18 Mar 2012
The following is a short article co-written with Wesleyan University’s Professor Peter Rutland, who blogs about nationalism at NationalismWatch. It was drafted in early March, immediately after the 2012 Russian presidential election. With Russia’s sixth presidential election having reached its preordained conclusion, what remains unclear is how Moscow’s already seething political opposition will respond to the [...]
1 Feb 2012
At the “Cabinet Lounge” on Monday, January 30th, Aleksei Navalny delivered a presentation to roughly fifty investment bankers — many of whom are gathered in Moscow this week for “The Russia Forum,” organized by Troika Dialog and Sberbank. The next day, Navalny on his blog joked that the bankers were curiously paranoid that an oppositionist [...]
11 Dec 2011
The first of possibly several waves of mass demonstrations has swept Russia. Yesterday, a crowd maybe as big as one-hundred thousand people gathered in downtown Moscow to protest voter fraud in the December 4th parliamentary elections. The big question now is: where does Russia go from here? For most observers on the ground, there is [...]
8 Dec 2011
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 [...]
6 Dec 2011
The votes are in, the violations are online, and Moscow’s oppositionists are out on the streets, gathered at dawn in Kitai Gorod, chanting at cops to release their most beloved celebrity, Aleksei Navalny. Russia’s best known activist-blogger found himself in police custody earlier tonight, when Sunday’s parliamentary election results confirmed for many that the authorities [...]
20 Nov 2011
“If an authoritarian regime can crumble under the pressure of a Facebook group, whether its members are protesting online or in the streets, it’s not much of an authoritarian regime. The real effects of digital activism would thus most likely be felt only in the long term rather than immediately.” This is what Evgeny Morozov, [...]
6 Nov 2011
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 [...]
2 Nov 2011
Last week, a slew of Aleksei Navalny’s personal emails leaked onto the Web. The emails were originally available at http://navalnymail.kz/ but that site is now dead. For those of you with moral qualms about reading over this man’s private correspondence, it’s worth noting that Navalny himself has invited the public to have a look: To read or [...]
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