Category Politics

Yes, I did vote yesterday. Against all candidates: it’s a valid option here. The best I could do to protest that farce misnamed election. Why did Putin have to turn the election campaign into a joke when he had a…

Utro, a somewhat sensationalist but overly reasonable Russian e-zine, reports, quoting other sources, that the Duma is going to consider a bill that would require all users to obtain a special permission (as usual) to get access to the Internet.…

Three weeks before the presidential election, Putin sacked the government. Gone is prime minister Kasyanov (a.k.a. Misha “Two Percent” Kasyanov), who saw the GDP grow by 30% in the four years of his tenure, and a flat 13% tax rate…

The opinion page of the Friday, 13 Feb. issue: on the left, a brief editorial, The President’s Constitutional Schizophrenia. It argues quite convincingly why Putin should not tamper with the Constitution, but who is it for? That Putin should serve…

I haven’t blogged for a few days, but I have left comments on two discussion threads: at Tacitus and Le Sabot Post-Moderne. The original posts are focusing on how and why Putin is terrible for Russia and the world; I…

Let me turn to the Russian papers that matter now. The two leading business publications are Vedomosti and Kommersant. Vedomosti, established with the assistance of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, have confined themselves to economics and politics (their…

If you’re still interested in Solzhenitsyn as seen by Russophone intellectuals, here’s, once again, the link to curious discussion. Using the word Russophone, I mean nothing but a parallel to, say, Francophone, without any connotations that the term may have…