COLD SNAP AFTER SPRING IN THE MIDDLE EAST |
17 June 2009
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As I write, angry demonstrations continue in Tehran and elsewhere in the Islamic Republic of Iran, over what the young demonstrators perceive as the blatant rigging of the presidential election to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power for another five years. Reports suggest at least eight protestors have been killed by police.
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ENOUGH GRAND-STANDING BY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT |
27 August 2008
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The typical criticism of the UK’s Foreign Office is the one eloquently expressed in John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener - that they are pitiless practitioners of real-politik who care more about stability than idealism, and who only really work to protect the interests of British corporations, rather than British values. But on Russia, the Foreign Office seems to have erred on the other side.
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LESS GOVERNMENT, MORE NATURAL SELECTION |
10 July 2008
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This week, 150 years ago, two papers were read out at the Linnean Society in London, one by Alfred Russell Wallace and the other by Charles Darwin, which first laid out to the world Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin’s theory continues to have a profound influence on psychology, via the growingly dominant theory of Evolutionary Psychology (EP).
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF MEDIA |
04 May 2008
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One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PricewaterhouseCoopers calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join them.
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ISLAM’S COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION? |
16 April 2008
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I’ve started writing about Islamic finance as of a few months ago. It’s a fascinating, bizarre market, fusing as it does the world of ancient religious law with the world of international finance. And it’s an increasingly important market, because the Middle East is suddenly where all the capital is, so companies, banks, funds and even governments are scrambling for their Koran to work out how to attract this capital.
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OH, THE TRANSHUMANITY! |
20 February 2008
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The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present. This week, the news read like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company $50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.
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WHAT WOULD A MCCAIN PRESIDENCY MEAN FOR RUSSIA? |
07 February 2008
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President Putin must be watching the US presidential elections with some mild concern. Because the person who is emerging as the favourite for the US presidency – John McCain – is also one of Putin’s most outspoken critics among the US political elite.
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IT’S IN THE FSB’S INTEREST, BUT NOT RUSSIA’S, TO TURN THE UK INTO A ‘THREAT’ |
22 January 2008
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The British Council has finally bowed to the inevitable and suspended its operations in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. I don’t see why it tried to continue operations when the government had made it clear it wasn’t welcome – you can’t operate in a country unless the government wants you there.
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GYMS – THE NEW CHURCHES |
06 December 2007
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I joined a gym last week. This is a key step whenever you move to a new city or country: finding your gym. Nowhere is it taken more seriously than in Moscow, where whole evenings are spent discussing which gym you go to, how much it costs, how big its pool is, how many running machines it has, and so on. I don’t think it’s taken quite as seriously in the UK – we are still a nation of over-weight couch potatoes.
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THE UK’S AWKWARD RELATIONSHIP WITH SAUDI ARABIA |
31 October 2007
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This week, the Saudi royal family is in London on its first state visit for 20 years. A state visit by the Saudi royal family is no small thing – this is a big family. Indeed, King Abdullah flew no less than five private jets to the UK, carrying over 100 advisors, ambassadors, economists, chefs, barbers, and some of his 30 wives. He has rented out most of the Dorchester Hotel for his retinue.
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CBT AND ITS CRITICS |
16 October 2007
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Last week, the UK government launched the biggest state-funded mental health initiative ever. It pledged £170 million to create “a ground-breaking therapy service in Britain”, according to health minister Alan Johnson. The service will include 3,500 new therapists, who will have to be found and trained by 2011, if targets are to be met.
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ABRAMOVICH VERSUS CHELSEA FC |
28 September 2007
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Here in the UK, yet another Anglo-Russian controversy has broken out, this one perhaps even bigger than the Litvinenko saga. What could be bigger than a political assassination in the heart of London? Football, of course. The controversy that is filling the pages of British newspapers concerns the abrupt departure of the manager of Chelsea Football Club, Jose Mourinho, from the club this month.
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PHILOSOPHIZING |
05 September 2007
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The best way to think of philosophy is not as a noun, but as a present participle: philosophizing. There is no such thing as philosophy, there is only philosophizing. Philosophizing, in the Hellenic concept, means an active wrestling with one’s conventional opinions and perceptions. It is something we can practice everywhere and at all times – on the bus, in a restaurant, having breakfast, going to bed.
