What is a victory?

Though this has more to do with the Russian Federation than with Estonia (with which it nominally has nothing in common), the subject matter is what Estonia and Latvia and other East European states are all about or rather about differences of civic and tribal identities. 

Here is the "inspirational" piece: 
Re: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/08/15/russia-the-ugly-side-of-olympic-nationalism/

Excerpt -

This has prompted an online poll , comparing an ethnic Armenian competing for Russia and an ethic Russian competing for Kazakhstan. The poll asks a simple question: "What do you view as a victory? The gold medal of Russian Federation citizen Arsen Galstyan? Or the gold medal of ethnic Russian Aleksandr Vinokurov?" Over eighteen thousand people have voted so far, and the results are 80% in Vinokurov's favor. Coincidentally, ethnic Russians make up around 80% of Russia's population.



I think this article  is remarkable, the poll results are revealing but they could be different if the ethnic Armenian had a Russian name because a lot of this  is superficial.  Second important consideration: through activities of the Putinist state and because of the Soviet "nationalities" policies before that, when and where all nationalities and ethnicities were in the past and are now entitled to their autonomy in one form or the other and (Great) Russians are deliberately denied it though forced to a system that was by no means a melting pot but an ethnic zoo, we are now facing the rise unstoppable rise of ethnic nationalism of the Latvian or Croatian fashion (this is an incredibly dark force -  just look at the size of Russia's - even Poland is not strictly an ethnic state, neither is Germany though it is somewhat close to the model, of course France and Great Britain are not ethnocracies and neither are India, Argentina or the USA), this popular ethnic nationalist movement, born out of Soviet and post-Soviet regimes own criminal policies,  perhaps might transform Russia into the world's largest ethnostate of the Central and East European model.  The Estonisation or Lettization of Russia  would mean a sad end for the great  Russian State's historic journey but admittedly even that outcome would be preferable to  the current status quo  with a kleptocratic semi-Bolshevist Nomenklatura-capitalist centralized Muscovite steppe khanate that is despised from inside and outside of the country's borders.

*****

and Mike Averko's commentary / conclusions from reading that piece differ from mine

"
Put mildly, there's reason to doubt how well the above excerpted conforms with actual reality - which isn't to say that intolerance doesn't exist in Russia.

For openers, one might ask why Vinokurov didn't (apparently) make an effort to represent Russia? The Kazakh born Russian ice hockey goalie Yevgeny Nabokov was able to successfully petition and compete for Russia.

One senses that most patriotically inclined sports fans the world over root for their country, with ethnicity being of little importance. The historical recollections I've come across indicate that in an era of Jim Crow laws, 1930s white America at large enthusiastically rooted for Joe Louis against Max Schmeling and Jesse Owens' performance at the 1936 Olympics.

Would most ethnic Russians root for Moscow born ethnic Russian Nastia Lukhin of the US against ethnic Tatar Alija Mustafina of Russia, in a hypothetical Olympic gymnastics gold medal showdown?  
"

Another message to Sokos - a new revelations, and I feel like an ignorant jackass - tourism to Tallinn, Estonia

Dear Harry Põder

First of all let me express my gratitude for such a prompt response.

I believe I made two mistakes for which I have to apologize.

There are fewer Russian visitors than Norwegians. I did not know that. Thank you for letting me know that the number Norwegian tourists in the Sokos Viru Hotel is greater than the number of Russian tourists?  It does sound however highly implausible judging by the number of transport connections and other factors but if you say that then I guess I would take it for granted, namely that Russian Federation passport holders are the fifth group by number at Tallinn (Sokos) Viru hotel.


