Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Electrical sound recording, which relies on microphones and amplifiers, became the industry standard around 1925. From Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the mid-1920s, sound was only recorded acoustically, the sonic vibrations transmitting themselves directly from the horn…
Sergei Belyakov reminding the reader of the more or less obvious: Minor Russians dominated in the Kherson governorate as well. In the second half of the 1870s they made up more than 70%, followed by Moldovans (17.9%) and Greater Russians…
Sergei Belyakov, the historian and literary critic from Yekaterinburg, was the runner-up for the Russian Big Book Prize in 2013 with his biography, Gumilev, the Son of Gumilev. I have yet to read it, but the only mainstream review I have seen, by…
Consider this alt-history passage: Ivan the Terrible once said: “I’m guilty of my son’s death because I didn’t hand him over to the doctors in time” when they were on the road and he [the son] fell ill. They were…
I learned of Robert Amsterdam when he was representing Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos as their international lawyer. Amsterdam’s relentless criticism of Russia’s legal system, which he witnessed in action at the first Yukos trial in 2003-4, was spot on but…
Leicester City, Trump, Brexit, England losing to Iceland, and now, Erdoğan apologizing or at least writing something as close to an apology as the man can manage without killing himself. Russia’s loss to Wales, although a face in the mud…
In July 2004, I linked to an article by historian Richard Pipes in Foreign Affairs, What Russians Think and Want (accessible with free registration). The old man overstated his case, perhaps, but as time goes by, I’m starting to think more…
The 1990 Playboy interview also provides an insight into the meaning and the purpose of Trump’s supposed admiration for Putin. Trump saw little to admire in the Soviet Union: I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. He showed…
Trump commenting in 1990 on his visit to the USSR in 1983 or 84 [it was 1987: I got the date wrong in the original version of the post]: Once you got to Moscow, how did the negotiations go? I…
In early 1990, Donald Trump appeared to understand that Moscow’s inability to reign in mass violence would soon finish off Gorbachev’s regime and the Communist state. He probably did not realize that the violence had been and would be driven…
Dr. Corin Throsby, a Cambridge academic, writes in The Times’ Literary Supplement: Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, who posited that it is primarily the reader…
Vladimir Yakovlev, the son of the prominent journalist of the Perestroika years, Yegor Yakovlev, sees no future for himself and his peers in Russia. His advice is sauve qui peut: if you can leave, just do it. Stanislav Belkovsky recommends self-improvement…