I haven’t done an update on Kyrgyzstan in several days.  While things seemed to have calmed in the southern part of the country, tensions are high, the humanitarian crisis is deep, and the political outcomes are uncertain.

Two questions have been occupying most commentators:  Why the violence, or, specifically why didn’t we see it coming? and What are the international ramifications, particularly for the US and Russia?  I’m personally less interested in the second question, and for the most part discussion on this has ranged from the ludicrous (for how ludicrous see Michael Hancock’s undressing on Registan), the paranoiac and uninformed, the all too typical, to the regurgitated.  Basically, I’ll leave it to the foreign policy wоnks to untangle this mess.  I just hope to hear something new as they do.

The “why” question, however, is the thing that seems ..read more

I have little love for Russian liberals.  Readers of this blog probably know that well.  Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov in particular, as one can sense from my take down of their 2008 anti-Putin screed for the now defunct and sorely missed The eXile. I even giggled when Nashi threw piss in Nemtsov’s face.

The dynamic duo is back with a new Putin obsessed treatise, elegantly entitled Putin. The Results. Ten Years.  So much for creativity.  It is sure to get more media attention than it deserves.  I have yet to read it, and probably won’t.  I’m sure my eXile piece applies just as well to this one.  According to reports in the Russian media, the text evaluates Putin’s decade long run and the tandem’s two year performance.  Vedomosti writes that Nemtsov characterized the text this way on his ..read more

From Ferghana.ru.

h/t Lyndon.

The more I educate myself about events in Kyrgyzstan, it’s becoming apparent that people who actually know something about the place are skeptical of the “longstanding ethnic strife” narrative.  Michael Anderson, a Dutch journalist who covers the region, put it this way in an interview with Ferghana.ru., “Unfortunately, Western media fall back on stereotypes, describing events in Osh such as “interethnic violence” and “interethnic problems”, although you and I know that that is not really what is happening.’  He went on to add this: “I am ashamed that western media pay so little attention and produce such poor coverage. This is bad. Another bad thing is the constant use of stereotypes – often wrong.”  For an example, see this piece on Slate which goes with the deep seeded ethnic strife thesis.

Not all are taken with the marketable stereotypes ..read more

Kyrgyzstan, the small Central Asian country which sprung onto the global scene in April, boggling the minds of American news anchors, has returned.  What I then called the “red revolution” has turned redder as ethnic violence swept through the southern city of Osh and Jalal-Abad this weekend.  On Thursday, marauding gangs began rampaging, attacking Uzbeks, burning government buildings, banks, cafes, and even an Uzbek theater first in Osh and then in Jalal-Abad.  Uzbeks locked themselves in their homes as rumors spread they would be killed on the street.  Uzbeks, being the minority, fled over the border in the tens of thousands into Uzbekistan.  Interim president Roza Otunbayeva declared a state of emergency and countrywide curfew, dispatched troops with shoot-to-kill orders, pleaded to Russia for help, and blamed supporters of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiev for the violence.  President ..read more

Contrary to what most people think, I see few signs of the neo-Sovietization of Russia.  What I have observed, however, is a return to Russian traditionalism, even a kind of re-embrace of Tsarist symbolism.  I’ve noticed this in several areas of Russian daily life: Christmas cards with the recently canonized last Romanov family, icons of the last Tsar sold in kiosks, large portraits of Petr Stolypin and Sergei Witte at the entrance of the International University, and book after book reevaluating the late Tsarist period, newly published volumes of Stolypin’s collected works, and the memoirs of not only Witte, but the diaries and biographies of princes and princesses in bookstores.

Let us also not forget the growing assertiveness of the Orthodox Church in cultural and political life, or the fact that Dmitri Medvedev’s inauguration looked like a Tsarist ..read more