My second misconception was about the Viru hotel itself. I was under a false impression that the Viru Hotel was constructed by the Moscow-based Intourist and is almost identical to a building they put together in Togliatti at the same time and Moscow-based Intourist hired companies from   Finland and Finland (though not exclusively Finnish) contractors participated in the building project for which they were of course most handsomely paid.  I just finished my own small hotel project in Moravia, in Czech Republic, in which I converted an old building (the foundation may be dates from the 14th century) to a small hotel / bed and breakfast use. I had different contractors working at the site, but I'd say I put this hotel together (there is a fine German word for it, Bauherr) and, let's say, not Hungarians, although I had one gentleman working who might have been of Hungarian origin or he at least confided that.  From what you implied the Viru Hotel was not built by Moscow-based Intourist but was a donation of the Finns. Sadly I was  unaware of that part story -I did not know that the building was a gift of the Finno-Ugric inhabitants of Finland (of course not just Finns live in Finland) to their Southern brethren. This would obviously be a fantastic marketing asset for the hotel, I was not aware of the fact and I apologize for my ignorance. I would certainly publicize this act of a historically unprecedented collective ethnic generosity.

As you've mentioned the much maligned USA - I must say you are absolutely right, I am a US national (and I spent a few years in Austria and I live in the Czech Republic), with a disclaimer that  Americans of Russian descent or those who were born there are Americans and not "Russians in America"  and I'd say that  in Austria (which is not an ethnic state) someone who has an Austrian passport is an Austrian (it is so believe me)  and I guess in the Czech Republic that tends also to be the case -  sometimes even if you don't have the Czech citizenship (as I don't) - I feel very much like a local.  I speak Czech but when I didn't I don't believe I had any encounters of the kind I had at your much esteemed establishment or in today's Estonia.  So while you are correct that someone of Russian descent would consider the flag of the United States as his or her as it would right be or someone who is of Russian background but is a citizen of France (I know that country also well) he would certainly feel French, I am not quite sure it is the case in Estonia - not at least after I talked to a few locals here.

Once again, thank you very much for your prompt response.
There are two points that I noted
first that at this time the number of Russian overnight visitors is smaller than of Norwegians though that might change in the future.
secondly (an important point to keep in mind and to spread around) that the Viru Hotel was a gift of the Finnish speaking nationals of Finland.

Warmest regards,


 

A letter to the Sokos (Finland-based) hotel chain

(let's wait for the answer):

Sokos Hotels
P.O. Box 1, 00088 S GROUP, Finland
Switch board: Tel. +358 10 76 8011

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently walked by the Viru Hotel in Reval, Tallinn, which was built by the Soviet Union in the 1972s (or about that time). There are enormous, staggering flagpoles on the side of the hotel displaying the flags of the Estonian ethnostate as well as Finland, Germany, Sweden, Norway and of the European Union.

As far as I know after Finnish tourists the largest group of people who stay at the Sokos Viru are Russian Federation nationals,  however the flag of the Russian Federation is conspicuous by its absence.

Would you please explain why the largest group, after the Finnish passport holders,  the greatest spenders by volume who collectively support your establishment financially is being discriminated against by your hotel chain? What would the reason be of such manifest and seemingly mindless, ungracious Russophobia?


Although I am not nominally a Russian passport holder I am informally studying the instances of corporate discrimination in the post-Soviet Baltic statelets, the purpose behind this effort is to single the most obvious and brazen offenders out  - those who discriminate against Russian language, Russophone speakers, or even, inexplicably, the flag  (discrimination here means that someone or something is treated differently from others even when demographics and history would warrant otherwise or in case of Estonia for instance only accepting the Estonian ethno-Nazi narrative as only one) and to punish them by organizing boycott in the Russian Federation itself or by leveling legal sanctions against by passing law on anti-discrimination in the former Russian Empire and the republics of the Soviet Union.

While I am not making any judgment yet, I believe that the number of Russian customers of Sokos Viru in Reval (today's Tallinn), a city where over one of inhabitants speaks Russian natively which has been a part of the Russian state or of the Soviet for close 300 years is probably somewhat greater than that of Norwegian - with all due respect to Norwegian visitors (I happen to like Norwegians a lot) and that begs the question why would the Norwegian - or the German flag - be displayed publicly, but not the flag of your Russian customers?



