Month: December 2007

December 15, 2007

A Lack of Trust in Russia

What’s behind the Kremlin’s deep-seated suspicion of the West? The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield Hayes takes a trip to Russia and finds himself quite unwelcome, and also quite unable to find his way around. His column is annoyingly anti...
December 15, 2007

Gennady Zyuganov Runs for President

No big surprise here, but the Russian Communists have officially selected Gennady Zyuganov to run for the presidency on the party ticket. It is particularly illustrative of how Russia has changed that the only tolerated political opposition are Zy...
December 14, 2007

Dr. Chee Soon Juan: On Authoritarian Capitalism

[The last time we heard from Dr. Chee Soon Juan, the leader of Singapore’s opposition party (SDP), he penned a column for this blog on the comparative authoritarian capitalist systems of Russia and Singapore. Since then, I’ve seen this...
December 14, 2007

Faces of Russian Style

It seems like there have been a lot of stories recently about the marriage of Russia’s emerging political culture and style. First there was that story of the oxymoronic $2,000 Communist-style coats, men and fur (“It makes me feel like a sex...
December 14, 2007

Anders Aslund: Putin Overplaying his Hand?

From Anders Aslund in the Moscow Times: “The fundamental point is that we have no idea what Putin is going to do because he does not want us to know — and because he enjoys dictatorial powers. The good news is that by overplaying his h...
December 14, 2007

On the Eve of Civil War, Russia Invests in Bolivia

One wears “sartorial” black turtlenecks, the other prefers bright stripy alpaca wool sweaters – even at diplomatic meetings. Yet Vladimir Putin and Bolivian President Evo Morales, both of whom have seen their presidencies enormou...
December 14, 2007

Andrei Illarionov: The Consequences of a Duplicitous Game

Andrei Illarionov doesn’t think that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is really helping matters in Russia when she offers her endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s selected candidate. Writing in the Washington Post today, he reasonably as...
December 14, 2007

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Dec. 14, 2007

Today: Russian-British relations worsen; Zhirinovsky to run for president; pharmaceutical deal could fall through due to nationalization fears; Nord Stream to hike project costs on key pipeline; Russia-US deadlock over missile defense continues. R...
December 13, 2007

FRONTLINE/World Documentary on the Russian Opposition

Check it out – a new video segment from Victoria Gamburg reporting from the streets of St. Petersburg around the time of the parliamentary elections. These videos are a teaser from a longer feature which will run on TV on February 26 before ...
December 13, 2007

Russian Newspapers Are Just “Putin and Boobs”

Blogging about the life-threatening transactions behind LiveJournal over at the Other Russia blog, Sergei Petrunin observes: If in the West the majority of blogs are something like electronic diaries along the lines of “I woke up at seven in the m...