Masha Gessen (Continuación)

Europa,

If you were a young iPhone-carrying client of RocketBank, a Russian start-up that offers app-based banking, you would have gotten some mixed messages on Thursday, Jan. 28. At 1:10 p.m., you would have received a letter written in RocketBank’s trademark pally style, only worrisome, and accompanied by a “shruggie” emoji:

“Hi [client’s first name], our longtime partner Commercial Bank Intercommerz is having cash-flow issues. Technically, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you would have problems with RocketBank cards serviced by Intercommerz, but times being anxious as they are, we would like to warn you as soon as we can and help you take precautions.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa, ,

Going into 2016, Vladimir V. Putin is a very different politician from the one he was a year ago. His most significant changes have little to do with what he has done in the last 12 months. Instead they were wrought by the justice systems of two foreign countries — Britain and Spain — and a slew of Russian and Western journalists and activists. Thanks to all these disparate efforts, there has emerged a vivid, comprehensive and, most important, public picture of allegations of corruption and connections to organized crime that in the past had been the province of rumors or maverick investigations publishers wouldn’t dare to print.…  Seguir leyendo »

Le Kremlin de Kazan, en Russie. Photo : Kirill Kudryavtsev. AFP

Europa

Les Occidentaux n’avaient pas plus tôt commencé à considérer Vladimir Poutine comme un dirigeant autoritaire que le régime russe avait de nouveau changé. Depuis qu’il a repris le rôle de président en mars 2012, la Russie a connu un effondrement politique, a déclaré la guerre à son voisin et s’est engagée dans un autre conflit, loin de ses frontières. Vite, elle a été considérée comme un paria par la communauté internationale et son économie est tombée en chute libre. De manière inattendue, ces événements ont insufflé une nouvelle motivation à la population et permis à Poutine de renforcer plus que jamais sa mainmise sur le pouvoir.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalOrden Mundial,

This is war. Vladimir Putin will never tire of declaring it.

Every autumn since 2004 Mr. Putin has gathered a large group of international political scientists and commentators for a couple of days of discussions. The gathering, called the Valdai Discussion Club, has shifted shapes over the years, changing locations, personalities and topics. It used to be held in Valdai, a national park about halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but this year it was held in Sochi, where facilities left over from the Winter Olympics had fallen into disuse. It used to focus largely on Russian politics and the economy, but in the last few years has turned increasingly to Russia’s role in the world.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

Vladimir V. Putin came to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday to demand that Russia be taken seriously and treated as an equal partner by the world’s great powers. In preparation for his visit, Russia in recent weeks has expanded its military presence in Syria, kept quiet in Ukraine, and even stepped back from its domestic antigay campaign — all in the hopes of reclaiming its place at the table.

The Kremlin ultimately succeeded in convincing President Obama to meet with Mr. Putin. But more than anything else, the Russian president succeeded in New York in laying out his worldview for all to hear.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

On Tuesday, a military court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don sentenced a Ukrainian film director to 20 years in a maximum-security prison after convicting him of terrorism. In the hours after the verdict, small groups of people came out to protest in front of Russian consulates and embassies in several countries. In Tel Aviv, two young people held up signs marked with three words: two obscenities and a Russian word for “idiots.” They probably best expressed the sense of gaping-mouth and helpless rage felt by all the people who had been following the Sentsov case.

Oleg Sentsov, 39, was arrested in May of last year in Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia less than two months earlier.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

A number of strange protests — small, mild and held in a sort of minor key — took place in Russia’s main cities this week.

A bookstore in St. Petersburg wrote in its window on Tuesday, “We are proud to be selling books published by the Dynasty Foundation.” The Dynasty Foundation, a charitable organization that funds research and educational projects, had just been designated by the authorities as a “foreign agent” — contemporary Russian-speak for an “enemy of the state.” In Moscow, a school teacher stood in front of the Justice Ministry holding a cardboard placard. Later, a writer wearing a graduation gown stood in the same spot, holding a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

“How bad are things, really?” This is a question that those of us who write about Russia — or live in Russia, or think about Russia — are asked often, and ask just as frequently. It has its variants: “Is it as bad as it was before perestroika?” “Is Putin as bad as Stalin?” And the rhetorical king of them all: “Is it 1937 yet?” The reference is to the year widely considered the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror, or the most frightening year in Russian memory.

People have different reasons for asking such questions. Non-Russians want to understand the news, put events in context and gauge the accuracy of their own reactions.…  Seguir leyendo »

A courtroom sketch of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the verdict was read on Wednesday. Credit Jane Flavell Collins/Reuters

MundoAméricaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

It took more than three months from start to verdict in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. It will most likely take another couple of months for the government and the defense to lay out, respectively, the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and for the jury to determine whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of all 30 charges on Wednesday, gets the death penalty, or life without parole. The trial has been an astoundingly time-consuming and expensive undertaking, but it has not given the public what it needs and wants most: the fullest possible understanding of what happened.

The two sides offered distinct visions of Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Portraits of the murdered opposition veteran Boris Nemtsov during a rally on Sunday in his memory, in Moscow. Credit Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency

Europa,

The scariest thing about the murder of Boris Nemtsov is that he himself did not scare anyone. “He was no threat to the current Russian leadership and to Vladimir Putin,” said the Russian president’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, eerily echoing comments the president made in 2006, when the opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed. By this Mr. Peskov meant that the Kremlin did not kill Mr. Nemtsov, a former first deputy prime minister, who was gunned down in central Moscow on Friday night.

