Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I wrote this two and a half years ago: If President Trump is truly an aging Narcissus, few things would please him more than toppling a powerful leader whom he, Trump, has previously considered close to a peer… If the…
Andrew Higgins writes in The New York Times, reporting from Moscow: The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop. But instead of curbing a…
The German terms Cäsarenwahn and Cäsarenwahnsinn gained some currency in the second half of the 19th century thanks to a novel by Gustav Freytag, a psychiatric treatise by Friedrich Wiedermeister, and a historical study by Ludwig Quidde. In the last…
Putin was born 60 years after Franco (October 1952, December 1892) and was appointed prime minister 60 years after Franco was installed in Madrid (August 1999, March 1939). Chronologically, Franco’s 1959, the year of the Stabilization and Liberalization Plan, which…
TASS reports on Putin’s annual address to the Russian parliament (the Duma and the Federation Council): The policy of developing the political system and institutions of direct democracy, as well as enhancing the elections’ competitiveness will be continued, the president…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
I thought the Monster Vote was merely wishful thinking by escapist desperados – until it materialized. Well done, folks. Now I fear that certain people in the Kremlin, who do not believe in the possibility of government by the people…
Erdoğan’s ongoing purge of the judiciary is unsurprising: apparently, an influential group of appellate judges was one of the few barriers left on his march to absolute power – although the magistrates’ motives may have little to do with the rule…
Vedomosti, the independent business paper, ran this headline today: “Savchenko’s release became Russia’s PR* defeat.” I disagree. Doing the right thing – in the simplest sense of right as good – can’t be bad PR. Even if the world thinks you are…
On the subject of Putin and Trump (see my earlier posts 1, 2, 3), Prof. Snyder also writes: As Putin understands perfectly well, the president of the United States has standing in Russia, and enjoys far superior power to the president…
Why would a TV channel owned and financed by an unfriendly country support a US presidential candidate? In the case of RT, I can think of five reasons: The Kremlin thinks RT’s support can help Trump win. That’s naive or…
Going back to Timothy Snyder’s piece, what about the top man in the Kremlin? Last December, Putin said this about Trump (in The Guardian‘s translation): He is a very colorful and talented man, no doubt about that… He says that he…