AUTHOR'S BIO
Alexander Etkind
Alexander Etkind, a Saint Petersburg native, is Reader of Russian literature at Cambridge.
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No Country for Young Oligarchs
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2011-10-05This past June, Mikhail Prokhorov, one of Russia's richest men, agreed to lead a political party to contest December’s parliamentary elections, seeming to believe that his business experience would boost his political prospects. He was wrong.... read Comments: 6 Recommended: 0 Read: 10301
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Putin’s History Lessons
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2009-09-15
Whereas Soviet ideology was always oriented toward the future, today’s official Russian ideology is focused squarely - and almost obsessively - on the past. Vladimir Putin typifies this ideology, which reflects the deep, unresolved problems of his own era.... read Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 16736
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The Kremlin’s Failing Monopoly
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2009-02-26Few Russian policymakers, much less the Russian public, expected oil and gas prices to collapse as they have. If prices remain stagnant at current levels, the regime that Vladimir Putin created - one based on a combination of repression and redistribution - is doomed to failure.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 16021
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A Communist Party without Communism
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2007-12-11Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anointment of Alexander Medvedev to succeed him shows that Russia’s leaders have not changed a whit. Putin's goal now will be to construct an omnipresent political party that will reduce the state to a legal fiction.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 16916
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Russia’s “Oil-for-Knowledge” Scheme
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2006-01-09Whenever you fill up your European compact car’s gas tank, or that of your American SUV, you pay as much as a Russian schoolteacher earns in a month. And every time you pay, you subsidize a regime that relies on energy, not information, as its main product. You finance the pre-modern and the inefficient, and perhaps worse: every time you pay, you may be collaborating with political evil.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 38244
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Putin’s Deadly “Great Game”
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2005-03-15President Vladimir Putin will visit Ukraine, the scene of his biggest foreign policy blunder, this weekend. Given his myopic actions at home, where he seems increasingly incapable of dealing with any institution that has any degree of autonomy, this seems unlikely. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 20634
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Remembering the Gulag
Alexander Etkind Series: The Worldly Philosophers 2004-06-17"There is nothing more inconspicuous than a monument," said the Austrian writer Robert Musil a hundred years ago. From the ruins of another empire, Russia's, I would add: There is nothing more conspicuous than an absent monument. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 29986
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Putin's Puppies and Russian Democracy
Alexander Etkind Series: A Window on Russia 2004-04-06When overseeing military exercises from aboard a nuclear submarine near Scandinavia, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had developed a new missile system, the finest in the world. It was not his most convincing moment. Three older missiles, launched in his presence, failed to reach their targets on Kamchatka. The submarine that Putin was on resembled the Kursk, which exploded during a similar military exercise in 2000, killing 118 sailors. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 20765
