Category Archives: US-Russia

I highly recommend “Nikita Khrushchev Goes to Hollywood” from the Smithsonian Magazine.  Khrushchev, always the showman, charmed, bantered with American capitalists, and even took in the filming of Can-Can during his tour of America in 1959.  When the Soviet premier went to Hollywood, hundreds of stars appealed for tickets to attend a luncheon with him.  He met such Hollywood legends as Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, and Charleston Heston.

The event apparently had several memorable moments.  When Heston leaned over to Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhtov and said “I have read excerpts from your works.” The novelist replied, “Thank you. When we get some of your films, I shall not fail to watch some excerpts from them.”  When businessman Spyros Skouras used his immigrant rags-to-riches story to educate Khrushchev about capitalism, the communist retorted:

He turned to Skouras—”my dear brother Greek”—and said he was impressed by his capitalist rags-to-riches story. ..read more

Hypochondriacs beware!  Swine flu has officially landed in Moscow. According to Novyi region, two women have been hospitalized in the capital. “Both women are citizens of Russia.  One of them arrived in Russia from New York yesterday, the second today.  They had fevers and were admitted to the hospital by our insistence,” Gennadii Onishchenko told Interfax. Interestingly, in Russia doctors call the virus, which has damned the good name of the pig the world over, “California 0409.”  That should make pigs feel better, but what of the sensitivities of us Californians?

Swine flu’s arrival makes Russia the fifteenth country to be infected.  The global hysteria sparked by the pandemic has led to altering flights, calls for a mass slaughter of pigs,  the quarantining of hotels at the first site of a Mexican tourist, and a whole host of other theories.  In Israel, the deputy health minister Rabbi Yakov Litzman won’t even ..read more

Are these ads racist?  Some think so.  The use of Barack Obama visage has become a marketing hit in Russia, generating cries of racism.  The charges relate to three ads featuring Obama. The Times of India reports:

Obama ice cream, anyone? Chocolate-vanilla ice cream is one of several Russian products being marketed using America’s first black president, even as critics call the ads racist.

Other ads featuring US President Barack Obama have promoted tanning salons and tooth-whitening services.

But the creator of one Obama-themed ad — for ice cream bars which have a chocolate-flavoured centre embedded in a layer of vanilla — insisted Friday that it was not racist and should be seen as a joke.

The ad for Duet ice cream bars features a smiling, cartoonish black man flashing a V-for-Victory sign in front of the white edifice of Washington’s Capitol building, along with the Russian slogan: “Everyone’s talking about it: dark ..read more

The plastic Reset button snafu has perhaps gotten far too much press than it deserves, and admittedly I’ve played my part in promoting the story.  If anything Americans can add peregruzka and perezagruzka to their Russian lexicon of tovarishch, borscht, vodka, glasnost, perestroika, da, and nyet. But amid all the cracks at Clinton for the goof, few have asked who is responsible for the mistake.  And since American discourse is so obsessed with “accountability,” one would imagine that the culprit would have stood up by now and engaged in a bit of samokritika.  Don’t hold your breath. The only words coming out of the State Department is the frank admission that they screwed up, which I guess is refreshing since the last Administration was so reluctant to admit mistakes.  Nevertheless, the question of who dunnit? is intriguing foreign policy nerd gossip even if wholly unimportant in a world-historical sense.  So ..read more

Yeah, yeah, I haven’t been blogging of late, but I hope to return at full throttle soon.  In the meantime I couldn’t resist mentioning a story in the NY Times about the US-Russia relations “reset button.”  We all now know that the Obama Administration is making some effort to repair relations with Russia.  The first sign came with Joe Biden’s “press the reset button” statement in February. Then earlier this week we learned that Obama sent a “secret letter” to Medvedev hoping to enlist Russia in dealing with Iran in exchange for scrapping the missile defense system in Eastern Europe.  The Russians received the letter coldly, and you can’t blame them.

Well the Reset Button Doctrine appears to be going ahead though the first problem doesn’t appear to be resetting relations as it is finding the correct Russia word for “reset”.  Secretary of State Clinton was in Russia yesterday to meet ..read more

One reads a lot of weird and fanciful things about Russia. The place is such an enigma to some that attempts to understand it leads one to make all sorts of absurd connections. Take for example, Anthony Julius’ commentary “Dreams of Empire Strike Back” in the Guardian.  Julius, whose bio says that he’s a “highly-regarded litigation lawyer specializing in media law and defamation,” poses the rather calumniatory question: “What do Osama bin Laden and Vladimir Putin have in common?”  Those who think that the obvious answer is a resounding “nothing” will be surprised to find that Julius believes that the vozhd and the terrorist “have identical perspectives on one specific issue” i.e. the desire to recreate a past empire. He writes:

What is that issue? Bin Laden’s and Putin’s imperialist ambitions are novel because they are driven not by a desire to create something new, but to recapture something that has ..read more