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 …
The Season of Discontent keeps chugging along in Russia this spring. Kaliningrad has attracted every political gadfly and climber around, and next Saturday’s demonstration promises to be the mother of all theatre. Who will win the rallying competition: the Kremlin stooges (like Zhirinovsky), dispatched to rouse the counter-protesting rabble? Or the Muscovite liberal imports, who …
Yesterday was Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia, a celebration that serves as a kind of ‘Men’s Day.’ If you’ve got a penis, thanks for defending the Fatherland! Originally, the day marks the beginning of conscription under Lenin in 1918 — the birth of the Red Army. Maksim Kononenko has an amusing op-ed in …