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Trouble in the North

Here’s Radio Liberty reporting from the north of Russia: Some 7,000 demonstrators have rallied in Russia’s northwestern Komi Republic against the construction of a new landfill in the neighboring Arkhangelsk region… The demonstrators gathered in Michurin Park in the Komi…

Dispatches from Antarctica

Via LanguageHat, the latest post on Maciej Cegłowski’s Idle Words blog. Gluten Free Antarctica seems to be the third installment of Cegłowski’s wonderful reminiscences of a voyage to “the only continent without a Michelin star.” The ship in question is Akademik Shokalsky (also spelled Shokalskiy), apparently…

Heroes?

Having moved to the US in 1974, Alexander Yanov published The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR in 1978. John C. Campbell summarized it in Foreign Policy: Yanov, one of the most perceptive and stimulating Russian political…

Kemerovo

From A fire in the system: Social implications of the tragedy in Kemerovo by Alexander Firsov in Forbes Russia: the disaster, he writes, will confirm… …a sense of profound moral and managerial corrosion underlying the system, which [corrosion] cannot be…

Plantago major

Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel prize in literature, was prone to grumbling about fellow writers’ and poets’ follies. His bitter shots hit the mark most of the time, but occasionally he missed and got hit…

It didn’t start in 1917

The organizers of Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 – the London show mentioned in this post – seem to believe that Russian arts burst into dazzling blossom in 1917 as the revolutionary spring ushered in a kingdom of liberty: …we will mark the historic centenary by…

Amos Oz and Three Versions of Judas

I read a brief excerpt from Amos Oz’s latest novel, Judas, this morning, then looked for reviews of the book and the author’s recent interviews. Here’s one from September 2016: But as much as the young Oz was enthralled by Jesus,…

Outlaw anonymous messaging!

The Moscow Times reports: A new bill banning anonymous users from using online messenger apps has been submitted to the Russian parliament. The plans would require users of apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to identify themselves with their cell phone…