Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
TASS reports on Putin’s annual address to the Russian parliament (the Duma and the Federation Council): The policy of developing the political system and institutions of direct democracy, as well as enhancing the elections’ competitiveness will be continued, the president…
They should have done it in 2014: Lawmakers [MEPs] voted on November 23 in favor of a motion condemning Russian state media outlets like the television channel RT and the news agency Sputnik for disseminating “absolutely fake” news. They said…
I have just learned of yet another Russian cable TV channel, courtesy of John Schindler: Then there’s Tsargrad TV, which is Russia’s version of Fox News, if Fox News were run by hardline Russian Orthodox believers. If “Fox News” stands…
There is no arguing with Gary Shteyngart that much Old-World nastiness, including anti-Semitism, has lately spread from the fringes of online alt-rightism. We would likely disagree on the dimension and perniciousness of those fringes. In the eyes of the novelist,…
Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist, comes across as sensible and well-informed, judging by this 2014 speech. Unfortunately, he is short on new solutions, to say nothing of a new worldview, but that would take a genius. At the moment, I’m more interested in the…
Those for whom the world ended with Hillary Clinton’s loss of the electoral college must have led lives basking in sunshine and boundless opportunity. But how does it feel – as years go by – to shed illusion upon illusion, wade through disappointment…
Owen Hatherley writes of British architects active in the first post-WWII decade: In the first ten years after 1945, the pure white style of Bruno Ahrends’s Berlin had been Anglicised, but not in the direction of the monumental dissonance of…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
OPEC expects Russia to produce at the same average rate in 2017 as in 2016, which means a slight decrease from the current daily output. The IEA acknowledges that, if Russia can continue pumping at the same rate as in October,…
I thought the Monster Vote was merely wishful thinking by escapist desperados – until it materialized. Well done, folks. Now I fear that certain people in the Kremlin, who do not believe in the possibility of government by the people…
Pavel Felgenhauer, the veteran Russian military observer (I recall reading him in 1992 or 93), sees the Admiral Kuznetsov‘s journey to the Levant as an argument for more funding, advanced by the Russian admirals to erode opposition from the finance ministry and the “tank…
They say there are three Vladimirs in Moscow now: one lying, one sitting, and one standing. That is, Vladimir Lenin’s body is in the mausoleum in Red Square in a horizontal position; Vladimir Putin “sits” in the Kremlin (as in…