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The Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region are well known for this and similar stunts. As such, they seem to be more a parody or conceptual art project in the spirit of the late Petersburg musician and trickster Sergei Kuriokhin or (closer to home for many of you) the late Andy Kaufman, especially during his professional wrestling phase. None of the local Marxists I know takes them seriously, although many people find them mildly amusing. Their M.O. is to keep themselves in the news with "campaigns" like the one they've currently mounted against Cameron. The English-language page on the party website features a report on the party aired on the English-language channel RT (Russia Today): http://kplo.ru/content/view/601/23/ The front page of the website is currently filled with dispatches from the "anti-Cameron front": http://kplo.ru/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/ The lead item states that one of their activists was detained yesterday while conducting a one-man picket against Cameron in Kupchino, a southern district of Petersburg. This is followed by the "news" that the party is organizing an "anti-Avatar coalition of Earthlings" to continue its "cultural-political struggle" against the film, which it calls a "theft of Soviet literature, a mutant, and a mockery of handicapped people." The website also has a collection of anti-Cameron statements from party activists: http://kplo.ru/content/view/1180/5/ Here is what Ekaterina Petrova, a friendly-looking older woman identified as the secretary of the Volkhov District Committee of the party had to say: "This starred-and-striped scum has raised his hand against the artistic legacy of the late Strugatsky, Efremov, Bulychev, and the director Pavel Arsenov, taking advantage of the fact that these deceased authors cannot file charges with the prosecutor's office. But we'll file those charges! Why has Polanski, who seduced a Young Pioneer girl, been deservedly arrested, while this gangster Cameron peacefully walks the earth and scoops up dollars by the shovelful, dollars earned by stealing Pandora from Soviet books? It is probably the case that Cameron's agents secretly bought up the novels of Soviet science-fiction writers beforehand and snatched from them whole pages, entire episodes for the delectation of Obama and his clique." I wouldn't be surprised if the party gets funding from someone like Kremlin ideology czar Vladislav Surkov to make the real Communist Party look bad. While they're not half as much "fun" and also try hard to make themselves look bad, they occasionally do some useful things on the local level. > Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Organization (CPLR) > demands the arrest of film director James Cameron, whose latest film Avatar > became highly successful globally. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
