Tag Archives: Vladimir Putin

Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 58

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• Week of 28.12.2013

2013

Thousands across eastern Canada still in the dark | Stephen Harper thanks ‘brave men and women in uniform’ in annual Christmas message | Canada departs Afghanistan in 100 days | Featured Article: The Corporate “Free Speech” Racket – How corporations are using the First Amendment to destroy government regulation | Associated Press announces Top 10 stories of 2013 | Music: Ian and Sylvia, “Got No More Home Than A Dog” | Edward Snowden says government surveillance now far worse than George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned | Activists clear to come home after Russian charges dropped | Wisconsin Has So Much Cheese They’re Using it to De-Ice the Roads | Botched circumcision allegations against Quebec doctor grow | 27 Things to Leave Behind in 2014

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World

Why the World Needs to Pay Attention to Pussy Riot

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RICHARD BOUDREAUX’S euphemistic coverage yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, of an “anti-Putin band” underscores the respective limits of polite discourse both here and in the former Soviet state. In Putin’s Russia, which is increasingly also the Mother Russia of the Orthodox Church, the cost of transgressing polite discourse’s state invigilated boundaries mounts.

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Current Events, History, Wayne's Picks

Russia’s War with the West is Not Over

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Vladimir Putin

WHEN IN THE final days of his anti-climactic election campaign Vladimir Putin sought the blessing of the Theotokos of Tikhvin, he confirmed symbolically an attachment both to the Russian Orthodox Church and the czarist tradition. Add to the pious optics of this gesture the state dominated, and eastern Europe dominating, megacorporation Gazprom as well as the country’s informal ‘silovik’ network of former security operatives—embedded into the country’s banking, commercial, media, and energy sectors—and one would have in a single photo-op a complete representation of the current Russian state.

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