'Russia' tag archive

Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8 Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it […]

Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 376pp, £30.00 hb., 978 0 23118 656 8 In the notebooks Alexandre Kojève wrote on his way to Germany, he sketched a structure of all relevant fields of knowledge, with each field labelled ‘bolshevism in …’: ‘politics’, ‘religion’, and […]

Commentary The poetry and prose of the Russian elections Svetlana stephenson Between 10 December 2011, the day of the first mass protest against fraud in the recently held Russian parliamentary elections, and 4 March 2012, the day of the presidential vote, Moscow was a transformed place. The suffocating atmosphere of Putin’s rule was disturbed as […]

There is a place in northern Moscow that represents, in a very focused and concentrated way, the tremendous change that has taken place in Russia since the start of market transition. This is VDNKh, the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. Its current name is different, but everybody stills knows it by its […]

Economists tell us that Russia is on its way to completing the transition to capitalism. The only problem remaining now is a political one – the paradise of a fully fledged ‘free-market’ economy is suspended by the lack of liberal democracy, while, conversely, the lack of a free market stops the development of liberal democracy. […]