THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR BEGAN ONE HUNDRED TEN YEARS AGO; TODAY PUTIN AND ABE MET TO TALK ABOUT TALKING ABOUT SOME OF THE SAME OLD ISSUES

THE RUSSO-JAPANESE 

WAR BROKE OUT 

February 8, 1904 

THE SEA OF OKHOTSK 

off the Southeastern Shore 
of Sakhalin Island 

South Sakhalin ("Karafuto") was won by the Japanese as a result 
of  their victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 

Captured by the USSR in World War II; the entire island is part of Russia 

Still in contention: 

Four islands and groups of islets known as the Kurils (Kuriles) by the Russians, and as the Northern Territories by the Japanese;

under Soviet and then Russian control since World War II 

Some background, here 

Today on the sidelines of the Sochi Winter Olympics Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met and agreed to talk about the sticky island dispute, which has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty winding up World War II, at their next meeting, scheduled to take place again in Sochi, at the upcoming G8 summit in June of this year. 

President Putin will then visit Japan in the fall. 

SOCHI THEN AND NOW: HOME OF THE 2014 WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES

SOCHI 

IN THE 

SPOTLIGHT 

SOCHI BACK IN THE USSR 
Summer of 1984 

"In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when everything was government sponsored, it used to be packed here. You couldn't move on the beach without someone taking your place." -- Aleksandr Zakharov, General Director, Radisson Lazurnaya Hotel, Sochi, Russia, quoted in "The Road to Sochi," audio report by Robin Lustig, BBC, February 4, 2014. 

Robin Lustig also has an article in the Financial Times, "Observations from Sochi," which overlaps the radio "Documentary." The radio version has material not covered in print; well worth listening to. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Sochi today; addressed the International Olympic Committee; and cuddled with a Persian leopard. 

More Sochi here; more Putin here. 

BORIS YELTSIN WOULD HAVE BEEN EIGHTY-THREE TODAY

BORIS YELTSIN 

February 1, 1931-April 23, 2007 

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT 

BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH YELTSIN 

In Harbin, China 

November 11, 1997 

AFTER THE GAMES ARE OVER: ONE WEEK TILL THE 2014 OLYMPICS

AFTER THE 

CIRCUS 

HAS LEFT TOWN 

"WELCOME TO BEJING OLYMPIC PARK" 

THE SIGN SAYS; 

"SECURITY CHECK" 

The Summer Olympics were held in China in August 2008; the photograph was taken after another major multi-day event, the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2012. 

What will become of the Olympic venues for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, due begin this February 7? Vladimir Putin has scheduled the G8 summit for Sochi this June. 

PUTIN TELLS THE EUROPEAN UNION: HANDS OFF UKRAINE (WOULD BE GOOD)

THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT 
WOULD LIKE TO 

DECLARE UKRAINE 

A NO-GO ZONE 

FOR THE EU 

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN 

The Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was offering concessions to the Opposition today as Vladimir Putin was having a truncated summit with the European Union (the EU's way of showing its displeasure was to cancel a formal dinner). 

The EU was apparently going to keep going to Ukraine anyway. And Russia may or may not give the $15 billion aid package it promised Yanukovych even if the opposition takes power. It was said that both sides seemed to want to play up the positives. 

Accounts of the Russia-EU summit and the new developments in Ukraine can be found here and here and here and here. 

NINETY YEARS SINCE LENIN'S BODY WAS FIRST PUT ON DISPLAY

LENIN'S FIRST 

MAUSOLEUM 

ERECTED 

January 27, 1924 

SPECTATORS AT 

VLADIMIR LENIN'S TOMB 

Red Square, Moscow, 1984 

Six days after Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin died on January 21, 1924, his body was placed in a wooden mausoleum on Red Square.  The permanent monument was installed in 1930. Sixty years and some months after Lenin's death, I made my first visit to the USSR, and joined the procession going past the embalmed body; the photograph above was made then, in the summer of 1984. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been periodic calls to find another burying place for the iconic Soviet leader (Stalin's body, which joined Lenin's after his death in 1953, having been removed long ago now). 

But, instead, in 2012 the mausoleum was closed for a re-do, re-opened the following spring.  And six days ago, pilgrims came to mark the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin's death. 

A vivid diagrammatic sketch of the mausoleum is here; a glimpse of the body and a quick look at the inside of the tomb can be found in a short video, here, with additional information here. 

A photograph of the former changing of the guards ceremony is here; another view of the mausoleum, here. 

