(Russia Beyond the Headlines – www.rbth.ru – Alexei Bausin, RBTH – March 7, 2013) Russia’s notorious pro-government youth movement Nashi is set for a complete overhaul. It is reported to be replaced by a new youth organization with a new name and different objectives Russia’s Nashi (Ours in Russian) youth movement, which made a name for itself by organizing outrageous […]
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(RIA Novosti – March 6, 2013) Roughly two in five Russians would like to have a female president, a Levada Centre poll has shown, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on 6 March. The poll, available at http://www.levada.ru/06-03-2013/rossiyane-o-roli-zhenshchin-v-politike, surveyed people’s views on the role of women in Russian politics by gauging responses to three questions. The number of respondents who […]
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(RIA Novosti – February 26, 2013) Aleksandr Lebedev, the co-owner of Aeroflot has nominated three people for the company’ board of directors, including his own son Yegor. According to open sources, Yegor was born in November 2011. Petr Fradkov (born in 1978), the eldest son of Mikhail Fradkov the director of the Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), heads the […]
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(www.opendemocracy.net – Alexei Levinson – March 5, 2013) Alexei Levinson is sociologist and senior researcher at the Levada Center, Russia’s leading polling organisation, Moscow On the 60th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, with Russian and international TV news bulletins showing old footage of his life and his funeral, Alexei Levinson looks at how his legacy still divides Russians today. Why […]
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(Interfax – Vologda, 7 March, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised that the nomination of the new head of the central bank will be a surprise for everyone. “It will be unexpected and you will like it,” Putin said when answering questions from journalists in Vologda. When answering a question about the reasons for the fall in output in […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Jake Rudnitsky – March 7, 2013) Russia is on course to send an unprecedented 25 percent of its crude exports to eastern markets by 2015 as rising demand from China and other Asian consumers attracts sales at the expense of Europe. The country sent 1.1 million barrels a day east in February, or 22 percent of […]
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MOSCOW, March 8 (RIA Novosti) US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul denied late Thursday that hundreds of Russian legislators may be blacklisted for US entry for supporting a ban on adoptions of Russian children by Americans. “This is not our policy at the moment,” McFaul said in a Russian-language interview on Ekho Moskvy radio. A US petition drive proposed […]
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TALLINN. March 7 (Interfax) – Members of EU liberal and democratic parties and movements said they were concerned that Moscow was straying from its international obligations in the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and offered to revive the Helsinki Process. “Russia’s abrupt deviation from the democratic standards enshrined in the 1993 constitution, […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Michael Bohm – March 7, 2013) Michael Bohm is opinion page editor of The Moscow Times. Shortly after Maxim Kuzmin was born to an alcoholic mother in the Pskov region three years ago, Russian child welfare officials placed him, and later his younger brother, in an orphanage after concluding that the mother was unfit to […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Howard Amos – March 4, 2013) The personal fortunes of businessmen rumored to enjoy close relationships with President Vladimir Putin jumped sharply in a new Forbes ranking Monday as Facebook investor Alisher Usmanov retained the title of Russia’s richest man. The wealth of Gennady Timchenko, owner of oil trader Gunvor and a large stakeholder in […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Joseph de Weck – February 7, 2013) Russia may pivot to Asia should the proposed U.S.-European Union free-trade agreement hurt its businesses, said Kirill Dmitriev, the Chief Executive Officer of the $10 billion Russian Direct Investment Fund. “Any attempt to use the liberal language of free trade to create something that excludes other countries and puts […]
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MOSCOW. March 7 (Interfax) – Russia is interested in building pragmatic and predictable relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) if NATO is ready to take into account Russia’s interests in security and to comply with international law, Russian Permanent Representative to NATO, Alexander Grushko, said. “These relations can develop in the right direction only if NATO complies with […]
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MOSCOW, March 7 (RIA Novosti) A lawyer for the star Russian ballet dancer who admitted this week to having masterminded an attack on the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater said in court on Thursday that his client had not ordered acid to be used in the assault. A masked assailant threw concentrated acid into the face of Sergei […]
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Moscow, March 5, Interfax – Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar supports the punishment of the members of the Pussy Riot punk band for their performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. “If we talk about the sentence itself, I think it isn’t that bad, because they did hurt believers’ feelings. It’s obvious they were to be punished. […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Alexander Bratersky – March 7, 2013) Yelena Andreyeva wears two hats. Most of the time, she is the head of Bastion, one of the country’s leading private security agencies, which she founded in 1992. But a few days a week, Andreyeva, a textile engineer by training, teaches students at the Moscow University of Design and […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – March 4, 2013) Anna Arutunyan is the politics editor of The Moscow News In Russia, there were a thousand shades of gray before Vladislav Surkov, the so-called “gray cardinal” behind Vladimir Putin’s first 12 years in power, was replaced in late 2011. Now, one year into Putin’s third term as president, there […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 3, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-polls-in-russia_3.html) Polls in Russia often influence public opinion more than they reflect it, according to a Moscow sociologist, because they are conducted after a decision is taken rather than before, because they use terms that dispose people to answer one way rather than another, and because as is […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – www.rbth.ru – Natalia Yamnitskaya, special to RBTH – March 7, 2013) A “babushka” used to spend her time babysitting grandchildren and gardening, but today’s retirees are taking advantage of a wide range of opportunities. Olga Kuznetsova, who graces the floor of a dance studio in an elegant dress and heels, can hardly be described as […]
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(Eurasia Daily Monitor: Volume 10, Issue 42 – Jamestown Foundation – jamestown.org – Sergei Blagov – March 6, 2013) On February 25, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich traveled to China to attend a first meeting of the bilateral intergovernmental commission on energy cooperation. The commission was formed in December 2012 to replace the bilateral Russia-China energy dialogue. Dvorkovich held […]
