>"W" is a Latin character that transliterates no
Cyrillic letter in any transliteration system of which I am aware, so that's
sort-of suspicious.
The standard transliteration used in east germany - and quite a lot of soviet books have been translated and quite a lot of names transliterated - used vor the "v", for instance in "Lev", a "w": "Lew Tolstoi". instead of "Lev Tolstoy", "Sinowjew" instead of "Zinoviev". It's because the letter "v" has in german two pronuciations, one like in english, mostly in foreign words, the other like "f" in english.
The other speculations about the authors I don't want to take part. The pathetic language is quite in use in russian - ore post -soviet - leftist groups, as is the play with names. Surprising for me is the selfconfidence in the claim:
"My guess is that it's primarily being circulated in anarchist cyber-space and has leaked out to a slightly larger circle of wishful Western leftists who've seized on it to support their "revolutionary defeatist" position. I'd be surprised if a single Russian soldier has seen it."
How many western soldiers going to Iraq have seen the leaflets of the western peace movement? Not to speak about the leafleats of leftist groups, not to speak about the quite different possibilities in the access to alternative media, not to speak of the much more restricted possibilities to move for drafted russian rank and file soldiers.
At the end: I don't know C ras-Iwa, I do know Boris Kagarlitzky. And all the time I know him he was and is somebody engaged in real conflicts - like the others of the "alternativy"-crew, Aleksandr Buzgalin, Andrey Kolganov e.a. Starting with the workers selforganization, based on the official law of socialist enterprise in the late 80ies, over the attempt to stop the decline of the Communist party and the help for the declining old official trade union in the 90ies. Somebody who opposed the bloodshed in Chechenya will not praise the russian leadership for defending the rights of their citizens.
sebastian
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