Tag Russia

No sane person would fight that wall

Paul Goble has translated large excerpts from Semyon F. Gluzman’s interview with Focus, a Kyiv-based journal. Gluzman served seven years in Soviet prisons and labor camps and three years in Siberian exile for his effort to prove that the dissident General Grigorenko had…

Ecliptica

The turnout was strong. Not for an election or an opposition march but for the partial solar eclipse in Moscow. At least in the part of town where I work, people left offices in droves at lunchtime but instead of…

1964–1991–201X

Earlier this year, I finished reading Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État, the dazzling 1968 “practical handbook” that outlined the soon-to-happen 1974 Portuguese revolution and has been recently invoked to explain the 2013 military coup in Egypt. However, Luttwak took care to distinguish between a coup d’état…

Five suspects, still no clarity

Two more people, all of them ethnic Chechens born and reared in Ingushetia, have been detained as suspects in the Boris Nemtsov murder inquiry. A fifth suspect has reportedly blown himself up with a hand grenade in Grozny. Two of the…

Two suspects, zero visibility

According to Ekho Moskvy, two men from the Northern Caucasus are suspected of being the hitmen in the murder of Boris Nemtsov and have been detained. The radio station cites an identified source saying the killers’ “biological material” has been found in “the…

Russia as Hunger Games territory

From Stratfor’s latest 10-year forecast: …we do not think the Russian Federation can exist in its current form for the entire decade. Its overwhelming dependence on energy exports and the unreliability of expectations on pricing make it impossible for Moscow…