Archive for the 'AP Russia' Category
Friday, May 20th, 2011
ELECTIONS in Russia have long ceased to be a contest for power or a competition between ideas. Instead they play the role of a plebiscite for the Kremlin and United Russia—a special-purpose vehicle designed by Russia’s rulers to ensure that they stay in power.
With the exception of the toothless Communists, all the parties in the Duma are integral parts of the political system set up by the Kremlin. Elections, like much of politics in Russia, are an imitation of the real thing. But the regional polls on March 13th deserve some attention, not least because they are seen as a dress rehearsal for a parliamentary vote in December and a presidential election the following March.
The general outcome was no surprise. United Russia, which has the entire Russian bureaucracy at its disposal, grabbed 70% of all seats in the 12 legislatures that held elections. Yet in terms of votes, the party did worse than in the previous parliamentary election, in 2007. It won over half the votes in only three regions. In the economically depressed region of Kirov, it received little over one-third.
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
Russian rule has always been tenuous there. The territory, which stretches from the Black Sea to the Caspian, was colonised late and was never fully integrated into Russia’s empire. Its Muslim peoples enjoyed considerable autonomy, both religious and cultural, until the Bolsheviks took over—whereupon the Caucasus was so modernised and Sovietised that when the Soviet Union fell only Chechnya declared its independence.
Two wars later Chechnya is relatively stable under President Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel whose patron is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister. Grozny, Chechnya’s once-ruined capital, is now a surreal place boasting several skyscrapers, the largest mosque in Europe, chandelier-lit streets and a Putin Prospect. The president enjoys something of a personality cult: official licence-plates carry his initials, and banners outside schools thank him for “taking care of our future”. Yet Chechnya is virtually a separate state, where women must wear headscarves in public and the sale of alcohol is restricted.
Violence has spread from Chechnya to other north Caucasus republics and beyond…
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
IT ALL seemed so clear a year ago. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, tweeted and blogged about modernisation, while Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and the other half of the tandem, pulled the strings, drove anything that moved and posed for cameras as he prepared to stroll back into the Kremlin in 2012, this time for two six-year terms.
But in recent weeks the picture has become hazier. Mr Putin’s return to the Kremlin is looking less certain, and Russia’s political system seems even less stable. The differences between the two men are mainly stylistic, but the signs of a political struggle are real.
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Does the sun revolve around the Earth? One in every three Russians thinks so, a spokeswoman for state pollster VsTIOM said on Friday.
In a survey released this week, 32 percent of Russians believed the Earth was the center of the Solar system; 55 percent that all radioactivity is man-made; and 29 percent that the first humans lived when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
“It’s really quite amazing,” spokeswoman Olga Kamenchuk said of the survey that polled 1,600 people across Russia’s regions in January, with a 3.4-percent margin of error.
However, people tend to forget what they have been taught at school if it is not part of daily use, she added: “I wonder whether our colleagues in other countries would find any different.”
Now do you believe in the “transition to democracy”?
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
In light of Khorodovsky’s show trial, the Economist offers a disheartening, though perhaps realistic view of contemporary Russian politics. In doing, the author offers a comparison of Medvedev and Putin and concludes that, “[w]ith Mr Putin in power, Russia may suffer deep stagnation, but a collapse of the system would be all the more dramatic. With Mr Medvedev stagnation may be shorter, but his grip on power would be weaker. This may matter little in the long run, but it makes a big difference for Russians living now—not least for Mr Khodorkovsky himself.”
Read “Frost at the Core”
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Here is a short but compelling piece about how United Russia propped up a political party, “A Just Russia”, and is now taking that party down in Siberia. It is also a courageous, if not misguided, Siberian woman who sees hope in a competitive political party system.
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Leaked embassy cables show US diplomats are concerned about the growing power of Russian organized crime and believe it has contacts with the highest levels of government in Moscow.
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
DMITRY MEDVEDEV has been long on talk and short on action ever since he became Russia’s president in 2008. That is why some were surprised on September 28th when he dramatically fired Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow since 1992, citing a “loss of confidence”. The 74-year-old Mr Luzhkov was one of Russia’s most powerful politicians and a senior figure in the ruling United Russia party. He is a household name all over the country; his wife, Yelena Baturina, a construction magnate, is Russia’s richest woman.
Read more on this power struggle among the Russian elite
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »
Monday, October 4th, 2010
With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948
Fascinating Photos!
Posted in AP Russia, World Civ-Russian Rev & Rise of Stalin | No Comments »
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
A year and a half after Barack Obama hit the “reset” button with Russia, the reconciliation is still fragile, incomplete, and politically divisive. Sure, Russia is no easy ally for the United States. Authoritarian yet insecure, economically mighty yet technologically backward, the country has proven a challenge for U.S. presidents since the end of the Cold War. Recent news hasn’t helped: The arrest in July of a former deputy prime minister and leader of the Solidarity opposition movement, Boris Nemtsov, provoked some of the harshest criticism of Russia yet from the Obama administration. Then last Wednesday, Russia announced that it had moved anti-aircraft missiles into Abkhazia, the region that broke off from Georgia during the August 2008 war. The announcement was hardly welcome news for the United States, which has tried to defuse tensions there for the last 24 months.
Yet however challenging this partnership may be, Washington can’t afford not to work with Moscow. Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase, “Trust, but verify” — a good guiding principle for Cold War arms negotiators, and still apt for today. Engagement is the only way forward. Here are 10 reasons why
Posted in AP Russia | No Comments »