Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fallout from the Dissenters’ March continues. First, the three MVD officers charged with ensuring “order” during the protest have all received promotions. Putin signed a decree yesterday that promoted Vyacheslav Kozlov to deputy chief of Moscow GUVD, Arkady Gostev as head of the Department for Securing Public Order at Moscow GUVD, and Vyacheslav Khaustov to command Moscow’s OMON. Kommersant adds, “Spokesmen for the authorities urged that the appointments are not linked to the successful crackdown on the Dissenters’ Marches” and that move was “scheduled.” Uh, yeah right.

That is not all. The Kremlin is also moving more aggressively to identify the financial backers of the Other Russia movement. Within the Kremlin and United Russia, Other Russia has long been suspected of receiving funds from Western NGOs and, possibly, governments. A task force has now been created comprised of United Russia’s Alexander ..read more

United Russia and Putin disagree? Sure it’s nothing major, but Putin shot down the proposal to eliminate the hammer and sickle from Russia’s WWII Victory Banner. As Kommersant reports:

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the leaders of veteran organizations in the Kremlin on Friday to discuss the implementation of his decree on preparation to celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War. State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov attended the meeting as well. After the meeting was over, he claimed that it was he who suggested that the president should send the notorious law “About the Victory Banner” to the State Duma to be revised.

The scandal was triggered by the law allowing to use the Victory Banner’s symbol during victory celebrations in May, instead of a copy of the real banner placed above Reichstag on May 1, 1945. The symbol differs ..read more

Are Putin and his cohort afflicted with trauma? This is the question Richard Lourie poses in an interesting column in the Moscow Times. Lourie rhetorically asks, why does an administration with 70 percent approval use such force against a small and politically insignificant opposition. Was it yet another sign of the “turn toward authoritarianism or pre-election jitters?” Lourie writes that:

It was a bit of both, but behind both lies a deeper cause. President Vladimir Putin and his generation were shaped by the traumatic collapse of the Soviet Union, just as previous generations were shaped by revolution, terror or war. Their own personal relationship to the Soviet Union and its demise — their sense of loss, regret and acrimony — is dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the event itself. Their shock resulted from seeing that something as mighty and gigantic as the Union ..read more

Boris Nikolaievich Yelstin is dead. Many are sure to evaluate his legacy over the coming days and years. Almost universally hailed as “democratic” in the West, Yeltsin’s rule was a complicated mix of democracy, authoritarianism, oligarchy, theft, corruption, crime, and gangster capitalism. It was a time of hope and fear for the average Russian. Gone was the authoritarianism of the Soviet system, but that vacuum also produced an uneasy feeling of what came next. A spirit of democracy quickly filled that vacuum only to flutter out as “western” democracy became associated with the utter destruction of the Russian social and economic base. Time doesn’t permit to cite the relevant statistics on the precipitous collapse of the standard of living in the 1990s.

Yeltsin, among many things, will be remembered for standing on a tank in Moscow thus preventing counter-revolution, bombarding the White ..read more

The Russian elite’s control over the Russian media marches on. The NY Times is reporting that media executives who are Kremlin allies are instituting a “50 percent” rule on news reporting. The bosses at the Russian News Service have told their journalists that “at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.” What is the difference between “positive” and “negative”? As one editor told the Times on the condition of anonymity, “When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive. If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.” The journalists also claim that they’ve been instructed not to mention opposition leaders and the US must be portrayed as an enemy. Nice. To think I thought Fox News was bad. Wait, this is exactly what Fox News does!

Most will ..read more

Since the merits of David Johnson and his, in my opinion, indispensable Johnson’s Russia List is such a hot topic of debate, I point readers to his interview in the Moscow News. It is rare that we actually hear what the man behind JRL actually thinks about Russia. Most of the time critics infer his views from the copious numbers of articles he includes (or doesn’t) in his daily newsletter. Here are a couple of responses that I found relevant to the debate:

MN: Once you wrote about a news conference at the Kremlin where President Putin spoke to a group of editors and correspondents. What was your impression of Vladimir Putin?

DJ: Putin was very impressive in his command of subjects and apparent open-mindedness. I think most of us at these meetings felt this. However, there were certainly critical views expressed about some of Putin’s policies. ..read more