‘Godfather of the Kremlin’ Boris Berezovsky found dead

By The Associated Press - Saturday, March 23, 2013 at 7:51 PM - 0 Comments

LONDON – British police said Sunday that experts in hazardous materials are searching a property after the death of Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled Russian tycoon who went from Kremlin kingmaker to fiery critic after a bitter falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Police said a 67-year-old “believed to be” Berezovsky was found dead at the property in Ascot, a town 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of London on Saturday. Thames Valley police say his death is being treated as “unexplained.”

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Death of adopted Russian child ignites firestorm of nationalism

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 3:16 PM - 0 Comments

The emergency room death of an adopted Russian child in the U.S. has ignited a firestorm of nationalism, political posturing, and anti-American anger in Russia.

Three-year-old Max Shatto, who was adopted last year by a Texas family, died in January under circumstances U.S. officials are investigating, though no arrests have been made.

Russian officials are not withholding judgment. The country’s senior investigating authority says the “murderers of the Russian child” will be punished; a special representative for human rights at Russia’s foreign ministry calls it “another case of inhuman abuse of a Russian child by U.S. adoptive parents.”

Last year, Russia passed a law banning U.S. adoptions—ostensibly because of previous deaths of Russian children in the U.S. But the move followed the passage of U.S. legislation to prevent Russians suspected of human rights abuses from entering America. There are almost one million orphans in Russia, many of them with health and psychological problems that make them less likely to be adopted by Russian parents. Americans have adopted 60,000 Russian children in the past two decades—their best shot at a life, said one orphanage director.

Math, sewing and AK-47s

By Janet Morassutti - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Sergey Kozmin

The little girls in the photograph are wearing matching military-style overcoats and Cossack hats. Their faces are half hidden, but the smaller one is clearly giggling under her gas mask. They are students at the Moscow Girls Cadet Boarding School No. 9, an elite military academy opened in 2004, the first in Russia for girls. It is a free, state school with 300 pupils, age 11 to 16, most of whom are from military or police families.

Along with the usual math, science and history, students spend six days a week learning military strategy, marching, self-defence and marksmanship. And they can strip down an AK-47 “in the time it takes most kids to send an SMS,” says photographer Sergey Kozmin.

It’s a strange cross between a military academy and a charm school: the girls are also required to spend their evenings taking courses in cooking, sewing, singing and dancing. Not every student pursues a life in the military. By graduation a girl has not merely been trained to serve her country as a soldier, but, says headmistress Viktoriya Silenskaya, as “a loving mother . . . and skilled hostess.

The girls practice shooting with special electronic guns (there are no bullets in the classroom).

Sometimes training gas alerts are announced to train the students to respond confidently in an emergency.

 At 7 a.m. the girls make their beds and prepare for classes. They start the day with physical exercise and end it in the evening ironing their uniforms.

A traditional Russian winter ball at Christmas provides a rare opportunity to meet boys from a nearby school and try out dance moves learned in class.

The Russian winter ball takes place every year after Christmas.

At the end of each school year each class must organize a performance to show what their pupils have learned.

 If the performance is not impressive the teacher can lose her job at school.

Thirteen-year-old Vasilisa, a student of the Cadet Boarding School.

Thugs, acid attacks and the Bolshoi

By John Fraser - Friday, February 8, 2013 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Wahl

The two worlds that Svetlana Lunkina lives and works in do not jibe very well these days. A prima ballerina at the peak of her career at the legendary Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, her life there has become increasingly scarred with wild and unproven criminal accusations about her husband and a savage attack on her artistic director.

Her domestic life in Canada, on the other hand, is almost picture perfect, with a dream house in bucolic Kleinberg, Ont., just outside Toronto, two young children whom she describes as embodying “the essence of my life,” and a quiet career of part-time teaching. The only connecting point between the two lives, it seems, is the miserably cold weather in both places, although Lunkina maintains, “the cold in Kleinberg is better than the cold in Moscow.”

