Posted by Sean on February 28, 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
Posted by Sean on February 28, 2008
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
