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August is normally a quiet month in Russian politics, except in the rare year when a disaster happens. This year Putin is staging a sort of royal progression around the regions to drum up the vote and the turnout in the September Duma elections. There was Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, which hopefully will be explai
There is a wide variety of theories in Moscow about John Ratcliffe’s visit on Tuesday. The FSB caught a high level CIA asset and a deal was arranged (in this case, it will be interesting to see who disappears/dies in the coming weeks) Negotiating give-and-take on Iran - if Russia agrees to join in the sanctions o
The Russian Supreme Court has ruled to remove Yabloko from the list of registered parties for the Duma elections on September 20th . One of the counts was that Yabloko had infringed the property rights of a number of organisations in creating its content, including those of the author of a 56-year old war song. Another
I’ve read the book and now seen the film. Neither is really historically accurate, but I don’t think it matters. I’m post-modern enough to understand that my version of the history of Russia in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s is no more likely to be the one that prevails, even if I was closer to the events
Andrei Melnichenko wrote an op-ed in the Economist , as well as a big interview in the Economist the week before last. Melnichenko is a 1990s era oligarch, who, critically, did not make money out of privatising assets on the cheap. Interestingly Tatiana Stanovaya, one of the leading Russian Kremlinologists, has likened
VchK-OGPU is a popular Telegram channel that reports behind-the-scenes gossip about Russian politics. It tends to focus on news relating to law enforcement and the security services and has a decent track record of predicting winners and losers. For instance, it was the first to identify some of the key Sechin people i
The first day of the month brings a welcome deposit from Stripe into my bank account, for which I am very grateful. It also reminds me that I should be doing more to justify the faith of my subscribers. I have avoided writing about Ukraine because there are so many other people talking about it, and also because the da
(I’m translating the term: “партия адъютантов” as “Party of Adjutants” because it fits the rhythm of the original better, and also avoids the impression that Putin’s former bodyguards are
The lack of open public politics in Russia means that commentators like me must try to create a full picture of the Kremlin’s internal political battles by latching on to the scant rumours, truths, and falsehoods that we can actually observe. I used to use the analogy of the five blind men and the elephant, to il
I believe I was one of the last to be trained in the old Kremlinology, a skill that was honed over decades of observing the Soviet Union. I started in 1987, just as perestroika and glasnost were beginning, and all of the old structures and certainties were dissolving. The highly controlled Soviet press bore no resembla