Mock Turtle

Democracy, Russia-style, from the Moscow Times:

One of the most commonly used methods for eliminating undesirable candidates is to disqualify on “legal” grounds the authenticity of signatures that are required to register a candidate. “Handwriting experts” from the Interior Ministry find mistakes on lists submitted by opposition candidates, and this provides the pretext to disqualify candidates from the vote. One candidate was rejected because on one of the forms he filed, he failed to write that he was a Russian citizen — even though one of the papers he submitted was a copy of his Russian passport.

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Update: More here

As Putin rears his head

and comes into the airspace of the United States of America,

where do they go?

It’s Alaska.

It’s just right over the border.

It is from Alaska

that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation,

Russia,

because they are right there,

they are right next to our state.

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The BBC has an excellent and balanced analysis of the Russia-Georgia conflict to date, raising many of the issues inherent in the situation. Here’s one worth some reflection, especially if you want to put odds on the next trouble spot:

8. Are borders in Europe to be sacrosanct for ever?

It has been one of the rules of post-war Europe – borders cannot be changed except by agreement, as say in Czechoslovakia. Perhaps this rule has been applied too inflexibly. Yet governments like that of Georgia are reluctant to give up any territory, even when the local population is so clearly hostile and might be in that state simply as a result of some past arbitrary decision. It was the Soviet Union that created a semi-autonomous region of South Ossetia in Georgia in 1922. Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Will this lead to trouble one day?

As the article mentions, August is a good time to think about alliances, it being the same month that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. I’m no apologist for the violence and appalling lack of concern for human life that Russia reliably demonstrates wherever it goes, most recently in Georgia/South Ossetia — but does anyone really want to be at the beck and call of a hotheaded, reckless leader who spends more than 5% of his country’s GDP on arms and training from Israel and the U.S. and is prone to regularly waving red flags in front of bulls?

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An awfully specific simile from the Economist:

Spending time in Russia is a bit like taking the psychotropic anti-malarial drug Larium: anyone with a propensity to anxiety should probably avoid it.

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I noticed this magazine at Pages the other day and picked it up, assuming it was a special Russia issue of some trendy design magazine. But no — it’s actually the third issue of a stylish magazine about Russia, covering style, art, business, and a lot more.

Highlights of this issue include:

- an annotated floorplan of a 1,200 square foot communal apartment in St. Petersburg, home to 7 families;

- a translation of a recipe for “little cabbage pies” from a popular Tsarist Russian cookbook;

- a feature on “Khrushovkas” — “crappy postwar apartment buildings”, translates the article — that have been turned into art pieces by muralists;

- a humourous travel piece on Arkhangelsk;

- a very subjective listing of the best English translations for various Russian novels,

… and much more.

This issue, like the first two apparently, is brought to us by the letter “T” — a conceit the editor admits he’d like to kill off — and each page has a random Russian word beginning with T in the corner, all translated by a handy glossary at the back.

It’s a handsome magazine, with great art direction, and at $4.99, great value as a read. I will probably subscribe, or at least become a regular buyer, but I’m wondering… beyond Russian Studies majors, like me, who exactly is the audience for this clever publication?

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