As the US prepares to “withdraw” (sic) from Afghanistan, a fiasco that has made its Soviet “prequel” seem like a Hollywood success story, two new books add insult to injury.
Written by a former British ambassador and a Russian journalist, and reviewed by Tariq Ali in …
The death of Andrei Sakharov’s widow, fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner, over the weekend brought out the usual opportunists.
In Russia, right wing liberals like Boris Nemtsov immediately swooped down to claim her mantle: “The demise of such a Soviet dissident as …
President Medvedev ‘outs’ Vladimir Putin’s sexuality before attacking the Prime Minister’s plane with a sub-machine gun, but it’s the more improbable sight of John Cusack savouring Putin’s rendition of Blueberry Hill that finally gives away the fictional nature of Russia’s most talked-about election video.
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The …
I recently watched two relatively old Soviet/Russian movies back to back, Taxi Blues and Luna Park, made by the famous Russian director Pavel Lungin, both produced in the early 1990s. Taxi Blues (1990) and Luna Park (1991) are critically acclaimed films from …
Australia is not happy with the FPA Russia blog.
The University of Sydney’s Philipp Ivanov wrote that my “arguments and the way they’re presented extremely narrow-minded, seriously lacking in depth and…biased”, leaving him “very disappointed that such a credible source of commentary as FPA …
Those Bolshevik posters depicting the Russian Orthodox Church as an integral pillar of dictatorship had to wait almost a century for vindication.
Ironically, it may come from as surprising an ally as the European Court of Human Rights, to which the museum curators sentenced for …
Everyone knows that the physicist turned human rights crusader Andrei Sakharov was a dissident, but what about oligarch turned oppositionist Khodorkovsky?
Foreign Policy magazine seems to think so. Yet the article’s simplistic title (‘Khodorkovsky – the Billionaire Dissident’) obscures an admirable level of nuance achieved …
All is not lost in Russia. Though deprived of meaningful political democracy, its citizens can still vote with their wallets and cinema tickets.
And their hearty rejection of “Burnt by the Sun 2″, Russia’s most expensive movie showed more than mere disgust at the laughably bad WWII ‘epic’ …
While readers were merrily gorging themselves on turkey dinners, FPA Russia Blog spent the past week hard at work: sniffing out traces of Soviet heritage in Hanoi, the capital of one of the world’s last remaining Socialist states.
Indeed, most middle aged Hanoians speak at least some Russian, and many experience …
Secret documents smuggled out of Moscow proving a conspiracy between Thatcher and Gorbachev to stop German unification? Christmas has come three months early for Cold War junkies.
A cache of files copied by Pavel Stroilov, a young researcher at the Gorbachev foundation mere months before they were re-classified, …
Why is “the man regarded by some as the patriarch of the dissident movement…almost forgotten at home”?
So asks a recent AP profile of the legendary Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalyov.
After all, wouldn’t the very people who campaigned hardest to end Communism have benefited most from its downfall?
Predictably, the …
Only five months after FPA Russia blog noted the intriguing similarities between Obama and Gorbachev, the AP’s Steven Hurt writes:
While historic analogies are never perfect, Obama’s stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet …
“Americans Chose Perestroika” was the headline splashed across Russia's leading tabloid, the Komsomolskaya Pravda, on November 5th.
Indeed, the scenes of solidarity, jubilation and catharsis that I witnessed in downtown Washington DC around 11pm on November 4 could have come from a documentary about the fall of …
The recent spat with America and Britain over Zimbabwe and Russia's continued intransigence over the US AMB shield in the Czech republic have dashed the hopes of many in the West that Medvedev would make a qualitative departure from Putin.
The Guardian's Luke Harding put it …
I'm not the nationalistic sort. I count in my head in English, I think Ukrainians are alright, at heart. Even the Georgians, when they behave. I quietly enjoy the good news from back home and decry the bad, with the equal dose of ironic detachment and self-referential mockery demanded of …
