Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The New York Times won three Pulitzer prizes yesterday, one awarded… …for international reporting for a series on Russia’s surreptitious assertion of power. The series, a collaboration among The Times’s international, Washington and investigative teams, explored how Russia was expanding its influence at home…
Christopher Caldwell’s speech at Hillsdale College, How to Think About Vladimir Putin, suggests an angle and a point of view symptomatic of a certain strain of thought on the American right. I believe it rests on error. No matter what…
Googling “Putin critic” turns up reports of a Russian defector assassinated in Ukraine; of a memorial to a Russian opposition leader killed near the Kremlin; of the current opposition leader jailed for a street protest; of a Russian investigative journalist who…
My latest two cents considering Obama the Cunctator and Trump the (hopefully) Knot Cutter. One Manufacturing regime change out of stagnant air is not, generally speaking, a sound suggestion. Smartly supporting a groundswell of discontent is a different matter. On…
The Economist wrote in November 2014 considering the proposal that Russian banks be disconnected from the SWIFT payment system: Now there are calls for Russian banks to be banned from SWIFT in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A group…
Good reporting by Howard Amos, a Moscow-based freelancer, and Jim Heintz of Associated Press. Russians are taking to the streets under anti-corruption slogans, and not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg: Navalny and his Foundation for Fighting Corruption had called…
Reviewing five recent books on the Russian Revolution of 1917 for the LRB, Sheila Fitzpatrick quotes S. A. [Stephen Anthony] Smith, professor of history at All Souls College, Oxford: The Soviet Union proved capable of generating extensive growth in industrial…
About two weeks ago, Mark Townsend wrote in The Guardian: Another Briton said to have had an influential intervention in the US elections is 52-year-old Jim Dowson, a Scottish Calvinist who founded the far right, anti-Muslim party Britain First. Dowson, from…
The Economist‘s Erasmus wrote last Sunday about the “row” concerning Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg: After the Bolshevik revolution a century ago, [the building] became a museum, dedicated at various times to science, atheism or simply its own history.…
This Russian official is, technically speaking, the third in the line of presidential succession: Vyacheslav Volodin, Putin’s former deputy chief of staff and current chairman of the state Duma, would support a law that protects the honor and dignity of…
Wednesday’s predictable but nevertheless bizarre re-conviction of Navalny and Ofitserov makes one wonder how the court managed the seemingly insurmountable barriers such as the absence of the corpus delicti and the ECHR’s ruling. It’s especially puzzling if, as Navalny has observed,…
It’s Groundhog Day for the Russian opposition and its informal leader: Alexei Navalny said the verdict at the retrial was copied word for word from his first conviction… As the judge read out the guilty verdict on Wednesday, Navalny tweeted out pages…