Sincerely yours,





PS: employees at Sokos Viru also refused to speak to me in Russian - that happened in the Mexican themed bar and another bar - it is obvious that hiring someone bilingual would make sense in a city where at least one third of inhabitants speak Russian natively and the second largest foreign group are Russian speaking tourists. Unfortunately the personnel does not speak German or French either.

The Guardian Sphinx

this is just a copy from my Flickr upload
http://www.flickr.com/photos/roobitphotography/6890537465/in/photostream

A few cultural notes. The text is under the picture.
Camera - Semflex
Film - Rollei RPX 400 (in actuality an ISO 320 film) pushed to 630
Rodinal 1 to 50
Click the image for larger view (all my images are also available as huge scans or as actual traditional photographic prints.

Coffee-in - on the first glance it is a somewhat witty, Anglicized or as the case is here Americanized  name for a small type of coffee-to-go chain that uses push carts, kiosks and really small stores to peddle  the coffee and the coffee itself is not bad not bad.  Today's former Soviet republic of Estonia is funded by injections of capital from Putinist Russia that uses its for raw material and fossil fuel transit  as well as for what amounts to money laundering on the state scape - that despite policies of ethnofacism and apartheid against Russian speakers on one hand (Russian Federation does not care about Russian speakers here for a number of reasons), and the largesse of the EU which, the Fifth Reich sort of project, has made the expansion into what used to Russian Baltic provinces before the Bolsheviks an ideological priority, and it won't allow their newly acquired territories to fail (we'll see about that, here goes the euro first:)

Because those territories are not economically, culturally or in any other sense viable or independent - not in any respect that I can think of, a number of things occurred. First there is a massive population exodus - like close to a third of inhabitants left the entity since 1990s. These are human losses greater than the same territory had in WWII and if projected as a hypothetical scenario on to the USA itself. then that would amount to sudden emigration or disappearance of now... just wait... 100 million (hundred million) US nationals. Even in these economic times and stringent visa barriers, the US remains a country of immigration, not emigration (as by the way - and miraculously to me at least - is the Russian Federation, say more  now migrate from Israel to Russian Federation than vice-versa, probably to some displeasure of hardened Zionists. The second phenomenon of that economy that is apparent to me, to an outsider and frequent visitor,  is that it is oriented toward a small strata of consumers of goodies, consisting of ethnocratic bureaucracy,  foreign  tourists (of which now riffraff from Moscow and Putinburg represent the largest and most freely spending portion), well-to-do employes of foreign banks, colonial administrators,  and that means that the prices are skewed. An espresso, a parody on the real Italian espresso (because the inspiration here does not come from Italy) or  not less delicious Gallic café expres, so an espresso costs like 2 euros - (it would like 1 euro in Ravenna, Italy) a caramel cappuccino is like 3 euros -   (now cappuccino is not what is to be enjoyed from a properly sized  china or ceramic cup  for breakfast or only in the first half of the day as is the case in Italy, cappuccino is really soapy, sweetish sludge in a huge paper cup - it is all US-inspired beverage but perverted and distorted in the process). Now an income in rural parts of this territory and among some people who are deemed inferior by the ethnostate (like say someone who is over 45 and unemployed and Russian speaker) is like 200 euros per month, could be worse,  per capita  income in Italy would be in effect, not in falsified EU statistics which are as phony as a three dollar bill (pardon the cliche which itself has mutated to "phony as a two dollar bill". despite the fact that two dollar bills are legitimate currency in the United States), so the comparative income is  10 times greater in Italy, so in effect the price of that espresso in that kiosk, for the locals,  is about 20 euros. One must also admit that the consumption of espresso like goodies  also culturally distorted in a different way, population has its spending priorities, like it does in Russian Federation proper where in large cities at least it is all very similar to what it is in post Soviet Estonian. In short the population does not go around here sipping espressos,  the average species when they make enough money usually sit voluntarily locked up in their Soviet era (that is statistically greater case) apartment and more likely than not would spend its resources on an automobile, a sedan normally, of Asiatic or Teutonic make, preferably of black, metallic silver or, the most Bohemian and adventurous ones, would choose  funeral white color. The creature here does not socialize - unlike say Czechs who go out to coffee places and pastry shops with their kids, that is even in small towns and who have a need to socialize - in beer taverns, in their fabulous pivnice a hospody., which are a part of local culture, but in this part of the world he post-Soviet urbanized peasant has no need for this sort of socialization, he just wants a big sedan like the Soviet bosses had (that is why those vehicles happen to be black or dark - exactly like the natives' souls) . When  you enter a restaurant in this part of town, you are more likely than not to be addressed in English (or in Finnish if you are taken for a Finn, the nose of the folks here is trained for things visually anthropological and racial to a phenomenal extent) . The last visible feature is linguistic Americanization, the local ethnocratic "elite" of Soviet provenance mainly feels being protected by America (like they were by the Germans in the short Nazi era) and the local Estonian-speaking urbanized peasant now plunged into the English speaking universe - English is the international and urbane (well it is not, but go tell them)  and */the* foreign language is really English. For a different reasons situation in the Russian Federation itself is very similar and in fact in many ways worse. English is absolutely everywhere but it is fantastically bad. As a Finnish friend of mine said that in the Soviet era the territory was bilingual (for examples most signs were in the local tribal language, called Estonian,  but also in Russian, which was the language of the confederation, the Soviet Union, and both versions were equally correct).  The local EU-protected ethno-Nazis had Russian is purged from visibility though not out of use and replaced it with Estonian (to me a useless tongue of no cultural clout and with less than a million speakers all of whom being recently urbanized peasants; there is no cultural layer cake and richness one sees in developed European languages, from Portuguese to Polish) . They even have language police in Estonia that would monitor that Russian does not appear and then even fine its users - that is called discrimination because only Russian is targeted and not English (as this photograph testifies) but this is something that does not bother the EU Nazis. Soon not the Estonian (which was the official language in the Soviet era here by the way) but he language of new owners appeared and - where is the language police I wonder (and let me tell you, they would be here in an instant if the sign was in Russian) ,  Now we come to the funniest part - the local tribe's tongue is gone, as one can see here right in this photograph, and everything  is now only in English. As are most advertising slogans and catch lines. But they are all in pig English.   Now, here are very few words and they are all obviously English words. A speaker of English would immediately detect that something is fishy though as one would not say "feel energy" in this contents of the catchphrase as he or she would most certainly say "feel the energy", not feel energy. This is a minor thing but there are major ones as well and a few are hilarious.

