Confusing Friend and Foe Russia's Crisis II
In an opinion editorial Viktor Erofeyev is a Russian writer and television host, comments that absorbed again by the old idea of national superiority, Russia claims to be infallible and demands that this be recognized by other countries, from Ukraine to the United States.
I thought that after Anna Politkovskaya's murder in October 2006, Russia would turn red with shame. Killing a woman journalist for her articles about the war in Chechnya seemed to be the height of cynicism and meanness. Instead, the opposite reaction set in - sleepy political apathy, as if conscience in Russia had become a marginal appendage, found only among a small number of human-rights activists.
Yet, when 80 people prominent in culture and the arts recently sent an open letter to President Dimitri Medvedev appealing for the release of a pregnant woman, Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer imprisoned in the Yukos affair, nothing happened.