NYT: A Beating On My Beat
|
posted by eagle on December, 2010 as ANALYSIS / OPINION
A Beating on My BeatBy OLEG KASHINPublished: December 11, 2010
Moscow
ON the night of Nov. 6, I was attacked by two young men armed with steel rods. The assault occurred a few feet from the entrance to my house, which is just a 10-minute walk from the Kremlin. A month later, I am still in the hospital. One of my fingers has been amputated, one of my legs and both halves of my jaw have been broken, and I have several cranial wounds. According to my doctors, I won’t be able to go back to my job as a reporter and columnist at Kommersant, an independent newspaper, until spring. A few hours after the attack, President Dmitri Medvedev went on Twitter to declare his outrage, and he instructed Russia’s law enforcement agencies to make every effort to investigate this crime. But no one has been apprehended, and I do not expect that the two young men will ever be identified or caught. Three theories quickly emerged about who was behind the ...
comments (0)
Window On Eurasia: Manezh Violence Boosts Putin Just Like 1999 Apartment Bombings Did, Delyagin Says
|
posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, December 13 – The Manezh violence, many Moscow analysts are suggesting, shows that ethnic Russians are organizing and that North Caucasian diasporas can no longer act as they please, while other writers are suggesting that these diasporas may respond with violence, especially since the militia quickly released those involved in Saturday’s violence.
But one analyst, Mikhail Delyagin, the director of the Moscow Institute of the Problems of Globalization, argues that what took place in Moscow streets over the weekend has re-ordered the political balance within the tandem in Vladimir Putin’s favor and that this in turn points to popular support for a new wave of repression against minorities and the opposition.
In an interview with Andrey Polunin of "Svobodnaya pressa,” Delyagin suggests that before these clashes, President Dmitry Medvedev was gaining the upper hand in the ongoing political contest with Prime Minister Putin, but "the disorders on Manezh ...
comments (0)
Economist: Frost At The Core
|
posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Frost at the core Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin are presiding over a system that can no longer changeDec 9th 2010 
ON DECEMBER 15th, in a small courtroom in central Moscow, Viktor Danilkin, a softly spoken judge, is due to start delivering a verdict. Its symbolism will go far beyond the fate of the two defendants, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, former principal shareholders in the Yukos oil company. Both men have been in jail since 2003 on charges of tax evasion. Their sentences expire next year. In order to keep them in prison, the government has absurdly charged them with stealing all the company’s oil. Neither the first nor the second trial had much to do with the rule of law. But there the similarity ends. In 2003 Mr Khodorkovsky personified the injustice and inequality of the 1990s, when tycoons wielded enormous power over a state that could not even pay pensions and salaries on time. Seven years on, Mr Khodorkovsky is a symbol of the injustices ...
>> full
comments (0)
The Other Russia: A Few Words About Methods
|
posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
December 7th, 2010 • Related • Filed Under Last Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live for the first time in ten years. Among a variety of other controversial statements, Putin took a stab at the United States for "organizing secret prisons, kidnappings, and the use of torture.” In this column for Yezhednevny Zhurnal, reknowned Russian satirist Victor Shenderovich comments on the hypocrisy of such an attack. A Few Words About Methods
By Viktor Shenderovich
December 7, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal I intentionally waited a few days – would anybody speak out? Nope. All is quiet… Impudence is bliss. "The methods of our security services differ in a good way from the methods used by United States security services,” Putin told Larry King. "Thank God… the officers of our intelligence services and other security services are not noted as having been involved in the organization of secret prisons, kidnappings, or the use of torture.” They were noticed, naturally, and more than once. The difference between Russia and the US is that ...
comments (0)
The Economist: Dealing With Russia Be Critical, Not Hypocritical
|
posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Dealing with RussiaBe critical, not hypocritical Western leaders should be much readier to criticise RussiaDec 9th 2010 AFTER more than a decade with Vladimir Putin in charge, few can be sanguine about Russia’s direction. Its democracy is a sham. Strong growth may have raised living standards, but its dependence on oil and gas exports often makes its economy resemble that of the Soviet Union. Corruption has become so pervasive that it undermines even the functioning of the state. Above all, the rule of law is absent, as will be seen again on December 15th when a Russian judge is expected to sentence Mikhail Khodorkovsky to another term in prison. The true crime of Mr Khodorkovsky, an unlovely oil oligarch who fell out with Mr Putin in 2003, is that his present jail term is about to expire. For a time optimistic Russians thought that modernisation might be possible without big political changes. But this hope has turned out to be vain. The political system itself has fostered the ...
comments (0)
|