In all likelihood no one in the Kremlin actually ordered the killing — and this is part of the reason Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

Russia has been producing so much bad news of late that a lot of it has passed without notice. The implosion of the Russian currency and the sham trial and questionable sentencing of the Putin opponent Aleksei A. Navalny and his brother Oleg have overshadowed less suspenseful stories — such as the designation of several nongovernmental organizations as “foreign agents,” the departure of the country’s leading economist from his academic post, and new attacks on the remaining scraps of independent media. And those were the latest battles for the hearts, minds and memories of the Russian people.

As the year wrapped up, the cabinet filed a bill in Parliament proposing to create a federally mandated list of the broadcasters to be carried by every cable provider.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

A pair of pudgy, hairy man’s hands draped over the back of an ornate chair; two gold rings; a gold watch on a bracelet a bit too tight for the wrist; amber cufflinks pulling together crisp white cuffs that also seem a touch tight. Everything in this picture connotes wealth and excess. To the Russian eye, the dark hair on the hands also connotes someone who is ethnically non-Russian: The hands might belong to a Jew, a Tartar, an Armenian or the representative of any number of other ethnic groups that, according to stereotype, have dark hair.

This picture of a generic Shylock appeared on Oct.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

Few post-Soviet countries are as comfortable for a Russian-speaker to visit as Kyrgyzstan. This landlocked mountainous country of roughly 5.6 million, wedged between China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, kept Russian as an official language after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Kyrgyz had fallen into disuse during the Soviet era and lacked the vocabulary for affairs of state. As a result, a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country still speaks Russian.

Recently, Kyrgyzstan has been growing notably more Russian. Although Kyrgyz has gained many words, speakers and advocates for making it the country’s sole state language, activists from nongovernmental organizations say they noticed a couple of years ago that Russian-language media got suddenly more robust, gaining a crop of new freelance writers who seemed to come from nowhere.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa, ,

Russians are about to lose access to virtually all food imported from the West — which is to say, a significant portion of the food that Russians consume. President Vladimir Putin ordered the ban on imports to retaliate against Western countries that imposed economic sanctions against Russia after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. More than anything that has happened this year — more than the annexation of Crimea, more than the latest crop of repressive laws passed by the parliament and more than the West’s sanctions — the food ban marks a turning point for Russia.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa, ,

The day Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in eastern Ukraine, I was in Moscow, having dinner with a small group of friends. Three of those present were living in Moscow and the other three, including me, were former Muscovites visiting from the United States. Perhaps because most of the people at the table were linguists, discussion of the airplane soon turned to a conversation about words.

“Why do we have to say ‘our country”’ asked one of the linguists. “Why can’t we say ‘this country,’ like Americans do?”

It’s a language thing: When speaking of Russia, Russians indicate possession the way English-speakers do with most other nouns — “my hand,” “my drink” — but not, as it happens, with countries.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa, ,

When a journalist admits that he has been lying to the public for years, this usually results in a flurry of media coverage castigating the guilty party, along with a dose of self-flagellation by his employer for having failed to notice the lies sooner. When this wave of humiliating publicity ends, the offending journalist is allowed to slink away in shame.

But sometimes journalists who admit having lied for years get to be heroes for a few days, garnering praise for their honesty and bravery. These public liars get to depart the story with their heads raised high and every reason to expect to continue a career in journalism.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

News reports described the encounter between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Obama on Friday as “awkward,” one in which they were apparently “avoiding one another” and acted “much like divorced parents at a child’s graduation.”

A more accurate simile might go something like this: “like divorced parents, one of whom abused the child systematically for years, then stopped briefly, only to emerge from rehab and violate the restraining order and resume the abuse.”

Less than three months ago Putin completed the first forcible annexation of land in Europe since World War II. For this, he has been predictably compared to Hitler by scores of commentators, including Hillary Clinton and Prince Charles.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

Returning to my home city after emigrating to the United States is a bit like being an apparition. I landed on a weekend in mid-May, when some of Moscow’s residents had not yet returned from the string of holidays that free up most of the first half of the month and others were out of town starting the summer dacha season. Moscow was unseasonably hot, unusually sparse of people, and felt like a ghost town — and I was the ghost.

If someone came to visit you from the afterlife, you would talk to that person about death. To me, everyone talked about emigration — although, to be fair, my friends claimed that’s all anyone talks about anyway.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa, , ,

Vladimir Putin has consistently explained his intervention in Ukraine by citing his concern for the security of ethnic Russians, Russian speakers and Russian citizens living there. This has caused the leaders of other neighboring countries with sizable Russian-speaking populations to shudder. It has also given rise to many jokes about the Russian-speaking and passport-carrying populations of Israel and New York calling on Putin to send troops to protect them.

The understanding behind all the jokes is: Obviously, Russian speakers andRussian citizens in Ukraine are, in the eyes of the Kremlin, significantly different from those in Brooklyn or Ashdod. They may not be living in Russia, but they are not exactly living abroad either.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

There is a look I have learned to recognize over the last few months — the look of intense concentration that masks complete disorientation. It’s the look of having had the ground kicked right out from right under your feet. A month ago you were an adult living your own life — it was difficult, but it was familiar — and now you are taking 15 minutes to order food, because nothing makes sense anymore. I found myself in New York City recently with two such men, and we had wandered into a kosher-vegan joint with a menu so convoluted it reminded them once again how far they were from home.…  Seguir leyendo »