Children’s Choir of the USSR

by Sean on January 4, 2012

More holiday catch-up. BBC Documentaries did a program on the Children’s Choir of the USSR. A good way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.

Here’s a performance of Crocodile Gena:

 

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Stephen Cohen on Democracy Now!

by Sean on January 4, 2012

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Amy Goodman did a segment on Democracy Now! with Stephen Cohen. Topics include the Russian protests, the Communist Party, and the general political mood of the populace. Decent discussion, I thought.

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Navalny the Unifier

by Sean December 30, 2011

It’s a few days old, but I wanted to draw readers’ attention to an article I wrote for the Exiled on Alexei Navalny as a potential unifier of Russia’s middle class and nationalists. Here’s a snippet:

On December 5, the day after Russia’s Duma elections, the anti-corruption crusader and popular blogger, Alexei Navalny, told a raucous crowd, “I want to say to you: Thank you. Thank you for playing you part as a citizen. Thank you for telling these assholes, ‘We’re here!’ For telling the bearded [Electoral Commission head Vladimir] Churov and his superiors: ‘We exist!’ We have our voices. We exist! We exist! They hear that voice and they are afraid! They can chuckle on their zombie-boxes. They can call us “microbloggers” or ‘network hamsters!’ I am a network hamster, and I will slit the throats of these cattle!” Shortly after giving this speech, Navalny was arrested, and by the ..read more

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Red Autobiographies

by Sean December 30, 2011

I recently published a review of Igal Halfin‘s Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self in the journal NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928 (vol. 5, 2011). For those who want a taste of my academic work, here’s the review’s opening paragraph:

For more than fifteen years, Igal Halfin has been a master craftsman in the academic cottage industry of “Soviet subjectivity.”  His work is essential reading, and his texts provide both historical and methodological inroads for the ways discourse enveloped Soviet citizens’ self-representation. While his arguments remain controversial, their influence on our understanding of Soviet subject formation cannot be denied.  It was Halfin along with Jochen Hellbeck who turned Michel Foucault into a permanent fixture in Soviet Studies. Halfin has urged us to take language, narrative structure and their deployment seriously. He even introduced a distinct Halfinian lexicon: “the self,” “brotherhood of the elect,” “the soul,” “towards the light,” “subjectivity,” “conversion,” “poetics,” ..read more

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Why are Russians Protesting Now?

by Sean December 9, 2011

As a day of protests against Sunday’s Duma election begins in Russia’s Far East, the big question is why are people protesting now? After all, it’s not like this is the first Russian election with shenanigans, fraud, etc, etc. It is, however, the first one when Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, are dropping in approval ratings. Still, VVP still garners, according to the last tally, a 67 percent approval rating. And if you buy that the elections were close to the will of the people, United Russia still polled 49.3%. But that is if you buy the results, which many, including myself, don’t.

Still, “why now?” is the question of the day.  Svobodnaya Pressa asked Leontii Byzov, a senior sociologist from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences this very question. I thought his answer was worth thinking about.

Svobodnaya Pressa: Not too long ago ..read more

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The New Decembrists

by Sean December 8, 2011

Some of you may know that I’ve started writing op-eds on Russia for Al-Jazeera English.  Here’s an snippet of my latest on the Russian elections:

In mid-November, the Russian site Slon.ru noted that political brands have a life cycle of five stages - ”rise”, “peak”, “stabilisation”, “fall”, and “political death”. As brands, Russia’s political tandem, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, and the ruling party United Russia, are no less immune to this cycle. Their popularity peaked in 2008-2009, was stable throughout 2010, and began to fall rapidly in the second half of 2011. In this sense Russia’s ruling elite are little different than, say, a pop song or a breakfast cereal. The more you consume them, the more disgusting they become, until their mere mention evokes the dry heaves.

As returns from Sunday’s polls show, more and more of the Russian electorate are getting nauseous with the political establishment, and Putin in particular. Technically, Sunday’s ..read more

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