http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com The World Affairs Blog Network Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:37:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My last post chronicled the large numbers of people (45% of Russians and up to 62% of Ukrainians) made worse off by the fall of the USSR. But what about the rest? One man who certainly did not figure among them was Misha, the hero of a vivid, at times zany, ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/05/chronicles-of-a-oviet-capitalist/ After twenty years of post-Communism, it's time to ask: cui bono? According to a sweeping Pew Research Center poll of Eastern Europeans released yesterday, "the prevailing view in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary is that people were better off economically under communism. Only in the Czech Republic and Poland ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/03/better-red-than-unfed-a-survey-of-post-communism/ Terrified German officers called them Night-Witches. 'Night' because of the way they idled their engines to glide silently over German cities in daring night-time bombing raids. And 'witches', because they were women. Today, the BBC aired an unmissable documentary about the legendary Soviet 46th Night Bombers Guards Regiment, the first female ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/02/tale-of-two-night-witches/ With a neo-con editor who believes that "with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero", the New Republic is the last place to find a reasoned view on Russia.  Or on Iran for that matter, considering this famously faux-liberal magazine's hawkish anti-Islamic stance. So imagine ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/27/a-good-russia-article-in-the-new-republic-and-a-flying-pig/ An interesting (fake?) discussion took place between top oligarch Boris Deripaska and Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday. According to veteran rogue journalist John Helmer, the exchange went as follows: Deripaska told Medvedev that it is impossible to get a fair ruling from the law courts without paying bribes. “The courts have become overgrown with ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/22/corruption-in-russia-nothing-is-what-it-seems/ "The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself...the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices". This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, once a qualified supporter of Putin, summed up the results of the ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/19/russians-to-democracy-good-riddance/ Before giving Moscow State University a statue of the humanist poet Walt Whitman yesterday, Hillary Clinton should have started by disowning the ideas of his nefarious namesake, Walt Whitman Rostow. Squandering all the promise associated with the cuddly Tolstoy look-alike after which his Socialist Russian-immigrant parents had named him, Rostow spent ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/14/more-walt-whitman-less-walt-whitman-rostow/ Coming back from the brink of death after a car bomb that put him in a coma, the Ingush president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov today dismissed his republic's entire government. Was it because he felt the leadership was not doing enough to stem the Islamist insurgency widely accused of destabilising this tiny territory ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/05/revenge-not-jihad-tearing-ingushetia-apart/ "War in South Ossetia: Georgia started it" Thus did today's editorial in Britain's Guardian say what almost the entire US media elite refused to do last summer. It referred to the comprehensive EU investigation that found the war to have been started by Georgia and not Russia, but could just as ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/01/fpa-russia-blog-10-elite-us-media/ The US, boxed in by a trigger happy Israel,  is frustrated about Russia's refusal to support Iran sanctions. But let's put Obama's European missile defence gambit in perspective. “If Russia is to give up Iran, the United States and the West have to offer something much bigger to Moscow than the ... http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/09/27/medvedev-milks-the-iran-standoff/