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PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE |
15 August 2007
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As we were discussing last time, there is a movement in philosophy at the moment to go beyond postmodernism’s emphasis on semiotics and ethical relativism, to return to an idea of philosophy as the practice of the ‘Good Life’. One can see this shift take place in the thought of Michel Foucault, who was both the leading postmodernist philosopher, and arguably the most famous intellectual, in the world.
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POSTMODERNISM AND THE GOOD LIFE |
02 August 2007
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I’ve moved to London to work on a specific project, which I think is of interest to Russians as much as British people. What I am exploring and researching is the philosophical idea of the Good Life, and its relevance to modern liberal societies and modern politics. The Good Life is an idea originating in ancient Greek philosophy.
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GOODBYE RUSSIA |
20 July 2007
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This week, I’m off back to the UK, after almost four years in Russia. No, I haven’t been expelled by the Foreign Ministry, it’s simply time to go home and begin a new project in the UK. I can take this chance to look back on the Russia in which I arrived back in January 2004, and how much has changed.
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THE ANGLO-KAZAKH CONNECTION |
06 July 2007
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The ill-informed Brit might think that the only thing that Kazakhstan and Britain have in common is Borat, the comedy Kazakh invented by British comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen. But actually, the connection is strong and getting stronger. Never mind the jokes – British businesspeople are making serious money in the oil-rich central Asian republic.
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WILL RUSSIA HAVE A CARETAKER PRESIDENT FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS? |
22 June 2007
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For the last couple of years, much ink has been spilled by hacks and pundits on the ‘2008 problem’. The problem being that the Russian constitution only lets a president rule for two consecutive terms, so president Putin is obliged to step down, even though he enjoys approval ratings of over 80%. Russia now seems remarkably calm about 2008 presidential elections.
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PUTIN’S POLICY OF ‘OBNOXIOUS RISE’ |
14 June 2007
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I don’t understand why Vladimir Putin feels the need to be so belligerent and obnoxious in international relations. OK, he’s aggressively asserting Russia’s new economic power, and it plays well with some insecure people at home who prefer to be ‘feared’ by foreign powers rather than free in their own country. But there’s no need to be so belligerent, and ultimately it defeats his own aims.
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THE END OF THE BOOK? |
31 May 2007
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I’m over in the UK at the moment, trying to get my first book published. To be precise, I’m trying to get an agent, to get me a publishing deal, to get my first book published. It’s proving to be tricky – two agents have said no so far, and that’s just the first hurdle. I’m beginning to realize quite how difficult the British book market is.
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THE EU’S CLUELESS ENERGY SECURITY POLICY MUST AMUSE RUSSIA |
16 May 2007
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Last week, the Kremlin signed a deal with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan that apparently stymies the mooted Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, which the EU was hoping would free up some Turkmen gas from the bear hug of the Kremlin. Instead, it looks like for the time being, all Turkmen gas will be exported via Gazprom.
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SOCIAL NETWORKING AND SOCIAL ANXIETY |
02 May 2007
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I’m writing a book at the moment about social anxiety. It’s an emotional disorder that makes you terrified of being negatively judged or humiliated by others. It was only officially recognized by the DSM Manual of clinical disorders in 1980, but since then, psychologists have come to think it could affect between 6 and 12% of the population in the US, making it the most common anxiety disorder in the West.
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RUSSIAN CORPORATES’ ‘BORROWING ADDICTION’ |
13 April 2007
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A strange situation is emerging in Russia: local brokerages have started to express concern over how much local corporates are borrowing externally, while the foreign investors to whom they are selling these bonds say everything is going fine. As the IMF noted in its global financial report, the amount of outstanding emerging sovereign debt is decreasing. In Russia alone, it halved last year...
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IS RUSSIA TURNING AWAY FROM WESTERN CIVILIZATION? |
10 April 2007
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I’ve been reading a speech that Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, gave to the Russian Council for Foreign and Defence Policy last month. He was discussing president Putin’s speech in Munich, and he had this to say: “The West is losing its monopoly on globalization, and this is probably why current events are presented as threatening to the West, its values and lifestyle...”
