by Antoaneta Dimitrova on February 20, 2014
(This is a guest post by Antoaneta Dimitrova, associate professor at the University of Leiden. We have edited for style.)
As the protests in Ukraine descended into violence in recent days and weeks, commentators focused on Russia’s geopolitical game and the EU’s incapability to counteract it. It’s hard to doubt Russia’s leadership was seriously perturbed by the Orange revolution and is determined not to lose influence in Ukraine again. It also seems clear that Putin’s intention in urging President Yanukovich not to sign the long negotiated Association agreement with the EU has been to encourage Ukraine to join the Russia-dominated Eurasian Economic Union instead. According to a friendly source, a treaty for Ukraine is currently under preparation in Moscow. Further speculations that Putin and more recently Medvedev have urged Yanukovich to use violence are still unproven, if plausible, and smack of the justifiably forgotten science of Kremlinology. [click to continue…]
by Antoaneta Dimitrova on May 29, 2012
Despite being modestly defined as a Russian fairytale by its author, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty combines, in an original way, Russian style fiction and social science. Its originality lies in making the history of an idea into fiction and doing it in such a way that the combination of documentary and fiction does not come across as false history or as historical literature, but as a complex, engaging, exciting epic illuminating questions of economics and politics that are normally too dry for art. By interweaving the stories of numerous characters with historical events and a grand narrative describing economic and social processes of several decades, Spufford fits into the best traditions of Russian fiction, but his focus on ideas rather than emotions makes his approach profoundly un-Russian. This is, to my mind, rather a plus than a weakness of the book, since the great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th century are unrivalled in portraying the great mysteries of the human soul in turbulent times. What they have not done, what hardly anyone has done, is to make a calm, objective, almost scientific investigation of the ideas and relationships that made the success of the Soviet regime possible in the 1950s and 1960s, at the genuine and idealistic belief of citizens and elites at the time that, as Spufford’s Kantorovich character reasons, ‘if he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better’ (p. 11).
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