Daily Archives: July 3, 2007

If you want to know anything about the political economy of CIS countries, there is no better place to turn than the Financial Times. Always erudite, FT’s special reports provide a broad evaluation of the region’s economy, politics, culture, and society often without the usual ideological claptrap about the incompatibility between capitalism and authoritarianism. Take for example the business daily’s most recent special on Kazakhstan.

I think that FT understands the essence of post-Soviet politics as a combination between one man rule, family circles, elite clans, and bureaucratic pressures. There is no total one man rule, only a network of alliances between competing elites. At the center stands, in the case of Kazakhstan, Nursulatan Nazarbayev, who parcels out power and pieces of the political and economic pie to maintain the integrity of the state. I think this description of Nazarbayev’s ..read more

Reports about how the CIS is dangerous for journalists are so common that their worthy efforts are starting to sound like a bad pop song. Freedom House is the newest NGO/think tank to give its evaluation of media freedom. To no one’s surprise its report, Muzzling the Media: The Return of Censorship in the CIS, “makes the assertion that most former Soviet states, including those in Central Asia and the Caucasus, are the most hazardous on earth, outside of active war zones, for journalists to work in. Entrenched authority in these states are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the “watchdog” role that media strives to play in open societies.” The report also points out that the CIS countries with the least media freedom are also those experiencing high rates of economic growth. Such a finding seems to surprise Christopher Walker, the report’s author, who thinks that ..read more

I found this delightful picture at Krill Pankratov’s NezNotes, who found it via Mad Max’s Journal. For non-Russian speakers, the sign reads: “Dear owners of local gardens: Those who throw trash will be fucked in the ass. The Brigade of Forest Homosexuals.”

Tags: Nonsense|Russia|environmentalism