Archive - 2005

Back in January last year (oh, it seems so long ago) I was a masters student, with time on my hands, and no responsibility other than to study and learn. And, I thought, what better way to keep track of my thoughts and...

If you live in the UK, you might want to check out Russian Godfathers, which will air on BBC2 this Thursday. Basically it looks like it will be a 50 minute roundup of who’s who in Russia, who is on the up, and who...

What do you do if you you’ve mined out your salt mine? Why, turn it into a haven for asthma sufferers, of course! In Soviet times a spell in the salt mines was the fate of dissidents and criminals. But today the...

Clearly, one should not mess with a siberian squirrel: Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report. Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black...

Oh, this is going to just thrill the boys at the Kremlin – Iran is training Chechens in terror techniques: Iran is secretly training Chechen rebels in sophisticated terror techniques to enable them to carry out...

I’ve held back from commenting on yesterday’s Chechen parliamentary elections, mainly because I’m pretty sure they’ll be… how can I put this?… unrepresentative. For anyone who...

The Moscow Times reports that Rodina, the nationalist (but not quite as ‘nationalist’ as Zhirinovsky’s mob) party have been barred from participating in the upcoming Moscow Duma election, amid claims...

The Jamestown Foundation notes that Defense Ministry tanks, under the command of the FSB, fired on Beslan School number one, as the school was being stormed. The revelation was made during the trial of Nurpashi Kulaev...

Laurence Jarvik links to a couple of reports that Russia should buy Alaska to solve America’s finacial difficulties. I read the original Washington Post column by Steven Pealstein that proposed selling Alaska as a...

Over at Blogrel, Katy has sparked a debate about whether Nagorno Karabagh is really a state or not: Why do I ask? Well, if NK doesn’t become part of Armenia and ends up being independent, it will act as a solo state...