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RUSSIA’S CENTRAL BANK COMES UNDER FIRE |
27 March 2007
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When 35-year-old Russian financier Alexei Frenkel was arrested in January for ordering the murder of deputy Central Bank governor Andrei Kozlov, many commentators were happy to see at least one of Russia’s many contract killings apparently solved. However, since his arrest, the situation has only got murkier.
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IS RUSSIA HEADING FOR ‘AFFLUENZA’? |
09 March 2007
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Britain has suddenly become obsessed with happiness. A whole new ‘happiness industry’ has boomed, with politicians, psychologists, analysts, and even economists falling over themselves to tell us that what we need is not more money, but more well-being.
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THE AIMLESS SOCIETY VERSUS THE DIGITAL AGE |
26 February 2007
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I think I’ve discovered the meaning of life. You remember how a couple of weeks ago, I was complaining that western society had lost a sense of telos, how we seemed to be meandering aimlessly, simply killing time? The week before that I was singing the praises of the digital age, and how it has transformed our existence. A contradiction?
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PUTIN’S RIGHT ABOUT THE US, BUT WRONG ABOUT RUSSIA |
12 February 2007
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An irony struck me about Putin’s speech in Munich. The Russian president made convincing, if rather blunt, points about the danger of one group having sole power in a political system.
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RUSSIAN RUDENESS |
02 February 2007
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What do I hate most about living in Russia? Is it the long, grim winter? Is the failure of democracy and the eclipse of liberal values? Is it the post-Soviet harship and suffering I see all around me? No, it’s the queue-barging. I really, really hate the queue-barging.
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THE AIMLESS SOCIETY |
23 January 2007
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This week, the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos. One of those closed gatherings of the global elite which so fascinates and infuriates conspiracy theorists. Davos, the Bildeburg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations: who are they? What are they talking about? Are they in control?
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THE DIGITAL AGE |
19 January 2007
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I came home to Moscow this month to discover I can suddenly pick up Wi-Fi in my flat. Various providers, like Stream and Golden Telecom, have been promising to make the whole of Moscow one big free Wi-Fi hotspot. Imagine – free information across the whole of Moscow! Dzerzhinsky must be turning in his grave.
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2006: A NEW LOW FOR RUSSO-WESTERN RELATIONS |
09 January 2007
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I imagine Sergei Lavrov is feeling a little blue this New Year period. Imagine if you will - everyone else in the Cabinet is at the New Year party, popping champagne and congratulating each other for their brilliance at managing all that petro-wealth. Then their eyes fall on Seryozha, sulking in the corner and muttering about double standards and western media bias.
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TWO RUSSIAS |
18 December 2006
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Two rallies in Moscow weekend – one by the new opposition movement called The Other Russia, the other by the Kremlin-funded Nashi youth group – provided a stark contrast.
I was walking up Tverskaya, through Pushkin Square, when the police started. A long, long row of Ministry of Interior (MVD) police, the foot-soldiers of the Russian state, which seemingly has an infinite number of them to dispose of at any given time.
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IS RUSSIA HEADING TOWARDS FASCISM? |
07 December 2006
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It’s becoming relatively normal in the western press to say Russia is becoming a Fascist state, and to compare it to Nazi Germany. Thus, The Spectator last week declared that “Fascism looms” in Russia. The Economist talked of the appropriateness of using the “F-word” when describing modern Russia. Its renowned Central and Eastern correspondent, Ed Lucas, talks of Putin’s “Fascist thugs” on his blog.
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THE BRITISH PUBLIC IS BEING TAKEN FOR A RIDE |
27 November 2006
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I hate seeing my country being taken for a sucker. But that, I fear, is exactly what it is being taken for with the unfortunate death of Alexander Litvinenko. As the case rolls on, and the media hysteria continues, more and more I feel what the situation is exposing is not the evilness of the Kremlin, but our own gullibility, the sloppiness of our media, the irresponsibility of our politicians, and the greed of our PR industry.
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GEORGIA COULD BE OBSTREPEROUS OVER RUSSIA’S WTO BID |
20 November 2006
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The Georgian government has apparently been offering olive branches to the Russian government over the last two weeks, with the demotion of hawkish defence minister Irakli Okruashvili to the ministry of economy (he’s since resigned).
