By Wayne Allensworth For nearly 40 years, your humble observer’s life has been connected in one way or another with Russia, or, better still, the Russian world, that broad cultural expanse that extends across much of Eurasia. And from the beginning of that journey, what drew me in as much as anything about Russia and the Russians were that country’s impressive cultural achievements. A tragic...
By Wayne Allensworth Yevgeny Prigozhin (english.nv.ua) In my recent article on the “coup” that wasn’t in Russia, I raised the question of what the popular reaction to Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s aborted “March for Justice” might be; i.e., would the crisis this past weekend undermine Putin’s poll numbers, for instance? And what would the incident do to Prigozhin’s poll ratings? Possibly, I wrote, the...
By Wayne Allensworth Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin (ideapod.com) Here’s a preliminary take on the events in Russia this past weekend: Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Putin crony from St. Petersburg who heads the Wagner Group mercenary organization, after claiming that regular Russian army units had opened fire on Wagner camps in the war zone, announced that he was organizing a column of Wagner...
By Wayne Allensworth The picture below, of Christ being led to a snowy Golgotha, is from a movie that, along with others from the film’s director, have often been chosen as among the hundred best ever produced. Rating movies can get complicated, but nevertheless this film belongs in any cinematic canon. The director is Russian Andrey Tarkovsky. The film is his Andrey Rublev (1966) about a...
By Wayne Allensworth The International Criminal Court has charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with war crimes, claiming that Russia has systematically kidnapped Ukrainian children during the conflict in Ukraine. The Russians say children who were orphaned by the war have been cared for as a humanitarian program. I don’t believe the charge, but the case against Putin is no surprise. As noted...
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