We’ve posted several articles already about the recent mass demonstrations in Vladivostok and other Russian cities against the recent steep increase in import duties on foreign cars – Vladimir Putin’s version of the recent Detroit “bailout” in the US. Today, our own Russia correspondent Grigory Pasko, who spent a significant portion of his adult life in Vladivostok as a reporter for the Pacific Fleet newspaper, weighs in on the subject as well. But a few points of explanation are in order before he does:

Pasko does not refer to these demonstrations as “demonstrations” in his article. He calls them “mitingi” in Russian, which is a word derived from the English “meeting” but which actually means something more akin to “rally”. In Russian, a “demonstration” means a government-sponsored event with lots of red flags and happy proletarians “voluntarily” expressing their support of (or outrage at) whatever they’ve been told to express it about.