Otto's Random Thoughts publishes a review of a documentary film on the fate of Mennonites in Stalin's Russia.
Paul Goble of WindowonEurasia reflects upon the split identities of current Russia between the big metropolitan cities and traditional rural and small-town life in the regions.
Since the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, many geopolitical analysts have tried to understand the origins of the conflict, and explain both U.S. support for the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Russian support for his opponents, the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In doing so, geopolitical thinkers around the world have sought explanations for the conflict that go beyond the personalities of the individual leaders involved, such as the Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
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There isn’t much by way of new information about the raid on Memorial. Why the human rights organization was raided still remains a mystery. Work has renewed at the organization’s office but day to day activities remain disturbed. After all, the police did confiscate a laundry list of materials. According to a statement issued by Memorial, those materials include several hard drives that contain “biographical information of tens of thousands of victims of Stalinist repression collected by Memorial over the last 20 years, a unique collection of photographs and copies of archival documents on Stalinist terror, the results of searches of camp cemeteries and firing ranges in the territory of the former USSR, and an archive of audio interviews with former GULAG prisoners.”
There are two new articles of note that concern the Georgian War and the low intensity media war against Russia. The first is Neal Ascherson’s “A Chance to Join the World” in the London Review of Books on the present and future of Abkhazia. The second is Mark Ames’ “Editorial Malpractice” or more aptly named on the Exiled site, “Freddy Gets Fingered: How I Busted the Washington Post’s Op-ed Page Editor.” Therein Ames unmasks WaPo’s “incessant demonization [of Russian and Putin] puts more weight on ideology than on journalistic professionalism–or simple fact-checking.”
