The Russian Restoration

To Play the King

By Garry Kasparov

It is difficult to believe that anyone could underestimate the danger of a wealthy, aggressive and nuclear petro-state that has no respect for the rule of law inside or outside its borders. And yet we constantly hear about Russia’s prosperity and Putin's popularity, which are two sides of the same myth. [subscribe]

Editorial

By Benjamin Ramm

This issue of The Liberal is devoted to exploring Russia in the age of Putin, with a view to the challenges facing her citizens and her government in the decade ahead. [more]

INTERVIEW

Akhmed Zakayev

Speaks to Vanora Bennett

Like many Chechens, Zakayev explains the conflict with Russia in terms of basic cultural incompatibility. The Russian state is hierarchical in spirit, a legacy of its history of serfdom and feudal rule. Russian subjects are resigned to living without freedom; Chechens can never be. [more]

1917 - 2007

From Autocracy to Anarchy

By Sergei Roy

On 27th February 2007, you could not buy the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in Moscow for love nor money – something unheard of since the heady days of perestroika. [more]

AMERICAN POLITICS

The Naming of the Beasts

By Tom Lane

Aspirants to the highest office not only have to name and define their enemies, but avoid being named and defined themselves. Being Adam is fine, but the worst fate is to be “the word made flesh”. [more]

POLITICS

Switch off Mugabe’s Power

By Peter Tatchell

Robert Mugabe has murdered more black Africans than the entire South African apartheid regime. In one region of Zimbabwe, in just one decade his army slaughtered 20,000 civilians. [more]

IRAQ

The Poetics of Freedom

By Joanna Tatchell

It was a contact in Stockholm who first alerted Nabeel Yasin to the weblog in May this year. “There is a posting from a man named Abdul Karim Kadum. You won’t like what's in there, but it's something you must read”. [more]

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

The Politics of Coalition

By Simon Kovar

Liberals, recalling the experiences of 1923 and 1979, ought to be well schooled in the traps of coalition politics; in each previous case, the result has been a substantial falling away of electoral support. [more]

CULTURE & SOCIETY

Poets and Censors in the Silver Age

By Elaine Feinstein

Long before samizdat, or stealth self-publishing – impossible in Stalin’s Russia, where every incriminating scrap of paper had to be destroyed – illicit poems survived in shared memories. [subscribe]

COLUMNS

The Unfree Market

By Anatole Kaletsky

It is wishful thinking to suppose that post-Putin Russia will suffer economically if it continues to turn its back on the experiment with democracy initiated by Mikhail Gobachev, one quickly subverted by the anarchy and corruption of the Yeltsin years. [subscribe]

COLUMNS

Camera...rolling...Cut!

By Clemency Burton-Hill

As I sat in the Tate Modern listening to Tony Blair wax lyrical about Labour’s record on the arts, it struck me as ironic that the phrase with which he chose to describe this decade was “a golden age”. [more]

EASTER

Saving Jesus from Christianity

By Simon Kovar

Far from wishing to found a new Church – still less one that would seek to wage bloody wars for temporal power over bodies and souls – Jesus wished to dismantle institutional and clerical barriers between man and God. [subscribe]

LETTERS FROM ABROAD

Letter from

Yerevan

By Jonathan Fryer

The sense of loss goes beyond the more than one million Armenian dead and the salami-style reduction of national territory over the decades. One can sense it outside Yerevan’s city centre, with its false air of prosperity and modernity. [subscribe]

LETTERS FROM ABROAD

Letter from Transnistria

By John Thorne

Although nobody recognises its sovereignty, Transnistria operates likes a separate state, with its own money, banks, stamps and government. But it still follows Russia’s cues, as I discovered during a recent visit. [subscribe]

AD LIB

Dinner for Six

By Sandi Toksvig

Whilst I suppose it would be educational to sit down amidst an array of great thinkers, my inclination would always be to invite wit rather than wisdom, and I suspect if I picked the right people, I might just get both. [subscribe]

NEW SHORT FICTION

Alpatovka

By Alexander Selin

Families in Alpatovka tend to be large – ten, fifteen members of more – but as a rule, after a few years five or six of them have gone missing. People in Alpatovka are fairly relaxed about this. [subscribe]

CHARITY OF THE MONTH

The Great Game in Central Asia

Human Rights Watch

HRW's London Director Tom Porteous discusses the lack of progress towards political reform made by Central Asia’s former Soviet republics since the break up of the U.S.S.R. [subscribe]