The eXile, a bastard lovechild of a newspaper (part Onion, part Slate) sired by brilliant, bitter and irreverent expatriates living in Moscow, has a piece on Solnyshko, an absolutely horrific but relatively well-off orphanage in the remote (even by Russian standards) Amurskaya Oblast. I’m no supporter of communism or other zero-sum, Robin-Hood economic policies, but it does strike me as particularly callous and even dangerous for the US Administration to be cutting off aid to Russia (for it's economic success, no less) while simultaneously and relentlessly advancing tax breaks for the richest people (as they are clearly over burdened) of the richest country in all human history.
Sting, in one of his most annoying songs, worried aloud that we were in danger of incineration if the Russians didn't love their children. Well, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
From:
The eXile
Bleak House
By Jake Rudnitsky ( jake@exile.ru )
“Visiting these kids is a truly sobering experience. Their condition is a far more direct and painful evidence of modern Russia’s complete degradation and moral bankruptcy than the looting of the country during market reforms, the lack of fundamental rights such as health care and heat, or even the war in Chechnya. Because, while these well-publicized crimes are abstract issues for the people who perpetrate them, the problem of orphans is an intensely personal and individual one. That these kids’ parents are alive and have inflicted such cruelty on their own children is mind-numbing.”