Putin Regime Not Just Xenophobic but Openly Racist, Yakovenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 15 – Tamara Pletneva, the chairman of the Duma’s committee on the family, women and children, says that Russian women must avoid having sex with foreign fans during the World Cup lest there appear a large number of unwanted children to single Russian mothers as happened after the 1980 Moscow Olympiad.

            “Especially dangerous” in this regard, the deputy said on a Govorit Moskva radio program, is any sexual contact among members of different races.  It would be a less bad if things were kept among members of the same race. “We must give birth to our own children,” she concluded (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B22A51233070).

            Many Russians have expressed outrage, as have people of good will around the world who would demand that such a position be repudiated by the government and its source fired; but they have also indicated that many Russians share Pletneva’s view and the Putin regime does little to oppose them (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B2215E7373E8).

            The voices of those of mixed race in Russia about this outrageous development are especially damning because they testify that if such attitudes are not opposed when they are expressed, they will spread and lead to even more horrific consequences including violence against minorities (takiedela.ru/news/2018/06/14/pletneva-ne-prava/).  

            Russian commentator Igor Yakovenko suggests that the Putin regime not only is not opposing such outrageous comments but in fact is overlooking them on some occasions and sponsoring them on others, a pattern that he argues is leading the current regime toward Nazism (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B22A51233070).

            Pletneva’s latest comment should have come as no surprise, Yakovenko says. She was involved with the distribution of cartoons “in which Barack Obama was portrayed with a banana,” she called for removing any reference to Jews on a Holocaust memorial in Rostov, and she explained that call by saying that “we have [in Russia] an ambiguous attitude toward Jews.”

            Not surprisingly, the Moscow commentator continues, “Pletneva, having offered her warning about sex with foreigners, immediately qualified her remarks by saying that she isn’t a nationalist. And this is the truth: because Deputy Pletneva is a Nazi and even more precisely a racist.”

            Her ideas are those of Adolf Hitler, Yakovenko says.  The only difference so far is this: the Nazi leader put his ideas out in the form of laws while Pletneva issues her’s as “norms of morality. Now, “there is not the slightest doubt that if need be, the Duma will adopt a package of laws analogous to the Nuremburg ones – and do so unanimously just like Hitler’s Reichstag.”

            What is especially sad is that Western governments have not denounced Pletneva’s comments, insisted that the Kremlin distance itself from them, and refuse to take part in Putin’s World Cup show until that happens.