Year: 2008

January 7, 2008

Alexander Mamut Invades the Blogosphere

The Telegraph ran a interview with Alexander Mamut of SUP yesterday, the new Kremlin-loyalist owner of LiveJournal (which we have blogged about here and here). Mamut comes off pretty eloquently, remarking that for some Russians in the blogosphere,...
January 7, 2008

Video: Bill Richardson Forgets About the Russian Federation

Here’s a clip from the Saturday U.S. presidential debates, during which New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson remarks that one of the first things he would do if elected president would be to “seek immediate negotiations with the Soviet Unio...
January 7, 2008

Energy Blast, Jan. 7, 2007

UK gas bills could rise 17% this year, with the price increase reportedly being “blamed on Russian supplier Gazprom”. Gazprom’s moves to tap Nigeria’s huge energy reserves “will send shivers through western governments already concerned about a sh...
January 7, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Jan. 7, 2007

TODAY: Russian Christmas; Clinton on Putin; Georgian elections – Russia doubts democracy; Poland signals stronger position on missile defense shield; Russia and the Middle East; could Russia give the OSCE a hard time this year? It is Christm...
January 7, 2008

Today in Russian Business

Analysts praising Russia’s strong performance “ignore the fact that Russia’s inflation demons are rearing their ugly heads and showing every sign of getting worse.” Oligarchs Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, previously joint owners of...
January 6, 2008

Gazprom’s Aim to Control LNG from Nigeria

A new report from the Financial Times on the potential Gazprom natural gas deal in Nigeria reveals that the company aims to control the country’s LNG export market to Europe and the United States, but Russia still hasn’t provided any d...
January 6, 2008

Gazprom as a Stakhanovite Corporation

Vladimir Putin is certainly not the first Russian to nab the cover of Time Magazine. In addition to Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Sakharov, Brezhnev and many others, if we go all the way back to Dec. 16, 1935, the cover was graced by the legendary Alexei St...
January 5, 2008

Georgia at the Polls

It was a fantasy come true for the Kremlin apologists. Distracted for just a moment from their diligent yet nutty work debunking the supposedly anti-Putin agenda/conspiracy in the international press (how these people reconcile that position with ...
January 5, 2008

Feudal Societies Practising Democratic Forms of Government

A few days ago Charles Krauthammer had a column discussing the rather imperfect democratic legacy of the recently assassinated Pakistani opposition figure Benazir Bhutto. The core question, the columnist argues, is whether or not democratic forms ...
January 5, 2008

The Popular Appeal of Authoritarianism in Russia and Bolivia

Last summer when Vladimir Putin boldly declared his interest in building a new global economic “architecture,” eschewing the influence of institutions such as the World Bank and Bretton Woods system, few in the West could predict how exactly Russi...