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One descends the steps of Kharkiv’s train station to a Soviet-era square with post-Soviet pretensions. Ukraine’s azure-and-yellow is teaming with Poland’s red-and-white next month, in what was originally seen as a boon to the former’s EU prospects, to co-host the
I hadn’t been in Ukraine for 10 minutes before I was forced to bribe its officials. “You don’t have the necessary paperwork,” the border guard said. This was a lie and we both knew it, but we also both knew
The road to Pripyat, Chernobyl’s long-abandoned city, runs through a budding forest. The pines here are all relatively young; the original forest died from radiation poisoning more than a quarter-century ago. You may be able to decontaminate city streets to
The relative success of Sunday’s “Writers’ March” through the streets of Moscow — not in terms of overall numbers, perhaps, but certainly as example of non-violent protest — was cheering. After last Sunday’s protester-instigated violence and the disproportionate police response that followed, it was
For the past six months, Western journalists in Moscow have represented the political situation in Russia as a simple dichotomy between good and evil, right and wrong, democracy and authoritarianism: in short, between the non-systemic opposition, spearheaded by figures such
As Russia’s political climate freezes over again, with Vladimir Putin less than a month away from being preserved in the Kremlin like the country’s soon-to-be-cloned mammoths were preserved in ice, Moscow has nevertheless begun to thaw. At Patriarch Ponds, where
A stone’s throw from Kazakhstan, within spitting distance of the Caspian, and an overnight train ride to the troubled republics of the Northern Caucasus, Astrakhan comes as a welcome relief to the weary, frostbitten traveller. After the egg-and-sugar snow of Nizhny
Every couple of years, when a few more Communists and Soviet nostalgics have gone to their graves, Russia toys with the idea of finally sending Vladimir Lenin to his. The remaining Communists and Soviet nostalgics usually kick up a fuss