AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
Siberian Light opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Click here to donate to the Red Cross Ukraine appeal.
As I’m getting back into the swing of monitoring the Russia blogs for these weekly reviews it occurs to me that it’s actually been quite a while since I’ve updated my Google Reader subscription lists. So, before you read through the great links below, I’d like to ask a quick favour – please tell me about any top Russia blogs out there that I really should be reading!
And now, back to this week’s links.
- Social Networking in Russia – some great articles and graphics at Scraps of Moscow.
- Kvas. You can never get enough Kvas. Now learn how to talk about Kvas, courtesy of Yelena.
- Talking about food and drink – check out this Russian Tea Cookies recipe from Windows to Russia. I’m hungry!
- An intriguing article from Paul Goble about how farmers from China are renting huge swathes of Siberian farmland.
- More on the Siberia – China population imbalance and its security implications here.
- Another fascinating fact from Paul Goble – Protestants now outnumber Russian Orthodox in Russia’s Borderlands.
- Global Voices report on the increasing prominence of bloggers from Russia’s regions – the dominance of the Moscow / St Petersburg bloggers is waning slightly, it seems
- Slightly out of area, but What does it take to be a female leader in Central Asia?, asks Erica Marat at the Jamestown Foundation blog.
- Stalin’s Summer Snowstorms, from Vilhelm Konnander.
- Joel from Far Outliers makes a welcome return to Russia with his post on American Travelers in the USSR, 1927.
- A geotagged map of Moscow photography, via Russia! magazine’s blog.
- Steve Levine’s Oil and Glory blog will be moving next week to become a part of the Foreign Policy magazine stable of blogs.
And, finally, if that’s not enough of a roundup for you, check out Poemless’ June spring cleaning edition of Odds and Ends.
And, finally, finally, just before you go, check out these amazing pictures of a toy soldier parade in Red Square.
Blogs that are not on your rss but should be:
A Good Treaty
Mark Adomanis
Izo
Here’re some others:
Austere Insomniac – http://www.austereinsomniac.info/
birdbrain – http://www.birdbrainblog.com/
Eastern European Forum – http://eastern-european-forum.blogspot.com/
Strategic Culture Foundation (webzine with blog feature) – http://en.fondsk.ru/
A blog that I would ask you, please, to remove from all your blogrolls and feed readers is: sovietrussia.co.uk
I had no my time to keep updating both the Spanish and the English version of the blog, so I had to discontinue the .co.uk one.
Regretfully, the domain was taken by a shameless plagiarist who copied all former posts with no images or atributtion, just for the sake of SEO, pagerank and so on (e.g: sovietrussia.co.uk/bringing-down-planes-with-balloons ).
I guess that really few of Siberian Light readers speak Spanish… however here you have the links where you can follow me from now on: http://sovietrussia.es & http://twitter.com/Soviet_Russia
Best regards from Omsk 😉
I really can’t for the life of me ever comprehend why Paul Goble is taken seriously. Paul Goble says: Protestants are taking over Russia’s borderlands (according to random Russian sociologist). Russians say: we are 75% Orthodox, <1 Protestant – source.
Don’t forget Julia Ioffe.
I might disagree with most of what she writes, she is certainly one of the four most prominent “new” Russia bloggers (the other three being A Good Treaty, Adomanis, & Austere Insomniac – as noted by poemless & Mike). I also highly recommend adding Dissonance by Alexandre Latsa – it is one of the leading French blogs on Russia.
Eric Kraus has moved to another site. Moscow Tory has resurfaced as The Russian Week – might want to keep an eye out if it gets more posts.
His giving uncritical reference to a claim that Medvedev and Yanukovych privately agreed to Pridnestrovie (Transnistria) going to Ukraine has little if any foundation.
http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2010/05/window-on-eurasia-do-medvedev-and.html
Having been denied by the Russian and Ukrainian governments, that hypothetical occurrence would counter Ukrainian attempts at getting along better with the West. The idea that such an agreement would somehow pressure Moldova to move closer to Russia is (put mildly) questionable. The overall mood in Moldova would see an increase against Russia for going along with such a plan.
Some in the Ukrainian political opposition have played up the supposed agreement in an obvious effort to make the current Ukrainian president appear less desirable to the West.
In an off the record way, perhaps the Russians and Ukrainians discussed the ramifications of a hypothetical scenario, that’s done on some other issues the world over. Such discussions can get on the reckless side, which explains why they aren’t formally released and actually implemented.
