Posted by Sean on September 4, 2007
We’ve seen rioting over WWII burials and protests against resurrecting a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. But a protest against a statue to Catherine the Great!? Yes. It seems in some quarters Russia’s history as a whole, and not just its communist past, is cause for nationalist outrage. Reuters reports that a plan to build a statue of the Tsarina in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa has sparked the ire of local Cossacks.
The modern-day heirs of the Cossacks, aligned with Ukrainian nationalists, vilify Catherine as a foreign despot who crushed Ukraine’s limited autonomy at the time, and disbanded units of their celebrated predecessors.
“We used to have communism. Now we are told how wonderful things were before the Bolsheviks. And people believe it,” said Serhiy Gutsalyuk, an “otaman”, or leader, of an Odessa Cossack group as preparations went ahead to restore the monument.
“City authorities will hear ..read more
Posted by Sean on September 4, 2007
The Russian electoral season is already unfolding like a stage performance. Putin, who we might refer to as the Director, announced the date for his troupe’s first performance: the State Duma elections scheduled for December 1. Kommersant Vlast’ has a thorough breakdown of its prediction of how the 450 Duma seats will be divided. The first thing to notice is the expectation that the number of parties represented in the Duma will drop by 10 percent. This is no doubt a result of two factors. The first is the increase of the electoral threshold to 7 percent. This along is expected to cut out 10 or 11 parties alone. The other fact is multiple. Namely, that Russian politics are a complex business, and the revamp of the electoral threshold matters most for parties already waining in influence.
To explain this complexity, Kommersant’s Dmitiry Kamyshev provides eight factors (with the number of ..read more
