Here is the Comment I have posted on OutsideLeft’s site: I have lived for most of my life in countries grappling with different forms of socialism (communist Yugoslavia, apartheid S Africa) or trying to escape from it (post-communist Russia, post-war Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia, post-communist Poland). So I feel qualified to […]
West Germans followed East German jokes to try to assess the popular mood under Communism, says Spiegel Online. Such as: What if the desert were communist? Nothing would happen. Then there’d be a sand shortage. Droll, nein?
I previously linked to analysis of Russia’s startlingly bad health statistics. Last night I was down at Eton College addressing the school’s busy Slavonic Society on the Psychology of Bigness, with special reference to Russia. I used one graph from this piece to show just how grim Russia’s situation is from a […]
Dominic Lawson looks at one Superfreakonomic idea for solving our supposed Climate Change problem: Let’s suppose, however, that our political leaders are not mistaken in taking the view that the threat to mankind does come from the greenhouse effect and its consequences. Here is where Levitt’s friend Nathan Myhrvold (described […]
Former President Zelaya has made it back into Honduras and is basing himself at the Embassy of Brazil. Since there is no obvious prospect of his being restored to power by lawful or normal political means, he evidently plans to try a popular power push of some sort. Which, one […]
Wrinkled Weasel asks: My line of late has tended towards the very position you are critical of – the concerns of Russians about "encirclement" Can you explain to me why the USA, which has far more form when it comes to "encirclement" than Russia has had in the last 50 […]
Chekov at Three Thousand Versts generously takes up my posting on the psychology of Russia’s foreign policy, and responds: In addition, we can agree that insensitivity to Russia’s concerns, from Nato and other western structures, caused Russian disillusionment which effects ‘cooperation’ to this day. Nato’s support for Albanian separatists in […]
Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision. Two take a different view, arguing that Putin’s Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not […]
President Obama has cancelled a plan to build US anti-missile defence radar facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. This move has been hailed by Russia’s President Medvedev as a "wise decision". Which, of course, prompts the ignoble thought that if the Russians like it so much, something must be […]
Picking up the theme of the previous posting, I might add that after the St Albans School prize giving this week a smart young pupil asked me for a couple of lessons learned from my diplomatic career. Gulp. Where to start? I offered only this one. Back in Belgrade in 1981/82 […]
