Let's Make it a Troika
To conclude our unlikely pre-Thanksgiving swing through the Land of Bear Fun, the lower house of the Russian Parliament just voted 370-18 to approve a favored tactic of paranoid authoritarians worldwide -- kick out the foreign non-profits.
In the debate in the Duma, one of the authors of the bill, Alexei Ostrovsky, expressed clear hostility to the work of Western-oriented groups, alluding to the government changes in Eastern Europe and blaming the US Central Intelligence Agency.
"We remember how those human-rights organisations defended human rights in Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Georgia under the cover of the CIA and we know how it ended," said Ostrovsky, a member of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party. […]
About eight environmental protesters, objecting to the legislation, tried to unfurl flags and placards outside the State Duma building but were arrested for staging an unsanctioned demonstration.
Our own one-woman human rights organization, the Moscow-born Cathy Young, gave a withering nyet to Vladimir Putin and his American cheerleaders one year ago. Jesse Walker tried sorting through the competing Orange Revolution narratives last November, and two years back I wrote about the testy relationship between the biggest Eastern Europe non-profiteer of them all -- George Soros -- and those societies that still aren't so open.
(Link via Sploid.)
