Category: AP Russia

Survey of Russia

The Economist offers keen insights into Russia’s past, present and future in this 2008 survey. The introductory and concluding articles are especially noteworthy. Enjoy it here.

Russia's crumbling economy provides stiffest test yet for autocratic leader

Obeying orders from the top, Russian television has banned the use of words such as “crisis”, “decline” and “devaluation”. Coverage of the mayhem in the country’s stock market, where shares have fallen by 75 per cent since August, is scant.
Instead, just as in Soviet times, Russians are told how bad everything is in the West. The US, Russians are told, is in irreversible decline, while desperate Britons are throwing themselves into the Thames. The Queen, facing imminent penury, has been forced to pawn her diamonds and, according to one tabloid front page, we can no longer afford to bury our dead…

On November 4, Dmitry Medvedev, the protégé Mr Putin shoehorned into his old job as president in May, announced that he would seek a constitutional amendment extending the standard term of office from two consecutive terms of four years to two terms of six.

Read on…

Sex for the motherland: Russian youths encouraged to procreate at camp

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia”.
Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation – known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” – is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

Read on

Russia and Georgia Clash

Russia conducted airstrikes on Georgian targets on Friday evening, escalating the conflict in a separatist area of Georgia that is shaping into a test of the power and military reach of an emboldened Kremlin. Earlier in the day, Russian troops and armored vehicles had rolled into South Ossetia, supporting the breakaway region in its bitter conflict with Georgia.

The United States and other Western nations, joined by NATO, condemned the violence and demanded a cease-fire. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went a step further, calling on Russia to withdraw its forces. But the Russian soldiers remained, and Georgian officials reported at least one airstrike, on the Black Sea port of Poti, late on Friday night.

The War is on? (from NYT)

Read Slate’s c overage from the Same Day

James Traub Interview on NPR (very good) 

In Pictures from Foreign Policy Magazine

Condi Rice Gets Tough on Russia

No Cold War, but Big Chill Over Georgia

Comparative Essay on Democratization and Revolutions

The field of comparative politics starts with the assumption that knowledge in the social sciences must proceed by way of the search for comparisons, or what has been called “suggestive contrasts.” Scholars of comparative politics compare in order to discover similarities and explain differences. As infrequent and highly complex events, revolutions have attracted a great deal of attention from comparativists.

In this article we will address the following topics:

  • The Concept of Revolution
  • Why Revolutions Happen?
  • Can Revolutions be Predicted?
  • What Do Revolutions Accomplish?
  • What Are some of the Failures of Revolutions?
  • Comparing Characteristics and Outcomes of Some Revolutions
  • Questions

NPR Russia Coverage

How Putin rose to power is spelled out by Russian journalist Masha Gessen. She says Putin, a KGB operative with little government experience before he was first elected in 1999, was specifically selected by the elite cohort that surrounded former President Boris Yeltsin.

Journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser are with The Washington Post. From 2001 to 2004, the pair, who are married, served as the Moscow bureau chiefs for the Post. The two have collaborated on a new book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution. In it, Baker and Glasser describe President Vladimir Putin’s shift away from democracy toward what they call authoritarianism.

In the The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about the murders of 13 journalists in Russia that have taken place since Vladimir Putin took office in 1999. Specter’s article is “Kremlin, Inc: Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying?”

The New American Cold War

Stephen F. Cohen of Colombia University posits that the Cold War is far from over and that “[c]ontrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America’s national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.”

The New American Cold War

Response Sheet to Cohen