Russia 18 Jul 2008 11:48 pm
I’ve been a little slow in posting this update to l’affaire Litvinenko. Back in May the Independent ran a follow-up, tallying up 18 months later what we know and still don’t know about how Alexander Litvinenko died.
That article pointed to a piece by Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Sun from March of this [...]
Agora and Russia 4 Jun 2008 8:17 pm
Russians may be great chess players, but they don’t seem to get the hang of American politics. Commenting on press reports that Hillary Clinton is open to the idea of being Barack Obama’s running mate, a reporter for Moskovskii Komsomolets writes:
Experts predict … if Obama invites Clinton to join his team as vice president, supporters [...]
Agora and Russia 24 Apr 2008 11:00 pm
As they have been doing for almost a century, Armenians around the world today commemorated the genocide carried out by the Ottoman government under the cover of World War I.
In Moscow cars with Armenian flags drove in a column around the Garden Ring Road, but were prevented from entering the street where the Turkish embassy [...]
Random and Russia 3 Mar 2008 7:56 pm
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …
I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates [...]
Russia 6 Feb 2008 7:10 pm
A day in the life …
Today it was announced that the legendary British band Deep Purple will perform in the Kremlin this month as part of the 25th anniversary celebration for Gazprom, the biggest extractor of natural gas in the world. Attendance will be by invitation only. Possible attendees include Russian President Vladimir Putin and [...]
Russia 31 Oct 2007 12:48 pm
Старые привычки … I don’t know if there’s a Russian equivalent for the English phrase: “Old habits die hard.” It would certainly apply to recent events in the Russian hinterland, where workers were ordered to attend pro-Putin rallies in a number of cities.
The Guardian reports:
A telegram from Sergey Lemikhov, a railways boss in western Siberia, [...]
Russia 21 Sep 2007 6:51 pm
A website I don’t visit often enough is Подслушано в России [Overheard in Russia]. A number of such “Overheard in …” sites exist, actually. They remind me of the Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times, where readers share conversations, exclamations, exhortations, or other utterances they happened to experience by chance in New York City [...]
Russia 1 Sep 2007 5:27 pm
Well, we made it through the doldrums of August. In an apparent attempt to inject some drama into this perennially languid month, a Russian journalist, Roman Trunov, tried to paint August in Russia as fraught with history-altering events. Four of his five examples occurred in the 1990s—admittedly a tumultuous time in that country. Two of [...]
Russia 11 Dec 2006 1:37 pm
I’ve been holding off commenting on the Litvinenko case, because … well, because I can’t make heads or tails of it. As international mysteries go, this one is particularly murky. But that doesn’t keep the preternaturally astute Charles Krauthammer from sharing his indisputable conclusion that Vladimir Putin did it. Fresh from his astounding success at [...]
Agora and Russia 10 Oct 2006 1:06 pm
It’s hard to imagine a more cowardly act than the cold-blooded murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. “The pen is mightier than the sword”—and, presumably, mightier than the bullet. Whistling in the dark. Bullets and bombs continue to make the weaker argument prevail, just as in the days of swords and battering rams; continue to [...]
This site uses a modified version of the WordPress theme FastTrack