks like I'm going to need to give some of you a crash course on what antisemitic language looks like, because I've been seeing entirely too much of it from some of you here on Tumblr.

Now, I think it's time for a Jewish history lesson, because I've been seeing way too many Nazi-related conspiracy theories going around. If you hear contradictions to the basic information that I am about to share (i.e., if you hear someone saying that the Jewish people are "a race that originated in Europe"), it is likely that you are hearing a white supremacist, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

So, here's the basics of Jewish history. Jews are indigenous to the Levant have been there for thousands of years. The Levantine people that Jews descended from have been in that area of the Levant since the Bronze Age. Jews as a distinct people have been there since the Late Bronze Age. Before it was Palestine it was the Kingdom of Judah, then Judea, and then Judaea, and that is literally where we are from. The word Jew means "a person from the Kingdom of Judah." The Romans renamed the area Syria-Palaestina (which they borrowed from the Greek name Palestina) in the 2nd century CE after destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem and leading another campaign to try to eradicate the Jewish people (guess what, we're still here, motherfuckers).

And even after the Romans tried to annihilate us, even after they scattered many of us into European diaspora, many Jews came back, again and again over the ages, and there have nearly always been Jewish communities in the region throughout history.

And if you come for me or try to dispute any of this history with white supremacist bullshit, I am a Jew who has studied way more Jewish history than you. And as politely as possible, you can take your white supremacist conspiracy theories and fuck off into the sun.

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's get into it!

Gloves are coming off, because this is just a sampling of the Nazi dogwhistles I've been seeing here on Tumblr about the Jewish civilians who were tortured, murdered, and worse:

- If you say shit like, "The Jews got what they deserved"...

GUESS WHAT? You're talking like a white supremacist, and you need to fucking check yourself.

- And if, on the other hand, you say shit like, "The reports were probably overblown. I think those were paid actors. I don't think those Jews were murdered. No Jewish children were killed. No Jewish bodies were desecrated" blahblahblah...

GUESS WHAT? You get to sit with the Nazis at their table for lunch.

- If you tell Jews "go back to Europe where you came from"...

GUESS WHAT? Not only are you telling the descendants of Jewish refugees to go back to the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the Nazi gas chambers, as I explained in this post, but you are also repeating a white supremacist conspiracy theory about the origins of European Jews.

Jews are a Levantine people from the area of the Middle East currently called Israel (formerly called the Kingdom of Judah, and then Judea). While there was some emigration to Europe during the late Roman Republic and the early days of the Roman Empire, the first mass migration of Jews to Europe was a forced migration. Gentiles from the Roman Empire dragged us there as captives after 70 CE, the year Rome destroyed the Second Temple.

- And if you're telling yourself that there are "good Jews" and "bad Jews," and those Jewish civilians were "bad Jews," so they deserved to be tortured and killed...

GUESS WHAT? You're spouting white supremacist ideology.

Antisemitism takes a long time to deprogram.

A lot of gentiles grow up with anti-Jewish ideology that they have never questioned.

And a lot of Christians are kept ignorant about Jewish history because preachers and priests fear it would make Christians question the many inaccuracies in the Bible.

But the first step in noticing antisemitic beliefs is to notice when you start singling people out *because* they are Jewish.

And I have been seeing some of you gleefully celebrating the murder of Jewish civilians *because* they are Jewish.

And that is antisemitism.

That is one step closer to the next generation of Jews getting shoved into the gas chambers. And there are only 16 million of us left in the entire world. We're 0.2% of the world's population. And we cannot afford another Holocaust.

And if your response to me saying that is, "Well, those Jews deserve it."

Guess what. You are making it easier for Nazis and white supremacists to spread hatred and commit acts of violence against Jewish people. And you will have to live with that blood on your conscience.

So...

If you are a gentile, and you see other gentiles repeating these kinds of white supremacist dogwhistles about Jewish people, here's how you can help:

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Help them direct their focus away from attacking random Jewish people online and towards helping Palestinians.

Actions that people can take right now are contributing to verified charities and relief organizations that help the people of Gaza. Only donate to organizations that are verified by CharityNavigator.org and CharityWatch.org.

2. Call that shit out. Tell people that they're being antisemitic, and explain that Jew-hatred is dangerous to Jewish people. Antisemitism gets Jews attacked and it gets Jews killed. In the US, many synagogues require round the clock security to protect against white supremacists who want to murder Jews. In Pittsburgh, my old home town, a group of Nazis from north of the city planned the murder of Jewish congregants at Tree of Life Synagogue, and so far only one of them (the gunman) has been arrested and convicted of the murders. The others are still at large.

