Russia

January 1, 2009

Nine Years of Putinism

On this day nine years ago, Vladimir Putin was sworn into office, bearing lofty promises: “In the traditional midnight New Year’s Eve address to the nation, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s new acting President, promised Russians that he...
January 1, 2009

Video: Just One More Year Until U.S. Disintegration

I wouldn’t usually bother posting clips from Russia Today, but for those of you who wanted to get a look at Russia’s newest media celebrity, Igor Panarin, this one should do the trick.  According to Panarin, the United States is d...
January 1, 2009

Goodbye, Juries

The Associated Press has announced that President Dmitry Medvedev has signed into law a new bill which will restrict jury trials for cases involving terrorism and treason.  Thanks to the newly expanded definition of treason, this could involv...
January 1, 2009

The Year in Review

Last night Moscow closed the books on a very eventful 2008 – and in traditional Russian style, I have no doubt everyone rang it in with tremendous style as though it were still the halcyon days of July. Russia finished the year with a much s...
December 31, 2008

Grigory Pasko: Person of the Year, Then and Now

The man from the magazine cover and the country in ruins Grigory Pasko, journalist Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. In the last new year holidays Time brought joy to the whole world by recognizing Put...
December 31, 2008

Enduring the Crisis

From Irina Yasina in the Lebanon Daily Star: Whole regions – the Urals and Mordovia, for example – are stagnant. Moscow, which used to rain gold on the economy, is also suffering, because it, too, depends on natural resources, and its ...
December 31, 2008

Video: Russia Today’s Bizarre Ads

NYT television critic Virginia Heffernan had a great blog post yesterday taking a look at the bizzaro commercials being played inside New York City taxis advertising the 24/7 cable news Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today.  I’ve als...
December 31, 2008

Stalin Calling

In relation to the previous post, I am catching all this news of a new mobile phone being released in Moscow by Nokia which features an image of Stalin – perhaps in the style of one of those U2-branded iPods.  After some hard searching,...
December 31, 2008

Forgiving Uncle Joe

I do agree with this author that it is particularly surprising how un-surprised everyone is that such as astoundingly large portion of the Russian population voted to forgive “Uncle Joe” Stalin and elect him as country’s most pop...
December 31, 2008

Two Trends for 2009 in Russia

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Leon Aron sees two trends emerging in Russia that the West should play close attention to: The first will be a growing dissatisfaction with the government, which may lead to a political crisis. The second will b...