Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Max Seddon remarks that Novorossiya is “a Tsarist-era name for Ukraine’s Russian-speaking southeast.” Russian-speaking today but not in the “Tsarist era,” as I have explained. Russian was the language of cities all over Ukraine (except Poltava) but most Novorossiya residents were rural…
In one of his bitterest poems, In Front of the Looking Glass, Vladislav Khodasevich wondered how he, once a young dancer at summer balls in Ostankino, near Moscow, had mutated into a critic whose every riposte induces “revulsion, animus and fear”…
Last week, Russia’s deputy PM Igor Shuvalov claimed in Davos that Russians would rather starve than turn against Putin in the face of foreign pressure. Igor is a sly old fox. His words can never be taken at face value…
Following up on this, I must admit haven’t read the dramatic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard, and I’m not sure I’m going to, any time soon. The brothers Ostrovsky, who translated the work into Russian, faced difficult…
I have finally seen Alexei Borodin‘s and Russian Youth Theater‘s production of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. The work consists of three full-scale plays so the show lasted for 10 hours gross and eight hours net of intermissions. Yet, to my…
The chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, made himself the butt of many a joke after intimating that serfdom had a certain value as a “spiritual bond” holding the nation together. He is now on the record supporting an…
Extracts from Yulia Latynina’s latest radio interview on Ekho Moskvy. Without endorsing her views in general, I more or less agree with this: First, I have to tell you that… I’m in the Netherlands, in Maastricht, at a congress… talking…
A final write-up on Putin’s Valdai hisitoricizing, following parts 1, 2, 3. The “lands wrongly handed over to Ukraine” meme seems to go back to the short-lived Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic, the DKR. The majority view is the DKR was a temporary…
Following parts I and II, I repeat parts of Putin’s “true history of Ukraine“: Perhaps you are not aware that in 1922, part of the land that you just named, land that historically always bore the name of Novorossiya… Why…
Continuing from part I, I’m going to focus on a misstatement that may not be important compared with Putin’s other claims but I’d still like to talk about it. “This land [Novorossiya] included Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Nikolayev, Kherson and Odessa…
Kedrov Street is a fairly quiet road in the southwest of Moscow, an area known for good schools and relatively high property values. One can find Gymnasium 1534 nearby, ranked in the city’s top 30. The street was named after…
Jake Barnes, the Oilfield Expat, wonders if Russia will descend into chaos with Putin’s demise. I’m not sure I can contemplate that coldly and dispassionately at the moment so I’ll follow up with an anecdote from Dovlatov’s A Typewriter Solo…