Who’d have thunk it? Russia’s top netizen—the brightest star in a shiny galaxy of Internet-charged oppositionists—has blocked me on Twitter. Navalny, who has collected over 339 thousand followers, blocked me sometime late last week, probably on March 19, after I published a short Global Voices update about his controversial attendance at an Aeroflot banquet hosted at …
Dear readers, though my Russia blogging has moved to Global Voices, I’m always looking for things worth posting to AGT, which I haven’t abandoned, and will one day undoubtedly return to. This Friday thru Sunday, I’ll be attending the 44th annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in New Orleans. This is …
Continue reading ‘The Best of the ASEEES 2012 Conference for Russia Watchers’ »
Everyone enjoys reading about himself. This wretched egomania fuels the celebrity phenomenon that is the lifeblood of modern society, and why not! So you can imagine my delight to awake this morning to Catherine Fitzpatrick’s latest four-thousand-word-long masterpiece — an attack on me, my sinister Kremlin sympathies, and the outfit (Global Voices) where I recently signed on as …
Today marks my first day as Global Voices RuNet Echo Project Editor. My inaugural post went live this morning: a report on an online petition that emerged last week advocating expanded controls on foreign-funded Russian NGOs. You can read it here at GV’s site. ‘A Good Treaty’ has been my primary blogging platform for more …
In the aftermath of last Sunday’s parliamentary elections, several large-scale opposition demonstrations are scheduled across Russia. The largest is expected to be the “Rally for Honest Elections,” planned for December 10th, Saturday afternoon, in Bolotnaia Square, not far from the Kremlin in Moscow. As I write this now, nearly 33,000 people have RSVP’d for the …
Over the weekend, in the aftermath of Unity Day and the Russkii Marsh, yours truly interviewed the author behind one of LiveJournal’s most popular anonymous blogs. According to Yandex, “Politrash_ru” ranks as the 111st most read blog on LiveJournal, just ten places lower than Ilya Yashin and 115 places above Vladimir Milov. When Navalny publicly …
Continue reading ‘AGT Exclusive: Interview with the Author of Politrash_ru’ »
Are Russia-watchers guilty of over-thinking or over-hoping? Sam Greene claims to have been the “last analyst left in Moscow who actually thought that Dmitri Medvedev would stay on as president of Russia,” but this is hyperbole. Analysts as talented as Stanislav Belkovsky, Igor Yurgens, and Gleb Pavlovsky (to name just a few) were also in …
Continue reading ‘How Did So Many Kremlinologists Get It Wrong?’ »
The eternal, hotly-debated question about whether or not Vladimir Putin will return to the Kremlin was answered yesterday in the affirmative. None other than Dmitri Medvedev made the announcement, minutes before Putin returned to the stage at the United Russia party convention to deliver what was essentially an early victory speech. There is much to …
Continue reading ‘No Time for Obituaries: Putin’s Return in 2012’ »