The Virtual Stoa

Another news snippet. Not surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

MOSCOW, Jan. 6 (UPI) — The majority of Russians prefer the lives they had lived before the country’s stormy economic reforms were launched in 1991, a poll said Sunday.

The survey, conducted by ROMIR-Gallup International public opinion research group, queried 2,000 respondents throughout Russia on New Year’s Eve.

According to the poll results, 55.1 percent of those asked said they wished they could have their pre-reform living standard returned.

Only 32.6 percent said they preferred their present lives. The remaining respondents were undecided.

The package of social and economic reforms, evolving chiefly from the Russian government’s attempt to drop communist state planning and introduce a market economy, saw millions of Russians hit by poverty and unemployment.

The age group most affected are the pensioners, who the reforms have deprived of many of the Communist-era social benefits, forcing them to make ends meet on meager pensions.

The really scary figures, of course, are the life expectancy figures: Stephen Cohen reports in his excellent Failed Crusade that male life expectancy in Russia has fallen to 58, roughly where it was at the start of the last century.

… Eduard Benstein, one hundred and fifty-two today!

I recently finished Hardt and Negri’s Empire, and I’m beginning to organise my opinions about it on paper, so it’s a good time to post the links I’ve been accumulating slowly over the last few weeks. The best treatment still seems to me to be Malcolm Bull’s essay in the London Review of Books. It’s the more aggressively hostile reviews which reveal more about the present political climate, though, and these include Alan Wolfe’s often interesting essay in The New Republic, David Pryce-Jones’s barking piece in the National Review and Roger Kimball’s treatment in the The New Criterion. New Republic editor Peter Beinart’s weird argument that Empire has something to do with the September 11 atrocities is available here; Thomas Dumm interviews Michael Hardt here; and there’s a useful if not wholly up-to-date collection of documents relating to Negri’s conviction and incarceration here.

Welcome back.

Here’s some breaking news, from reuters.com:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Film-maker Leni Riefenstahl plans to release a new movie this year in time for her 100th birthday, half a century after her Nazi-era links ended a brilliant film career, a report said Sunday.

“The film will have its premier in August exactly in time for my 100th birthday,” Die Welt newspaper quoted Riefenstahl as saying in its Monday editions.

The last feature film Riefenstahl released was Tiefland in 1954. Since then she has found herself blacklisted because of her work during the Third Reich.

Triumph of the Will, a powerful documentary of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, helped cement Adolf Hitler’s image as the all-powerful leader. It also forever linked Riefenstahl with Hitler in the minds of many critics.

Her 1938 film Olympia, a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, is considered one of the great and most innovative films of the 20th century.

The film-maker’s new 45-minute movie, Underwater Impressions, will be a compilation of footage from the more than 2,000 scuba dives she made in the Indian Ocean between 1974 and 2000, the report said.

There’s an informative Riefenstahl site here, and a pair of faintly peculiar fan sites here and here. Susan Sontag’s classic essay, “Fascinating Fascism” from the New York Review of Books has been reprinted here, and there’s an interesting, hostile article about Riefenstahl’s postwar photography in Africa by James C. Faris here.