BORIS BEREZOVSKY WOULD HAVE BEEN SIXTY-EIGHT TODAY

BORIS BEREZOVSKY 

January 23, 1946-March 23, 2013 

BEREZOVSKY 

pictured at the height of 

his powers in Russia; 

died in exile in the U.K., 

an apparent suicide 

Why did he do it? 

Some contemporaneous reporting on the investigation into his death, including video of his house, here; three long appreciations, here, here, and here. 

Gone, but still in the courts. A week ago, and almost ten months after his death, the British High Court of Justice granted Aeroflot the right to appeal a case against Berezovsky (here). 

DEMONSTRATIONS IN KIEV THEN AND NOW

KIEV (KYIV) 

AT A TURNING POINT? 

"DEMONSTRATION" 

KIEV, USSR 

September 1, 1984 

A mass rally for Peace and Knowledge Day (September 1) in Soviet Ukraine:  all the participants were vetted; the leaders and speakers (on the stairs) keep their distance.  The journalists are working in the no-man's land (a kind of dry moat) between the chosen citizens and their leaders. 

An independent Ukraine emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. 

Nine years ago the Orange Revolution toppled the government. 

Two months ago demonstrators took to the street in Kiev again, after President Viktor Yanukovych chose to partner with Russia rather than the European Union. This week there have been violent clashes between protestors and the police.  Legislation severely limiting demonstrations is due to come into force tomorrow. Today the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, weighed in, protesting against the protesters. 

Reporting and analysis (and photographs and video) can be found here and here and here and here and here and here. 

Update February 18, 2014: Violence and fire and a meeting of President and Opposition, but no meeting of minds, here. 

BEHIND THE CURVE, BUT INTERESTING: VLADIMIR PUTIN PITCHES IN ENGLISH

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN 

MAKES A PITCH FOR 

YEKATERINBURG 

VLADIMIR PUTIN 

 Moscow, March 2000 

Last year Russia made a bid for the 2020 World Expo to be held in Yekaterinburg. To help promote Russia's chances, President Putin made a video appeal in English, which can be seen here (with an HD option).  It is dated June 2013; the photograph above was taken      the day of Putin's first election. 

The website for the Yekaterinburg bid is here. 

Vladimir Putin said that surely it was time for Russia to host the World Expo, but in November it was announced that Dubai had won instead. 

ONE MONTH TO GO TILL THE SOCHI OLYMPICS

LOCATION, LOCATION, 

LOCATION, AND 

SECURITY, SECURITY, 

SECURITY 

INTERIOR OF THE MOTHER RUSSIA 

MEMORIAL TO THE 

BATTLE OF STALINGRAD 

VOLGOGRAD, RUSSIA 

The world has had a few years to get used to the fact that Russia's first Winter Olympics was to be held in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, better known for its beaches than its ice skating. It had also not gone unnoticed that Sochi was uncomfortably close to the restive North Caucasus region. 

Just over a week ago, on December 29 and 30, suicide bombers struck not at Sochi but several hundred miles away at the presumably easier target of Volgograd, devastated in the pivotal World War II Battle of Stalingrad. Terror struck first a train station and then a bus, in the run-up and on the road to the Olympics. 

Read more here and here 

MANMOHAN SINGH WILL NOT SEEK ANOTHER TERM AS INDIA'S PRIME MINISTER

AFTER TEN YEARS, 

INDIA WILL HAVE A 

NEW PRIME MINISTER 

INDIAN PRIME MINISTER 

2004-2014 (planned) 

MANMOHAN SINGH 

(second from left)  

ON THE WORLD STAGE 

at the Expanded G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July 2006, with then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on his right, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev on his left, and then Chinese President Hu Jintao to Nazarbayev's left 

A selection of postmortems and appraisals 

here and here and here 

For a time it was "Singh Is King," and then... 

