Word: russianizing
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Peter Podobry, known to many Harvard Square pedestrians for his amplified guitar stylings in front of Au Bon Pain during warm summer evenings, shakes his head while talking with another musician in his native Russian. He fears the new regulations may force him into another career...
...It’s a bit of a conundrum for friends,” Dean Hunt, Schoenhof’s Foreign Books employee and long-time language maestro, admits with a chuckle. Because, despite the fact that Hunt knows French, German, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Ukranian, Finnish and a smattering of Slavic languages, he hasn’t ventured off this continent in 18 years. “I hate flying,” he says, at home with the store’s obscure volumes and multilingual clientele. Hunt leans back decisively...
...Kremlin persecution of Russia’s powerful oligarchs has become routine: An obscenely rich Russian criticizes the president, often on his own TV station; Putin sends ski-masked officers from the Federal Security Service—the successor organization to the KGB—to confiscate assets and arrest the upstart; and the oligarch either escapes abroad—usually to London—or languishes in prison until he accedes to the president’s demands. Khodorkovsky hasn’t gotten past the languishing-in-prison stage, and, unlike his predecessors, it looks as though...
Khodorkovsky’s likely imprisonment is not just a tragic prospect for Russia’s wealthiest individual. Russia will lose its most trusted entrepreneur, which will make foreign investors more cautious. It has taken years for the Russian economy to buck the perception of dysfunctional cronyism; the latest ham-fisted attack on the most prominent Russian industrialist—and its seizure of 44 percent of Yukos—only makes the business climate more unpredictable and unattractive. Indeed, capital has once again started to flee from the country, and it now looks as though an anticipated merger...
...grab also throws Russia even farther off the path toward liberal democracy. Though the government threw up a shoddy facade of legality, every time the Kremlin goes after a political enemy for tax evasion, it chips away at the impartial rule of law. If the president wants to purge Russian industry of those who took advantage of privatization, he should go after all of the profiteers. But Putin would never do that—it would upset too many investors, foreign and domestic. Instead, he just waits until the oligarchs start to speak up. So in Russia, for the time...