By Anna Pivovarchuk As Western media focuses on the Crimean crisis, Russia intensifies its assault on civil society. When Nikolai Gogol wrote about the winged troika in his 19th century masterpiece on provincial corruption, The Dead Souls, little did he know that he was creating a perennial image that would come to represent Russia for centuries […]
As Edward Snowden slipped into Moscow this afternoon, asylum documents in hand, he joined another recently freed man: Alexey Navalny. Russia now has two famous cyber-whistleblowers on its hands, and hasn’t yet figured out what to do with either. One thing is for sure, Putin’s planned meeting Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit […]
Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God By Damien Cave The New York Times Magazine “If the economy worked for the common good, there would be no Zetas. There would be no cartels,” says Robert Coogan, the chaplain at Cereso. Here the Zetas, Mexico’s most feared crime syndicate, run operations from the inside. And they […]