I mean, it's funny, but in that "Wow, I bet the Brownshirts looked pretty comic from a safe distance" kind of way.
Kevin James is: Paul Blart, Mall Cossack.
In tsarist Russia, frontier colonized you.
This is excellent news for John McCain.
Russia's continuing reversion to Tsarism is fascinating to watch, in a horrifying kind of way.
Arguably, tsarist Russia was less nationalist Russian than contemporary Russia. If I'm understanding things correctly, the book reviewed at the link in 2 is about roughly the same region as the NYT article, but the area sounds more homogeneously Russian now than it was in the 18th and 19th century.
Arguably, tsarist Russia was less nationalist Russian than contemporary Russia.
Hm, yeah, that's a good point. It was certainly an empire rather than a nation-state, and that's a pretty important distinction in this context.
I'm guessing the Times story is relatively accurate, if incomplete. A grad student friend of mine has been back and forth to the Ukraine (where he is originally from, but which he left as a child) studying migrant issues, and his stories are pretty chilling. There's lots of neo-Nazis out that way too, who are even less constrained than the neo-Cossacks. Plus the regular cops are not exactly Officer Friendly when it comes to dealing with migrants.
Also: I hope Anne Applebaum is pleased with herself!
Cossacks? beating up... Muslims? Whatevs.
I do not know about this region. It's 200 miles from Grozny, 800 miles from Moscow. I haven't read anything about Grozny in either the French or Czech papers for a while. My Russian is not great-- I read Ogonyok sometimes, don't know what a better source would be. Nothing there either, no surprise. But I don't think that there is much immigration. I guess heavy weapons are no longer used. Basically, I don't know why anyone would choose this story for the NYT when there is much worse to tell. Here's an article from this year about Grozny:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/02/09/f-margaret-evans-grozny-makeover-chechnya.html
No mention of how far from the city center it is safe to go unarmed.
Here is a fair and balanced counterpoint to the OP:
http://lenta.ru/news/2012/03/02/arpaio/
I don't know the writer, she's certainly written about worse places, which is a good perspective.
It's quite something to think that there are still places where "let's call out the Cossacks!" is a legitimate public policy option.
On a related topic, I have just learned from Peter Hennessythat
a) no one is quite sure who has the authority to command a nuclear attack by the UK
b) most people are fairly sure it _isn't_ the Prime Minister
c) best guesses are either "the Queen" or "it would just sort of happen when the time was right".
That's an unwritten constitution for you.
Isn't the answer "the Prime Minister can authorise a nuclear attack, but because he or she is a civilian, only the Chief of the Defence Staff or failing that someone else with a funny hat can order it?" Like the Soviet thing of having a dual key between the commander and the political commissar, but with (even) more tea.
Re: neo-Cossacks, they've been about since the end of the Soviet Union, and various manifestations of the deep-state have tried to make use of the movement, but AFAIK they're not much in terms of numbers. (I once mentioned them to a Russian diplomat I was told might be a KGB agent*, and she practically fell about laughing before remarking that the nationalist/fascist skinheads were much more trouble.)
*by my then professor at Vienna University, H-J Heinrich - she was officially accredited as something like deputy cultural attaché, but spent the whole briefing talking oil, gas, and North Caucasus ethnic politics.
12: I was about to add "of course Alex will know all about this".
re: 13
I remember a series of photographs that appeared in some of the photographic press, and, iirc, in the Guardian which had been taken at some sort of Cossack academy.
[Google]
Ah, yes:
http://www.anastasiataylorlind.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=5&a=0&at=0
There's a bit of accompanying text.
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Jesus Christ. I look out the window and it's snowing again? I am so sick of this goddamn winter.
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Hear bloody hear. Snowing yesterday over here as well. I had a terrible dream that maybe this would be the year that it just wouldn't get warm, ever.
It's not as if it was a cold winter -- I was running with Newt four mornings a week at six all through it, and I wouldn't have been doing that if it had been much below freezing often. It just won't end.
Hey, at least the Cossacks aren't up on the really serious eliminationist rhetoric, unlike certain leaders of the Hungarian ruling party
A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls. [...] These animals shouldn't be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved - immediately and regardless of the method."
I can't find a source right now, but the same dude earlier said that if a driver sees a Roma child on the road, he should step on the gas rather than the brakes and make sure his aim is good.
And in Poland the ONR, a revival of an interwar hardline fascist group who saw Nazi Germany as a good model for Poland, are now salonfahig and happily involved in co-organizing marches and demos with the main opposition group.
Arguably, tsarist Russia was less nationalist Russian than contemporary Russia.
Not so sure about that, the late Tsarist court was extremely nationalistic. However, Muslim minorities tended to be treated ok as long as they accepted that they were second class subjects. They even had a degree of local autonomy.
21: well, at least we can be sure that if they get into anything really outrageous, like Keynesianism, European NATO airpower will soon be streaking across the Pannonian plain to drop spans of the Chain Bridge.