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THE EU SHOULD BE PLAYING IRAN AND RUSSIA OFF AGAINST EACH OTHER |
08 November 2006
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The European Union is increasingly anxious about being over-reliant on gas imports from Russia. The Kremlin, it is clear, intends to wield its huge oil and gas reserves as its main bargaining chip in foreign relations. The EU is concerned that its authoritarian neighbour to the east has it “over a barrel”, as one British MP put it.
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KRAS AIR |
31 October 2006
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I’ve just come back from a trip to Buryatia. I took the train out there, and the plane back. Funnily enough, even though the train took four days and the flight a mere six hours, the train was by far the easier leg of the journey. The reason for this is two words – Kras Air.
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THE EXPAT SCAM |
19 October 2006
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Eric Kraus once wrote that there is a certain type of expat that loves nothing more than to come to Russia, having failed to make it in the West, and get an easy ego boost by constantly harping on about how the West is superior to Russia. They walk around thinking ‘God these people are barbarians, I’m so much more advanced’, and feel pretty good about themselves.
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FASTEN YOUR SEAT-BELTS, WE ARE ENTERING SOME TURBULENCE |
13 October 2006
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There is an atmosphere of unease in Moscow. Three high-profile contract killings in a fortnight, including Anna Politkovskaya, the courageous reporter of Novaya Gazeta. People are wondering who will be next.
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WILL THE CONSUMER BOOM CONTRIBUTE TO FREEDOM IN RUSSIA? |
03 October 2006
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Most liberal-minded Russia-watchers are working under the assumption that the greatest hope for freedom in Russia is the consumer boom. This is for several reasons. First, the rise of consumerism goes hand-in-hand with a transformation of consciousness among Russian people. It involves a switch from a producer-oriented economy to a consumer-oriented economy.
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THE END OF THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP? |
22 September 2006
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For many British people, one of the most frustrating aspects of Tony Blair’s reign at Number 10 Downing Street has been his apparently knee-jerk support for US policies, whether it be his immediate support of US belligerence towards Saddam Hussein, or its more recent belligerence towards Iran over its nuclear programme.
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WHEN MADONNA CAME TO MOSCOW |
15 September 2006
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It’s the day before Madonna’s first ever Moscow show, and the atmosphere around the gig is tense. Many Muscovites say they are sure something will go wrong, and the gig will be cancelled. There is a sense that there is more riding on this concert than just music.
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THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY OF 1968 |
05 September 2006
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Last week, French interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy launched his presidential bid with a speech attacking the values of May 1968, and the student uprising which swept across the world and particularly struck Paris, almost bringing down the government of General Charles De Gaulle.
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MOSCOW VERSUS LONDON |
21 August 2006
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Back in London for one of my periodic visits, I notice I’m starting to acquire the ability to see London with Muscovite eyes. I see, certainly, the famous ‘multiculturalism’ of London. This is what many Muscovites report back to me after visits.
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THE REGIONS PUSH BACK |
16 August 2006
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The Russian federal government continues with its move to assert control over the regions, and to spread United Russia’s influence throughout the country, to make the Party once again the unifying National Idea of Russia.
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RUSSIA’S REMONT |
07 August 2006
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I am on a road-trip at the moment, going around some Russian regions for an article for Euromoney magazine. I have never traveled so intensively in all my life. Euromoney wanted me to visit three regions and write the piece by Wednesday, so I had to do it in ten days. I’ve basically been on the move every day – flying from Moscow to Krasnodar, then from Krasnodar to Sochi, then from Sochi to Krasnodar, then back to Moscow...
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KAZAKHSTAN’S LOW EXPECTATIONS HOLDING IT BACK |
31 July 2006
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This month, President Nazarbayev undertakes his first state visit to the US for five years. As he stands on the White House lawn shaking President George Bush’s hand, he may well reflect that his reign, in its seventeenth year, has been a success.
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FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE? |
24 July 2006
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I believe in Russia and the West gradually forging a successful relationship together, but at the moment, I think our values and histories are simply too different for the majority of relationships between Russian women and western men to be anything more than convenient arrangements.
