You non-Slavists out there must be wondering why so many Russian and Central/East European women tennis names end in -ova. Such as Maria Sharapova: Luckily there is a handy and quite extensive explanation on YouTube:
You non-Slavists out there must be wondering why so many Russian and Central/East European women tennis names end in -ova. Such as Maria Sharapova: Luckily there is a handy and quite extensive explanation on YouTube:
Nasty public mood growing in Russia? Who cares? It’s the FT’s strange editing which catches the eye: Russian ultra-nationalism, however, is a phenomenon created not without the Kremlin’s help, and observers argue that Mr Putin’s Kremlin has used nationalism as a force for political consolidation during his decade in power. […]
Here’s a question. How do you attack a highly protected Iranian computer system not linked to the Internet? Here’s the (obviously well briefed) answer. A virus which does all sorts of ingenious things in sequence, very fast, and without being spotted… In case you’re thinking about having a go yourself, […]
Readers of this site usually have some interest in central Europe and/or the great battles of ideas which ‘Europe’ represents. One of those battles, perhaps the central battle in that it defines the intellectual space upon which all the others are fought, is the ‘comparison’ between Communism and Nazism, between […]
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is in Moscow. Some thoughts. One of my earliest blog postings from back in 2008 described some of the issues arising from the Russian authorities’ beastly treatment of the British Council. It recorded something said to me by a senior Russian diplomat in 1996 […]
Over at Business and Politics is my nob unsuccessful attempt to bring trendy retail chain Joe Browns to explain why they think it is OK to sell clothes with communist images. They do try to wriggle out of a tight corner, and seem to accept that Che committed atrocities: The […]
Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes. Here he was in October last year. And now again today: For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former. […]
When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene? Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to […]
What was Kim Philby really up to when he started working for the Soviet Union? Boris Volodarsky follows the complicated story: Stalin had decided that one of the ways to solve the ‘Spanish problem’ would be to assassinate Franco. In 1937 Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, sent several operatives on […]
Welcome Browser and other new readers. After reading my thoughts below, check out this piece I wrote back in 2008 about inat. If you don’t understand inat, you can’t understand Kosovo or Serbia or anything about former Yugoslavia. Sorry, but there it is. * * * * * The International […]
