In honor of the holiday, just a short post today. Not a post, at all, really, but a partial repost and recommendation that anyone with some spare time on this blazing-hot Monday take a look at Ilya Yashin’s recent blogging about his tour of the United States. Suddenly the amateur anthropologist/ethnographer, Yashin has visited Washington …
Continue reading ‘A Russian in America: Ilya Yashin's Travelogue’ »
As expected, figures in the Russian liberal community reacted harshly to Vladimir Putin’s comments in an exchange with Yuri Shevchuk last Saturday. Also unsurprising, journalists unfriendly to the opposition responded as they do by defending the actions of the authorities and questioning the motives of the liberals. All in all, it was another day in …
Yesterday in Foreign Policy, Julia Ioffe published the most in-depth English-language article to-date on the hidden-camera scandals in Russia. She interviews Solidarnost’s Ilya Yashin, Nashi’s Robert Schlegel, and the center of the fiasco himself: Viktor Shenderovich. It is a weird article. Yashin compares infidelity and mattress-humping to defecation; Shenderovich says that his wife “reacted completely …
Continue reading ‘A Response to Julia Ioffe's 'Bears in a Honey Trap'’ »
Today’s attacks in the Moscow metro appear to have killed about forty people. As many people died a little more than six years ago in the tunnel near Avtozavodskaya station in a similar suicide explosion. Today and tomorrow are days of mourning, but the smoke had hardly cleared before the speculation and accusations started. The …
Ilya Yashin has set the new standard in weird blog posts. This is quite a feat, considering that he seemed to have managed this achievement just last week, when he responded twice to a circulating YouTube video that captures him offering traffic cops a bribe to get out of a ticket. The first response was …
Make of it what you will, but three notable opposition figures (political commentator Dmitrii Oreshkin, activist Ilya Yashin, and journalist Mikhail Fishman) have been thoroughly embarrassed by a recently published YouTube video (see above) that depicts each of the men offering bribes to highway patrol officers, in order to get out of a formal ticket. …
Continue reading ‘Opposition Figures Caught Offering Bribes’ »
A couple of days ago, Tomsk Governor Victor Kress was leaving a local community event, when a man approached him, screaming “For the death of my grandmother!” and popped him one in the nose. The man, Sergey Zaikov, is a member of the Solidarnost’ movement, though he apparently attacked Kress because he blames the governor …
Continue reading ‘Activist Punches Tomsk Governor In the Face’ »
Julia Ioffe, a young journalist who’s written for Fortune, Newsweek, and the New Yorker, has an interesting new article out in Foreign Policy. “The Revolution Will Definitely Not Be Televised” is about the Russian opposition’s new campaign of “thirty-firsts,” which is an uncharacteristically well conceived strategy that’s recently popped up among the liberals. Modeled on …
Continue reading ‘The Un-Alarmist Article Will Not Be Published’ »