Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
In one of his bitterest poems, In Front of the Looking Glass, Vladislav Khodasevich wondered how he, once a young dancer at summer balls in Ostankino, near Moscow, had mutated into a critic whose every riposte induces “revulsion, animus and fear”…
Enough to scare the bejeezus out of anyone in Russia: A mother of seven has been accused of treason for calling the Ukrainian embassy about Russian troop movements… The woman — who faces between 12 and 20 years in prison…
The Russian Central Bank’s decision to cut the key rate by 2 percentage points from 17% to 15% seems like an act of abdication, of renouncing its own independence. Actually the end-of-independence signal came in earlier, when Dmitry Tulin was…
How, then, to square my claim that the sanctions against Russia are working well with the renewed Russian-backed assault on Mariupol and across the board in Donbass? First, the economic disaster, although inexorable, has yet to hit with full force.…
Putin has signed into law a bill making it legal – again – to advertise wine on TV, but only if it is produced in Russia from Russian grapes. While some wine-grade grapes grow in Russia proper, e.g. in Krasnodar,…
The year 2014 has been disastrous for Russia. The Kremlin has set the country on a path to national self-destruction with no salvific detour in sight. It does not hurt so much yet, but it’s only a question of time.…
Russia is sliding into a full-scale economic and social crisis faster than I expected as the fiscal and monetary authorities are powerless to stop, much less push back, the juggernaut of self-destructive behavior launched by the Kremlin earlier this year. The…
Extracts from Yulia Latynina’s latest radio interview on Ekho Moskvy. Without endorsing her views in general, I more or less agree with this: First, I have to tell you that… I’m in the Netherlands, in Maastricht, at a congress… talking…
In this post, after some whining about a potential conflict of interest at the new Ukrainian cabinet, I suggest that the new finance and economy ministers were chosen with a view to attracting foreign capital above all other priorities. President…
[PDF] The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money by Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss. It started with Pomerantsev’s piece in The Atlantic, I think. His LRB diary is also great.
A final write-up on Putin’s Valdai hisitoricizing, following parts 1, 2, 3. The “lands wrongly handed over to Ukraine” meme seems to go back to the short-lived Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic, the DKR. The majority view is the DKR was a temporary…
Kakha Bendukidze, the brain behind the Georgian reforms under president Saakashvili, has died in London at 58. The Georgian reform team achieved something out of the ordinary in 2004-8: Georgia became the first post-Soviet country east of the Baltic where it was easy…