3. Explain to them that it is antisemitic to celebrate someone's death *because* they're Jewish. ALSO, it is antisemitic to blame a random Jewish person for the actions of ANY government, whether that be the Israeli Government or the US Government.

4. Explain to people that they're not going to solve this conflict by posting antisemitic statements and memes online. All they will do is alienate the Jewish people in their lives and make those Jews feel scared and unsafe. And they will contribute to this current wave of antisemitism.

Antisemitic hatred doesn't help Palestinians. All it does is put Jewish people around the world in danger.

[determinate-negation]

"Jewish Marxists have always rejected Zionism. In 1906, a leading member of the Bund published this polemic in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy. "A national economy would mean a territory where the Jewish people — and in the capitalist mode of production: the Jewish bourgeoisie — form the majority and oppress peoples who are in the minority, just as they have been oppressed until now." "Do the Zionist socialists intend to introduce … exceptional laws for immigrant, non-Jewish workers?"

Many people claim that Zionism and Judaism are identical, as if the Jewish people, for thousands of years, had obviously longed to return to Jerusalem. Yet Zionism is a relatively new political movement — a product of the era of bourgeois nationalism and colonialism. Theodor Herzl's programmatic manifesto only appeared in 1896, at a time when Jewish socialist groups had been active in London and other cities for more than two decades. Long before anyone thought of colonizing Palestine, Jewish revolutionaries had been fighting for socialism.

Zionism was far from hegemonic among Europe's Jews. In the largest Jewish communities, in the Pale of Settlement on the western edge of the Tsarist Empire, far more Jewish people were drawn to socialism. The most important organization of the Jewish proletariat was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, or the "Bund" for short. The Bund opposed the Zionist program of emigration with a program of class struggle and "doikayt," or hereness.

Herzl's Zionism was bourgeois, and he sought support from the Tsar's antisemitic ministers, the organizers of terrible pogroms — he saw they had a common interest in getting Jews to leave the Empire and stay away from revolutionary organizations. After the 1905 revolution, the rise of class struggle in Russia and the radicalization of Jewish workers led to the emergence of various hybrid forms of socialism and Zionism. "Socialist Zionism" was founded by Ber Borochov, and its most important organization was Poale Zion (The Workers of Zion).

Poale Zion had a contradictory program: sometimes it said that Jewish workers should focus on emigrating to Palestine in order to build a socialist society there; at other times its emphasized class struggle, while the construction of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land was declared to be a goal for the distant future. Due to this contradiction, Poale Zion did not last long; after the Russian Revolution, the left wing joined the Communist International, while the right wing became a reformist and colonialist party that founded the State of Israel.

In this 1906 essay, Chaim Yakov Gelfand, a leading member of the Bund, explained why socialist Zionism was a reactionary utopia. Socialism and Zionism were fundamentally incompatible: the former depended on the political independence of the working class, whereas the latter required long-term collaboration with both the Jewish bourgeoisie and with the imperialist colonial powers. This text appeared in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy, edited by Karl Kautsky. In his own book on the question from 1914, Kautsky also declared that oppressed Jewish workers should aim for a "revolution in Russia" instead of emigration to Palestine.

Gelfand's essay is tragically prophetic. Even in 1906, it was clear that Palestine was far from uninhabited, and that the establishment of an exclusively Jewish nation-state would inevitably lead to conflicts with the indigenous population. Marxists understood that colonization would create new forms of oppression and also new hatred against Jews. Gelfand made clear that a Jewish state could only be built in cooperation with imperialism and would therefore never be socialist.

It's interesting to read about the progressive ideals of sections of the early Zionist movement, prior to the foundation of the State of Israel. The contradictions of this "socialist" colonial project proved to be insurmountable. Over the decades, numerous young Jewish activists turned away from socialist Zionism and joined the Trotskyist movement — in some cases only after arriving in Palestine.

The most famous of them is undoubtedly Abraham Leon, a scholar-warrior who wrote a Marxist history of the Jewish people while leading the underground fight against the Nazis in Belgium, before being murdered at Auschwitz at 26. Left-wing Zionists from Berlin such as Martin Monath and Rudolf Segall also became Trotskyists — the former in exile in Belgium, the latter while working at a kibbutz in Palestine. Both, like many other former Zionists, became leaders of the Fourth International.

Today, the internationalist traditions of Jewish revolutionaries are being erased. This text, in its first English translation, is a reminder that Zionism is only a small and controversial part of Jewish history. Jewish-led protests against the war in Gaza are reviving these internationalist traditions."