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FOR ROSNEFT, THE REAL CHALLENGE IS JUST BEGINNING |
14 July 2006
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So, after all the nail-biting and anxiety, the Rosneft IPO was a success. The banks managed to raise $10.4 billion, with the deal 1.5 times oversubscribed. President Putin told German TV he was “satisfied”.
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SHOULD RUSSIA HOST THE G8? |
10 July 2006
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Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, has written the cover story for the Spectator magazine this week. It’s called ‘Should Russia Host The G8?’, and the answer is a resounding no. The article is, in some ways, typical of Western op-ed coverage of Russia’s presidency of the G8, and I want to look at it closely to show some of the mistakes that western commentators are making.
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PUTIN TO STAY ON AS PARTY LEADER? |
03 July 2006
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I don’t envy Putin’s successor. He will come to power despite the fact that the majority of Russians want Putin to stay on. He will have the irritating presence of Putin, still young and healthy, somewhere behind him. He will no doubt hear constant negative comparisons between his rule and the golden age of Putinism, and constant calls for Vladimir Vladimirovich to return and lead the country back to glory.
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RUSSIA’S ASIA-EUROPE DILEMMA |
21 June 2006
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There’s a line from Hamlet – “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?” It reminds me of Russia’s predicament today, Russia’s eternal predicament, crawling between Asia and Europe.
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SEVERSTAL SEVER-STALLS |
16 June 2006
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Alexei Mordashov doesn’t seem very sure what he wants, which is the last thing you look for in a chief executive.
I went on a media tour around the steel works at Cherepovets this week. It was great. I’ve never really been to a big industrial works, and the sheer noise and steam and red molten metal of the place gave me a surge of Victorian joy at the might of industrial man.
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MEDVEDEV: WHAT I’D DO IF I WAS IN CHARGE |
06 June 2006
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I managed to sneak into a private speech that Dmitri Medvedev, deputy prime minister of Russia, gave to around 100 editors at the World Editors Forum in Moscow. He launched into a rather boring speech about the Russian economy, when the interpreter ear-pieces broke down. So his speech was abandoned and we went straight to questions from the floor instead.
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THE SILENCE OF THE HACKS |
05 June 2006
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I have to say when I saw the Zurich court ruling, I and other foreign journalists thought it spelled the end of Reiman’s political career, that he’d be forced to resign. For the first time, a political ally of the president’s would be brought to account because of corruption. Instead, the lack of government action against Reiman, and the press silence with which this was received, speaks volumes.
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EU AND RUSSIA NEED TO COOL IT ON ENERGY RELATIONS |
24 May 2006
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President of the EU Commission Jose Manuel Barroso flies to Sochi today for an EU-Russia summit with president Putin in Sochi. Diplomats say they will discuss energy relations between the two countries, at a time when these relations could hardly be worse.
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GOODBYE TONY? |
19 May 2006
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It looks like we are in the last days of Tony Blair, a man who has been prime minister of Britain for as long as I have been voting. The PM has told members of his party that he intends to step down in the middle of next year, giving his successor, who we assume will be Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, time to prepare for the general election in 2009.
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THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION |
15 May 2006
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You might think that the consumer boom in Russia is bad news for the ‘Russian soul’. That’s the kind of thing Aliaksandr Lukashenka often says in Belarus – that evil American consumerism is corroding the minds and morals of Belarusian youth. But we’re beginning to see signs, here in Russia, of how a consumer culture is changing people’s political behaviour for the better.
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THE PRICE OF FREEDOM |
06 May 2006
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For decades, like a spoilt child, Ukraine has relied on unlimited and very cheap gas from Russia. As a result, says Kamen Zahariev, head of the EBRD's Ukraine office, “Ukraine was probably the least energy efficient country in the world”.
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LONDON GETTING JITTERY ABOUT RUSSIAN IPOS |
02 May 2006
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Whenever there’s a boom in a particular type of business, people – especially journalists – always get the jitters. Financial journalists in particular like nothing better than to predict a market will go belly up, because they themselves don’t have any money to invest, and are secretly envious of everyone else making money.
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SIGNS OF LIFE AT THE FEDERAL FINANCIAL MARKETS SERVICE |
20 April 2006
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I met and interviewed Oleg Vyugin at the Federal Financial Markets Service last week. In our hour-long interview, Vyugin outlined at least 10 different laws or amendments he plans to introduce, some of them far-reaching.
