Weekly Blog Roundup, Sunday 9 January

After taking a break towards the end of 2010, welcome to the first weekly Russia blogs roundup of 2011.  Naturally, with this being the beginning of a new year, the past week or so has been packed with posts rounding up the year just gone by, and offering predictions for the year to come.

• Best of the bunch was Vadim Nitkin’s Russia Report Card for 2010.  Head over for his subject by subject breakdown of Russia’s academic year (final verdict – “great potential but could do miles better”)
• Anatoly’s decision to cover not just Russia but the whole world meant he couldn’t fit everything from his New Year Special into one post – so here’s his 2010 review, and here’s his 2011 predictions.
• Gordon Hahn sums up the year for the thaw and the tandem.
• Also popular with wordpress.com hosted bloggers were an auto-generated post reviewing their blog’s stats for the past year.  If you’re a nosy stat geek (like me), then click through to see how Eagle and the Bear and In Moscow’s Shadows did last year.  It’s nice to see Siberian Light was one of the biggest referring sites for each – hopefully as a result of these weekly roundup posts.

With it being Russian Christmas on Friday, we also saw quite a few posts about Christmas:

• Natasha of the Devushka Diaries went out for dinner, and narrowly avoided a Christmas romance with a 14 year old Leon Trotsky.
• I wonder if the NORAD Santa tracker also tracks Grandfather Frost? Mind you, if Grandpa’s dressed in yellow and roaring around Rostov-on-Don on a massive motorbike, he’s going to be pretty hard to miss…
• Yelena at Russian Blog explains all the Russian Christmas words you’ll ever need and Sveta explains all about Russian Christmas.

But there’s been other stuff too. For example…

• Resisting the temptation to over-simplify things, The Ivanov Report reflects on the latest Khodorkovsky trial verdict.  The over-simplified takeaway: “Khodorkovsky is a thief and will remain one for the rest of his life, regardless of whether he’s in jail or not.  But Russia doesn’t have to look like a jail to the rest of the world. “
• Anne Applebaum’s latest article caused controversy.  Her suggestion that when oil prices are low Russia plays nice and when oil prices are high Russia plays nasty was met with disdain from the Kremlin Stooge (Selling Krazy By the Kilo) but was praised by the Streetwise Professor (Cocaine Blues, Redux).
• Mama Won’t Stand For It – Sean digs up a nugget from the Komsomol archives.
• Vadim Nitkin notes that not all former KGB agents turned politicians are authoritarian baddies.
• Moving slightly away from Russia for a moment, Natalie presents part 2 of her History of Kiev.
• Devushka Diaries visits the Graveyard of Fallen Heroes, “a really cool, eerie, and moody sculpture park that is right across the street from Gorky Park”.
• Russian Life blog reviews ‘Russian Lessons’, an “emotional rather than analytical” documentary about the war in Georgia.
• Robert Amsterdam interview’s Belarus expert Andrew Wilson and posts some of his own analysis.
• Mark Galeotti, the man lurking In Moscow’s Shadows, has a new book chapter about post-Soviet crime.
• The Copydude is now living in Berlin, and has a new blog venue for his Ostalgia.

And now, I shall depart.  Toodle-pip.