Corruption
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 >>Moscow in Perspective
By Sean at 29 November, 2009, 11:51 am
Moscow. Being in Russia’s capital provides a perspective impossible to acquire through the news. Contrary to popular belief, the Internet doesn’t bring us closer together. Instead, via the Internet Russia exists as mystified, mediated through the ghastly stories that both the Russian and Western media are obsessed with. It is only after being here a [...]
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 >>“Good people live in bathtubs.”
By Sean at 31 July, 2009, 10:44 am
Vedomosti has a great article on the history of Russia’s housing crisis. Housing, as Maksim Trudoliubov notes, is a chronic historical problem in Russia, one which the Soviets tried to attenuate, but made little headway until the 1960s. “The comfort of our home life is still not good for many of us,” Trudoliubov begins. “As [...]
Read More >>Kill’em All
By Sean at 20 October, 2008, 8:05 am
Here are some interesting findings from a recent VTsIOM survey on corruption:
Thirty percent of Russians approve of the idea of public executions to fight corruption, the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion has found. Fifty-nine percent of those opposed to that innovation are not opposed to public execution itself, they simply doubt its [...]
