Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

https://www.svoboda.org/a/27686926.htmlRadio Liberty, ‘Kremlin Firewall’ (in Russian), 20 April 2016.

The vast majority of the territory of the Soviet Union was ‘closed’ to foreigners: they were not allowed to go there. There were also numerous ‘closed towns’ – sometimes large cities – where even Soviet citizens needed a special pass to live or visit. For foreigners there was no such thing as a visa for the Soviet Union. The visa stipulated the places to be visited and was valid for travel only within a twenty-five-kilometre radius of the centre of that place – provided no ‘closed’ areas fell within it.

In 2009 it was announced that the Russian government was to create a place of technological advancement and innovation at Skolkovo, just to the west of Moscow.

Oprichnik was the term given to a member of the Oprichnina , an organization established by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to govern a division of Russia from 1565 to 1572. The Telluria of the third title is an imagined republic with large deposits of ‘tellurium’ peacefully snuggled in the Altai Mountains.

Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University Press, 1999).

The Zemsky Sobor was a type of feudal parliament, first called by Ivan the Terrible in 1549. In 1613 it elected Mikhail Romanov to the throne, beginning a dynasty which lasted until Nicholas II was removed by the Revolution of February 1917.

Moscow-City is the business district of the Russian capital, where the skyscrapers have gone up since the collapse of the USSR. The name was chosen as a direct reference to ‘the City of London’, the British capital’s business district.

Stalin ordered the building of seven imposing skyscrapers of similar design, nicknamed ‘wedding cakes’, including Moscow State University, the Ukraina Hotel and the Foreign Ministry. In the post-Soviet period an eighth has been built.

A line from the untitled poem, which begins, ‘Now I am dead in my grave with my lips moving’. http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/library/Mandelstam_Poems_Ilya-Bernstein.pdf. ‘The Poems of Osip Mandelstam’, trans Ilya Bernstein (EPC Digital Edition, 2014, p. 40).

Peter the Great brutally put down a rebellion by his soldiers known as the streltsy – from the verb, strelyat , meaning ‘to shoot’ – who were protesting about their conditions. Some were publicly executed on Red Square.

Within a few months of the Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the Russian capital back to Moscow from Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg, later Leningrad; now once again St Petersburg).

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2008/03/14/stalinskij-proekt-u-stola-vlasti. ‘The Stalinist Project: At the Table of Power’ (in Russian), 14 March 2008.

In 1722, Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, which carefully delineated the standing of everyone in the military, government and court. ‘Feudalism’ in Russia effectively lasted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

This is what the peasants had to do in tsarist times if the Tsar’s carriage went past.

A cargo cult is a belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society.

https://texty-pesen.ru/zato-my-delaem-rakety.html. Yuri Vizbor, ‘But we build missiles’, words and music (in Russian).

In August 1991, hard-liners in the Communist leadership tried to seize power to prevent the President, Mikhail Gorbachev, from signing an agreement with the constituent republics of the USSR, which, they believed, would lead to the break-up of the country. Their so-called coup lasted less than three days and had the effect of speeding up the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1993, there was a stand-off between the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and his opponents in Parliament. After fighting on the streets of Moscow had left dozens dead, Yeltsin took the decision to send in the tanks and bombard the Parliament building, where his opponents had barricaded themselves in.

The Russian (and before that, Soviet) Army used to be staffed by professional officers and conscript soldiers. Under President Putin a category has been introduced of ‘contract’ soldiers, who sign up for a specific period and who are paid, unlike conscripts.

https://ria.ru/20150619/1079035580.html. ‘Russian Defence Ministry Orders Research on ‘Colour Revolutions’ (in Russian), 19 June 2015.

http://www.strana-oz.ru/2013/2/klassifikaciya-i-ranzhirovanie-ugroz(in Russian).

Vladimir Vysotsky was a popular singer of ballads in the 1960s and 1970s whose often humorous songs were regarded as being on the edge of what was acceptable to the Communist leadership. http://vysotskiy-lit.ru/vysotskiy/stihi-varianty/317.htm. Letter to the Editor (in Russian).

The Observer , 17 March 1985.

https://tass.ru/politika/2536355(in Russian), 17 December 2015.

Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Khatyn is a Belarusian village where the entire population of more than 150 people was slaughtered, mostly burned alive, by the Nazis in retaliation for an attack by Soviet partisans. Eight people managed to survive. Babiy Yar is the site of the mass extermination of the Jews and other residents of Kiev by the Germans in 1941. It is believed that nearly 34,000 Jews were massacred in less than forty-eight hours.

Alexander Pushkin, Letter to Pyotr Vyazemsky (8 June 1827).

The Russian term is ‘ okolofutbol ’, literally meaning ‘around football’. It suggests that the hooligan movement is based on football without really being a part of it. ‘The thugs’ game’ conveys the idea, without, perhaps, the irony of the Russian.

The Communist International (Comintern), known also as the Third International (1919–43), was an international organization led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that advocated world communism and carried out subversive acts to try to bring this about.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism; Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, ‘bare life’ and homo sacer . The concept of biopolitics (see below) informs many of his writings; Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher. His subjects include continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology.