As his nation was fighting a major war, a Russian general came to the conclusion that the current political dispensation was incapable and started to move his troops from the frontlines towards the country s capital in what seemed to be an armed coup d etat.
With Russian forces retreating in eastern and southern Ukraine in the face of a masterful Ukrainian counteroffensive, some commentators in the West have argued that the war the Kremlin launched in February must not end with the “humiliation” of President Vladimir Putin or Russia. In fact, the opposite is true: Putin s appalling aggression must leave Russia thoroughly chastened on the world stage.
The current (May 12) issue of the New York Review of Books carries Gary Saul Morson s chilling essay/review (behind the NYRB paywall) taking up March 1917: The Red Wheel/Node III (8 March–31 March): Book 3 and Between Two Millstones: Book 2, Exile in America, 1978–1994, the most recent of the books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be translated and published in English. Professor Morson channels Solzhenitsyn s thinking on the preface to
The wave of cultural backlash against Russians is not only discriminatory but also wrongheaded, counterproductive and may end up playing well into Putin s hands by confirming his antagonistic worldview of the West
Eleven days into the Kremlin s invasion of Ukraine, a wave of cultural backlash against Russians (in a sense, a wave of Russophobia) seems to have swept over Western countries. Russian artists, musici.