Beyond the surface, the story is infinitely more complicated than a lot of stories that have recently appeared, some of which claim she is “defecting” to Canada because of the troubles back home. In fact, Lunkina is still a star of the Bolshoi, on leave, and is still listed on the company’s roster of top dancers. And unlike the famous Russian defectors of the old Communist Soviet Union, she has not had to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. She can go back and forth at will and has maintained a home in Canada for nearly a decade. Continue…

The real melodrama at the Bolshoi Ballet is offstage

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 1:42 PM - 0 Comments

Yuri Marytyanov/Kommersant/Keystone Press

The world was shocked earlier this month when a masked assailant threw acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, requiring him to have operations to save his eyesight. But it was just one of many scandals at Russia’s most beloved arts institution. In the past two years, Filin has had his tires slashed by what he claimed were his artistic enemies at the company; a deputy director was forced to resign after photos of him in bed with a man were circulated online, reportedly by a rival; there were allegations of trading sex for promotions; one ballerina who sued the company told the Daily Beast, “Men with knives threatened to kill my ballet partners.” Another Bolshoi dancer fled to Canada this week after being threatened over her husband’s business.

For North Americans, the whole thing seems mystifying. Here, the world of classical ballet and dance is a low-stakes world. But Russians “take a special pride in the world of ballet and opera,” says Valery Gergiev, the celebrated conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. “There are many national heroes and national treasures.” That’s the good side of a world where culture is taken seriously enough to have actual scandals.

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Mennonites in Mexico looking for new home, again

By David Agren - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 9:06 AM - 0 Comments

Gael Gonzalez/Reuters

Peter Friesen talks as if he’s seen the promised land. A Mennonite farmer and father of 13 in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state, his blue eyes brighten as he paints a picture of a place with pleasant people, raging rivers and vast tracts of virgin land ideal for agriculture. “We saw really good land with lots of water,” Friesen recalled, while seated in the booth of a Mennonite pizzeria that sells pies smothered with the prized local product, a tangy cheese known as queso menonita.

Friesen isn’t talking about paradise. He’s talking about Russia, where his Mennonite ancestors once worked the land before departing for the Canadian Prairies and then the high plains of northern Mexico. Friesen and 10 Mennonites recently travelled to Russia to explore a possible relocation from Chihuahua to the prairie of Tatarstan—900 km east of Moscow and similar to Manitoba with its cold winters, hot summers and flat prairie. The possible relocation is not a nostalgic return to his roots, but rather a resolution for the most pressing problems Mexican Mennonites face: shortages of land and water. “We could cultivate 10 times more than we have here,” says Enrique Voth Penner, who also went to Russia. Continue…

Hitting Russia’s ‘crooks and abusers’ where it hurts — in Canada

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 2:36 PM - 0 Comments

Russian President Vladimir Putin. (RIA-Novosti, Mikhail Klimentyev/AP)

“It is only our task to bring democratic change to Russia,” says Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. “It’s for the democratic opposition. We don’t want or need outside actors to come in and do anything.”

But, says Kara-Murza, there is much that Western democracies such as Canada can do to help Russian democracy by passing legislation in their own countries.

Russia’s political elite routinely plunders the country of billions of dollars. They operate like organized criminals: protecting their own and murderously silencing those who expose them. They rule in the style of Zimbabwe or Belarus, says Kara-Murza, but prefer the West as a safe place to store their money, buy second homes, and send their children to school. And it is in the West where they are most vulnerable.

Kara-Murza was in Ottawa this week to urge Canada to pass a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal member of Parliament Irwin Cotler. The proposed legislation would render inadmissible to Canada Russians who played a role in a particularly egregious example of Russian state pillage and brutality. Continue…

A global tour of carbon pricing

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 at 1:24 PM - 0 Comments

As noted yesterday, Stephen Harper is presently in India, a country that has a carbon tax. After India, he will visit the Philippines, where pig farmers are currently selling carbon credits.

In June, Mr. Harper visit France, which previously abandoned plans for a carbon tax, but is part of the European Union’s emissions trading system.

