At start of Sochi Olympics, State Department issues Russia travel warning

On the same day as the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, the U.S. Department of State distributed a travel alert that, while couched in diplomatic language, seems designed to discourage American citizens from attending the Olympics this month.

Here's how the travel alert -- which I received by email -- begins:

The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens planning to attend the 2014 Olympic Games in Russia that they should remain attentive regarding their personal security at all times. The Olympic and Paralympic Games will take place in Sochi, Russia, from February 7 to March 16, 2014. This travel alert replaces the alert issued on January 24, 2014, and provides updated information on reported threats against the Games, cyber-security risks, identification requirements, and lodging. This Travel Alert expires on March 24, 2014. Full information about the Olympic and Paralympic games for U.S. citizen visitors is available on the Sochi Fact Sheet and the Country Specific Information for the Russian Federation on our website, travel.state.gov. The Department strongly recommends that all U.S. citizens residing or traveling abroad enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) in order to receive pertinent safety and security information.

The State Department advisory goes on to note potential problems with medical care, hotel room availability, terrorism, crime, and cybersecurity and none of the language is likely to promote confidence in anyone's capacity to remain safe in Sochi:

MEDICAL CARE: The Olympics are the first large-scale event to be held in Sochi and medical capacity and infrastructure in the region are untested for handling the volume of visitors expected for the Olympics. Medical care in many Russian localities differs substantially from Western standards due to differing practices and approaches to primary care. Travelers should consider purchasing private medical evacuation and/or repatriation insurance.

Western Russia (Source: Central Intelligence Agency)

LODGING: There may be shortages of hotel rooms during the Olympics. Some hotels are still under construction, and there are reports that some rooms booked in advance have not been available upon arrival. Advertised rates for standard rooms are currently $300-1,000 per night.

TERRORISM: Large-scale public events such as the Olympics present an attractive target for terrorists, and the U.S. government continues to monitor reported threats of potential terrorist attacks in Sochi or in Russia in general. Acts of terrorism, including bombings and hostage takings, continue to occur in Russia, particularly in the North Caucasus region. Between October 15 and December 30, 2013, there were three suicide bombings targeting public transportation in the city of Volgograd (600 miles from Sochi), two of which occurred within the same 24-hour period. In early January 2014, media reports emerged about the possible presence of so-called "black widow" suicide bombers in Sochi. These reports have not been corroborated, and the U.S. government continues to seek further information. Other bombings over the past 10-15 years occurred at Russian government buildings, airports, hotels, tourist sites, markets, entertainment venues, schools, and residential complexes. There have also been large-scale attacks on public transportation including subways, buses, trains, and scheduled commercial flights, in the same time period. On January 11, 2014 Russia implemented a "no liquids" policy for carry-on bags on flights originating within Russia in response to potential security threats against commercial aircraft. In line with the Government of Russia's actions, on February 6, 2014, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration implemented similar precautionary measures for direct flights between the United States and Russia.

In July 2013, Doku Umarov, the head of the Caucasus Emirate (an organization the United States designated as a terrorist organization in 2010, and known in Russian as the Imirat Kavkaz or IK) released a video message rescinding prior directions not to attack civilians and calling for attacks on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The Caucasus Emirate is responsible for many of the aforementioned attacks. The group has targeted civilians, as indirect supporters of the government, including through attacks on a ski resort, metro system, high-speed rail, airport, and a theater. Westerners have not specifically been targeted, but are viewed by IK as complicit in the Russian government's efforts to control the North Caucasus region. In January 2014, another video was released by a radical Islamist group claiming responsibility for the Volgograd bombings and promising "a present for tourists" in connection with the Olympic Games in Sochi.

Travelers to Sochi should expect increased police presence and enhanced security measures in and around the Olympic venues. There is no indication of a specific threat to U.S. institutions or citizens, but U.S. citizens should be aware of their personal surroundings and follow good security practices. U.S. citizens are urged to remain vigilant and exercise good judgment and discretion when using any form of public transportation. When traveling, U.S. citizens may wish to provide a friend, family member, or coworker a copy of their itinerary.

