Corruption At The Sochi Olympics
Gary Hershorn / Reuters When pressed about the 2014 Sochi Olympics’ record $51 billion price tag — a sum that is five times the amount spent on the last Winter Games in Vancouver and that dwarves the GDP of three-fifths of the world’s countries — Vladimir Putin has shrugged off allegations of corruption, insisting that…
Scenes Of Outrage And Solidarity From Pussy Riot Protests Around The World
Pussy Riot’s three members sat in a glass cell in a Moscow court room this morning, holding up the judge’s verdict.
Putin Struggles: With Threats To Media And Hacker Attacks On Opposition
Putin and United Russia Get Less Than 50 Percent Of Vote MOSCOW–On the day of the State Duma elections, the chief editor of the online publication gazeta.ru Mikhail Katov was summoned to the headquarters of Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor. The day before, he had received notification that his site violated…
Vladimir Putin Set To Be Russia’s Next President – The Boss Again
The return of Vladimir Putin The once and future president It may bring clarity over who is in charge, but it will still be bad for Russia Oct 2011 IT WAS hardly a surprise when Vladimir Putin told his United Russia party conference on September 24th that he would run for the presidency next…
Russia has two paths—to change or to die : Zahar Prilepin
A literary festival in St-Malo, France, Russian writer Zahar Prilepin and I spoke on a panel about Russia’s war in Chechnya. The audience was fired up with anti-Russian sentiment, having just seen a documentary on the devastation of Grozny by Russian forces in 2000. Prilepin—muscular, silent—sank sullenly in his chair as the…
Blacklisting Known Spies : Russia vs. U.S.A.
Russia has drawn up a list of Americans who will be banned from entering Russia. The move comes as a response to Washington’s blacklisting of Russian officials linked to suspected human rights violations. Barack Obama’s much vaunted ‘reset’ of relations between the United States and Russia has suddenly hit a major…
Czar Putins Dead Soul
The Vladimir Putin era sometimes calls to mind Nicolai Gogol, a master of absurdist and biting social critiques of Czarist Russia. In the latest chapter, the prosecutor’s office in Moscow recently announced the reopening of a tax evasion case against Sergei Magnitsky, who has been dead for two years. A week earlier the…