Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
From the Russian daily Kommersant: …The director “ascertained the reality of a ‘gentle Moslem occupation’ exemplified by the co-existence in a faraway Kostroma village of a few lonely old women and a family of Uzbek refugees with their numerous children.…
Passing by a construction site in the US and seeing mostly Mexican-looking workers — presumably recent immigrants — I used to wonder what kepts native-born Americans away from construction jobs. I came up with three obvious choices. Perhaps Mexicans are…
If I were the President of the Russian Federation, and happened to be fixated on helping Russians in Latvia, I would amply finance a network of private Russian schools in that Baltic country. They would be equally open to students…
Schumpeter was not the first to classify Marx as a (false) prophet of a new world and the founder of a new religion. The Russian religious philosopher (to use a common Russian term) Sergei Bulgakov published an article titled Karl…
Chechen independence, no matter how many times the Western press may repeat the expression, would make little sense anyway — an unworkable option, unlike Corsican or Basque independence. How would Italians feel if there were a little Albania planted in…
What the heck is going on in Baghdad? Is the war over or not yet? A great number of Russians don’t seem to believe CNN coverage because they mistrust US government and media as much as they mistrust their own.…
A shallow but entertaining piece from Russian Journal (not to be confused with The Russia Journal). An inelegant translation of some excerpts follows. It looks like the anti-Iraqi allies did not realize indeed what they were getting into. Americans planned…
US believes Russian technicians helping Iraqi defense: official I told you so a few posts ago. This piece is also amusing: U.S. Concerned About Russian Weapon Sales. Surely the US has known all along that a) Russia sold weapons and…
Kommersant reports that about 20 (!) people showed up to protest against the war in Voronezh, and a tiny few in Vladivostok. Nothing of note in the capitals, Moscow and St. Pete. Being an anti-anti-Americanist, I’m nonetheless not amused by…
The Philosopher of Islamic Terror by Paul Berman. [Post edited in 2021.] Gamal Abdel Nasser was the only Nasser whose name Russian announcers articulated with a stress on the second syllable: Nah-SER. The audience enjoyed punning on that surname because…
In case you didn’t know, the word Proletariat was nearly a swearword in Soviet Russia in the 1970s–1980s. The well-off and the educated so labeled the drink-loving, foul-mouthed, good-for-nothing working classes. Well, not exactly good for nothing — when it…
It looks like Russia’s birth rate is still dwindling, but it is hardly the case in Moscow. And there is immigration – from the Caucasus, China, Ukraine, Vietnam, Africa, etc. Not that I’m worried “we” might lose our identity –…