Archive for December, 2008
In Lieu of an End of Year Rundown
By Sean at 31 December, 2008, 12:09 pm
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 [...]
Read More >>A Very Nashi Christmas
By Sean at 25 December, 2008, 10:06 am
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 [...]
Read More >>Let the Russians Eat (and Serve) Big Macs!
By Sean at 22 December, 2008, 10:06 am
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 [...]
Read More >>Russia’s Protest Armageddon Averted
By Sean at 21 December, 2008, 1:35 pm
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 [...]
Read More >>Evidence Against Memorial Delayed
By Sean at 17 December, 2008, 11:21 am
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 [...]
Russia’s Far East says: “No New Taxes!”
By Sean at 15 December, 2008, 9:01 pm
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 [...]
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