Tag: Russia

Andrew Roth: Rights group’s closure is part of rapid dismantling of Russian civil society

In a terrible year for human rights in Russia, beginning with the imprisonment of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the closure of International Memorial stands out for its ruthlessness. Founded in the late 1980s by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet-era dissidents, the group took the new freedoms offered under Mikhail Gorbachev and used them to reveal raw… Read More Andrew Roth: Rights group’s closure is part of rapid dismantling of Russian civil society

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रूस ने गुलाग इतिहासकार की सजा और बढ़ाई / Gulag historian, activist Yuri Dmitriyev sentenced to 15 years

रूस के गुलाग शिविरों पर शोध करने वाले इतिहासकार यूरी दमित्रियेव की जेल की सजा को 13 साल से बढ़ा कर 15 साल कर दिया गया है. उनके समर्थकों का कहना है कि उन्हें उनके काम की वजह से सजा दी जा रही है. 65 साल के यूरी दमित्रियेवके समर्थकों का कहना है कि उन्हें इसलिए निशाना बनाया… Read More रूस ने गुलाग इतिहासकार की सजा और बढ़ाई / Gulag historian, activist Yuri Dmitriyev sentenced to 15 years

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Memorial and the liberating power of history. By Timothy Snyder

NB: Attempts to rewrite history with the use of political power are taking place in India as well. Ironically, the infamous habit has been connected to communist regimes, but is quite clearly popular with anti-communist ones as well. As George Orwell remarked in his dystopian novel 1984: “He who controls the past controls the future;… Read More Memorial and the liberating power of history. By Timothy Snyder

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Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that endeavor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) turned his back on the lionization that awaited him in New York and other cultural capitals of the West and instead settled with his family in… Read More Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

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Sergei Savelyev: ‘I was always scared’: inmate who exposed systemic Russian prisoner abuse

The videos from the Russian prison hospital are almost too horrific to describe. In the worst, the victims are tied down while other inmates rape or penetrate them with metal objects, the screams and abuse recorded in bodycam footage that was later used as blackmail. Sergey Savelyev says he spent two of his years as an… Read More Sergei Savelyev: ‘I was always scared’: inmate who exposed systemic Russian prisoner abuse

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Jonathan Steele: I came to Russia a political correspondent and left a crime reporter // Rafael Behr: 30 years after the Moscow coup, democracy is in a crisis of self-esteem

When Jonathan Steele moved to Moscow for the Guardian in 1988, the story of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms was getting “hotter and hotter”. But with all the restrictions on foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, the question was how to report it. The sources were mainly local journalists authorised to speak to foreigners or dissidents. The… Read More Jonathan Steele: I came to Russia a political correspondent and left a crime reporter // Rafael Behr: 30 years after the Moscow coup, democracy is in a crisis of self-esteem

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Fedor Stepun, 1884-1965

NB: Fedor Stepun was a Russian writer, editor, professor, political commentator. In 1922, he. along with over 200 non-communist intellectuals perceived as hostile to the Bolshevik regime. was arrested and ordered to leave the USSR within a week. They included the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, and scores of other academicians, writers, artists, editors of journals etc. DS… Read More Fedor Stepun, 1884-1965

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Book review – 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

Vladimir Nabokov – one of Stepanova’s many literary companions in In Memory of Memory – once wrote: “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”     Years ago, Maria Stepanova visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to do… Read More Book review – 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

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Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev – Putinism and the oil-boom years

The war in eastern Ukraine, rumbling into life once more after the collapse of an unsteady ceasefire, has created a widening breach between Russia and the west, with relations now worse than they have been in decades. In Russia, the hardening of the domestic consensus behind Putin has been helped along by the media’s increasingly strident nationalism, and by a… Read More Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev – Putinism and the oil-boom years

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