United Russia
Black PR vs. Black PR?
By Sean at 7 February, 2010, 11:03 pm
As the Power Vertical’s Robert Coalson explains, this is the way the game is played. Anyone familiar with Russian politics over the last 20 years, if not the last century, will not be surprised by the revelation a United Russia hatchet-men hired “spin doctors” to spread black PR to smear political opponents of UR power broker and Saratov deputy Vyacheslav Volodin. But is this latest revelation merely black PR about black PR? Yet another example of the Russian elite cannabalizing itself?
Read More >>United Russia Deputy Murdered
By Sean at 25 October, 2009, 9:35 am
Here’s a murder you probably won’t hear about in the Western press. Grigory Nosikov, 48, was found dead on Wednesday of stab wounds outside the gates of his house, which is located in the Naro-Fominsk district some 60 miles west of Moscow. Nosikov was not a journalist, oppositionist, or a human rights activist. If he [...]
Read More >>Volgograd Obama Times Two
By Sean at 24 August, 2009, 9:06 am
Joachim Crima was surely mistaken if he thought he would coast into Russian history as the first Afro-Russian to run for public office. Enter Fillip Kondratev, 34, technical director at the Volgograd construction company “Pyramid,” Afro-Russian, and newly declared candidate for mayor of the Srednaya Akhbuta. But being black in Russia is pretty much were [...]
Read More >>“Volgograd Obama” Declares “Let the people decide!”
By Sean at 30 July, 2009, 10:21 am
My post about Joachim Crima, the so-called “Volgograd Obama,” has received a lot of traffic thanks to Joshua Keating’s link to it at Foreign Policy. So given the interest in this Russian political novelty, I figured I’d do an update on the first Afro-Russian to run for public office.
The first articles I read about Crima [...]
Sochi’s Electoral Magic Show
By Sean at 27 April, 2009, 6:00 am
The results of the mayoral election in Sochi were as expected. United Russia’s candidate Anatoly Pakhomov won. No repeat of the Murmansk mayoral contest allowed. The losers, Solidarity’s Boris Nemtsov and the Communist Party candidate Yuri Dzaganiya, have already charged massive fraud, dirty campaign tricks, and use of a variety “administrative resources” to hoist Pakhomov [...]
Read More >>Gensek Putin
By Sean at 15 April, 2008, 9:58 am
Delegates at United Russia’s 9th Congress voted unanimously to make Putin its party chairman. Putin accepted. Surprise, surprise. This possibility has been buzzing around the Russian media for a few weeks now. And in one fail swoop, what was thought to merely be a shell of a political party, has gained importance. Clearly [...]
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