The U.S. Embassy will continue to monitor the security situation in Sochi throughout the Olympics. In the event the U.S. government receives information of any specific and credible threat, the Department of State will immediately provide information to the public. Information about potential threats to safety and security can be found on the Embassy's website and the Department of State's travel website. Individuals who have enrolled in STEP will receive this information directly via email.

CRIME: U.S. citizens planning to attend the Games in Sochi should remain alert regarding their personal security at all times. Criminal activity in Sochi is similar to other cities of comparable size. However, major events such as the Olympic Games are a prime opportunity for criminal elements to target tourists, and travelers should be alert to the possibility of mugging, pick pocketing, theft, and harassment. Travelers should avoid going out alone at night and carrying large amounts of money or other valuables. Since cash may be the only accepted form of payment outside Olympic venues, consider keeping money in a hotel safe or dividing money and placing it in several different locations on your person. Purses, wallets, cell phones, and electronics should be secured in public, especially while traveling on buses, trains, or other forms of public transportation. Travelers should only use marked taxi services and prearrange transportation through hotel concierge or other reputable services whenever possible. If you are stopped by the police, you may ask to see the officer's identification. Photocopies of passports, visas, credit cards, and other important documents should be kept in a secure location so proper notifications can be made if original documents are lost or stolen.

CYBER SECURITY: U.S. travelers should be aware of cyber security threats and understand that they have no expectation of privacy when sharing sensitive or personal information utilizing Russian electronic communication networks.

Finally, the State Department travel warning notes that the Russian police have a "papers please!" policy, that freedom of expression is limited, and that Russia is not a welcoming environment for gay people:

IDENTIFICATION: Russian police officers have the authority to stop people and request identity and travel documents at any time and without cause. Due to the possibility of random document checks by police, U.S. citizens are strongly advised to carry at all times their original passports, Russian visas, hotel registration, and migration cards (issued at the airport upon entry into Russia.)

PUBLIC DEMONSTRATIONS: U.S. citizens should avoid large crowds in areas that lack enhanced security measures. Use caution in any areas where protests, demonstrations, or other public disturbances are taking place. Demonstrations intended to be peaceful can develop quickly and unpredictably, sometimes turning violent.

On January 10, Vice Prime Minister Dmitriy Kozak announced that the Sochi authorities have determined that the village of Khost, located seven miles from the Olympic venues, will be the designated area for political demonstrations during the Winter Olympics. Demonstrations must be unrelated to the Olympics and the organizers must receive permission prior to the event from the regional authorities of the Ministry of Interior and the Federal Security Service (FSB). It is also worth noting that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Charter states "no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas."

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER (LGBT) ISSUES: In June 2013, Russia's State Duma passed a law banning the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" to minors. The U.S. government understands that this law applies to both Russian citizens and foreigners in Russia. Russian citizens found guilty of violating the law could face a fine of up to 100,000 rubles ($3,100). Foreign citizens face similar fines, up to 14 days in jail, and deportation. The law makes it a crime to promote LGBT equality in public, but lacks concrete legal definitions for key terms. Russian authorities have indicated a broad interpretation of what constitutes "LGBT propaganda," and provided vague guidance as to which actions will be interpreted by authorities as "LGBT propaganda." LGBT travelers should review the State Department's LGBT Travel Information page.

Porn for a Cause

Each week I look forward (pardon the pun) to an email from The Jewish Daily Forward, with a list of its most recent articles. I can always depend on The Forward for quirky, unexpected news and cultural commentary that simply can't be found anywhere else.

For instance...

This week there was a story on Russian-Jewish emigre Michael Lucas, who spent his childhood under Soviet Communism and who now lives an entrepreneurial American success story. Simply put, he's an adult movie producer -- in fact, he's an award-winning gay porn producer.

The article, headlined "Pornographic Stimulus Plan," by Michael Kaminer, highlights the latest offering by Lucas Entertainment, a video entitled Men of Israel.

Kaminer says that it is claimed that the film is "the first gay adult film made in Israel with an all-Israeli cast." (That cast includes Avi Dar, Matan Shalev, Jonathan Agassi, Guy Ronen, Morr-Foxx, Naor Tal, and Ninrod Gonen.)

