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☆ Meet the woman who engineered Russia's wartime economy and helped secure another term for Putin
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Huileng Tan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Russian central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina has played a key role in stabilizing Russia's sanctions-hit economy. It's also aimed at the woman behind him: Elvira Nabiullina, the country's central bank governor, who plays a chief role in keeping Russia's wartime economy ticking. At the time, she was the first woman to lead a Group of Eight, or G8, central bank. In 2015, Euromoney, a finance trade publication, named Nabiullina Central Bank Governor of the Year. In December, she issued a warning that Russia's economy was at risk of overheating.

Persons: Elvira Nabiullina, —, Putin, It's, Nabiullina, Daniel McDowell, McDowell, wined, Christine Lagarde, Nabiullina —, Richard Portes, Portes —, Portes, Anders Åslund, Åslund, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Yaroslav Kuzminov, Kuzminov, Nabiullina's, Alan Harvey, Herman Gref —, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, Maxim Shemetov, Michel Camdessus, she's, isn't, Sergei Aleksashenko, Alexei Makarkin, Vladimir Pesnya, Nabiulina, let's Organizations: Ukraine, Service, Russian, KGB, Syracuse University, Kremlin, International Monetary Fund, US, London Business School, Moscow Times, Bloomberg, Higher School of Economics, —, Moscow State University, SNS, USSR, Industrial Union Board, Gref, Central Bank Governor, Nabiullina Central Bank Governor, Banker, Central Banker, IMF, Monetary Fund, Financial Times, Government, Political Technologies, Wall Street Journal, RBC, Politico Europe Locations: Russian, Ukraine, Russia, Brussels, Nabiullina, Swedish, Moscow, Ufa, Central Russia, Tatars, Crimea, Euromoney, Europe, steadying

☆ Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-19 | by ( Gary Saul Morson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Journal Editorial Report: Rifts emerge among the Republican presidential candidates. Image: Mohammed Saber/ShutterstockAs I read about Harvard students demonstrating in favor of Hamas and educated people proclaiming that “decolonization” should be pursued “by any means necessary,” I thought of Dostoevsky’s reaction, a century and a half ago, to atrocities committed by the Ottomans as they suppressed uprisings among their Slavic subjects. This was a case, apparently unknown to today’s “decolonizers,” in which a Muslim empire persecuted colonized Christians. The European press was then filled with reports that now seem familiar. Whole families were wiped out; women raped and tortured; living people humiliated and corpses abused; children slowly murdered before their parents’ eyes; and, in one case that particularly shocked Dostoevsky, a young child forced to watch her father being flayed alive “completely.” The child, Dostoevsky reported, was being cared for in Russia, where she repeatedly fainted as she recalled what she witnessed.

Persons: Mohammed Saber, “, Dostoevsky Organizations: Republican, Harvard, Ottomans Locations: Russia

Adding Ukraine to NATO and the European Union would be the biggest geopolitical shift in our lifetime. If we bring Ukraine into that European Union, that would be one of the most consequential geopolitical tipping points since East Germany was united with West Germany. Who was the Russian spy in East Germany who was introduced to international relations by running the KGB there? It was Vladimir Putin whose big introduction to geopolitics was watching the magnet of the West melt down East Germany and lead to the unification of these two countries. The big decision point going forward is, when do we say to the Ukrainians we may have to settle for a dirty deal?

Persons: I’m Tom Friedman, they’re, Who, Vladimir Putin, Putin, we’re, I’ve, We’re, Peter the, It’s, Dostoevsky, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Sakharov Organizations: Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Orthodox Church, European Union, NATO, EU, Union, East Locations: Kyiv, Ukraine, Saint, NATO, Russia, East Germany, West Germany, East Germany’s Germany, Russian, Germany, Siberia

☆ Pope acknowledges his Russia comments were faulty
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-04 | by ( Philip Pullella | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

[1/3] Pope Francis holds a news conference aboard the papal plane on his flight back after visiting Mongolia, September 4, 2023. "I was not thinking of imperialism when I said that," Francis said about his comments last month. The comments caused an uproar in Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin has invoked the legacies of the two Russian monarchs in justifying his invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of its territory. They were welcomed by the Kremlin, which praised the pope for his knowledge of Russian history. There were dark political years in Russia but the heritage is there, available to all," he said.