In March, Mr. Harper visited Thailand, South Korea and Japan. Thailand is reportedly moving towards a cap-and-trade system. Japan has now introduced a carbon tax, while Tokyo has had a cap-and-trade system for the past year. South Korea passed cap-and-trade legislation in May.

In February, Mr. Harper visited China, which is now experimenting with a carbon market.

In January, Mr. Harper delivered a speech in Switzerland, which has both a carbon tax and a trading system.

(In September, Mr. Harper visited Russia, which is maybe (?) thinking about cap-and-trade.)

Georgia’s post-Soviet politics

By Paul Wells - Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Nothing is routine in a place where routine has never been given a chance to settle in. On Oct. 2, the ruling party in Georgia counted the votes in a parliamentary election, realized it had lost, conceded defeat and prepared to hand over power without fuss.

Nothing like that had ever happened before in Georgia.

For generations in the homeland of Joseph Stalin, putsch and betrayal were the standard techniques for political succession. The most recent transition was more peaceful but not more voluntary: an anti-authoritarian Rose Revolution put an end to years of dreary post-Soviet oppression in 2003 when much of the population rose up to protest fixed elections. But the revolution’s principal beneficiary, Mikheil Saakashvili, had not lost an election since. Frequent allegations of election impropriety left the impression he was not interested in putting his power to an honest test.

So it was to Saakashvili’s credit that he conceded immediately after preliminary results showed his governing United National Movement had lost to the upstart Georgian Dream coalition, led by a shadowy expat billionaire named Bidzina Ivanishvili. Saakashvili stays on as president, but most government powers will be exercised by Georgian Dream parliamentarians led by a prime minister who’ll probably be Ivanishvili.

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Georgia just had its first peaceful power transition—ever

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

Supporters of opposition coalition 'Georgian Dream' celebrate in Tbilisi on Oct. 1, 2012. (Shakh Aivazov/Ap Photo)

Nothing is routine in a place where routine has never been given a chance to settle in. On Oct. 2, the ruling party in Georgia counted the votes in a parliamentary election, realized it had lost, conceded defeat and prepared to hand over power without fuss.

Nothing like that had ever happened before in Georgia.

For generations in the homeland of Joseph Stalin, putsch and betrayal were the standard techniques for political succession. The most recent transition was more peaceful but not more voluntary: an anti-authoritarian Rose Revolution put an end to years of dreary post-Soviet oppression in 2003 when much of the population rose up to protest fixed elections. But the revolution’s principle beneficiary, Mikheil Saakashvili, had not lost an election since. Frequent allegations of election impropriety left the distinct impression he was not interested in putting his power to an honest test.

So it was to Saakashvili’s credit that he conceded immediately after preliminary results showed his governing United National Movement had lost to the upstart Georgian Dream coalition, led by a shadowy expat billionaire named Bidzina Ivanishvili. Saakashvili stays on as President, but most government powers will be exercised by a government of Georgian Dream parliamentarians led by a prime minister who’ll probably be Ivanishvili.

Continue…

REVIEW: Former people: the final days of the Russian aristocracy

By Patricia Treble - Saturday, September 29, 2012 at 2:51 PM - 0 Comments

At the beginning of the Russian Revolution, there were nearly two million nobles in the nation. Some were the sybaritic aristocracy in Czar Nicholas’s court; most were in the educated elite— intellectuals, doctors, bureaucrats and historians. By the Second World War, only a few thousand were left in Russia, eking out an existence at the fringes of society. Officially classified as “former people,” their stories were forgotten. Now, for the first time, Douglas Smith—through a gripping saga focused on two prominent families, the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns—tells how an entire class was destroyed. Smith tracked down and interviewed survivors, pored through the scattered families’ long-hidden letters and memoirs and combed state archives. In the process, he turned what could have been a depressing litany of horrors into an engrossing book.

As chaos engulfed Russia, palaces and estates were looted and burned, possessions seized and often destroyed. Noble families were torn apart—some fled, others stayed, determined to adjust to the new reality. Remarkably, the Sheremetevs continued to live in their opulent Moscow residence. At a ball held there in 1920, Yelena Sheremetev and Vladimir Golitsyn fell in love. But their nuptial feast of fish and cabbage pies showed how much had changed, as did their new accommodations—a small apartment already crowded with more than a dozen relatives.

