Today, Mark Ames, the editor of the embattled Russian dissident paper The eXile (whose plight this Blog has been morbidly following) writes for the first time about the harrowing ordeal in an article for Radar Magazine. It is required reading.
In addition to the Limonov factor, he sheds some more light on the possible causes for Federal complaints against the often terrifyingly obscene newspaper.
Ironically, of all the reasons why a paper as brazenly scandalous as the Exile, whose content could have easily got it into trouble in even the most liberal of democracies (its masthead once read: ‘Making use of Russia's lax libel laws’); reasons like his last article, which stated “that the Exile ‘farts in Russia's face’ and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can “urinate into the president's mouth without any fear of consequences,” and he's so small he should be “zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail”; of all those reasons,
Ames believes that the crucial factor in the probe was not the paper's affronts to Medvedev (or occasionally racist, pornographic content), but its lack of seriousness:
In my opinion, this is the real reason they’re moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the “serious” rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin‚ so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it's also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West's Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia…
…The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There's no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the “New Yorker without political reporting.”
So there you have it. I had written earlier about the creeping spectre of seriousness stalking Russia. It seems that it is now striking painfully close to home.
