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When I was in Sochi the year before last, I took a pleasure cruise on the Black Sea. I remember being fascinated by the city’s skyline, its cranes as striking and numerous against the snow-capped mountains as the dashes on
The Sochi Winter Olympics, which begin next week, will forever be known as Putin’s Games. However they eventually pan out, Russia’s President has staked a good deal of political capital on their success — not to mention plenty of actual
When Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were released from their respective penal colonies last week, as part of Vladimir Putin’s conveniently-timed amnesty for more than 20,000 non-violent offenders, practically the first thing they did was call for
In the lead-up to the March 4 Russian presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won in a landslide amid allegations of fraud, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by Thomas de Waal titled ‘How Gogol Explains the Post-Soviet World’. “How about
The first-time visitor to Grozny has to be reminded that, until recently, the Chechen capital was often called “the most destroyed city on Earth.” Today, Grozny rises out of the plain like the Emerald City of Oz. The famous Associated
Those crazy Russians. We have just overtaken a fishing boat on Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia and are now heading at a clip across its surface in the direction of its largest island. We are not in a boat but
The relative success of Sunday’s “Writers’ March” through the streets of Moscow — not in terms of overall numbers, perhaps, but certainly as example of non-violent protest — was cheering. After last Sunday’s protester-instigated violence and the disproportionate police response that followed, it was
For the past six months, Western journalists in Moscow have represented the political situation in Russia as a simple dichotomy between good and evil, right and wrong, democracy and authoritarianism: in short, between the non-systemic opposition, spearheaded by figures such