Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Guardian sums up reports from the Khovanskoye cemetery in the South-West of Moscow, a most unlikely location, one would think, for violence of this sort: At least three people were killed on Saturday when a mass brawl involving hundreds…
I know very few people who support the current Kremlin regime, so I cannot judge from personal experience what turns Russians into its fans and whether this attachment is deep and sincere. I still believe there is an antidote for…
Donald Rayfield, the British Russianist and the author of Stalin and His Hangmen, reviews On Stalin’s Team by Sheila Fitzpatrick: Two myths lie behind Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia. One is that he won the second world (or “great patriotic”) war —…
On the subject of Putin and Trump (see my earlier posts 1, 2, 3), Prof. Snyder also writes: As Putin understands perfectly well, the president of the United States has standing in Russia, and enjoys far superior power to the president…
Why would a TV channel owned and financed by an unfriendly country support a US presidential candidate? In the case of RT, I can think of five reasons: The Kremlin thinks RT’s support can help Trump win. That’s naive or…
Following the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine, which saw Victor Yanukovych prevail over Yulia Tymoshenko, Anne Applebaum wrote in Slate: The only thing that has remained consistent over the past four years is the democratic process itself… Six years after the…
It may prove unfortunate if Donald Trump’s view of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has truly been influenced, or even shaped, by people like Paul Manafort, a former adviser to Yanukovych, and Carter Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker and fund manager with ties to…
Going back to Timothy Snyder’s piece, what about the top man in the Kremlin? Last December, Putin said this about Trump (in The Guardian‘s translation): He is a very colorful and talented man, no doubt about that… He says that he…
In his latest NYRB piece, Timothy Snyder lists a number of Russian “politicians” supportive of Trump. They turn out clowns of varying colors; none of them operators to be reckoned with. Particularly amusing is Snyder’s naming Alexander Dugin as “the leading Russian fascist ideologue and…
There are a number of reasons why Moscow may sincerely want Trump to be elected president. Trump is more of an isolationist and less of an interventionist than Hillary Clinton. Trump has no foreign policy experience and no experience holding…
Excellent reporting by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: Why Soviet Refugees Aren’t Buying Sanders’s Socialism. She has interviewed some older-generation Americans of Soviet-Jewish extraction and found them categorically opposed to Sanders and leaning towards Trump. It seems at times that…
Not much commentary on the latest Yukos judgment. Keith Johnson writes: “The district court ruling is a small setback, not a defeat, for Yukos shareholders” in Foreign Policy. I’d like to think so but I’m not sure. Opinio Juris, a…