Even then, banishments to gulags and secret executions were destroying swaths of both families. The terror was often arbitrary. While Vladimir Golitsyn (uncle of the newlywed who died in a gulag in 1943) lived to his 90th year, his son, daughter and son-in-law were all executed in 1938. In the end virtually none of the Sheremetev family survived. The Golitsyns were luckier, if only because their clan was larger. Even so, Yelena estimated that 300 of her relatives were killed. Before she died in 1992, she told her grandson, Nikolay, that while she forgave the Bolsheviks long ago, she never forgot.

What Putin said to Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 4:48 PM - 0 Comments

David Akin reports details of the conversation between the Prime Minister and Vladimir Putin during last weekend’s summit.

But none of this will surprise Russian President Vladimir Putin who as much warned Prime Minister Stephen Harper during their one-on-one meeting in Vladivostok on the weekend that the West should expect this kind of thing for “instigating” mobs in Egypt and Libya. According to officials in the room with the two men, Putin said Harper and other Western leaders are acting like “Trotskyites” – that was Putin’s line — for exporting revolution and promoting instability.

I’m not sure how Putin connects the dots between Stephen Harper and Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, but Putin’s basic point to Harper was that Western leaders were being dangerously naive by meddling in the affairs of the dictators of the Middle East.

Yaroslavl marks anniversary of plane crash that wiped out hockey team

By The Canadian Press - Friday, September 7, 2012 at 6:22 AM - 0 Comments

MOSCOW, Ohio – The Russian city of Yaroslavl paid its respects today to the 44 people who were killed in a plane crash that wiped out a hockey team a year ago today.

Lokomotiv Yaroslavl was en route to its first game of the KHL season in Belarus when its jet crashed on take-off on Sept. 7, 2011.

The 44 victims included Canadian head coach Brad McCrimmon and a host of former NHL stars, including Pavol Demitra, and future prospects.

A memorial service was held today at a city cathedral before friends and relatives of the victims laid flowers at a cemetery.

Hockey fans were slated to walk silently to the team’s arena, then release balloons to mark the exact time of the crash.

The Russian news agency Ria Novosti also reported on its website today that investigators have determined that the crew of the airliner had no right to fly.

Ria Novosti today quoted a spokesman for the investigative committee as saying an official with the Yak-Service airline allowed the two pilots to fly the aircraft “illegally.”

Vladimir Markin said one pilot had falsified documents and the other lacked adequate training to fly the plane.

Markin says the airline official, Vadim Timofeyev, has been charged with breaching air safety rules.

Just two months after the crash in November, 2011, Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee also pointed to insufficient crew as a cause of the tragedy.

The committee further said that one pilot of the Yak-42 plane accidentally activated the brakes, then yanked a control wheel too sharply in a desperate bid to take off.

One player survived the crash but died in hospital five days later.

Among the dead were assistant coach Alexander Karpovtsev, one of the first Russians to have his name etched on the Stanley Cup as a member of the New York Rangers.

Demitra played for the St. Louis Blues and the Vancouver Canucks and was the Slovakian national team captain.

Putin endorses Obama, defends role in Syria and looks to eject critic from parliament

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 9:52 AM - 0 Comments

Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB officer, and one of a small group of Russian members of parliament to take part in demonstrations against Vladimir Putin, faces ejection from the legislature next week, Reuters reports.

Gudkov has used his seat in the State Duma to voice his opposition to the ruling United Russia party. He is now being accused of continuing business activities while a deputy minister, and could face two years in prison. Ejecting Gudkov would also strip him of parliamentary immunity and enable the authorities to prosecute him over allegations of illegal business activity. He says the charges are unfounded and part of a campaign of politically motivated harassment.