What's more, the Forward article continues,

Lucas claims that his motivation behind “Men of Israel” was not just titillation, but also a counterbalance to lopsided portrayals of Israel in mainstream media. “It’s free PR for Israel, and it’s much better than the PR they’re getting on the news,” he said during a tour of the company’s expansive second-floor offices, with views of the New York Times building across the street. “The reality is that Israel has only one face to people on the street, and that’s the West Bank and Gaza. All people see in the media is a country of disaster. They get images of a blown-up bus.”

By contrast, Lucas said, the images in “Men of Israel” — filmed in telegenic Tel Aviv, Haifa and desert locations by Israeli fashion photographer Ronen Akerman — amount to a pornographic stimulus campaign for gay tourism.

“Nobody goes to Israel for Golda Meir, I’m so sorry,” Lucas said in heavily Russian-accented English. “People don’t care that you have a great orchestra, and they’re not particularly interested in the Holocaust museum. Gay people, and straight people, want beautiful beaches, beautiful nature, beautiful men and women, good food, good hotels. Israel shouldn’t be mistaken about why people go there. They need me.

Will Men of Israel do for Israeli tourism what The Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand, or what Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol, is expected to do to bring more tourists to Washington, D.C.? Michael Lucas seems confident that it will; Kaminer reports that Lucas recently became an Israeli citizen.

Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!

Godwin's Law and Georgia

This tidbit comes from the FOCUS News Agency:

Moscow. A top Russian politician on Monday compared Georgian actions in South Ossetia with Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin likened them to Saddam Hussein's war crimes, AFP reports.

"I can compare this treacherous attack with the attack by Hitler on the Soviet Union in June 1941," the Speaker of the lower house of Russia's parliament, Boris Gryzlov, was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS news agency.

Apparently Godwin's Law applies even in international diplomacy.

'Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the towering literary figure who gave us the phrase "Gulag Archipelago" and whose life spanned from Lenin to Putin, died on Sunday at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn cut an imposing figure. With his curled beard and high forehead, he resembled a cross between a Biblical patriarch and a 19th-century Mormon pioneer.

While he led a brave life, unbowed by the pressures of totalitarianism, he was, apparently, meanspirited personally and loathe to keep friendships alive and active. If there is a photograph of him smiling, I have not seen it -- unless it was taken upon his return to Russia in 1994 after 20 years in exile in decadent Vermont.

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn delivered a commencement speech at Harvard University that was highly critical of Western culture. He condemned freedom and democracy and accused the West of soullessness.

As the New York Times' obituary described him in this context:

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

The Washington Post's one-time Moscow correspondent, Robert Kaiser, adds:

Living in this country confirmed Solzhenitsyn's worst fears about the West. He deplored the American way of life, and was not reluctant to say so. At Harvard in 1978, he gave a remarkable speech to the graduating seniors with a clear warning that Western civilization was in grave jeopardy. "The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future," he said. "It has already started. . . . A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger." He criticized the reliance on law; he criticized the idea of freedom: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space" by Western civilization, he said.

In his tirade against Western culture, Solzhenitsyn lamented:

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

He also said in this speech (titled "A World Split Apart"):

... the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

Harvard graduates, then as now, no doubt listened to Solzhenitsyn's harsh judgment on American society and Western values and nodded their heads in silent agreement. In 1978, remember, Americans were in the midst of a "malaise" that many identified as having its roots in the hypermaterialism of the "Me Decade." (That, and the high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, and gasoline shortages exacerbated by misguided Carter administration policies.) Others, however, were not so sanguine and suggested that Solzhenitsyn, a virtual recluse, was personally clueless about America and the West.

Two years after the Harvard speech, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I was working at the time as a Georgetown undergraduate, published a collection of essays called Solzhenitsyn at Harvard. It included some of the editorials and op-eds that had been published in reaction to Solzhenitsyn's address shortly after he delivered it, plus six specially-commissioned essays.

On September 16, 1980, the book was launched at a dinner in Washington with two speakers commenting on it: newspaper columnist George F. Will and social philosopher Michael Novak. Their speeches were later collected in a slim pamphlet called Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy. (The pamphlet seems to be no longer in print, while the larger volume is still, in theory, available through Amazon.com.)

