Video: Russia’s Political Culture, Present and Past

Here’s is perhaps one of the more controversial segments from our interview with Paul Goble, the former State Department official who blogs over at Window on Eurasia.  Part of this discussion was related to a blog post written by Goble about Irina Pavlova’s critique of Gleb Pavlovsky – which interestingly predicted the media campaign that would be waged in Washington by the latter (as evidenced by the FT and NYT pieces) a month before it happened.  Pavlova’s argument, which will certainly raise some disagreement among many (including ourselves), is that the current leadership of Russia is increasingly behaving in a “Stalinist” fashion – especially with regard to the orally dictated secret directives to security forces.  This one is open to interpretation.