Archive

April 28, 2009

Energy Blast – April 28, 2009

President Medvedev delayed without explanation his meeting with Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev in Moscow, implying relations remain frosty over the pipeline issue.  Russia’s electricity providers will install 65% less power t...
April 28, 2009

Today in Russian Business – April 28, 2009

The Economic Development Ministry has announced that unemployment reached 10% last month, and will continue to rise, but at a slower pace.  The government is sticking to its plans to reduce inflation to 8% by 2012, and plans to reduce tax pre...
April 28, 2009

RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – April 28, 2009

TODAY: landslide victory declared for United candidate in Sochi; Nemtsov to contest in court; issues on Georgia war games remain; ex-Yukos lawyer freed United Russia candidate Anatoly Pakhomov has been declared the official winner of the Sochi ele...
April 27, 2009

Trouble Ahead for the Tandemocracy

Interesting piece by Pavel K. Baev at Eurasia Daily Monitor today: Berdimuhamedov apparently presumes that Gazprom is not what it used to be, while probably not reflecting much on the predicament of his own gas-centric mono-state. Gazprom is indee...
April 27, 2009

Kremlin-Approved News in the U.K.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s very own mouthpiece newspaper, has purchased itself a nice big supplement section in the British newspaper the Telegraph called “Russia Now.”  (This supplement has been running fo...
April 27, 2009

Thought Experiments for Aging Autocrats

For the time being, things like repeated referendums and organized mayoral elections may work for the likes of Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, but what will these and other authoritarian-leaning leaders of the world come up with in ten years time ...
April 27, 2009

The Semantics of Democracy

Perhaps we should be a little more economical with our use of the d-word.  This comes from Fred Weir’s blog at CSM: “In the final analysis, Pakhomov’s victory was an expression of public support for Putin, and his margin of ...
April 27, 2009

Grigory Pasko: The Price of Common Sense in Pipelines

How much does it cost to think? The real cost of ambitious gas projects is surely unknown Grigory Pasko, journalist Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. On Lenta.Ru I read: «The cost of construction of th...
April 27, 2009

Crashing Pokhomov’s Party

It shouldn’t be any mystery to readers who won the mayoral election in Sochi this weekend.  There was just one candidate, the incumbent Anatoly Pakhomov, who had the support of the Kremlin, meaning that no other competition was even fea...
April 27, 2009

Brezhnevian Stability

Alexei Bayer’s column in the Moscow Times today brings up a rather eloquently concise framing of how Western and Russian perspectives differ over the roles of states and markets … being that the fundamental agreement may have something...