I just wanted to post this powerful photo taken by Aziz Elkhanoglu today at Rafiq Tagi’s funeral.
Another sad day for Azerbaijan, a country saddled with more than its fair share of injustice and pain. Rafiq Tagi, who was hospitalized a mere three days ago after being stabbed by unknown assailants, died today in a Baku hospital of complications after initial treatment for his wounds and surgery to remove his spleen. He […]
Vladimir Putin deports thousands of Tajiks migrant workers. The Russian Communist Party puts Stalin on its election posters. Liberal anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny becomes the keynote speaker at a massive anti-immigration rally. What do these three events have in common? They show leaders of all three poles of Russian politics – regime, left, […]
In a shocking incident, independent journalist Rafiq Tagi was stabbed repeatedly today in Baku, according to this RFE/RL report. Tagi is best known for his thought piece entitled “Europe and Us,” published in 2007 in the Sanat newspaper. In the article, Tagi compared modern Muslim societies to their European counterparts, and argued that Islam had […]
Another Russian March Rally commemorated the recent National Unity Day in Russia. The celebration of accord and reconciliation succeeded former Soviet holiday dedicated to the Great Russian Revolution. The new holiday introduces a tradition of Russian nationalist rally, so called, Russian March, exciting for some, but precarious for others. This year the March gathered between […]
U.S. – Russia political interactions often resemble a swinging pendulum that goes from hardly negotiated consensus to deepening disagreement and swooping across to ‘tit for tat‘ tactics. The Recent Russian response to U.S. ‘Magnitsky list’ is a good example of that. The story began with the accidental death of Sergey Magnitsky, a 37-year old […]
Russia. It’s not all doom and gloom (we’re not Greece, you know!). Sure, in their latest dispatches from Vladivostok and Lake Baikal, the BBC’s Reggie Nadelson and the Atlantic’s Nicholas Schmidle didn’t ask the hard questions. Like, where’s all that money earmarked for preparing for the APEC Summit really going? Or, what about the Baikal […]
After a week of Oligarch wars, Medvedev-Luzhkov sniping, spy-plagiarism and a Victor Bout guilty verdict, it’s good to know we can still lead the world, even if it is in the corruption stakes. It’s unclear how much the Kremlin paid Transparency International to take China’s crown (or whether it was more or less than the […]
As the presidential elections approach in Russia with the vote due in March 2012, media and opinion polls point out at the growing apathy amongst Russian population. Gloomy and grim attitudes stem from widespread perceptions that the positions of president and prime minister are predetermined with Putin’s comeback to the Kremlin is almost sure. With […]
It’s become so fashionable to automatically diss everything Putin does that critics are rarely forced to use their brains. That’s the only way to explain the curious liberal denunciations of the Eurasian Union, a free-trade economic and political bloc of major former Soviet states that Putin is rushing to get started. After all, what liberal […]
A portly man stands covered in glistening crude oil: this visual joke on that iconic scene from Goldfinger sets the scene for British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews’s exploration of life in post-Soviet Central Asia. This week, she won an international photography award for a series on Naftalan, Azerbaijan, and its crude oil spa treatments. Equally […]
It’s a story that could have been written by Borges. A powerful man publishes a satirical novel under a playful yet obvious pseudonym. The book’s protagonist is a fiercely intelligent, insecure and amoral intellectual, a “‘vulgar Hamlet’ who can see through the superficiality of his age, but is unable to have any real feelings for […]
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