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IS ST PETERSBURG READY FOR THE G8 SUMMIT? |
14 April 2006
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I hear St Petersburg’s police have purchased some water cannons from Israel, in preparation for the upcoming G8 summit in July. I only hope they use them on the buildings and streets of the city.
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THE KREMLIN’S PPP FRENZY |
07 April 2006
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I went to a conference on PPP yesterday organized by Vnesheconombank (VEB). OK, that’s an inauspicious opening sentence, but stick with me, it was actually very interesting. I came away with two conclusions. Firstly, the Kremlin intends to use PPP as the cornerstone of its very ambitious programme to rebuild Russian infrastructure. Secondly, no one is quite sure what is going on, but everyone is pretending they know.
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BRING BACK BILL BROWDER! |
22 March 2006
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It was a real shock to hear that Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, had been blocked from entering Russia. He manages the biggest portfolio fund in Russia, a four-billion-dollar gorilla that makes other Russia funds look like hamsters.
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A MONK’S LIFE |
17 March 2006
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I spent some of last week staying at Optina Pusting, the monastery near Kaluga, to the south of Moscow. The monastery had been closed by the Bolsheviks the year after the revolution, and turned into an agricultural institute. In 1987, it was given back to the Orthodox Church, in a terribly dilapidated state. Father Benedict, a monk from Sergiev Posad, was sent there in 1992 by Patriach Alexei to restore it.
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BRITISH CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE KGB |
09 March 2006
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On Monday, I met with a figure from an obscure British research institute called the Russia Research Network. The person, a British security analyst based in London, had emailed me to say he liked my journalism, and wanted to meet when he was next in Moscow.
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH! |
02 March 2006
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Ten years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev ran for president, in the pivotal 1996 election. He won 1.5% of the vote. His national popularity was at its lowest ebb. His Social Democratic party seemed a nothing, compared to the hard-core communism of Gennady Zuganov, and the desperate capitalism of Boris Yeltsin.
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WINTER IN MINSK |
22 February 2006
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It looks like it will be another long, cold winter in Belarus. On Tuesday the 21st of February, armed KGB agents raided the homes of 10 young opposition activists in Minsk, searching their homes and taking them away for questioning. The activists were all members of Partnership, a Belarusian NGO which acts as an independent monitor of elections.
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THE CULT OF PERSONALITY – STILL ALIVE AND WELL? |
17 February 2006
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Fifty years ago this week, Khrushchev shook the Soviet Union to its foundations with his secret speech at the 20th annual congress of the Communist Party, which he used to attack the actions and behaviour of the recently deceased Stalin, and the ‘cult of personality’ which he had built up.
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HEY, IT WAS JUST A JOKE… |
08 February 2006
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A newspaper in darkest Denmark publishes a cartoon, and embassies in Syria and Lebanon burn. Welcome to 21st century globalization.
You are no doubt aware of the situation – a Danish newspaper published a cartoon showing Mohammad with a head-scarf shaped like a bomb.
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WE SHOULD FIGHT FOR THE EUROPEAN PROJECT |
03 February 2006
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The apparent failure of that unique historical project, the European Union, is bad news. It’s bad news for the West, and its bad news for the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine and Georgia, but also Russia. We need to fight for this project, to instil it with energy before it becomes mired in fear and inertia.
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SPIES LIKE US |
25 January 2006
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These days, it seems everyone is either a spy in Moscow, or suspected of being one. It’s one of the more fun parlour games of the Moscow expat community, to guess which of your acquaintances is a spy. It turns out that the central defender of my football team, Paul Crompton, is ‘the Moscow head of MI6’ according to the FSB.
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EUROPE AND RUSSIA BETTING ON ‘MATURITY’ OF IRANIAN GOVERNMENT |
20 January 2006
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On February 2, the International Atomic Energy Agency will meet in Vienna, and – if diplomatic sources are to be believed – will vote to refer the case of Iran’s continued attempts to enrich its own uranium to the UN Security Council.
