Category Russia

How far is the end?

When Putin says, “We need to get on with work, not look for successors,” it’s a sign he fears being viewed as a lame duck and has good reasons for that. These reasons are not constitutional term limits but rather…

Why not try this at home?

AP reported this yesterday: Did teens, TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music troll the president of the United States? For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in three months on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma,…

Alexandrian challenges

Back to where I left off last time. In his comments to Propertius III:15, John Kevin Newman remarked: Propertius is sentimental, but evidently sentiment does not exclude cruelty. To this observation, Newman supplies a footnote quoting from The Brothers Karamazov:…

The First Socialist War

To quote myself: Vietnam’s quarantine, I imagine, was much facilitated by the people’s apprehension of threats and dangers coming from the north. That is, from China. Back in 1979, China invaded Vietnam, devastated the borderlands and withdrew in the face…

Khlebnikov and Beuys

Not that I know much about Joseph Beuys‘s work but this episode from his younger years – perhaps invented – keeps interjecting itself into my random thoughts. Actually, I’m pretty sure he did invent it now. Here’s the deal: When…

The Kremlin vs. the shaman 3

A follow-up to the adventures of the anti-Putin shaman: Aleksandr Gabyshev was forcibly placed in a psychiatric clinic against his will after 20 officers from a special police unit of Russia’s National Guard stormed into his home in Yakutsk, the…

Putin’s useless playbook

Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine: Most American politicians, Republican or Democrat, would take Putin’s perspective on handling hostile demonstrations as a cautionary tale. This is how Putin would respond to protests used to be, self-evidently, an indictment. Trump…

“Here everything rhymes”

Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1933 in Conversation about Dante: Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to…

Back to work, you cowardly peons

Earlier this week, Mikhail Tamm, a Russian physicist and statistician, explained (in Russian) why the number of deaths in Moscow in April is a far better estimate of coronavirus mortality than the official rate: Ten days ago [the number of…

Russia’s Covid fatality rate

From today’s issue of The Telegraph: Russia boasts one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 mortality rates, but new figures released by Moscow authorities suggest that hundreds of coronavirus deaths could have gone unreported. Scientists and doctors say the low death…

Indecisive authoritarians

Covid-19 data from Russia is a mixed bag: the number of new cases identified per day seems to have plateaued – well, almost – but the death count remains so suspiciously low that it’s impossible not to doubt the top…

Downgrade the plague to a nuisance

When in late March Vladimir Putin visited a Moscow hospital wearing a hazmat suit, he got ridiculed by Russian viewers for more than one reason. First, the full-body protective gear was obviously overkill. Unless his immune system had been damaged…