Tag: russia

This month’s books newsletter is pretty chatty for a topic that’s supposedly the pastime of introverts!

Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.

The Americans shows us one way to write a female antihero.

An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.

Kovalenko’s choice? Facing mortars on a daily basis or exposing your children to the after-effects of Chernobyl.

Facebook’s botched war against propaganda campaigns.

When Russia attacked Ukraine with sophicated malware in 2017, it caused over $10 billion dollars worth of damage and revealed the whole world’s vulnerabilities.

The precarious future of messaging apps.

“A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children… One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned.”

The shadowy world of Russian organized crime in America.

Russian money is parked in English real estate and other assets, but is it too late to purge its influence on Britain?

A reminder, courtesy of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova.

A forester’s daughter spends a night in a cabin in Soviet Russia, but it takes decades to discover how much danger she put her family in.

What was going on at Russia’s consulate in San Francisco?

The House on the Embankment housed hundreds of Soviet leaders. Eventually, it was the former house of hundreds of purge victims.

Canada is taking in gay Chechen men subject to persecution, the risk to Canada-Russia relations be damned.

A close reading of this whole Don Jr.-Russia situation.

Last time Sessions spoke in a public hearing, he lied. This time, the stakes are higher.

Sometimes the best choice is the devil you know.

In Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, one in 50 are HIV positive, half of which are due to intravenous drug use.

The Russian election is one year away, but taking on a ruthless autocrat may not be welcomed by a generation looking for stability and security.

At BuzzFeed, Ali Watkins investigates the way the Russian consulate called Sergei Krivov’s death a heart attack when he seems to have died of blunt force trauma on the floor of New York City’s Russian Consulate building.

Joshua Kucera travels to the nation of Georgia, along the border of Russia and Europe, to examine the longstanding debate about whether it belongs to Asia, Europe, or the Middle East, and why it matters.

Journalist and illustrator Lomasko was first noticed in the West for her graphic reportage from the Pussy Riot trial. In Tbilisi, Georgia, she spoke with historians, artists, journalists, activists, squatters, and local clergy about the political and cultural climate in this former Soviet republic.

At New York Magazine, Russian-born Michael Idov reflects on the few years he returned to Moscow to edit the Russian edition of GQ, beginning in 2011. He was surprised by the culture of cynicism he encountered — a response to constant deceit and crushing autocracy under Vladimir Putin. And he wonders whether a similar lack of trust and sense of defeat are in store for the U.S. under Trump.

Six stories that examine the complicated heritage of the fall of the Soviet Union.

“The point is to spoil [the internet], to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it.” –Adrian Chen, in The New York Times Magazine, on Russia’s massive troll army—and their plot against him. Read the story

The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

Elaine Brown was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Black Panther Party. She looks back on Jean Seberg, COINTELPRO, and internal divisions within the organization.

Why then does the American public still consider all spies to be demons? Why does the public make no distinction between technical spies like Julius Rosenberg stealing useful knowledge and tactical spies like Kim Philby destroying human lives? Perhaps it is because the American public is misled by the American secrecy system. The secrecy system is a bureaucratic monster that classifies vast quantities of information as secret, making it impossible for the ordinary citizen to see the difference between important and unimportant secrets.