Putin’s all-powerful ‘power vertical’ is a ‘myth’?
The gulf between what President Vladimir V. Putin says and what happens in Russia raises a fundamental question about the nature of his rule after more than 18 years at… Read more »
Tag: Masha Gessen
Arseny Roginsky: Giving Russia its history back
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The line comes from one of Milan Kundera’s novels about the totalitarian experience in the twentieth century, “The… Read more »
Can Russia protests lead to genuine movement?
The people who came out to protest corruption in Russia this week “still represent only a tiny fraction of the population; in the absence of independent media and with civil… Read more »
Hybrid Putinism: ‘a mafia state with a totalitarian society’?
The question of what constitutes democracy did not have time to be hashed out in the Russian public sphere before that sphere began disappearing a decade and a half ago,… Read more »
Russia shows symptoms of old disease: totalitarianism
Long before the Russian state declared the Levada Center, Russia’s only reputable independent polling organization, to be a “foreign agent” in September, its director, Lev D. Gudkov (left), knew this… Read more »
Putin nemesis planning post-Putin Russia
Most post-Communist countries have made a transition to some form of democratic rule, notes Masha Gessen. Not coincidentally, most of them had a memory of such institutions to build on,… Read more »
Putin’s ‘prelude to a purge’?
The arrest on June 24th of Nikita Belykh (above), the liberal-minded governor of the Kirovsk region, was headline news on Russian state television. It even preceded the report on… Read more »
Re-drawing the Iron Curtain?
With ever-increasing enthusiasm, Russia claims to be the heir to the Soviet Union, and attacks on bronze, granite and plaster Lenins in Ukraine have generally been interpreted here [in… Read more »