Every Wednesday, The Interpreter’s managing editor James Miller will be speaking with Dr. Matt Sienkiewicz, a professor at Boston College, about the major headlines of the week. If you have questions you’d like Matt to address in future episodes, feel free to tweet to him: @mediastudied. If you have feedback on the content feel free to tweet to James: @MillerMENA. […]
Yesterday, Russian state-owned media outlets carried a “leaked” report that the imprisoned Pussy Riot members were included in the draft amnesty bill. Today, it has been announced that the Supreme Court has thrown out their sentences anyway. As their prison terms are set to expire early next year, this is being interpreted by many as […]
Dan Kaszeta is a chemical weapons expert, but he has also spent many years of his life studying Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc. He raises many good points about the deep internal divisions within Ukrainian society. As Ukraine is now in the midst of its second period of major popular unrest in less […]
RIA Novosti is, or perhaps “was,” a state-owned news source that was still regarded as fairly balanced and objective. Its articles, in English and Russian, were typically lacking the kind of pro-Kremlin spin often found in, say, Izvestia. Though some editorials were perhaps more clearly in this line (like the sensational article about the Washington […]
One of the many scandals related to the construction of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the environmental impact of the project has been flagged by many experts. But it’s not just the environment that is in danger. Heavy rains and high risks of landslides have already washed away construction sites, and there are fears […]
Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, a member of the punk rock group Pussy Riot, has written a letter from prison, describing the harsh conditions there. Alyokhina is due to be released soon, so the letter can be seen as more a witness for those prisoners who are still incarcerated. However, after publishing the letter in The New […]
The following is a translation a report written by opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and Solidarity activist Leonid Martynyuk, detailing allegations of rampant corruption in the preparations for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics The original excerpted report was published on July 7, 2013. A significant update, with many new findings and some eyeopening headlines, has been published […]
Recent history of the Russian media shows how the media system was preconditioned by the country’s political development. In the 1990s the Russian media system underwent major transformations following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The media were introduced into new realities: the market economy, the end of ideological control of the Communist Party, political […]
When the artist Pavel Pavlensky stripped naked on Red Square last month, then sat down on the cold cobblestones and nailed his scrotum to the ground, many people were not so much shocked as hoping to scrub the cringing image from their eyes. He didn’t quite gain the hipster world-wide popularity and saturation media coverage […]
Nezavisimaya Gazeta, an independent Russian daily newspaper, shines a spotlight on another one of Russia’s neighbors, Belarus. – Ed. Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko has acknowledged the woeful state of the national economy, but stopped short of admitting his own complicity in it. Experts regard the failure of the current president’s socio-economic policy as the cause of […]