Another curious thing one encounters here (the most curious thing is the massive fabrication of history and its falsification on a scale that is quite breathtaking but I won't go into it)  is transposition of own (or rather Russian as they have little of their own) cultural notions onto something else and then labeling it all in pig English. I saw a bizarre object - should buy it just for photographing - there was a single sour pickle (a pickled cucumber) suspended in a glass jar.  The twisted yellow-greenish cucumber was very much floating there like a preserved fetus in the solution of formaldehyde as an exhibit of some anatomically-themed display. The label was in English however - it said Good Morning (a local peasant feels like an educated master when addressed in some sort of anglais-esque, I don't believe they export those single pickles to the Court of St. James) ,  now I had to pause for a second - why would a bizarre looking pickle in a jar be labeled Good Morning, what did the language of Shakespeare and Milton had to do with this gastronomic abomination was beyond me  then eureka! I saw the light - Russian alcoholics are known to quench their morning first with pickle juice. I am quite sure there is no tradition of guzzling down pickle juice or eating sour pickles in the morning in the any English speaking country I am familiar (certainly not in the USA, not  as far as I know), but the thing is labeled in English because those who labeled that (frankly disgusting) condiment are culturally inadequate.

Feel (the) energy.

As I saw from the larger scan later the basilisk inside the kiosk did not enjoy being photographed - even though I did  enjoy photographing it, I took the picture "on the go" without setting up a tripod or even stopping for more than a fraction of a second sufficient to release the shutter of my Semflex, I did survive though she was securely caged in the confines of the kiosk.