Daily Archives: November 5, 2007

I got an email this morning about a new blog called Executed Today.  The blog, according to its introductory entry, seeks to provide “an unrepresentative but arresting view of the human condition across time and circumstance from the parlous vantage of the scaffold.”  It’s no surprise that Russia will figure prominently an the the site’s daily chronicles of executions pile up.  In fact, it already has one Russia related execution as part of its theme Spies.  Today we have Sidney Reilly, British spy and the inspiration for James Bond, who was executed on 5 November 1925 for his attempting to organize a coup against the Soviet government.  Reilly didn’t fair as well as his fictional counterpart and was shot in a forest outside of Moscow.  I’m told that Wednesday’s entry will feature the Soviet spy Richard Sorge who was hanged in Japan.  Check it out.

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the Russian liberal opposition.  Not only do they seem to be out of touch with the sentiments of the population, or seem to offer any alternative to Putinism, they also appear prone to something I call historical transfiguration.

Take for example, what “parallels” Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko, Leonid Gozman of SPS, and Garry Kasparov of Other Russia see between the Russia of 1917 and Russia of 2007.  Yavlinsky said that some of those parallels are “the dominance of corruption   and  bureaucracy,  the  absence  of  inner  mechanisms  for modernization,  the  absence  of economic and political competition, the absence  of a mechanism for the government’s renewal, and the absence of the chance to form a responsible and efficient opposition.”  Gozman thinks that like in 1917, today’s rulers have an “absolute feeling of stability, and the tsar also  had  it.  In addition, the opposition is being ousted ..read more