Friday, June 27, 2008

Gazprom and Gasification with The Jewish Autonomous Region


In a swampy, remote region in the Soviet Far East bordering China, on the banks of the Amur River, Joseph Stalin and his Russian Federation established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1928. The idea was to create a new "Soviet Zion," in a socialist framework. The Stalin answer to settle the "Jewish Question."

The name was somewhat misleading, for the Jewish population never reached more than 25 percent to 30 percent of the population. Today, despite Stalin’s attempt at national engineering, the Jewish population is about two percent of the 190,000 locals.

Gazprom OAO ($56.45), the Russian natural gas giant, noted in its 2007 Annual Report that the company had signed contracts on "Gasification" with the Jewish Autonomous Region. Stalin’s two purges to stamp out Yiddish culture, the Holocaust, and rising anti-Semitism—whoever dreamed up the gasification name might want to rethink the global wisdom of using that label to describe Gazprom’s natural gas projects.
When translating its filing into English, it's a good thing Gazprom knew the difference between the prepositions 'with' and 'of.'

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