Persons: Pope Francis, Ciro Fusco, Pope, Catholic Church Pope, Francis, tsars Peter I, Catherine II, Vladimir Putin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Peter, Catherine, Francis said, John XXIV, Philip Pullella Organizations: REUTERS Acquire, Catholic Church, Kremlin, Communist Party, Vatican, coy, Thomson Locations: Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine, Kremlin China, China, Vatican, Beijing, Vietnam, Marseilles

MOSCOW, July 12 (Reuters) - Russia is decaying in a potent brew of absurdity and repression that is comparable to the Leonid Brezhnev-era of the Soviet Union, Oleg Orlov, one of the Russia's most respected human rights campaigners, told Reuters. One of the leaders of the Memorial rights group, which won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 a year after being banned and dissolved in Russia, Orlov stood by his articles and cast Russia as a country gripped by the demons of history. "Russia is going backwards," Orlov told Reuters in his Moscow flat over a glass of the traditional fermented kvas. "For Putin, war is his political technology," Orlov said. Current Russian levels of repression, he said, could be compared to the Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union after the arrest of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1965.

Persons: Leonid Brezhnev, Oleg Orlov, Orlov, Wagner, Russia, Vladimir Putin's, Putin, Brezhnev, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, unpatriotic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky's, Tatiana, Guy Faulconbridge, Filipp Lebedev, Nick Macfie Organizations: Reuters, Memorial, Solidarity, West, Thomson Locations: MOSCOW, Russia, Soviet Union, Moscow, Ukraine, Soviet, Afghanistan, Chechen, Russian, Tbilisi

☆ Review: A Composer’s ‘Lear’ Freshens a Shakespeare Evening
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( Zachary Woolfe | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

With tolling bells, grim chords and an uneasy melody, the opening immediately brings to mind Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” another tale of a king gone mad. This first section, “The Divided Kingdom,” shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations over the past few years. (Aucoin is currently working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” planned for the Met.) The Tchaikovsky lacked the passionate opulence that is this score’s reason for being.

Persons: “, “ Boris Godunov, ”, Kurosawa’s, —, Yannick Nézet, Dostoevsky’s, Bernstein, Tchaikovsky Organizations: Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, hiccups Locations: “ Heath, ”

☆ Russia's Medvedev snaps back after U.S. appeal over Ukraine war
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the most deadly wars in Europe since World War Two and the deepest crisis in Moscow's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Medvedev said the missiles could be placed 100 miles (160 km) off the U.S. coast, adding: "So rejoice! He was speaking after the U.S. embassy to Russia released a video that it called an "an appeal to the people of Russia". The 50-second video included images of the impact of bombing in Ukraine, saying what was happening there "is not worthy of you". Since the war began, Medvedev's rhetoric has become increasingly vitriolic though his published views sometimes chime with thinking at the top levels of the Kremlin elite.

☆ Crypto winter highlights gold’s warming qualities
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-25 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

That’s why crypto pioneers developed stablecoins, which peg their market price to old-fashioned fiat currencies. The FTX founder agreed that digital tokens were impossible to value since they generated no cash flow. In other words, the entire crypto world has the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. In such a nightmare scenario, access to a decentralised, anonymised type of digital money could prove indispensable. In this world bitcoin serves as the lifeboat for civilisation, offering protection against both anarchy and the surveillance state.

☆ Breakingviews: Crypto winter highlights gold’s warming qualities
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-25 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

LONDON, Nov 25 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The crypto winter is bitterly cold. The FTX founder agreed that digital tokens were impossible to value since they generated no cash flow. In other words, the entire crypto world has the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. In such a nightmare scenario, access to a decentralised, anonymised type of digital money could prove indispensable. In this world bitcoin serves as the lifeboat for civilisation, offering protection against both anarchy and the surveillance state.

☆ Putin — who has jailed critics and rivals — took a nonsensical detour in his major foreign policy speech to rail against 'cancel culture'
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-27 | by ( Jake Epstein | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Putin delivered a nonsensical speech about Western "cancel culture" on Thursday in Moscow. What began as commentary about Russian foreign policy quickly transitioned to a rant. "The so-called cancel culture is basically a cancellation of culture that annihilates everything that is alive and creative. This is not the first time Putin has railed against cancel culture throughout his eight-month-long unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, he also lashed out against cancel culture in a recent rant about gender fluidity.

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