20 Jun 2011
On March 30, 2011, President Medvedev gave a speech in Magnitogorsk, where he announced a series of executive orders aimed at improving Russia’s miserable, “bad, very bad” investment climate. In an apparent effort to reach out to business interests, Medvedev declared that social insurance payroll taxes (strakhovye vznosy) were too high, and he ordered the [...]
1 Jun 2011
Anyone remotely familiar with Russian cinema has probably heard of Nikita Mikhalkov, an Oscar-winning film director, the son of an illustrious artist family, and a notorious asshole. It was just a few years after the end of the USSR, when Mikhalkov won his Academy Award for the 1994 film ‘Burnt by the Sun.’ That movie [...]
6 May 2011
Beginning in the middle of April 2011, several people who donated money through Yandex.Dengi to Aleksei Navalny’s RosPil said they were contacted by a female reporter claiming to work for “Sol’” newspaper. Bloggers have since identified the caller as Yulia Dikhtiar, a Nashi commisar in Voronezh. On May 2nd, this story developed into a full-blown scandal, [...]
22 Apr 2011
“I don’t know why foreigners love to always photograph me in vests. A possible explanation is that, in every foreign article about me, it’s necessary to cautiously mention that my ‘general views are somewhat nationalist.’ To Europeans and Americans, the vest is a symbol of the four-eyed nerd. Maybe a “nerd-nationalist” is somehow less scary.” [...]
14 Apr 2011
For anyone a member of or interested in the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), that group’s world convention is occurring this week at Columbia University in New York. Yours truly will be playing the role of Discussant for Panel R9 (“The Construction of Power in the Russian State”) this Saturday, April 16th, at [...]
8 Apr 2011
In Russia these days, the sky seems to be falling even more than usual. In mid-March, INSOR (the Institute of Contemporary Development) came out with its annual report on Russia’s political future, advocating its patented brand of Medvedevian liberal reform. This produced the usual bubble of chatter, and would likely have faded into oblivion [...]
26 Mar 2011
Roughly a week ago, a muckraking blogger and a scholarly nepotist got together with some other eggheads and talked for nearly four hours about in-the-works reforms for Federal Law 94, which is a beastly piece of legislation regulating government tenders. The law is made up of 65 articles, and has been revised several times since [...]
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