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NOVOSIBIRSK, March 6 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he plans to control implementation of a plan to rearm the armed forces that he said was a “historic chance” for Russia. “We have held a series of meetings on providing the army and navy with new armament systems,” Putin said at a meeting on the prospects of […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Alex Grant – March 6, 2013) KOSTROMA Russia’s last royal dynasty was honored Saturday in the ancient city of Kostroma in northern Russia. The first Romanov tsar was elected in this city in 1613, the year that put an end to the Time of Troubles in medieval Russia. The enthronement of tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Natalya Krainova – March 6, 2013) Russia saw virtually no increase in life expectancy from 1990 to 2010 and lagged behind more than 100 countries in the key health statistic over that period, according to a global study released Tuesday. The study, called the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2010, says that while global life […]
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From: Andrei P Tsygankov <andrei@sfsu.edu> Subject: Latest work on foreign policy Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity, 3d edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220010 La Russie et le Moyen-Orient: entre islamisme et occidentalisme. Politique étrangère 78, 1, Spring 2013 The original in English is available here: http://online.sfsu.edu/andrei/Research/Articles.htm — Andrei P. Tsygankov Professor […]
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Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 From: “Russian Analytical Digest (RAD)” <newslist@isn.ch> Subject: No.123: The Russian Media Landscape RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST Newsletter 21 February 2013/No. 123 The Russian Media Landscape To download this issue please click here: http://www.css.ethz.ch/publications/DetailansichtPubDB_EN?rec_id=2432 Analyses Putin and Russia’s Crippled Media, by Robert W. Orttung and Christopher Walker, Washington, D.C. Open Government Partnership in a Regime that Is […]
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MOSCOW, March 2 (RIA Novosti) Russian officials reacted with a mixture of anger and suspicion on Saturday after officials in the United States said the death of a 3-year-old Russian child in Texas was an accident. Max Shatto, also known as Maxim Kuzmin, died on January 21 in Ector County, Texas, sparking anger in Russia, where his death was […]
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MOSCOW. Feb 28 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said he disagrees that there were human rights problems in Russia in 2012, adding that election campaigns are accompanied by accusations of human rights violations all over the world. “I don’t believe we had any special problems with human rights in 2012. We had an election campaign in 2012,” Putin told […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Nikolaus von Twickel and Irina Filatova – March 1, 2013) President Vladimir Putin on Thursday hosted his French counterpart Francois Hollande for four-hour-long talks in the Kremlin, which diplomats said were direct and productive. Hollande’s first visit since the socialist was elected president in May was preceded by expectations that the French leader would challenge […]
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Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 From: Robert Bridge <robertvbridge@yahoo.com> Subject: New book “Midnight in the American Empire” I have just published a book entitled, “Midnight in the American Empire,” which deals with the United States in the post-Soviet era. Much of the book deals with US corporate power, but there is a section devoted to Russia, which I think would […]
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(RIA Novosti – Fyodor Lukyanov – February 28, 2013) Fyodor Lukyanov is Editor-in-Chief of the Russia in Global Affairs journal, an authoritative source of expertise on Russian foreign policy and global developments – http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/ Russia’s much-anticipated Foreign Policy Concept has finally been released. And while the latest version does not contain anything revolutionary, it does provide insight into how Russia’s […]
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(RFE/RL -– rferl.org – Robert Coalson – March 1, 2013) Eighty-one-year-old Nikolai Khasig was born in Sukhumi in 1932. It was just one year after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin stripped Abkhazia of its short-lived status as a full-fledged republic of the USSR and made it a region of Soviet Georgia. At the end of 1936, Lavrenty Beria — at that […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, February 28, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/02/window-on-eurasia-from-upper-volta-with.html) Twenty-five years ago, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt characterized the Soviet Union as being an “Upper Volta with missiles.” Now, Russian analysts, in response to findings of a Swiss firm, have suggested that a better analogy might be between the Russian Federation and a “Nigeria with snow.” The […]
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(Eurasia Daily Monitor: Volume 10, Issue 39 – Jamestown Foundation – jamestown.org – Sergei Blagov – March 1, 2013) The Russian government pledged to manage $3.3 trillion worth of its state-controlled assets more efficiently, including through the continued privatization of state-owned companies. However, the authorities have to prove that the latest privatization efforts could fare better than earlier attempts to […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 1, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-five-new-statistics.html) Five new statistics about Russia this past week one about Muslims in the army, a second about the state of its roads, a third about the number of illegal migrants in the country, a fourth about Russian attitudes toward religious instruction in the schools, and a […]
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(Governent.ru – February 26, 2013) Correspondent (via interpreter): Mr Prime Minister, thank you very much for finding time for Globo in your schedule. In your recent article in the influential Financial Times, you wrote that Russia should look to the East, to the Asia-Pacific Region. How, looking East, did you wind up in Brazil? Did you follow Columbus who set […]
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MOSCOW. Feb 28 (Interfax) – Some 47% of Russians believe that President Vladimir Putin can keep the election promises, the Levada Center told Interfax after having polled respondents in 130 towns and cities in 45 regions this February. A third (34%) doubted that and 17% were hesitant, the sociologists said. In the opinion of 65%, President Putin has done more […]
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MOSCOW. Feb 27 (Interfax) – Russians are losing interest in science, Russian Public Opinion Study Center (VTsIOM) told Interfax. It polled 1,600 respondents in 138 towns and cities in 46 regions on February 2-3. Only 47% show interest in the latest scientific achievements and technologies. The indicator stood at 68% in 2007, the center said. The number of people who […]
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