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GEOFFREY HOSKING ON RUSSIA’S IMPERIAL HANGOVER |
13 January 2006
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Geoffrey Hosking, Professor of Russian history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is considered one of the best foreign historians of Russia. His classic work, ‘Russia: People and Empire’ (1997), puts forward the thesis that the attempt to hang onto a large multi-ethnic empire always stood in the way of Russia’s development as a Western-style nation state and constitutional democracy. I interviewed him to see if he thought that was still the case.
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2005: THE YEAR OF RUSSIA’S REVOLUTION PHOBIA |
28 December 2005
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It is a long historical tradition that events at the centre of the Russian empire determine events at the periphery. What happens in Moscow, or St Petersburg, defines what happens in Kyiv, Tashkent, Bishkek or Minsk.
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PUTIN, BUSH AND NATURAL LAW |
21 December 2005
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If you want to point to one main difference between president Putin and president Bush, it’s that Bush believes in the idea of natural law, and Putin doesn’t. This is the cause of a certain amount of tension between the two governments.
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THE RUSSO-GERMAN SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP |
14 December 2005
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The German Chancellor had lost the election. His victorious opponent had, during the election campaign, criticized him for his over-cosy relationship with the Russian president. Analysts predicted that relations with Russia would cool under the new Chancellor.
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WHO PAYS THE PIPER |
08 December 2005
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An article in Kommersant this week claimed the Russian government was working to set up a new, pro-Kremlin think-tank in Washington, as a means to improve Russia’s standing in the US.
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THE GLEB PAVLOVSKY SHOW |
30 November 2005
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These are strange times in Russia. In just about any other country, Saturday night prime time TV means some light-hearted family entertainment – Baywatch, Saturday Night Live, the Muppet Show. But here in Russia, it’s Saturday night, so it must be… Gleb Pavlovsky!
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THE NGO BILL – WHAT A MISTAKE |
24 November 2005
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Professor Bill Bowring is one of Europe’s leading experts on judicial reform in Russia. The professor, who is also a British barrister, has advised the Council of Europe and the European Commission on the Russian legal system, has worked on Russian law for 12 years, and has a Russian wife.
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THE RISE AND HOPEFUL FALL OF UNITED RUSSIA |
14 November 2005
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More and more, I’m getting a sinking feeling about Russian politics. I look to eastern Europe or to Asia, and see the emergence of boisterous democracies, like Poland or South Korea, where genuine multi-party systems have developed. One party governs for a few years, then the population gets sick of them and kicks them out, and a rival party governs.
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UKRAINE SHOULD NOT JOIN NATO |
07 November 2005
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I was at the first US-Ukrainian conference in Boston last week. The first speaker, a former US National Security Council wonk named John Tedstrom, was particularly excited about Ukraine’s move to join NATO, which at the moment looks more realizable than its other ambition to join the EU. NATO accession, said Tedstrom, would help anchor Ukraine in a trans-Atlantic-focused foreign policy.
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AMERICA THE WEARY TITAN |
26 October 2005
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I wonder, when World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz visited Moscow last week, if he reflected on the turnaround in the US and Russia’s relative position in the last few years.
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WHO IS MR BUNICH? |
19 October 2005
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Eagle-eyed residents of Moscow have been bemused, over the last eight months, to note the sudden appearance of large, prominently placed billboards advertising an economic analyst named Andrei Bunich, and his website Bunich.ru.
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SMILE FOR THE CAMERAS |
12 October 2005
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“Alright, follow me and we’ll see the news room”, said Margarita Simonian, chief editor of the Russia Today TV channel. I and another 15 or so foreign journalists followed the diminutive Simonian through a door and down a dusty corridor, with no news room in sight. She looked around bewilderedly. “Wait…it’s upstairs. Follow me…”
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RUSSIA’S RAPPROCHEMENT WITH THE WEST |
05 October 2005
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President Putin’s trip to London almost got off to a bad start this week, when Kommersant carried a front-page story about a new tax investigation by the General Prosecutor’s office into the British Council.
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THE BULLS ARE OUT IN MOSCOW |
28 September 2005
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Moscow these days is reminiscent of Pamplona, such is the quantity of bulls appearing in the streets, proclaiming the amazing growth of the Russian stock market.
