Trivial thought of the day brought to you by “I need to buy a *lot* of postcards some day soon”

Does anybody else feel silly writing somebody’s full name on envelopes? I mean, assuming there aren’t seven Mary-Sue’s or whatever at an address, it makes no difference to getting the thing there. And I’d never use the surname of a friend in conversation, unless there was some confusion over who I was talking about.

Yes, folks, you’ll have to head elsewhere for heartfelt confessions and words of wisdom tonight.

Do you ever get the feeling of

this is where it’s at

? That’s what I’ve been feeling as I start following Russian livejournals more closely. Every time I look, I find another embryonic political or social movement, full of potential to change Russia – and being largely ignored by the outside world.

Take the debates. Run by the youth movement “[Democratic Alternative](http://www.daproject.ru/)(*)” Every few weeks in Moscow, some of the leading lights of Russian livejournal get together for a [public political debate](http://dadebatam.ru/). They’re judged by the audience, and by a panel of popular bloggers.

The audience at an earlier debate

Many photos from yesterday’s event here

Their latest event was yesterday, pitting nationalist [Dmitri Rogozin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Rogozin) against economic liberal [Boris Nemtsov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Nemtsov). The debate was about Georgia, and Rogozin won, but the transcript of the debate hasn’t been posted yet.

Also, this blog doesn’t seem to like cyrillic much. I wonder if it’s Movable Type in general, or my setup, or what?

*: I’m not sure who funds them or what their background is, but they feel less astroturfed than most Russian ‘youth movements’

From [Anthony Cordesman’s latest paper](http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,3537/), via [Abu Aardvark](http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2006/10/cordesman_iraqi.html), a chart of violence in Iraq:

Spot the Askariyya mosque bombing.

Since I’ve been reading so many Russian livejournals recently, I figured I should do something useful with it. So I’ve got involved in Global Voices, a blog translation project. The plan is that I’ll post occasional snippets from Russian blogs, once a month or so. Here’s my first post, translating a Georgian post about the treatment of Georgians in Russia.

If Russia decides to escalate the dispute with Georgia, one option is for it to recognize Abkhazia as an independent state. Abkhazia is [pushing](http://www.regnum.ru/english/722014.html) Russia to do just that.

What makes this a plausible scenario is Kosovo. From Russia’s perspective, the situation of Abkhazia within Georgia is parallel to that of Kosovo within Serbia: regions enjoying de facto autonomy within hostile states, and pushing for formal self-determination. In [Putin’s words](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b55abaf4-dfc0-11da-afe4-0000779e2340.html):

“If someone believes that Kosovo should be granted full independence as a state, then why should we deny it to the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians?”

The implied ‘someone’ is the UN, where glacial negotiations are moving towards the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state. Russia is unlikely to let this through the UN without demanding a similar decision on Abkhazia. It might not even wait for Kosovo to come up at the UN – ten days ago, for instance, [Mikhail Gorbachev](http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/5b958386-975f-40ca-9824-90f0c1f1048f.html) wrote that the “

logic of international development may lead Russia to a situation in which we will have no other choice but to recognize Abkhazia

”

What I didn’t mention in the last post – because I didn’t believe it – was that Sanskrit isn’t the only course going. Cambridge is also

closing the Hindi department

. This is something like the fourth most widely-spoken language in the world, 400 million speakers (many more if you include urdu speakers, and speakers of hindi as a second language). How does nobody think it might be useful for somebody to be able to speak this language?

Russia has made a point of maintaining transport links to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, despite the blockade of Georgia. It’s something that Georgian politicians have complained bitterly about. Now they’re driving it home by sending a train to South Ossetia loaded with $741,000 of humanitarian aid. Behind this is Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who is even more energetic than Ken Livingstone in maintaining his own foreign policy agenda. Luzhkov calls the train “

a symbol of Russian assistance to South Ossetia, which wants to live independently and not to obey those, who have subjected these people to genocide,

”