Staff writer Chelsea Paige spent last semester in Russia. Far from Georgetown, she still managed to run into a DC export: weaponized sadness.

Spending 70 years behind the Iron Curtain is like being frozen in carbonite: once you get out, you’re shocked to realize that your friends on the other side are wildly successful (or Jedis) and you’re still a ne’er-do-weller with a debt to an obese gangster.

Russia’s Han Solos, shocked by leaving commie-freeze, have been embracing the fruits of their new, pseudo-capitalist life a little overzealously. Moscow oil tycoons make a little cash and suddenly the city looks like a version of Vegas built by 12-year-olds. This isn’t going over well with the government, who have grown even more paranoid about outside influences.

The latest threat? Those clearly “suicidal” emo kids, who have taken to their new lifestyle with vigor. The genre, born in DC as “emotional hard-core rock”, constitutes no less than an “emotional and spiritual crisis” in Russia, according to the government.

The “suicide” label also comes from the government, so you shouldn’t be surprised that Russian legislators wants harsher regulation of emo sites and a ban on people dressed emo from entering government buildings and school. Some schools have gotten a little more descriptive:

In November, the Novgorod regional education department issued a letter to all schools in the region with a description of emo culture, saying the “dream of every [emo] is to die in a warm bath from the blood of cutting their wrists.”

This crackdown would seem par for the course for President Medvedev and his cronies, except that we’re talking about a country that produced an artist who threatened to stab himself to death at St. Basil’s Cathedral if Stalin destroyed it.

Clearly, this is the most emo, melodramatic country in the world. Babyshkas should be cutting themselves in the street to the tune of Elliott Smith and while crying! What I would pay to see Putin paint his nails black.

Flickr photo by dbarronoss used under a Creative Commons license