The sacking of Moscow mayor Luzhkov and the continuing debacle of Khodorkovsky's second trial could be seen as tests for the Russian President. Will Medvedev pass muster? Mikhail Zygar considers the options.
You can’t reason with the absurd, as IKEA found when it tried to build a model business in Russia. Institutional corruption is out of control. Kafka’s Castle is finally collapsing. This is good news, as Russians, ordinary Russians are losing their fear. Now they’re just angry, says Andrei Loshak.
In his final letter home from the army our conscript Tolya “finds” a mobile phone, is pursued by a mad officer and wonders what kind of man the army’s made of him
Our conscript Tolya continues his study of violence in his airborne division of the Russian army
Our conscript Tolya had such high hopes of his new posting in the elite regiment of the Russian airborne division, but the bullying goes on – if anything it’s got worse
Conscript Tolya has been moved again, this time to a show regiment. Life suddenly looks rather better, but is it for real?
Throughout Russian and Soviet history, the intellectual has played a central and hugely influential role in society. Today, that has changed. A recent internet vote on the country’s most influential intellectual saw instead postmodern ambiguity emerge victorious, writes Lyubov Borusyak
Our conscript, Tolya, has left basic training. He hopes that things will be different, but his hopes are soon dashed when he meets his demobbers or dembels.
Letters are a life-line for Tolya. The army’s a mysterious entity, unknowable by anyone outside it, the conscript reflects. Awful though it is, he wouldn’t have missed it. He’s learned a lot. And even (possibly) made a friend
Anastasia Baburova and Stanislav Markelov were gunned down in a neo-Nazi contract killing a year ago. In this moving tale Andrei Loshak tells us why he and his friend, who also suffered neo-Nazi violence, will be going on the Moscow march in their memory
In this third excerpt from his letters, our Russian conscript ends up in hospital, with time to reflect on what lies ahead. He reflects on the bullying of the ‘bitches’ by the ‘grandpas’. So deeply entrenched is it, he reckons, that the army would fall apart without it.
