14 Nov 2012
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 [...]
11 Jul 2012
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 [...]
29 Sep 2011
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 [...]
27 Sep 2011
In light of Aleksei Kudrin’s departure from the Ministry of Finance yesterday, I’m posting this follow-up to my initial thoughts about Russia after Putin’s return. Before Medvedev spit hellfire and brimstone at Kudrin on Monday, Igor Shuvalov seemed convinced that Russia’s long-time Finance Minister would be migrating from the ‘government’ to the ‘Kremlin,’ just as [...]
12 Feb 2011
In my last post about the Law on the Police, I dedicated a section to Aleksandr Khinshtein, whose opposition to the legislation I characterized as phony and predicated on bad blood dating back eleven years to a bizarre run-in with the MVD involving a traffic violation. A very knowledgable friend immediately wrote me to [...]
23 Jan 2011
In collaboration with Anatoly Karlin at Sublime Oblivion, we have created three tables listing the biggest players in the “Kremlin clans” according to Vladimir Pribylovsky’s recent book ВЛАСТЬ-2010: 60 биографий (Power in 2010: 60 biographies). (See Karlin’s comments and his original translation of the book’s introduction). The biggest update has been the replacement of Sergey Bogdanchikov by Eduard [...]
21 Jan 2011
In a Novaya Gazeta article published January 12, 2011, Liliia Shevtsova argued that Russian authorities rely on three columns of support to maintain their existence: nationalism, internationalism, and systemic liberalism. Her diagnosis is that nationalism is coming into its own and gaining spontaneity, not to mention coming into friction with international cooperation efforts (like the [...]
11 Jan 2011
I recently read a very interesting interview with the always-provocative Maskim Kononenko, an insanely active Russian LJ blogger, journalist, and creator of the wildly funny vladimir.vladimirovich.ru short stories saga. The original text of this “Russkii Zhurnal” interview can be found here, and my translation appears below. One thing I’ll note about Kononenko’s comments is that [...]
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