· December, 2006

Stories about Russia from December, 2006

Russia, Belarus: “Gazilla”

  30 December 2006

There's a distinct sense of deja vu this New Year's Eve: Gazprom, Russia's largest (and state-controlled) company and the world's biggest extractor of natural gas, is in the spotlight again, both locally (due to an ambitious and controversial construction project in St. Petersburg) and internationally (due to a dispute over...

Russia: Kalmyk Deportation

  28 December 2006

Yet another sad anniversary from J. Otto Pohl: “Sixty-three years ago the Stalin regime deported the vast majority of the Kalmyk population from their historic homeland to Siberia.”

Russia: Moscow Half a Century Ago

  27 December 2006

LJ user fool_4_lifetime found a rare photo album in a Moscow dump – Im Flug nach Moskau, by Erich Einhorn, ARTIA, 1959 – and scanned and posted 60 spreads of Moscow photos from it in the moya_moskva (My Moscow) LJ community. (Warning: bandwidth intensive!) Here is one of the photos:...

Belarus, Russia: Gas Problems

  26 December 2006

TOL's Belarus Blog writes that the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom “is not going to tolerate Lukashenka’s bluff and proceeds from warnings to direct actions.”

Russia: A Blogger's Short Stories

  25 December 2006

Copydude is posting short stories – one, two, three, four – he wrote while in Tatarstan: “They come under the category of ‘True Lies’ – or what writers prefer to call ’semi-documentary’. I wrote them about real people – but sourced largely from local gossip.”

Russia: Litvinovich on Beslan Report

  25 December 2006

David McDuff of A Step At A Time translates a piece by Marina Litvinovich, an activist and founder of the Truth of Beslan portal; she writes: “Another of the report’s conclusions is that 32 people took part in the school seizure, of whom 31 were killed and one has been...

Estonia: Lavrov's (Lack of) Logic

  20 December 2006

Itching for Eestimaa doesn't understand the logic of Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “Because I just can't grasp how outlawing the symbol of fascism makes one part of a fascist revival.”

Ukraine: Brezhnev's 100th Birthday

  19 December 2006

Carpetblogger marks Leonid Brezhnev's 100th birthday with a Brezhnev joke: “Stalin, Krushchev and Brezhnev were riding on a train. The train comes to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Stalin yells out: ‘kill the engineer!’ Khrushchev calls out: ‘rehabilitate the engineer!’ Brezhnev says: ‘pull down the window shades and...

Russia: “Chess Revolution”

  19 December 2006

Very Russian writes about what could have been Russia's “Chess Revolution”: “This is beginning, just slightly, to look like what’s been the Kremlin’s worst nightmare since the Orange Revolution.” Sean's Russia Blog has more on this weekend's protest – here and here.

Russia: Marching Towards Christmas

  19 December 2006

The Turkish Invasion posts a few Soviet New Year's greeting cards and writes about and posts pictures of a weird rally that took place in Moscow: “Now here is how the Moscowites rehearse their record breaking attempt by converging the most amount of Santa Clauses in a a single city...

Russia: Oleg Gazmanov's “Born in the USSR”

  18 December 2006

La Russophobe posts “a multi-media presentation with some insights regarding pop music” – featuring Oleg Gazmanov's song “Made in the USSR”: “[…] The Ryuriks, the Romanovs, Lenin and Stalin/They are my country/Pushkin, Yesinin, Vystotsky, Gagarin/They are my country […]”