Tuesday, August 24, 2010

9:17 pm, Bozeman time

My digital camera is officially dead.

This was the first digital camera I ever owned, purchased in January of 2004 in St. Petersburg. I was spending the year in Russia and hadn't used one in research yet, but finally at the Fontanka branch of the National Library in St. Petersburg I had the chance to pay for the day and take as many photos as I wished so I decided it was time to buy one.

Fierce clever with the finances as always, I neglected to buy one while in the US over Thanksgiving, and ended up paying more than $400 for a camera that probably would have cost less than half that in the US.

But hey, I was on vacation.

Anyway, it was a great camera, and it performed heroically. I took approximately 35,000 photographs with it over six hard years, sometimes taking hundreds of photographs a day for weeks on end. In the archives the camera totally changed my research, allowing me to photograph thousands of documents in archives and libraries in a bunch of archives in Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Turkey. This was during a brief window of opportunity in the middle of the last decade when it was easy and inexpensive to photograph in archives in the former USSR, a window that has closed in some places but is still open in others. 

In addition to research, I took that camera on lots of great trips, many of which (the post-2004 ones further down) were taken with the Casio.

The camera also recorded some of the happiest moments of my life.

Okay, this is getting maudlin. I just wanted to recognize the good service of this camera, because it has just died. This is a drag for many reasons, one of which is that I'd wanted to post some photos of beautiful Bozeman.

But you know what? I've already taken every photograph of Bozeman that is humanly imaginable and put them up in these posts (scroll down past the Princeton stuff).

And it's glorious to be in Bozeman. I took a long bike ride today and came home sunburned! I lugged my cool green aloe stuff all around Russia, Turkey, Spain, Michigan and never once used it, and on my first full day back in the Bozone got fried.

As for getting a camera I'll probably buy the new version of the model. Does anybody know anything about it?

Anyway, enough with the chit-chat.

Here is your N & P!!!


Bianet sez Turkish PM Erdogan is protecting MIT, the internal security services. I know nothing about this, but the article does raise a valuable point—we shouldn't be thinking in terms of "deep state" versus AKP. There are people in intelligence, the military, and certainly the civil services (and increasingly, the national police) who do support Erdogan, while there are others who don't. There is a lot of factionalism within these institutions that many accounts of Turkish current affairs, including my own, do not often address as carefully as possible.

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The Jamestown spooks, who are very anti-Russian generally, are running a piece saying that Ukraine's new (pro-Russian) government is using the federal security services to attack the opposition.

I find it hard to trust the JS folks, due to their CIA background, but I keep them on my blogroll because they do run a lot of pieces that are of interest to me.

Is there someone out there who knows more than I do about Ukrainian politics who could comment on this piece?

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Joshua Kucera sez: US military blowing stuff up in M-golia.

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Yigal Schleifer stops eating long enough to write about the upcoming referendum in Turkey. 


The referendum is taking place on September 12, a big day in Turkish history (coup of 1980 and the introduction of a large regular role for the military in the country's governance). In the eyes of, I think, most people, the AKP (the ruling party which supports the constitutional change) is using this date for the referendum as part of an effort to underscore the democratizing impact that it is saying the referendum package will bring.

And that's a big part of the story with the AKP. They're using tough methods to take on a system that was messed up to begin with. Frankly, they're fighting fire with fire, as the timing in the shift that the Ergenekon trial took shows: the investigation into state-sponsored assassinations became one which looked at anti-AKP activities only after the the closure case was opened against the AKP.

Pretty much all of my friends in Turkey hate the AKP and say they'll vote against the reform package only because Erdogan is in favor of it and a victory in the referendum, they say, is a victory for Erdogan and the AKP.

I think they're in a minority.

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Book review on Steven Kinzer's new book on Turkey, Iran, and the US. 

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Crossing their fingers: Radio Liberty ballyhoos "small group" of Tatars staging nationalist demonstration in Kazan.

The Tatar national movement hit its peak in 1992, when roughly 60% of the republic voted in favor of sovereignty without separation from the Russian Federation.

But this declaration of "sovereignty," whatever that term means, was later suspended by Tatarstan, and in the era of Putin at least one of the important directions of power (there are others) is that of increased central control, even if there is factionalism on all sides. Today, Tatarstan doesn't even elect its own president, a development which would mean more if Tatarstan had been a functioning democratic state in the first place, but nevertheless is something that had some symbolic value for many Tatars.   

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Fakih factor: Freep sez Dearborn disappointed but proud re Rima Fakih's Miss World experience.