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IN MODERN RUSSIA, LIFE IS CHEAP |
21 September 2005
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A few weeks ago, there was a story on Interfax about a policeman shooting an Uzbek woman in the neck on Tverskoi Bulevar, after an argument about her documents. I’d just started stringing for a newspaper, so I decided to check the story out. It was exactly the kind of story London news-desks go for.
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PUTIN’S TURN TO THE LEFT |
14 September 2005
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I was surprised by the media reaction to president Putin’s announcement of his political agenda for the last two years of his presidency. This was a bold announcement, the outlining of around $4 billion in spending on health, education and infrastructure projects.
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THE CAMBRIDGE SPIES |
06 September 2005
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The reason the Cambridge Spies continue to fascinate Russians and British alike is simple – they were Establishment. They went to public school then Oxbridge; they worked at the Foreign Office or the Treasury; they wrote for The Economist and The Spectator magazines; and of course, several of them worked for MI5 and MI6 – those most establishment, most English of institutions.
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THE HUNT FOR A NATIONAL IDEA |
31 August 2005
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Last week, a columnist for Komsomolskaya Pravda declared Russia was drowning in a sea of meaninglessness, for lack of a National Idea to cling to. The columnist said that Russia had gone through two national ideas – first ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy and National Character’, and then ‘Workers of the world unite’, and now needed another, and quick.
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BLESSED ARE THE MIDDLE CLASS, FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH |
23 August 2005
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The best hope for a functioning constitutional democracy in Russia and other CIS countries has always been the emergence of a middle class. As the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out in 1960, in his seminal work, “Political Man”, only a large middle class has the education, leisure and financial self-interest to truly hold a government to account.
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WHO’S AFRAID OF AUGUST? |
10 August 2005
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Russians seem to have a thing about months. Why, for example, is the 1917 revolution known as the ‘October’ revolution? Why do we call the leaders of the attempted coup of 1825 the ‘Decembrists’? If it had happened a few weeks later, would they have been known throughout history as the ‘Januarists’?
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IS RUSSIAN LITERATURE BEING OUTSOURCED? |
03 August 2005
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Last month, a new novel appeared, called The People’s Act of Love. It is being hailed as one of the most significant works of fiction of recent years. It’s set in Siberia at the end of the civil war, it tackles great themes of Russian history and philosophy, and reviewers are already hailing it as a Great Russian Novel. The only problem is, it’s written in English by a Scotsman - James Meek, former Moscow correspondent of the Guardian newspaper.
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SPEAKER’S CORNER |
26 July 2005
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There’s a spot in the north corner of Hyde Park in London known as Speaker’s Corner. It was set up in 1872, as a place where dissident political views could be expressed and angry political opposition could ‘let off steam’. It’s become a symbol of British tolerance, attracting in its time the likes of Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suffragettes, evangelists, and more than a few lunatics.
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THE PROBLEM WITH NASHI |
20 July 2005
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I was at Nashi’s summer camp this weekend in Seliger, where 3000 activists gathered for sport, music and political indoctrination. Nashi is a youth organization set up by the Kremlin, in response to youth NGOs like Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine, which played a role in resisting the attempts by authoritarian regimes in those countries to steal elections.
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FOGGY VIEWS ON LONDON |
12 July 2005
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British people often have amusing misconceptions about Russia, such as that it is cold all year round, the food is mainly cabbage, the mafia is all powerful and jeans are still in desperate shortage.
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REN-TV PRISED OUT OF CHUBAIS’ HANDS |
05 July 2005
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I happened to be in the Ren-TV studio last week, watching a debate between Eduard Limonov, leader of the National Bolsheviks, and United Russia MP Valery Galchenko for the programme Nedelya. At one point, Limonov leaned forward and declared: “The 2003 Duma election results were completely falsified. That’s the only reason you’re sitting there. But the will of the people isn’t with United Russia. It’s with us!”
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TO CONSUME OR NOT TO CONSUME |
28 June 2005
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When I lived in London two years ago, I wrote many articles criticizing how consumerist Western society had become. According to the western anti-consumerist NGO, Adbusters, the average urban Westerner is exposed to around 5,000 advertizing messages in a single day. To walk through London today is to be hit by a barrage of adverts, all inciting one to spend.
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