A conspiracy thought of sorts comes to mind. Perhaps Russia and/or Ukraine wanted this claim released in a way that can be denied. At some point, one or both of them can then come back with a plan that’s less provocative, but one which Moldova hasn’t accepted. In this situation, some might be more inclined to put the onus on Moldova needing to be more flexible given what was supposedly discussed (Pridnestrovie going to Ukraine).
Haggling Over the Former Moldavian SSR Dispute
http://www.eurasiareview.com/haggling-over-the-former-moldavian-ssr-dispute.html
http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/3557.cfm
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/158716
Thanks everyone, those are some great blogs.
Please keep the ideas coming, and next week I’ll publish a post listing them all in one place.
Thanks Xavi – I’ve removed the link to the site (from the sidebar and now from your comment).
Your comment’s actually given me an interesting idea. I have a re-seller hosting account for other sites that I own. I wonder if people, like you, who are thinking of closing down a Russia blog might be interested in archiving their contents and maintaining the domain name, for free, on my servers.
If anyone’s interested, let me know.
Would it be a little bold to suggest my own blog? 🙂
It’s http://russianizethis.com
It’s a blog about culture, entertainment and Russians in general. The blog is quite new, so new readers would be much appreciated. I’m also going through other blogs on Russia to add to my rss. It’s interesting to see different people’s perspective on us Russians.
Cheers
Disagree. Ioffe is more a journalist than a blogger. She’s a journalist with a TrueSlant account.
Like calling Taibbi a blogger…
SUBLIME PSCYOPATH probably also finds it hard to understand why such publications as The Moscow Times and The New York Times, to say nothing of Siberian Light and La Russophobe, routinely laud, quote and publish Mr. Goble while utterly ignoring SUBLIME PSYCHOPATH>
It may well be because Goble is a prominent scholar doing yeoman work translating from the Russian press while almost never editorializing at all, while SUBLIME PSYCOPATH is exactly the opposite.
It can be a fine line. “Bloggers” can take the form of “journalists” and vice versa. This point relates to academics and others taking an academic approach.
“Editorializing” can take the form of highlighting some points while ignoring others.
I invite La Russophobe to wipe the froth of her mouth, get back on topic (the discussion isn’t about myself), and…
1) explain how Protestants can outnumber Russian Orthodox in “Siberia and the Russian Far East and in Karelia and Kaliningrad” – regions that contain around 30mn people, or more than 20% of Russia’s populations – when according to the poll I cited, Protestants constitute less than 1% of the Russian population while Orthodox account for 75%…
and 2) more generally, explain how cherry-picking anything and everything in the Russian media that says how bad it is and how it is going to collapse any day – and then nit-picking the most sensational parts of those articles – is a useful or even honest service.
He writes in a suggestively negative way about the ROC-MP/ROCOR:
http://www.austereinsomniac.info/blog/2010/5/21/paul-gobles-prometheism-reaches-into-ecclesiastical-spheres.html
Rhetorically put, that particular denomination is stacked with former spooks of the Communists, whereas little if any mention is made of former spooks for the the Nazis and Communists in some other denominations.
In fact Paul Goble is not even able to discern a Russian surname from a Church Slavonic monastic name. As Anatoly said, someone who cannot read a Russian text properly nor make a few searches in the wikipedia, should not be taken seriously.
I’m sorry to inform you that Paul Goble is unable to translate from Russian properly. The fact that Moscow Times and New York Times quote him only highlights the ignorance of these mainstream outlets.
There’s a good deal of Russian language material in contradiction to what’s often being selected for referencing in some circles.
A matter of being careful, inclusive of knowing the limits of knowledge on a particular subject. Intuition, with the ability to efficiently follow-up with research serve to provide a more complete overview.
On the other hand, the game plan might be intentionally one-sided.
In contrast, is the attempt to present different perspectives while making the case for one view being the more ideal.
The funny thing about Goble’s blog is that it (probably unintentionally) refutes the idea (common among pundits of his ilk) that freedom of speech is persecuted in today’s Russia, since the doom-mongering articles he highlights are published openly in the Russian press.
Andy,
Thanks for the link to “Social Networking in Russia”, I am interested in development of internet in Russia, social networks.
There are interesting articles about social networks in http://www.sarafannoeradio.org (only in Russian).