Latest Posts
One of Anna Politkovskaya’s great qualities as a writer was her sense of the absurd. As horrified as she was by the first one-and-a-half terms of Vladimir Putin’s presidency — she was gunned down before the second term was over — she also managed, in books
Five years ago last month, on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lift of her Moscow apartment building. The Novaya gazeta journalist, who had written at length about Putin’s brutal and brutalising campaign in the northern Caucasus, was
The reaction of the international media to Vladimir Putin’s now-inevitable return to the Kremlin next May has been nicely bifurcated into two distinct waves. The first, which I wrote about last month, was that of completely unjustified surprise. Putin’s return
One of the more surprising things about Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s endorsement of Vladimir Putin as his successor is how much it seemed to surprise the journalists covering it. Western correspondents and commentators, particularly those based in Moscow, took to