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One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... to make ends meet in murkier ways, or migrate. Politically speaking, widespread collusion with the Yeltsin regime lamed much resistance to its successor. In such conditions, it was now the corruption and commercialisation of the intelligentsia itself that became a target of the country’s leading ironist, in Pelevin’s scathing portrait of Generation P. But ...

Diary

Orlando Figes: In Moscow, 19 January 1989

... threat to the Party leadership: although the Young Turks who organise the Front in Moscow, such as Boris Kagarlitsky, have argued that ‘conditions are not yet ready to replace the one-party system with a multi-party one,’ it is implicit in their arguments that they favour this transition. The July Party Conference was a disappointment for the liberal ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... had been hastily updated to include new sanctions in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Boris Johnson said the bill would ‘tighten the noose around Putin’s regime’. Anti-corruption experts are more circumspect: the measures are piecemeal and there is little sign of meaningfully increased investment in enforcement. A veteran financial ...

Poison and the Bomb

Norman Dombey, 20 December 2018

... facility at Sarov wrote that 800 mg of polonium-210 was being shipped to the US every month. Boris Zhuikov, the head of the Radioisotope Laboratory at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Moscow, was quoted in the Washington Post in 2007 as stating that 97 per cent of the world’s polonium-210 came from Sarov. The Attlee government decided to build ...

When did your eyes open?

Benjamin Nathans: Sakharov, 13 May 2010

Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov 
by Jay Bergman.
Cornell, 454 pp., £24.95, October 2009, 978 0 8014 4731 0
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... In 1957, Boris Shragin, a young art historian, accompanied a group of foreigners on a visit to the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Arts. Gerasimov had made his name with fawning neoclassical portraits of Stalin and Voroshilov, and used his position to crush ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘formalist’ artists whose work strayed from the official aesthetic ...

Putin’s Rasputin

Peter Pomerantsev, 20 October 2011

... out your weak spot.’ Top jobs followed at banks and TV channels. In 1999 he was invited to join Yeltsin’s presidential administration. Looking more like a designer than a bureaucrat, he stood out from the rest. He was one of the key spin doctors behind the promotion of Putin for president in 2000. Since then, while many of his colleagues have fallen from ...

Gazillions

Neal Ascherson: Organised Crime, 3 July 2008

McMafia: Crime without Frontiers 
by Misha Glenny.
Bodley Head, 432 pp., £20, April 2008, 978 0 224 07503 9
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... not only provided bodyguards but also took on the enforcement of commercial contracts. Was Boris Yeltsin’s sale of public resources – oil, gas, diamonds, and copper flogged off at dirt-cheap prices to a few incredulous young bankers – a criminal act? Glenny calls it ‘quite simply, the grandest larceny in history’. The sell-off certainly ...

Murder in Mayfair

Peter Pomerantsev, 31 March 2016

A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West 
by Luke Harding.
Faber, 424 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 1 78335 093 3
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... HQ, where he plans a new Russia for when Putin falls. Until he died in 2013 Down Street was where Boris Berezovsky plotted, or threatened to plot, anti-Putin revolutions. Berezovsky had played a significant role in Litvinenko’s fate. In 1998 Litvinenko, then an investigator into organised crime at the FSB, had betrayed ‘the firm’ when he went public ...

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