2003: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: From Russia with 'love': quotable statements (01/11/04)

2003: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

From Russia with 'love': quotable statements

Plenty of quotable statements seemed to appear in 2003. Here we choose to highlight some of the more ridiculous and/or pernicious, coming to us from Russia and Russians.

We started off the year by reporting that Nina Khrushcheva, Nikita's granddaughter and a college lecturer in the New York area, expressed a, shall we say, most biased view of Ukraine in an article about Russia that she wrote for a newspaper article in early 2003. That article, which was picked up by various sites in cyberspace, noted:

"... some other countries sloughing off the skin of communism are only too ready to adopt a new history - even one based on fancy and invention - to suit current needs.

"Ukraine provides an example of this. Does Ukraine have a history? Well, the place certainly does, but is the place a country? Ukraine means, literally, 'on the edge.' It is more a frontier than a region, let alone a country. So it is well suited to an invented history - and who better to supply it than a Ukrainian diaspora eager to boost the land of their forefathers? It may be no accident that independent Ukraine's first history textbook was written in Toronto, not Kiev [sic]."

In August, Russia's Ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, said that Moscow doesn't intend to apologize for the Stalin-era famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine and that was denied by Soviet officials for decades. While Mr. Chernomyrdin acknowledged that Russia had assumed the Soviet Union's obligations as successor to the collapsed regime, he denied that its responsibilities included apologizing for the Famine-Genocide that occurred during the regime of Joseph Stalin.

"We're not going to apologize ... there is nobody to apologize to," the envoy said on August 6. He added that Russia deserved praise for taking on Soviet-era debts and other obligations but would not "bear the cross" of the famine, Interfax reported.

Referring to the fact that Joseph Stalin was a Georgian, Mr. Chernomyrdin also said: "Why not ask Georgia to apologize?"

None other than Russian President Vladimir Putin chimed in with his own notorious and eminently quotable statement in September. He was apparently quite angered by a statement by Steven Pifer, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who criticized the "deplorable violations of human rights" by Russian armed forces in Chechnya and said that this has a negative impact on U.S.-Russia relations. Mr. Pifer, it should be noted, was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 1998-2000.

Asked about Mr. Pifer's comments during a meeting with a small group of American journalists at his dacha September 20, less than a week before his scheduled Washington visit and meeting with President George W. Bush, Mr. Putin said he would not care to comment on mid-level State Department officials. "I'll let Colin [Powell] deal with him," he said, according to The Washington Post's Moscow correspondent Peter Baker, who was at the dacha meeting.

"But we have a proverb in Russia," Mr. Putin added, "in every family there will be somebody who is ugly or retarded." According to The Washington Post, President Putin then started complaining about "double standards," and "went off on a rant" about U.S. human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. He also criticized U.S. officials' meeting with Chechen representatives, which, he said, was comparable to meeting with representatives of al Qaeda.

To conclude the year, there was a tripleheader (from the Ukrainska Pravda website of December 8, as cited by RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report) coming from Russian parties at the time of the Russian parliamentary elections:

"My position regarding Ukraine is simple - we need to reunite. We are a divided nation." - Sergei Glazev, a leader of Russia's Motherland National-Patriotic Union election bloc.
"The position regarding your country [Ukraine] should be the same as I have regarding my wife, who is from Ukraine. There should be a natural reunion of two sisters - each of them should try winning the place of the first beauty but avoid getting incomprehensible lovers." - Dmitrii Rogozin, a leader of Russia's Motherland National-Patriotic Union election bloc.
"We are not only neighbors - we are a single nation. There have never been any borders between us. We are a single civilization. The world has not begun to speak Ukrainian, but it has already started to speak Russian." - Vladimir Zhirinovskii, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

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