Post-Soviet

One popular way for developing nations to announce to the world that they have made it onto the global stage in the early 21st century is to host a major international sporting event: From China's Beijing Olympics in 2008, to Russia's upcoming Winter Games in 2014, South Africa's World Cup stewardship in 2010 and Brazil's double coup of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics; staging a spectacle of this magnitude is a clear signal to the world that you are now a country of note.  This was certainly the motivation for Poland and Ukraine's joint bid to host the Euro 2012 soccer championships this month.  But the event that was suppose to b

Imagine for a moment a country a few days away from national elections, a place where the once all-powerful ruling party is fading in the eyes of the citizens, thanks to an economy burdened by low wages and rising unemployment, where even the prime minister – who has carefully cultivated an image equal parts action hero and everyman – is looking increasingly small; it all seems like a recipe for an electoral drubbing.  But the country is Russia, and elections, like the one scheduled for this Sunday, really aren't suppose to bring about change, especially in the era of Vladi

It was one of those simple, glad-handing moments that national leaders find their days filled with; last Friday Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin climbed into a prototype for Russia's first domestically-designed and built hybrid car along with billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who financed the construction of the “Yo-mobile,” for a drive from Putin's dacha (vacation home) to President Dmitry Medvedev's nearby compound.

Last Tuesday, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on whether or not President Barack Obama’s foreign policy signaled America’s decline as the driving force in global affairs: Dan Senor and Mort Zuckerman argued yes; Wesley Clark and Bernard-Henri Levy argued no.

Now, I’m not talking about the seeming inability of print and broadcast news outlets to successfully adapt to newfangled inventions like the Internets and Electronic Mail, but rather their slavish dedication to a peculiar worldview where the Cold War never ended.

Is the future of international relations being written in the waters off the coast of Somalia?

Last Monday, Yahoo pulled the plug on their once-popular GeoCities network.  If you surfed the web in the late 1990s, then you probably visited your share of GeoCities sites, a big part of the reason Yahoo paid $3 billion for GeoCities back in 1999 (GeoCities were once the third most-popular Web destination).  The idea of GeoCities was that individual sites were grouped by theme into virtual “cities” – for example, Wall Street was the “city” for business-themed pages – it was a forerunner to the social networking sites that would eventually replace it.

The media in Russia won a rare victory on Tuesday when a judge in a Moscow courtroom struck down the claim of Josef Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, that the newspaper Novaya Gazeta had damaged Stalin's “honor and dignity” by claiming in April that the former Soviet leader was, among other things, “a bloodthirsty cannibal” for ordering numerous purges of his enemies, both real and imagined (“Stalin” by the way, was the nom de guerre of Iosef Dzhugashvili, and means “steel” in Russian). Grandson Yevgeny was suing Novaya Gazeta for libel on behalf of the memory of his grandfather.