Tag: Russia
Alternatively euphemized in the press as “separatists,” “activists,” “armed men,” “militants,” and “commandos,” Russian paramilitary forces with heavy assault rifles and armor bearing no insignia stormed municipal buildings in Eastern Ukraine this weekend. At least one Ukrainian officer was killed on Sunday and several were injured, according to the Times. This morning, paramilitaries defied the […]
They were “The New Artists” of St. Petersburg, an underground collective operating out of communal apartment in the early 1980s, influenced by German Expressionism, Pop Art and Primitivism. The collective was founded by artist/philosopher Timur Novikov, attracted the likes of Brian Eno, Andy Warhol and John Cage, and sprouted the sexually ambiguous and homoerotic “New Academy” movement. The work and […]
We know that Russia Today aka “RT” is a ridiculous front for Kremlin propaganda. We know about Putin’s massive crackdown across the Russian media landscape. What’s left? Calvert Journal has published a comprehensive “media compass” in the style of New York Magazine’s approval matrix, ranking the left-over outlets from lowbrow to highbrow and state-controlled to independent. Turns […]
Have no fear, Crimea! Jared Leto and his shitty band have arrived to Kiev for a concert. There he is — the actor who shouted out “the dreamers” in “the” Ukraine during his Oscar acceptance speech (which was censored by the Russian state-controlled television) — visiting what is left of the protest camps of Maidan and looking […]
Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, the two members of Pussy Riot who were recently whipped by Cossack cavemen at an Olympic protest they were holding 20 miles from Sochi, got assailed again, this time in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. According to the Guardian, the human rights activists were there to look into the […]
Russia’s state-run Channel One cancelled its planned live broadcast of the Oscars last Sunday, to make room for “live coverage” of “the situation in Ukraine,” aka Russia’s Crimean invasion with a signature Kremlin media spin. When the 86th Academy Awards aired in Russia a day later, Jared Leto’s Best Supporting Actor Award acceptance speech was edited out, Rain TV reports. “To […]
Russia’s surprise invasion of Ukraine has pundits on the right positively giddy, as they point to statements made during the elections in 2008 and 2012 by then-candidates Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney. But long before someone presumably ghostwrote that foreign policy position for Palin or Romney walked back his stance, it was liberal Cosmo Kramer […]
Here’s a freshly-released trailer for late Aleksei Yuryevich German’s last film Hard To Be A God. Based on the novel by Strugatsky Brothers (who also wrote Roadside Picnic which inspired Tarkovsky’s Stalker), the black and white sci-fi Russian-language film premiered earlier at Rotterdam. Watch the trailer below, via Twitch, for erratic gorgeously-filmed Middle Age-like chaos… with something very alien, far less […]
Last month, Lena Klimova — founder of “Children-404: We Exist” LGBT youth support group on Vkontakte and Facebook — was the fifth person to be officially charged under Russia’s “anti-gay propaganda” legislation. She was just acquitted, on the technicality that she did not actually register the social media group; she merely administrated it. The charges followed a complaint from the […]
This is the new Pussy Riot for “Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,” starting with delicate music and some waves, until the bright balaclavas emerge triumphantly out of the water and hell breaks loose all over the Olympic International Committee’s fantasy of non-involvement. Though the IOC’s Mark Adam said “what happened wasn’t in the context […]
