The poet Andrei Voznesensky died on 1 June. One of the former “big 4” Soviet poets, he managed to hang on to his cult status until the 1990s as that of the outspoken Joseph Brodsky rose ever higher. The poet Elena Fanailova reviews his position in the pantheon of Soviet writers and assesses his co
The political atmosphere that surrounded the constitutional referendum in Kyrgyzstan shows that the country’s crisis is not over, says Sureyya Yigit in Bishkek
The explosion of violence in southern Kyrgyzstan is the result of social pressures, economic hardship and political malpractice. The interim government’s constitutional referendum can do little to address these problems, says David Gullette.
Judith Beyer observes the run-up to Kyrgyzstan’s constitutional referendum from the vantage point of the countryside, away from the centres of violence. A Kyrgyz majority will ensure that Otunbaeva gets the result she wants, Beyer predicts. But this bodes badly for the future
Obama sacks top Afghan war commander, General Stanley McChrystal. Southeast European countries denounce Israeli attack on aid flotilla. Refugees returning to Kyrgyzstan. Suspected drug kingpin arrested in Jamaica. All this and more in today’s security briefing.
The West turned a blind eye to the potential volatility of Central Asia because it was convenient, in Carlo Ungaro's view. Recent events in Kyrgyzstan show how dangerous this stance is. In adjacent areas of Afghanistan the discovery of mineral riches is likely further to complicate an already frau
The explosion of terrifying violence in southern Kyrgyzstan reveals deep-rooted problems in this central Asian state. A provisional map of the crisis, by Sureyya Yigit in Bishkek.
Media talk of ‘ethnic conflict’ in Kyrgyzstan is misleading, in that it takes ethnicity to be causal. This does not describe the complex, messy process – political, economic, social and structural – whereby this crisis has become ethnicised. What matters now is to understand why and how this has o
Ex-Yukos bosses Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev stand accused of a crime that even prosecutors are finding difficult to define, writes Mariana Toroschesnikova. Now foreigners are beggining to understand the real danger in Russia lies not in wild bears roaming its streets but in wild prosec
On April 9 2010, after explosions in the Moscow metro killed 39 people, rumours were circulated of 1,000 ‘black widows’ who had been recruited by the militants. When the press published the names of 22, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch found that she knew some of these dangerous women : a seam
The humanitarian crisis in southern Kyrgyzstan fits all the requirements for international intervention. So why is it not happening, ask Natalia Leshchenko & David Hayes.
Russia’s Duma has been trying to draft a ‘memory law’, in order to protect the Soviet version of the events of World War II from revisionist interpretations. The historian Nikolai Koposov deconstructs the attempts so far. His view is that the proposed law is not only misconceived, but would be unw
