Category history

One more year

It’s been a bad year for all decent Russians. As the country continues its long descent into existential misery, the ugliness of its political regime contrasts remarkably with the charms of the winter season. Unusually for this millennium, December has…

The Treaty of Kars: some background

A sequel to the post on the Treaty of Kars centenary (1921-2021). In much of the XIX century, Britain and France propped up the weak Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion. With the rise of the Entente Cordiale,…

Presentiment

Of nothing in particular. Ruins of Ivan Zholtovsky’s puzzling pavilion, grainy rain clouds above, a pop-artsy fence, and tired, lifeless grass in the foreground: Dusk in Gorky Park. By way of explanation, a quote by Alexandra Selivanova pasted from this…

The prognosis is unfavorable

In the past two or three months, the Kremlin has suppressed all organized opposition and outlawed most political speech. Apparently terrified that the regime’s growing unpopularity would translate into a humiliating defeat at the Duma election in September 2021, Putin’s…

The most generous SOB of them all

About ten days ago, Language Hat wrote about the 1928 novel The Cynics by Anatoly Mariengof (alternatively transliterated as Marienhof): Given its low profile, I probably wouldn’t have read it if Joseph Brodsky hadn’t called it one of the most…

“Kipling was a great writer”

This past Wednesday, AP reported from Moscow on Putin’s 2021 state of the nation address: In an apparent reference to the U.S. allies, he compared them to Tabaqui, a cowardly golden jackal kowtowing to Shere Khan, the tiger in Rudyard…

Remembering March 5, 1953

I should have posted this two days ago, on March 5. Better late than never: March 5 is the day Stalin died in 1953, the so-called Cheyne-Stokes Day. In 2016, I wrote two more posts about that day of deliverance:…

That mural sea

Reviewing Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age by Anatoly Liberman, Sibelan Forrester remarks: Russians who read Anglophone poetry in the Soviet period turned to the works available, which were largely translations or original editions of poetry from the era…

Navalny’s return III

There’s no shortage of sources to follow the Russian protests. I should probably recommend two Telegram channels in this post, RussiaNexta and SOTA. You don’t have to know Russian – just look though the images and the videos. The story…