Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
In his memoir, Lighted Windows (1978), Veniamin Kaverin recalls scenes from Pskov in the first days after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd: Kostya von der Bellen was a student from our class. He was very short, important-looking, jug-eared. A line from Chekhov’s notebooks – “A tiny…
My superficial impression of the Brexit controversy – which I tried to express in two words in a comment to this post – is of a high downside-to-upside ratio. Lots to lose and not much to gain. Of course it…
At the Eurovision 2016 contest held last Sunday, the largest group of the Ukrainian callers who took part in the voting chose the Russian number. Azerbaijan and Poland came second and third in that Ukrainian poll. Russian callers awarded the most…
In the previous post, I was talking about the “clean hands” operation launched by Milan prosecutors in 1992, which destroyed the old political order and unexpectedly brought a rightwing coalition headed by Berlusconi to power in 1994. Two things stood…
Commenting on the role of social media memes in ending Ted Cruz’s never-stellar campaign, The Guardian mentions Honoré Daumier’s 1831 caricature of king Louis-Philippe, Gargantua. King Gargantua, pictured on his toilet-throne, is not merely gobbling down the taxpayers’ money but…
In his latest NYRB piece, Timothy Snyder lists a number of Russian “politicians” supportive of Trump. They turn out clowns of varying colors; none of them operators to be reckoned with. Particularly amusing is Snyder’s naming Alexander Dugin as “the leading Russian fascist ideologue and…
This happened on the eve of Hitler’s birthday, April 20: Printers at several universities across Germany produced anti-Semitic leaflets… after hackers appeared to break into their computer systems, according to university officials… At the University of Hamburg, the leaflets were anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic: The…
The Hague district court has annulled the 2014 ruling of the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which awarded $50 billion to former Yukos shareholders (Mikhail Khodorkovsky not being one of them) as compensation for the expropriation by Russian authorities. The reason for…
The mode of the murder in Grosvenor Square was so inordinately bizarre that for years, I could not bring myself to accept the Kremlin’s complicity. Perhaps the 21st-century approach to political assassination is performing it as if an episode of Austin…
Anna Bikont had an article in Tablet in mid-March about the new Polish government’s attack on the historian Jan Gross. Poland held a presidential election in May 2015. At a televised debate, the most important of the campaign, the pro-Kaczynski…
The Lavrov argument – “Who are you to f—ing lecture me?” – makes a certain sense when the lecturer is currently acting in ways similar to the auditor. Otherwise, it seldom works. Being lectured by David Miliband must be torture – but hey, so what? “Your…
Opponents of the EU-Ukraine association agreement made up 61% of the voters who took part in the Dutch referendum. The turnout was 32%. That works out to 20% of the eligible voters opposing the agreement. Potentially, a powerful minority, but a…