Occupy Pravda: MSM Pretends Putin Faces Revolution

Boris Nemtsov-opposition leader, former deputy prime minister

PJ MEDIA-By Kim Zigfeld/

As former Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov looked out over a crowd of between 30,000 and 100,000 Russians (depending upon who was counting) on Christmas Eve in Moscow — just before calling for the ouster of Vladimir Putin — he saw a sea of tricolor black, white, and yellow flags before him, and a second sea of red flags.

The tricolor is the flag of the Russian Nazis, the skinheads who want to liquidate anyone who is not “Rooski” — the Russian word for “Russian” meaning white, Slavic, and Orthodox. Their poster boy is Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

The red flag represents the Communist Party, led by Gennady Zyuganov. Both men have sizeable contingents in the Russian parliament. Nemtsov doesn’t have a single seat, nor has he ever been allowed to place his name on the presidential ballot.

Nemtsov must have wondered why these two groups have played such a leading role in opposing Putin’s neo-Soviet dictatorship, rather than democratic-minded folks like himself. But he should know the answer, having probably recognized that his “organization” was incapable of accurately counting the members of the crowd, or of reporting with one voice in English why they were assembled or what they planned to achieve.

The crowd started booing Nemtsov.

Just days before the protest, tape recordings undoubtedly collected by operatives of the successor to the KGB — the FSB — had been played on a Kremlin-friendly TV network. The tapes revealed Nemtsov brutally criticized other members of the hodgepodge group that organized the protest, hurling all manner of personal abuse at them. The tapes were  an obvious attempt to discredit Nemtsov among his peers.

Nemtsov’s comments about his peers were perfectly justified, even somewhat measured — I was thrilled to read them. Due to its pernicious infighting, the opposition to Putin has been unable to agree on an achievable agenda, a leader, or even a name for their group. Yet: the fact that Nemtsov needed to make them — and didn’t realize he was being recorded — tells you pretty much all you need to know about the prospects of this so-called movement.

Which is just as well, because if you relied on the reporting of the mainstream media for this information, you’d be out of luck. The mainstream reports on the demonstrations against electoral fraud in Putin’s Russia have been nauseatingly wrong.

Granted, it’s hard being a Russia correspondent. You spend most of your time frozen, worried about getting brutalized or murdered, hated by the local denizens (who are famous for  xenophobia), and writing about a country most people couldn’t care less about. So when you get a whiff of a story that might thrust you onto the front pages, you’re pretty desperate to tell it.

Even if there isn’t really any story at all.