Monthly Archives: February 2008

T-minus three days and counting.  Russians will go to the polls on Sunday to cast their votes for a new President.  But one shouldn’t get to carried away with the casting votes part.  Yes, Russians will vote, but no one has any doubt who the victor will be. Dmitri Medvedev will be the third President of the Russian Federation.

And it seems that Russians have been getting ready since Putin anointed him successor in December.  According to the Moscow Times, bureaucrats and businessmen have been furiously snatching up portraits of Medvedev.  Photo shop owner Vladimir Tyshko is cashing in on the pre-election rush.  As the MT says,

“Since it was announced that Medvedev was the official successor, we immediately started getting inquiries about him, and now Medvedev has really overtaken Putin in sales,” said Vladimir Tyshko, who sells photographic portraits of politicians.

“With the elections approaching, Medvedev is selling very well: ..read more

The Russian “middle class” remains an elusive and rather unclear category. It’s an entity that is recognized, but what exactly are its contours is rarely clearly defined. Kommersant has fitted one piece into the Russian middle class puzzle. The Russian middle class, at least as defined by Kommersant, is purely monetary. I’ve never been satisfied with defining the middle class by income. Income brackets just doesn’t provide the human stuff that make up class relations. Numbers don’t say much about how people act or collectively define themselves. I tend to side with E. P. Thompson’s notion that class is first and foremost “an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness.” Most importantly, again following Thompson, class is “something which in fact happens in human relationships.”

Nevertheless, income is part of the ..read more

The 3 March issue of the Nation has two reviews of four recent books on Soviet history. The first review, “The Ice Forge,” written by Jochen Hellbeck, examines Lynne Viola’s Unknown Gulag and Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers. Viola’s book chronicles the deportation of Soviet “kulaks” during collectivization. About it Hellbeck writes, “The Unknown Gulag, is an indictment of the utopian folly and criminal neglect of Soviet officials, and a moving account of human suffering.”

Similarly, Figes text is an exploration into private life under Stalin’s rule. “Reading The Whisperers,” Hellbeck states, “one comes away with a powerful sense that stigmatization and self-reinvention were central, indeed defining, attributes of the Soviet experience for many Russians of rural as well as urban backgrounds.” Figes has set up a website for the book which allows visitors to access the many interview he had conducted for his study. Despite ..read more

Kommersant has an interview with Elena Shestopal, the deputy chair of the Political Psychology Department at MGU, on how Russian society views the inevitable election of Dmitri Medvedev. I think the title of the interview, “Thus far Medvedev’s character remains unclear in the consciousness of the masses” says it all. Here is an excerpt.

Almost 3/4 of Russians are prepared to vote for Dmitri Medvedev. Do the people trust the authorities so strongly?

They trust Vladimir Putin personally. Around his person we are seeing the complete consolidation of society in Post-Soviet times. Thus far Medvedev’s character remains unclear in the consciousness of the masses. When we ask people who they will vote for, we hear Medvedev’s name on rare occasions. Usually they answer: “It’s clear for who. Why do you ask?” or “What is to become of us?” Such answers signify the fatality ..read more

Those Nashi kids really, really want to go to Estonia.  So bad that they’re protests are beginning to sound more and more deranged.  Leave it Nashi to push a campaign to the brink of absurdity.  Is Estonia bashing all they have left?  I guess they “10=5″ campaign just doesn’t provide that populist umph.  If this is Nashi’s future, then the greatest threat to Nashi is not a fed up Russian government, Garry Kasparov, or their imagined fascists.  It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Nashi’s greatest enemy might just be themselves.

Take for example Nashi’s new virtual campaign chernymspiskam.net.  That’s right you too can “be active” in Nashi’s quest for victimhood.  Perhaps the most egregious aspect to this site is not so much the 30 minute film which makes a pathetic attempt to paint the Estonians and the West as fascists.  It’s that in order to do so Nashi portrays itself as ..read more

Boris Kagarlistky’s new article “Labor Movement and Civil Society” is a must read. I especially liked these two excerpts:

The significant outcome of the events at the “Ford” plant lies in the fact that the labor movement has attracted public attention. They started to talk and write about it, they started to look at it – some with hope, others with apprehension. In essence the labor movement proved to be so far the first and the only real manifestation of the civil society in modern Russia. Not of the artificial one, established for Western grants or sitting in a fake Public Chamber, but of a real grassroots movement.

The owners of enterprises respond to the demands of employees with natural irritation. Though there are differences. Western managers used to negotiate with strikers. Managers and owners, representing Russian capital behave in a quite different way. During the strike at the Murmansk sea ..read more