While Putin has not commented on the Godkov matter, this week he did defend Russia’s role in Syria, saying that “other nations” should re-evaluate their role in the uprising. He hinted that the Obama administration might be repeating mistakes made in the 1980s in Afghanistan by supporting rebel forces. He did, however, tell reporters that he supports a second term for the American president, saying Obama is more committed to missile defense than his Republican rival. Putin added that Mitt Romney was “mistaken” to call Russia “America’s greatest geo-political foe.”

Police make arrest in Pussy Riot killings

By Scaachi Koul - Friday, August 31, 2012 at 8:33 AM - 0 Comments

The day after two women were found dead in a central Russian city, police have detained a man who confessed to the killings.

University Igor Danilevsky confessed to stabbing a 38-year-old woman he was dating and her 76-year-old mother.  It is said Danilevsky wrote “Free Pussy Riot” on a wall in the victims’ blood because he wanted it to seem like a “ritual killing.”

Three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison earlier this month for a “punk prayer” they held in February in Moscow’s main cathedral, asking the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Vladimir Putin.

The new CDS on the F-35

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 1:09 PM - 0 Comments

As John Geddes notes, Lt.-Gen. Tom Lawson is an avowed fan of the F-35.

He was, for instance, asked about the plane by Conservative MP Ray Boughen during a March 2011 committee hearing.

Everything that the air force has done by way of analysis of all those aircraft available to Canada suggests that there is no comparison.

A month earlier, he’d been in Mississauga to talk up the purchase.

We’re not only defending Canada,” said Major-General Tom Lawson, assistant chief of Canada’s air staff, “we’re also doing that with a partner to the south who expects us to meet our NORAD obligations.” … Buying the fighters will give Canada the best and most inexpensive method of fulfilling its obligations to its military partners, including the United States, said Lawson, a former Commandant at the Royal Military College in Kingston.

There is also what Lt.-Gen. Lawson wrote in the Canadian Military Journal this year. Continue…

The Russians aren’t coming

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 at 9:57 AM - 0 Comments

Despite what you might have heard, David Pugliese reports that the Defence department isn’t worried about a Russian military threat in the Arctic.

The Government of Canada is committed to protecting Canada’s security and exercising its sovereignty in the North, including in Canada’s Arctic internal waters. Defence issues do not drive Arctic affairs and Canada does not see a military threat in the Arctic, including from Russia.

 From a defence perspective, relations with Russia and our other Northern neighbours remain positive and are marked by cooperation in several areas given shared challenges associated with operating in the unique Arctic environment and the mutual benefit of exchanging lessons learned and best practices.

See previously: The Russians are mocking, ‘A good working relationship’ and ‘Hook, line and sinker’.

Pussy Riot sentenced to two years

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 17, 2012 at 8:07 AM - 0 Comments

Smile when your lungs are aching, smile when your heart is breaking

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, August 10, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP

Synchronized swimming is one of the rare smiling sports at these the London 2012 Summer Games, which are usually more about pant, sweat, grimace and grunt. Smile when you win, smile when you lose; smile at the judges and pray they didn’t decide the results two weeks ago over dinner.

There was Canada’s all-Quebec synchro team after a stellar, acrobatic performance Friday, smiling in their beaded, neon-hued swimsuits and their waterproof makeup, excited and proud that they’d given their all in a joyous, technically demanding program.

They’d been in fourth Thursday after their technical routine. Their free routine Friday, inspired by Cirque du Soleil, moved them to first, but they must have known, standing in a nervous pack in the bowels of the Aquatic Centre, that it wouldn’t last. The judges had left plenty of point room for the powerhouses of the sport who had yet to perform.

In the end, to the surprise of no one, there was no change from Thursday. Russia won the gold, as Russia does—the fourth consecutive team Olympic gold and sixth straight overall gold. China finished second, with Spain taking bronze. It would have required an epic failure by one of the top teams to get the judges to move Canada beyond the fourth it held Thursday and the fourth it finished in Beijing. That didn’t happen.

Tracy Little, one of the nine-person Canadian crew, said afterwards that she was “pretty down” after the fourth-place ranking Thursday. The team awoke Friday, determined to make this “a good Olympic moment,” come what may. She thinks they delivered that in the pool. “I didn’t care what the scores were for the first time in my synchro career,” she said.

