Putin, Power, and a New Kind of Russia /
I have watched the scene out the window of my flat in Moscow thousands of times in the last 11 years, and I still find it compelling. For me, there is no better way to sum up the nature of power in Russia.
Some 400,000 cars pass by every day [...]
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Putin’s Dream: An Energy Superpower /
Out here in Omsk, on the southwestern edge of Siberia, Russia’s petroleum trickledown lights up the dark autumnal nights. Omsk, a black-collar city of 1.3 million, nearly the size of Dallas with all the luster of Albany, is a boomtown. Welders’ sparks illuminate the condo towers rising fast. And out at [...]
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The Seventh Continent /
In the somewhat unlikely setting of the Theatre de Champs Elysees in Paris recently, I caught a piece of Russia. It was in the hands, I saw, as the Russian-born French pianist Mikhail Rudy played Liszt’s “Sonata in B Minor,” part of a dazzling recital. In so many passages, watching his [...]
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FSB: The KGB with A Vengeance /
From the start, President Vladimir Putin spared no resource to strengthen Russia’s intelligence agencies. He inflated security budgets with cash from soaring oil prices, and he used state-owned media to make spying look good again. A belief spread that the KGB ogre had re-emerged as the FSB, the Federal Security Service. [...]
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Nashi: “Ours” as in “Not Yours” /
By Vladimir Putin’s second term, Russia was flush with oil money. Terrorists and liberals – “agents of the West” – had been crushed, the oligarchs brought to heel. Yet Russia’s leaders saw a remaining weak spot: the malleable youth. Enemies had to be stopped from exploiting them.
Ukraine, Georgia, and [...]
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Crime and Non-Punishment /
Russia’s oil wealth is no shield from global economic turmoil, but its subsurface parallel economy thrives with undeclared trade in people, arms, drugs, counterfeit goods, and even nuclear materials. Cyber crime ranges from child pornography and identity theft to attacks on the Web infrastructures of such troublesome neighbors as
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A New Russia : Less Evil, More Empire /
Symbols get no starker than those dueling flags, back in the 1960s, atop embassies on opposite banks of the Congo River. In Brazzaville, a hammer and sickle on the blood-colored Soviet banner rose above walls bristling with barbed wire, topped with guard posts, as forbidding as the Iron Curtain up north. In Kinshasa, [...]
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