Russia
Cicero on Putin
Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in…
Crimean notebook
Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little…
Barometer
The best places to open a brothel The Commons all-party group on prostitution has called for a Scandinavian-style law where…
Leave Ukraine to the Russians
‘You can’t always get what you want,’ chorused Mick Jagger, ‘but if you try some time/You just might find/You get…
A reminder of the UK energy gap as Putin prepares to put another knot in his pipeline
To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon…
Europe’s nightmare neighbour
Putin has now broken the post-Cold War consensus for good. But Russia may not enjoy the results
The Guardian vs the Hobbits
Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the…
When is a protest not a protest? When we decide to call it a revolution
It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs.…
Low life
My boy was downstairs cooking Sunday roast. Earlier, I had been clambering about on a woodpile, stepped awkwardly, and twisted…
Letters
Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods…
Sochi’s spotlight reveals the rottenness at the heart of the Russian body politic
Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter…
Putin’s masterplan
Russia is returning as an ideological force in the world – to champion conservative values
New York notebook
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
Putin’s poison
Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the…
High life
Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in…
‘The most important Jewish writer since Kafka’
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
Russia’s missing memorial
Why is there no gulag museum to compare with Yad Vashem?
Hiding in plain sight
A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to…
Nationalist stirrings
Philip Hensher on how an impassioned, chaotic group of amateur 19th-century composers created the first distinctively Russian music
The leader who followed
The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese…
