Humor and Brutality in Moscow's Red Square

Masha Gessen, Russian investigative journalist who visited us March 8th, is back in Moscow (against the advice of her friends, family and readers).

Here's a recent post from the "Latitudes" blog of the New York Times / International Herald Tribune.

MOSCOW — We spent most of April Fool’s Day laughing. My friends and I started right around midnight on Saturday when, sitting around my kitchen table, we began talking about the protest scheduled for the next day, April 1: Strolling in Red Square while wearing white ribbons....

More.

Read More......

Russia: What Happens Now?

"[T]here is the habit that revolutions have of turning on their own. I have first-hand experience of this. Our revolution has not yet won, and fellow organizers have already on occasion asked me to keep my lesbian, Jewish, and American-passported self off the front pages."

"I realize that in throwing myself headfirst into organizing protests, as I have done in the last couple of months, I have given up the rarefied environment of a certain subset of Moscow intelligentsia, with its cultivated air of tolerance. In the worst-case scenario, the new Russia will be a xenophobic society that will have no place for someone like me. In the best-case scenario, I and others like me will have to come out of our shells and use a newly created public space to educate people about our differences." More.

So writes Masha Gessen today in her blog for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Russian journalist visits Albany on Thursday 3/8.

Read More......