In his remarks, Novak -- who contributed one of the original essays to the larger volume -- began by noting:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard might be viewed as a contemporary updating of Pope Pius IX's famous critique of modernity, "The Syllabus of Errors." Solzhenitsyn, like Pius IX, is adept at pointing out the errors, onesidedness, and blind spots in many of the things that we, in a liberal, democratic society, hold most dear. Like Pius IX, he holds up in contrast some of the models of Christian civilization from the past -- their ideals rather than their practices.

Novak suggested that, for all his emphasis on religion and spirituality, Solzhenitsyn failed to see the link between those and liberal democratic values. He continued:

The great novelist, however, in concentrating so singlemindedly on soul, sometimes overlooks its necessary political, economic, and social artifacts. Human soul does not live alone. It is embodied. It is embodied in social, political, and economic systems as well as in its own human skin, tissues, sinews, and organs of feeling and sensibility.

Solzhenitsyn often seems to wish to reject modernity. "Western ideas" -- above all, democracy and all its works and pomps. He sometimes seems to desire a world of soul alone, leaders infused with virtue, peoples astonishingly and simply committed to the evangelical laws of peace, justice, order, and charity. If this were a world of angels, Solzhenitsyn's vision would create a City of Light. Its rulers would be saints, its people willing followers, its constitution the very laws of God. The civilization he envisages would be a heavenly city. The state would wither away. There would be a kind of benevolent dictatorship of, not the proletariat, but the gentle Christian community.

Upon reading that last paragraph, it should come as no surprise that Novak sees a paradox in Solzhenitsyn's thought:

It is stunning, after all, to see how closely the dream of Solzhenitsyn mirrors the dream of his archenemy, Karl Marx, how he has turned Communism inside out as a vision of effortless Christian civilization, populated not by sinners but by the virtuous, organized not by trial and error, checks and balances, separation of powers, and the differentiation of systems (political system, economic system, moral-cultural system, each relatively independent of the other), but by simple righteousness. He guides us to a heavenly city, before we have learned to live in the sinful climes of earth, protecting ourselves against its inevitable tyrannies.

(It may be worth noting that Novak's words in the preceding few sentences foreshadow the central theme of his then-yet-to-be-published book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.)

The utopian vision suggested by Novak's interpretation of Solzhenitsyn's thought has another unintended paradox, one often unrecognized by Rockford Institute-type social conservatives who are wary of individual liberty and free enterprise. Novak goes on to say:

Solzhenitsyn does us honor, though he may not think so, by being so affronted by the awful cheapness, vulgarity, and open sinfulness of our way of life. Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness. Not even a coercive regime can repress the sinfulness of the human heart. No more can democracy be sinless than can Communism (committed, as Solzhenitsyn sees it, to systemic lies, immorality, and lust for power) drive out all virtue.

One sentence there bears repeating: "Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness." That is a profound insight, related to the fundamental truth that virtue must be freely chosen, else it is not virtue.

As Novak approached his conclusion, he proved to be remarkably prescient. Remember, this speech was delivered in September 1980. Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected president, and there was no certainty that he would be. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other "students" still held American diplomats hostage in Iran. Leonid Brezhnev would be General Secretary of the CPSU for another two years, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire lay a decade in the future. The Cold War had every indication of being a perpetual condition. So what does Novak say?

Yet with Solzhenitsyn's basic message we stand in agreement. The world is, sadly, split apart. World War III did begin in 1945, and the "correlation of forces" is less in our favor now than then, less so than at any time in the history of this republic. We are at an hour of maximum peril.

Yet so, also, is our foe. A system based on lies cannot endure. The world cannot survive half slave and half free. The reckoning rumbles in Poland. Events are picking up speed. The great chapter of our age is drawing toward its climax.

Whether Novak was aiming for dramatic effect or was somehow clairvoyant is up to him to reveal; few commentators in 1980 would have suggested an "approaching climax" to the Cold War except in apocalyptic terms, predicting nuclear war rather than an outcome favorable to liberty and democracy. (To be sure, Novak's prediction is ambiguously shaded. Perhaps it can only be read as optimistic in retrospect.)

For his own part, George Will focused less on the spiritual notions than the practical political ones suggested by Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West. He drew on American history, with a focus on James Madison's theory of faction. Will spoke mostly without notes, except for a long excerpt from Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and the published version of his speech is based on a transcript from the recording.

