Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Mateusz Mazzini argues in Foreign Policy: The revisionist politics of the current Polish government plays right into Moscow’s hands. A rejection of multilateralism, strife with the EU, and growing antagonism with neighbors, notably Germany and Ukraine—all these features of Polish…
Alice Cherki, a friend and colleague of Frantz Fanon, writes in her memoir: Fanon went to Moscow in mid-January 1961. He had put on some weight, and his white cell count was substantially lower… [Dr. Michel] Martini remembers that Fanon…
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people have taken to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against a law that would make the city’s residents extraditable to China. A huge turnout for a city…
The Guardian has a write-up on Russian political prisoners. Not all of them: the human rights group Memorial puts their total number at 77 while another recent estimate is 230, and the total number of people persecuted for political reasons…
Forty years ago, Leon Edel – an expert on Henry James – sneered at Nabokov’s claim that the communist revolution in Russia completely destroyed the rule of law and took away all the limited but tangible liberties that Russians enjoyed…
Reviewing To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Eleonory Gilburd, Jennifer Wilson writes in The New Republic: According to the nineteenth-century philosopher Georgy Fedotov, “a unified Europe had more reality on the banks of the…
Late in April, Rwanda’s Supreme Court struck down a law criminalizing “defamation, insults and cartooning public officials” but upheld the clause that made insulting the president a crime. (In addition, the court refused to decriminalize adultery.) Specifically, Article 154 criminalizes…
Karen Allen reported from Madagascar earlier this month: The three Russians who landed on the Indian Ocean Island of Madagascar showed a curious interest in church architecture when they arrived months before the 2018 presidential election… But their particular interest…
Andrew Higgins writes in The New York Times, reporting from Moscow: The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop. But instead of curbing a…
In April 2017, Jehovah’s Witnesses were declared an extremist organization and outlawed by Russia’s top court. Their ordeal continues: A spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, an organization that Russia labeled extremist in 2017, alleged that at least seven adherents of…
Brick and mortar buildings like this, this, and this are a common sight in post-Soviet cities. They are colloquially called transformer booths because they house transformer (sub)stations. They are not all ugly but it’s understandable that some people would rather…
Stephen Kotkin, the author of two biographical books on Stalin, wrote in this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement: Solzhenitsyn wrote it [The Gulag Archpelago] conspiratorially, in fragments, hiding his completed sections in the homes of trusted allies… In…