The Volga Car Factory in Togliatti is the biggest in Russia. The management recently announced 7,500 redundancies, all before the end of the year. How are the city and its inhabitants coping? на русском языке
With a media epidemic of obesity-panic, do we not have a right to choose ill health and an early death?
Many young Russians brought up in institutional care have ended up homeless because regional authorities are ignoring their responsibility to house them. Georgy Borodyansky reports from Omsk.
Russia’s industrial cities are more than a blot on the landscape. They are the source of appalling chemical pollution, a problem that neither the authorities nor the oligarch owners seem to have any interest in addressing. But people still have to live there.
In Kyiv, Metropolitan Pavel – aka ‘Pasha the Merc’ – has succeeded in closing down Ukraine’s only specialist HIV/AIDS clinic, which was inconveniently located in the grounds of the Pecherskaya Lavra. A new clinic has yet to open, and now all the patients can do is pray…
Protests against the proposed mining of nickel and copper in the heart of Russia’s Black Earth belt have been escalating, and so has the media smear campaign against the protesters. Konstantin Rubakhin, an activist himself, sees this as a positive sign.
Harsh sentences have been meted out to Russians who took part in last year’s political demonstrations on Bolotnaya Square. But possibly none more chilling that the compulsory treatment in a mental hospital ordained recently for Mikhail Kosenko. Our regular contributor, Daniil Kotsyubinsky, discuss
Russia has an ageing population, a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, and an inadequate system of palliative care for terminally ill patients that leaves Russians feeling betrayed. The failure of authorities to tackle the problems makes a bad situation worse, says Olga Usenko.
The Russian Orthodox Church has, since the late 1990s, become an increasingly powerful force in Ukrainian politics and society. But the violent desecration of a piece of modern art shows it is also increasingly intolerant of different viewpoints.
In most parts of the world the incidence of HIV/AIDS is falling, but official figures for Russia show 200 new cases being recorded every day. And as Grigory Tumanov reports, if you’re a migrant worker or immigrant, you face not only discrimination and stigma, but deportation as well.
The decision to initiate the badger culling scheme is not only ill-informed, but deliberately shallow. It is time to consider a positive and viable solution rather than scapegoating a species.
The fertile territories around Voronezh have long been referred to as Russia’s ‘breadbasket’. They also hold the last major nickel reserves in Europe, and the mining companies are about to move in...
