In the absence of facts, the speculation about possible culprits says far less about reality than it does about the speculators’ worldviews.
Continue reading...Nemtsov and the Smoking Gun
Eliot BorensteinVerbal Judo, or How Not to Commemorate International Holocaust Memorial Day
Ernest A. Zitser
The President’s speech was targeted less at Holocaust deniers than at political opponents, who dare to dispute post-Soviet Russia’s official scenario of power, which privileges its people’s tragic, heroic, and, ostensibly, redemptive role in world history.
Continue reading...Separatism and the Russian Solution: Baja California, here we come!
David Rainbow
Everyone’s afraid of the separatists these days; they’re messing up countries all over the place.
Continue reading...Ukraine’s ‘far east’: on the effects and genealogy of Ukrainian Galician reductionism
Andriy Portnov
In the context of the current war, faith in the idea of national ‘purity’ often comes couched in rationalist terms, positing no known cure for the Soviet hangover in the Donbas, and, in any case, no time to look for one.
Continue reading...Totalitarian Speech: Putin’s “National Traitors”
Mikhail Iampolski
Liberty Island or Liberty Peninsula?
Harry Leeds
Crimea “has always really been part of Russia” only after it had already been annexed. That is, the sentiment that some parts of Ukraine are really Russia was not an issue of such gravity until after they saw a chance to make a move.
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