Singh the Placeholder, the loyal former Finance Minister 

Now to make way for Rahul Gandhi -- 

Except the polls do not make this look an auspicious time for the Congress Party Rahul Gandhi is meant to inherit the leadership of  

THE LAST DAY OF THE AUGUST 1991 SOVIET COUP

THE RUSSIA DELEGATION 

BRINGS MIKHAIL GORBACHEV 

HOME TO MOSCOW 

THE SOVIET DELEGATION 

IS ACED OUT 

Russia Vice-President ALEKSANDR RUTSKOI 
(center left, with dark hair and moustache) and 
 Russian Prime Minister IVAN SILAYEV 
(center right, with white hair) 
at the Congress of People's Deputies of 
the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic 
July 1991 

On Wednesday, August 21, 1991, a delegation of Russian leaders including Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and Prime Minister Ivan Silayev flew to Foros in the Crimea, where Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was said to have been held against his will since Sunday, August 18th.  A delegation of Soviet leaders flew in a separate plane.  Gorbachev rejected them as implicated in the coup against him, and flew back to Moscow with the Russian delegation instead.  His arrival in the early hours of August 22nd definitively ended the coup, but Gorbachev was soon to find he had stepped back into a very different political world. 

More to come in  RUSSIA REDUX 

WHY THE AUGUST COUP? THE UNION TREATY WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN SIGNED TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO TODAY

DAY THREE OF 

THE 1991 AUGUST COUP 

August 20, 1991 

NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV 
President of Kazakhstan 
Photographed in 1997 
In office in 1991, and still in office today 

From RUSSIA REDUX, Chapter Eight: 

Gorbachev has described the coup plotters "as 'egotistical careerists' who decided to act against him when it became clear that there would be no place for them in the new order."  The new order was to be brought into being by the signing of the Union Treaty on August 20, 1991; it "would have reshaped the Soviet Union as a loose confederation of sovereign states and resulted in a major government shake-up."  So it was not just some abstract concerns about intergovernmental structures which drove the conspirators, according to their patron, but the detailed knowledge about kto kogo -- who was going to do what to whom. 

For Gorbachev was convinced, afterwards, that his conversations with the top republican leaders at Novo-Ogarëvo were bugged, and what they contained was dynamite.  Gorbachev has been releasing this dynamite in pieces.  In an early version he revealed that: 

Yeltsin, Nazarbayev, and I already had an understanding that once the Union Treaty had been signed, and without waiting for the new constitution, we would move toward new organs of power and new elections.  We were thinking in terms of agreeing this [sic] with other republic leaders too.  Thus, new people would have come to the fore. 

Yeltsin of Russia, Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, and Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, had reached an understanding. 

And so some of the "old people," people Gorbachev had appointed,  organized the coup -- the GKChPists, including Vladimir Kryuchkov (the KGB) and Dmitry Yazov (Ministry of Defense) and Boris Pugo (Ministry of the Interior).  

But they did not seize Boris Yeltsin. 

THE 1991 AUGUST COUP, DAY TWO

THE COUP BECOMES PUBLIC 

THE TANKS ENTER MOSCOW 

BORIS YELTSIN STANDS ON ONE 

August 19, 1991 

DMITRY YAZOV 

SOVIET ARMY MARSHAL 

USSR DEFENSE MINISTER, August 1991 

Photographed in 2005, after his membership in the failed GKChP coup attempt led to eighteen months in prison, and after the Presidential (Putin) award of the Order of Merit, November 2004 

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AFTER THE FIRST DAY OF THE AUGUST COUP IN THE USSR

DAY ONE 

GORBACHEV 

IN FOROS 

August 18, 1991 

BORIS YELTSIN (l.) and  

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (r.) 

Shake Hands at Yeltsin's First Inauguration 

as Russia's First President 

July 10, 1991 

Some background to the coup that helped precipitate the breakup of the Soviet Union: 

As of June 12, 1991, Russia had a popularly elected president, for the first time in its history.  As the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, though, Russia was one part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had its own president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who, however, had not sought, and did not have, a popular mandate.  Gorbachev did attend, and speak at, Yeltsin's inauguration on July 10 (above). 

After the election, Yeltsin set about building up his Moscow as a power base and Russia as a sovereign entity, claiming resources the "Center" had hitherto controlled.  In August he made a tour of Tyumen', a major oil and gas province of Russia.  The day the coup began, Sunday, August 18, he was back in the Moscow region.  Gorbachev was vacationing in Foros.  It was there that the State Committee for the State of Emergency, or coup plotters, did or did not arrest the head of the Soviet state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  In any event, they announced that Mikhail Sergeyevich (Gorbachev) was ill. 

Day One. 

