Monthly Archives: December 2008

The first thing on order is to wish everyone a happy New Year! I sincerely thank all of you for reading SRB over the last year and I hope you continue into the next.  The news about Russia certainly promises to heat up in 2009 as the economy, by all predictions, continues its nosedive, a new president takes office in the United States, and whatever other unpredictable events crop up in our favorite Slavic nation.

In the meantime, I have been silent about some of the recent news stories coming out of Russia.  I have another dissertation deadline and I’m trying to finish a chapter on masculinity in the Komsomol in earnest.

However, there have been a few news stories that have caught my eye over the last week.  First, of course, is the announcement that Aleksandr Nevskii won the Name of Russia contest. An interesting choice for sure.  Most reports have ..read more

Nashi’s been keeping a list.  There’s no need to check it twice.  They know who’s been naughty and nice. In their own version of a “Komsomol Christmas,” members of the pro-Kremlin group Nashi decided make their own mockery of the holiday.  But unlike their Soviet predecessors, the enemy wasn’t religion but the leaders of “most unfriendly governments” toward Russia.  And which leaders received lumps of coal? According to a poll of its members, none other than Mikhail Saakashvili, Viktor Yushchenko, and George Bush.

The Nashists sent several neckties to Saakashvili “just in case he gets anxious and begins to chew on his wardrobe accessories publicly in the future.”  Yushchenko got a package of coal and logs to keep him warm after Russia turns off the gas.  He also got a reworked Ukrainian flag that combines the US flag, the Ukrainian blue and yellow, and a Nazi swastika. To outgoing US President ..read more

Russia’s “oil-fired economic miracle is unraveling,” the protests over the car tax is being hailed as a sign of “broad discontent,” unemployment grows by 400,000 in November with an extra 70,000 this past week alone, Russia’s richest man, Oleg Deripaska, is looking for investors wherever he can to save his metal empire, and Putin is imploring Russia’s business to only fire people only if it is absolutely necessary. From reading today’s English language press, one would think it was February 1917 all over again.

Luckily for all of Russia’s unemployed and redundant labor, there is one business that might be hanging “Help Wanted” signs as the rest of the economy goes down the toilet: McDonald’s.

In an interview in Vedomosti, Khamzat Khasbulatov, Micky D’s man in Russia and Eastern Europe, had this to say about how the economy has affected his company’s ability to peddle cheap, overly processed burgers.

Have McDonald’s felt the ..read more

The barrage of mass protest fired in Russia’s far east ten days ago echoed with a whimper as opponents of the import car tax hike staged actions across Russia. Today’s protests lacked the manpower of the previous ones, and in Vladivostok, the epicenter of the movement, OMON easily dispersed a crowd of around a 500 people. Police detained about 30 100 people among them included protesters, onlookers, journalists, and broadcast footage by REN-TV’s Valentina Troshina. Here’s a BBC video of the zachistka.

The columns of cars which were so successful in paralyzing Vladivostok ten days go also had limited success.  One column of around 40 cars were able to make it to the center of town where the honked their horns.  Another column of about 30 cars jammed Magnitagorsk street, while a third of about 30 cars waved flags as they circled the town center.  No mass traffic disruption seemed to ..read more

Since the raid on Memorial is hitting more and more English language news outlets, the most recent being in the Chicago Tribune, I figured it was time to give an update to the story.

Since the raid on Memorial’s St. Petersburg’s office on 4 December there have been a few developments, but none that illuminates the real reason why police confiscated the NGO’s archival materials and financial records.  The raid has gotten a lot of international attention.  Orlando Figes, whose recent book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is mostly based on interviews and materials collected by Memorial, has written a petition to President Medvedev.  So far the petition has been signed by many well known American and European scholars.* In addition, the US State Department expressed concern about the raid and called for Russian authorities “to ensure the speedy and safe return of all seized equipment and archival material.” ..read more

In Russia, December 14 is remembered as the day of the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, but today’s dissenters are marking it as a annual day of protest.  While most international reporting has focused on the arrests of some 90 demonstrators at the sparsely attended the Dissenters’ March in Moscow, on the other side of the country thousands of people paralyzed the city of Vladivostok for five hours in a protest against taxes on the purchase of foreign cars.  The increase set to take effect on January 11, 2009 will increase the price of an imported car by 10 to 20 percent.

The action pits the Russian government and citizen against each other in the form of a classic tax revolt.  Ironically, the government’s attempt to protect the fledgling Russian auto industry from foreign competition has found its greatest foe among the very people Russia’s economic boom has benefited: those ..read more