Category: Russia
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Dutch Court Finds Pro-Russian Separatists Guilty in Downing of MH17, Gives Life Sentences; Free Europe Bulgarian Service, mid-November 2022
What was so compelling about this article was not so much that justice is finally being served, although its proverbial long arm cannot extend so far as to actualize it by plucking the guilty parties out of their haven in Russia, or that a verdict has been forthcoming after so many intervening years; rather, that…
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Christian Humanism – A Panacea for the Russian Condition?
In his editorial, In the Power of Murky Intuition, Autocratic Russia is Losing the Instinct of Self-Preservation (https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/125354824/posts/4359682819 for my translation), Russian intellectual Aleksandr Tsipko addresses Russia’s propensity, because of its authoritarian power structure, to “eternally intrud[e] into the world of the unpredictable.” This tendency, he argues, is based on an autocratic leader’s irrational intuition,…
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Book Review: Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War, by Ken Adelman
Ken Adelman’s masterpiece, running to a quite manageable 375 pages including notes and a bibliography, uses the October 1986 meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev as the springboard to prove his thesis that it was indeed the catalyst for…
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In the Power of Murky Intuition, Autocratic Russia is Losing the Instinct for Self-Preservation
Russian intellectual and social philosopher Aleksandr Sergeyevich Tsipko on June 6, 2022, wrote the following opinion piece on the Newspaper Ideas and People internet site. By utilizing the Platonic philosophy of the partıcular vs the universal, Tsipko speaks truth to power, excoriating Russia’s return to an autocratic system of government which in turn led to…
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“Alone I Go Out On The Road,” by Mikhail Lermontov
Although I have read some Lermontov, for example, Hero of our Time and Caucasus Captive, I was not aware of this poem of his, the first line of which was applied to an article that I was reading. Since Lermontov’s writings are among the best of the 19th-century Russian Romanticism literary movement, I have decided…
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Being Infatuated with Anti-Western Ideas Has Become a Dangerous Path for Russia
The following is an opinion piece published on the Moscow Komsomolets news site written by Aleksandr Tsipko, who, as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1972, has enjoyed a long career as a social philosopher and political scientist. He was a proponent of Gorbachev’s perestroika strategy and is the director of the…
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Russian and Arab Money Won’t Save Erdoğan, Turkish Economist Says, mid-August 2022
The Turkish internet news site, DEMOCRAT HABER, on August 14, 2022, posted the remarks in a transcript format of a YouTube program during which one of the discussants maintained that the influx of money from Russia and/or Saudi Arabia could not overcome the effects of the current inflationary cycle in the Turkish economy. The remarks,…
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Sochi Economic Agreement Provides Life Support for Both Putin, Erdoğan, mid-August 2022 Greek report
My Comment: It turns out that strongmen, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, are in need of each other’s help in order maintain a facade of bravado in the face of the dire financial shortcomings in their economies. In the case of Russia, more than 30 years after the fall…
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Russia Agrees to Take Rubles for Natural Gas Deliveries to Türkiye, Early August 2022
The Greek language internet site News Break, on August 11, 2022 carried the following news item that describes an agreement reached between Moscow and Ankara to allow Türkiye to pay rubles for a certain portion of Russian natural gas imports. The article also mentions the two countries’ plan to significantly increase bilateral trade turnover. The…
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Turkish Gambit and Kurdish Pawns; Turkiye’s Sudden Acquiescence of its “Unbending” Positions to Add Instability to Several Regions
Moscow, July 8, 2022, Institute RUSSTRAT Turkiye has opened a Pandora’s Box of issues by reneging on its declared intent to block the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO until those two countries extradited the Kurdish terrorists who had allegedly sought asylum there. This was the opinion of the Russtrat Institute, a conservative think…
The Dragon is Slain 