BORIS YELTSIN IN THE NEWS TODAY II

WHAT ELECTIONS 

CAN BRING 

BORIS YELTSIN VOTING 
IN THE 1991 RUSSIAN 
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 
(the first) 
Moscow, June 12, 1991 

Pausing in casting his ballot to help 
the photographers get their pictures 

Yeltsin won 

Today Boris Yeltsin is the news as a comparison point in a Forbes piece by Melik Kaylan on "Understanding Egypt": 

"The last decade has introduced to the world the novel phenomenon of the genuinely re-elected dictator, the populist who gets successive mandates largely because he controls all information, much of the economy, starves opponents of funds, because he has delivered a measure of stability and because the alternative looks worse. The alternative might be what went before – Boris Yeltsin in Moscow...." 

Well.... 

BORIS YELTSIN IN THE NEWS TODAY

BORIS YELTSIN 

CHECKS IT OUT 

BORIS YELTSIN INSPECTS THE BOOKS 
Sakhalinskaya Oil Platform 
Sea of Okhotsk, off the City of Okha 
Sakhalin Island, Sakhalin Oblast', USSR 
August 1990 

From today's Washington Post obituary of Kongar-ol Ondar, a "master of throat singing" from the Russian republic of Tuva: 

He mesmerized audiences with his ability to produce two or more notes simultaneously — a low, steady drone overlaid with higher-pitched tones that to the unaccustomed ear sounded like a radio gone haywire. 

His talent was so extraordinary that when he sang for Yeltsin in 1994, the Russian leader looked into his mouth in search of a device that could produce such music. 

From Russia Redux, Chapter Six:  Yeltsin "was never kabinetnyi, never one to be desk-bound."  He "liked to be out in the field, seeing things first hand." 

TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY, BORIS YELTSIN MADE A TRIP TO ORËL (ORYOL), RUSSIA

PRESIDENT YELTSIN 

MAKES AN INSPECTION TRIP 

AND COMMEMORATES 

THE BATTLE OF KURSK 

August 4, 1993 

BORIS YELTSIN (center) WAVING TO THE 
CITIZENS OF ORËL (ORYOL), RUSSIA 

EMERGING FROM THE SECOND LIMOUSINE IS 
YEGOR STROYEV, GOVERNOR OF ORËL 

Among the issues of the day 
The competition with Rutskoi and Khasbulatov 
The currency exchange crisis 
The harvest 
Land reform 
A new Constitution 
Yeltsin's health 

The story coming in 
RUSSIA REDUX 

VLADIMIR PUTIN TO EDWARD SNOWDEN: STOP HURTING OUR AMERICAN PARTNERS!

THE SPYING GAME  

I 

VLADIMIR PUTIN 

SETS TERMS 

II 
EDWARD SNOWDEN ACCEPTS 
IS GRANTED RUSSIAN VISA 

III 
WASHINGTON IS UNHAPPY 

IV 
ONGOING 

UPDATE 
A difference that can be split (still in the balance): 
Go to the G20; skip any Moscow summit; see, e.g., here. 

UPDATE II (August 7, 2013) 
President Obama did split the difference: 
Yes to G20, no to Moscow summit (here). 

MOHAMED ELBARADEI NAMED INTERIM PRIME MINISTER OF EGYPT TODAY -- OR NOT? *UPDATED*

EGYPT HAS A NEW 

*INTERIM* 

PRIME MINISTER 

MOHAMED ELBARADEI 

 (second from left, glasses) 

Smiling at the "Family Photograph" 

of the Expanded G8 

St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2006 

Others, from camera left, Hu Jintao (then president of China), 

Jacques Chirac (then president of France), and 

Paul Wolfowitz (then president of the World Bank) 

At the time of this G8 summit, ElBaradei was Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and 2005 co-winner, with the IAEA, of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

He was mentioned as a potential leader when Hosni Mubarek fell from power, but was passed over.  Now the interim president, Adly Mahmud Mansour, has named ElBaradei the interim prime minister.  Initial reporting and analysis can be found here and here.      

Update:  Someone's having second thoughts; see here. 

Update to the Update (July 9, 2013):  ElBaradei was appointed
"vice president in charge of foreign affairs." Question:  Is there to be another vice president, presumably in charge of domestic affairs, or will that be the job of the finally (?) appointed prime minister, Hazem el-Belawi?  Washington Post account here. 

Five weeks later: Blood on the streets, and ElBaradei resigns, today, August 14, 2013.  From the Reuters dispatch: 

Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who lent liberal political support to the ousting of Egypt's first freely elected president, resigned in dismay at the use force instead of a negotiated end to the six-week stand-off. 

"It has become difficult for me to continue bearing responsibility for decisions that I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear. I cannot bear the responsibility for one drop of blood," ElBaradei said.