Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. This billboard, “He died: you, too, will die” – clearly addressed to the current master of the Kremlin – appeared this morning near the Paveletsky station in Moscow. For Kamil Ikramov, the announcement of Stalin’s…
It’s a pity The Revenant is already taken: should Leonardo DiCaprio decide to play Lenin, it would be a perfect title for the film. It’s also regrettable that the Russian rendering of The Revenant chosen by the dubbers, Vyzhivshiy, simply…
“Father of politically active Koch brothers built a refinery for the Nazis,” The Washington Post tells us, and so do a number of other newspapers and e-zines. Reviewing a new book on the Koch family by Jane Mayer, Tom Hamburger…
The Russian Orthodox church is a Julian-calendar holdout, and the big winter holiday in Russia is still the New Year rather than Christmas. Less than a week to go until the feast of sweet champagne, salami and salad. One particularly popular…
Donald Trump’s latest comments on Putin and the press: “If he has killed reporters I think that’s terrible,” Trump replied. “But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s…
The latest, largely anticipated, turn in the story: Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky says he has been formally accused in a criminal case that, according to associates, involves the 1998 killing of a Siberian mayor that President Vladimir Putin has previously suggested…
Putin is a demigod: his airstrikes help some Russians to live out, vicariously, their dreams of taking revenge on the mockingly cruel world. Putin’s lieutenants and footsoldiers are not octoroon-gods, however: their place is at the receiving end in the…
Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker three weeks ago: A Belarusian-language literature has been developing, and Alexievich has expressed regret that she cannot write in the language of her country. At present, the language of Belarus appears to be…
It’s not easy to get strangers to tell you things they wouldn’t tell their children and grandchildren. Some people open up to perfect strangers easily, but talking to a journalist means that one’s confession could make it to print, if anonymously. Some of…
Svetlana Alexievich has been a major presence in Soviet and post-Soviet letters since 1984, when a censored version of War’s Face Is Not Female was first published. She has authored six documentary books: two on WWII, one on the Soviet…
Kto kogo? (no comma), from Lenin’s 1921 speech, is often cited in various political contexts. It is often translated as “Who Whom?” (with or without a comma), which is neither technically incorrect nor particularly helpful. In old times, “Kto kogo?” was a question…
Last week, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, sensationally claimed that the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseny Yatsenyuk, had fought on the side of Chechen separatists in December 1994 – February 1995 against Russian troops and, moreover,…