Conservative Activists Drive Popular Kubana (Rock) Festival Out of Russia. Latvia welcomes it.
One of Russia’s largest rock festivals will be transplanted to the Latvian capital of Riga in light of a recent determination by Kaliningrad regional authorities that they would be unable to protect concertgoers from conservative activists.
Municipal lawmakers in the Kaliningrad region's Yantarny district decided last week to cancel the famed Kubana festival, citing security concerns amid mounting outrage from hedonism-wary activists.
A regional Russian Orthodox Church leader had blasted the event for its "blatant immorality" in late April. "Upon familiarizing myself with publicly available information about this festival, I was simply shocked: complete degradation, malfeasance, alcoholism," Baltic Bishop Serafim said in a statement on the Kaliningrad Eparchy's website.
After the cancellation in Kaliningrad, other Russian regions offered to host Kubana, but the organizers thought it would be better to relocate to Latvia. "Unfortunately, the problem that we faced in Kaliningrad could have happened in any Russian region," Ostrovsky said, noting that he plans to make the festival a Riga staple for the foreseeable future.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/conservative-activists-drive-popular-kubana-festival-out-of-russia/524165.html
Russia's loss is Latvia's gain. Score another one for conservative Russian 'family values' activists who are concerned about 'hedonism' and 'blatant immorality'.
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It was German until Stalin annexed it and Russian troops ethnically cleansed the Germans. You know, ethnic cleansing, that thing that only fascists like the Ukrainians do?
This is a historical injustice that cries out for correction, and lies entirely in Russia's purview to remedy. Russian honor rests on it: the humiliation of being ethnic cleansers and colonizing imperialists needs to be corrected.
Of course, before the Russian would-be genocide it was inhabited by a Baltic ethnicity who'd been there for many, many hundreds of years. However, they were assimilated to a German identity over the centuries and expelled by Russians as Germans for being German, so I'd say it should go to Germany, where the descendants of the locals were forcibly shipped to. A right of return should be established. (After all, the same reasoning is used in other parts of the world: Assimilated, diluted populations still retain the birthright claims of distant ancestors.)
A compromise would be to try to divide the problematic territory between Poland (which assimilated related Baltic tribes to a Polish identity ... rather poorly and only fairly recently) and the current Baltic states.
That is, if Putin's words aren't just the nationalistic imperialism that many think he's high on, with a strongly irredentist flair: "what's ours or has ever been ours is only properly ours and must always be ours." (Or we can call it "imperialistic nationalism," if that sits better.)
You know, that bit of irredentism really does remind me of another country. Um ... Not a very important one ... Oh, right. The People's Republic of China. (I guess that's actually short for "The Han People's Republic of China."
