Our conscript, Tolya, has left basic training. He hopes that things will be different, but his hopes are soon dashed when he meets his demobbers or dembels.
Jobs are scarce, pension rises mediocre and the local authorities have even taken away the Christmas trees. But despite the disquiet, appetite for protest in Tatarstan remains low, says Oleg Pavlov
Letters are a life-line for Tolya. The army’s a mysterious entity, unknowable by anyone outside it, the conscript reflects. Awful though it is, he wouldn’t have missed it. He’s learned a lot. And even (possibly) made a friend
Anastasia Baburova and Stanislav Markelov were gunned down in a neo-Nazi contract killing a year ago. In this moving tale Andrei Loshak tells us why he and his friend, who also suffered neo-Nazi violence, will be going on the Moscow march in their memory
In this third excerpt from his letters, our Russian conscript ends up in hospital, with time to reflect on what lies ahead. He reflects on the bullying of the ‘bitches’ by the ‘grandpas’. So deeply entrenched is it, he reckons, that the army would fall apart without it.
In this second letter home our new conscript Tolya is starting to settle in to his two-year stint in Russia’s army. He tells us about the food and how he has learnt to avoid being beaten up.
Corruption has always been part of Russian life, and the Oryol region today just offers a rather extreme example, says Elena Godlevskaya. Some of the main perpetrators have been named, but the punishment being meted out to them is a joke.
A new Russian army recruit writes home about life at a parachute regiment basic training camp
Yegor Gaidar, architect of the radical economic reforms in Russia which followed the fall of Soviet power, died on 15 December. Dmitry Travin reflects on the achievement of a great economist and patriot who saved his country and quietly shouldered the hatred that followed.
The recent catastrophic fire at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm grabbed national headlines. Local authorities all over Russia are suddenly having to get their act together, says Elena Strelnikova
The region is gripped by swine flu panic, much of it orchestrated, in the opinion of Elena Strelnikova. But every cloud has a silver lining – we’re all having unscheduled holidays
In the second of two articles on Russia’s Muslim strategy, Walter Laqueur observes that hostility to the United States and its allies inclines Russia’s elites towards an anti-Western alliance. This blinds them to threats close to home. These are, above all, demographic: while Russia’s population s
