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After a week of Oligarch wars, Medvedev-Luzhkov sniping, spy-plagiarism and a Victor Bout guilty verdict, it’s good to know we can still lead the world, even if it is in the corruption stakes.
It’s unclear …

It’s become so fashionable to automatically diss everything Putin does that critics are rarely forced to use their brains.
That’s the only way to explain the curious liberal denunciations of the Eurasian Union, a free-trade economic and political bloc of major former Soviet states that Putin is …

A portly man stands covered in glistening crude oil: this visual joke on that iconic scene from Goldfinger sets the scene for British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews’s exploration of life in post-Soviet Central Asia.
This week, she won an international …

It’s a story that could have been written by Borges.
A powerful man publishes a satirical novel under a playful yet obvious pseudonym. The book’s protagonist is a fiercely intelligent, insecure and amoral intellectual, a “‘vulgar Hamlet’ who can see through the superficiality of his age, but …

In a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of the internet’s role in Russian civil society (which just happened to include a few thoughtful and nuanced reflections from your humble blogger:), Radio Liberty’s Daisy Sindelar writes:
“The Russian Internet, or RuNet, is the first medium in …

Nostalgia is everywhere these days, a far cry from the good old days when we used to live for the future. Woody Allen. South Africa politicians. Even Mad Men are in on the act.
But nostalgia for …

Did you know that Skype comes from Estonia?
Ok, smartypants. But did you know Skype loves the Soviet Union?
Well, maybe not loves exactly, but at least gives credit where credit is due.
For some reason, Baltic people are not exactly what you’d call nostalgic for their former Slav …

In 2024, I’ll be middle aged, turning 40. Maybe filthy rich, much more probably struggling to feed the kids. Or without any kids. Or maybe even dead – who knows? The polar ice caps might be gone and the US broken up into individual chunks run …

Of all the things to envy about Alexander Lebedev – his billions, his international media empire, his mansion on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace – what most Russians are really jealous of is that it was he and not them who knocked …

I remember when Russian haute cuisine was a 10 letter word: mayonnaise.
When the first “Western” pizzeria opened in my home town of Murmansk around 1994, its house specialty certainly looked like pizza: a slick flatbread baked in a giant rectangular pan and sliced …

As if any more evidence were needed that Putin will return to the presidency, Britain’s David Cameron has raced to Moscow to mend fences.
Of course, this being Cameron, his limp supplicating came with an extra dose of hypocritical moralising.
The UK has not been …

What is it about transition societies? No matter how far away they are from each other or how different their culture and history, they have much the same problems: inequality, crime, corruption, a single dominant party, health crises, poor education systems and pervasive nostalgia for the …

“An irreparable loss for ice hockey”. That’s how Vyacheslav Fetisov, head of KHL, the Russian equivalent of the NHL, called today’s horrific plane crash that wiped out the Locomotiv ice-hockey team en route to Belarus, killing 43.
Only two people survived the crash as their 18 year old …

As Russia desperately struggles to make amends with Libya’s rebel government, a fantastic new article uncovers some amazing parallels between Libya’s revolution and Russia’s transition from Communism.
Writing in the Exiled, the web-only successor of the defunct Russian gonzo paper,

Was the August Coup the blueprint for the Arab Spring?
Sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky says no. “The only thing the Arab Spring and the end of the USSR have in common is that they happened to involve large crowds. It’s like comparing a political rally …