Whether the judges ever move the team beyond fourth is not something the swimmers can control, she said. “If we swim perfect or not, who knows if they’re going to give us the same marks?” She only knows how hard they worked to deliver in that pool. “They can’t take that away from us. This moment of being proud right now, no matter what I finish I’m going to have this forever.” She said that, of course, with a smile.

Pussy Riot vs. Putin

By Mika Rekai - Friday, August 3, 2012 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

Young Russian oligarchs take Manhattan

By Claire Ward - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 2:01 AM - 0 Comments

Jean-Claude Cohen/Visual Press

The exotic accents floating in and out of the gilded doors of 15 Central Park West betray the 19-storey limestone building as the home of well-heeled foreigners. The two-towered private residence overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park is next door to the flashy Trump International Hotel and Tower. The tight-lipped, uniformed doormen won’t say who lives here, but recent headlines confirm that Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the 22-year-old daughter of Russian billionaire and potash king Dmitry Rybolovlev, has purchased the 6,744-sq.-foot penthouse for a cool $88 million. A three-bedroom rental in the same building is currently listed at $40,000 a month. One doorman, whose own accent casts him firmly as a local, looks over his shoulder before chuckling, “Well, they ain’t from Brooklyn.”

Rybolovleva is the latest in a string of scions of oligarchs—Russian business magnates—whose families are buying up high-end real estate in New York. The cash-rich crowd has been taking advantage of the economic downturn, investing in the top tier of available properties, according to Edward Mermelstein, a lawyer specializing in high-end real estate for wealthy Russian clients. “New York has gained in popularity,” he adds. “We’re seeing a reverse of what was happening 10 years ago, where London was attracting foreign investment and keeping its immigration policies much looser than the U.S.”

Real estate prices aren’t New York’s only draw. Until recently, most of Russia’s business elite landed in London, earning it the nicknames Londongrad and Moscow on Thames. But Russia-U.K. relations have cooled considerably since the poisoning in London of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Immigration policies have tightened, and minigarchs have recently become a target of scorn, not just for their tabloid lifestyles. In August, four wealthy Russian youths were convicted of raping a young woman and filming the assault at south London’s Bellerbys College. Add the political unrest following Vladimir Putin’s recent election win, and it’s no wonder that the Rybolovlevs went looking further afield.

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John Baird warns gay travellers to beware in St. Petersburg

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 16, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has told the House of Commons he’s concerned about new legislation banning “homosexual propaganda” in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Canadian Press reports. Baird said Canada has lodged an official protest over the new law, which comes into effect on Saturday.

According to an Russian travel advisory on the Foreign Affairs website, the new law prohibits “propagandizing homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality and transsexuality among minors, and prohibiting public actions propagandizing pedophilia.” The advisory also warns, “public actions (including dissemination of information, statements, displays or conspicuous behaviour) contradicting or appearing to contradict this law may lead to arrest, prosecution and the imposition of a fine.”

St. Petersburg is among the world’s most popular tourist destinations. It is the fourth Russian city to put such a law in place. Baird says he’s concerned about the law, which he says runs counter to Canadian values.

The Russian spring

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 3:25 PM - 0 Comments

It’s after midnight in Moscow. The anti-Putin rally at Pushkin Square has been broken up with — according to some reports — some 250 arrests, including opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whose accomplishments include popularizing the epithet “crooks and thieves” to describe Putin’s United Russia party. Another 300 were arrested in St. Petersburg.

I’ve got two notebooks and a digital recorder full of material which I’ll spend tomorrow trying to gather into some sort of coherent narrative for this week’s magazine. In the meantime, two thoughts:  Continue…

Live from Russia: scenes from an anti-Putin rally

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 10:38 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Petrou is in Russia to cover this weekend’s presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won under dubious circumstances. Thousands of anti-Putin protesters have amassed in Moscow as a result. Michael will be posting updates below throughout the day. Follow him on Twitter: @michaelpetrou. Continue…