Will said:

It is essential to the understanding of America to realize that it was founded by men who sought explicitly to tame and submerge passion, to drain it into commercial undertakings and away from the ideological and religious and political divisions that had turned the Old World into a boiling pot and that could ruin a melting pot. James Madison's great breakthrough in the understanding of democracy was the realization that all previous political thinkers had been wrong in one critical particular. All previous political thinkers had said that if -- and it was an enormous hypothesis -- if democracy were possible at all, it would be possible only in a small, face-to-face society, something like Pericles' Athens or Rousseau's Geneva; in such a society, the people, knowing one another and enjoying a relationship of neighborliness, would not be riven by factions, which were assumed to be the enemy and ultimate destroyer of democracy.

Madison's breakthrough was to turn that idea on its head. He began with a progression like this: The problem of any political system is the prevention of tyranny; they tyranny to which democracy is prey is the tyranny of the majority; the way to prevent that is to avoid having a majority, to have only shifting coalitions of minorities that can never become a stable and oppressive majority. Therefore faction is to be celebrated, and the United States is to succeed through a saving multiplicity of factions, made possible by a complex economic system and a continental expanse.

Continuing, this widely-syndicated newspaper columnist went on to explain:

To find American political thought summarized in two short newspaper columns, read two of the Federalist papers: Number Ten, where Madison celebrates factions, and Number Fifty-one, where he says, "You will see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives." Ours is the first nation founded on the premise that it could get along without anyone having good motives, without anyone being public-spirited; that out of the cheerful maelstrom of factions would emerge something that could be baptized, in a magnificent a priori swoop, "the public interest."

But what of Solzhenitsyn, the reason for this speech in the first place? Will argues that Solzhenitsyn

says that statecraft cannot just be a matter of social control; it must be, to some extent, soulcraft.

(I have to wonder if this was the first time that George Will used the formulation "statecraft as soulcraft," later the title of his 1983 collection of essays.)

Solzhenitsyn, Will says,

is understandably startled by the raucousness of American life. He's not the only one, and it's not just American life. George Orwell made the point, not long before he died, that "all popular entertainments have one thing in common: they seem to aim at the numbing of consciousness." (He said this before recreational drugs, and he never saw American television.)

Recreational drugs, I would note, have been with us since man was still a hunter-gatherer. But I might add that Orwell never saw Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, either -- nor, I suppose, did Solzhenitsyn. Back to George Will:

Solzhenitsyn understands that there is something profoundly disturbing about the sensory blitzkrieg that is part of our social life. He understands the irony of an age in which self-expression is the ultimate -- and some would say the only -- value, yet all the themes of modern literature seem to converge on the fragility of a sense of self.

After quoting historian John Lukacs, who had suggested in his 1978 book 1945: Year Zero that Solzhenitsyn would turn out to be the pivotal figure in the conflict between East and West and (perhaps -- remember, this was 1980) in the collapse of the Communist East, Will concluded by saying:

For two centuries the human race has been assailed by the misconstructions first of physics, then biology, then psychology, more recently sociology, and today biochemistry, all telling us in different ways that man is not free, that he is a creature of vast impersonal forces, and that individuals do not make a difference. Solzhenitsyn's life says, "Not true."

With the perspective of nearly 30 years, we can add a few more individual lives that say "Not true": Lech Wałesa, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and others. None of them singly but all of them interrelatedly through their individual efforts made the difference between liberty and serfdom for millions of human beings.

For all his faults, and for all his shortsightedness with regard to Western values and achievements, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was very much an individual who made a difference that mattered -- even to those he disdained.

Silent Flows the Don?

From Novosti, the Russian News and Information Agency:

A statue is to be unveiled to an enema at a health center in the southern Russia's town of Zheleznovodsk, the center director said on Monday.

The 1.5 meter-high bronze monument, weighing 350 kilograms (771.6 pounds), portrays "three angel-like children carrying above their heads a big pear-like enema," the Alexander Kharchenko said.

"This will be the first monument to an enema in the world," he said, adding that the initiative to erect the monument was proposed by the center's administration, where hundreds of similar procedures are carried out every day.

"It is high time a monument to an enema was erected," he said.

Considering all the odd things along America's highways and byways, it's rather surprising that the Russians erected the first enema monument.

At least we beat them to the moon.