Maria Stepanova, Equator:

My task is to understand and to analyse what is happening today in Russia – and in the wider world (which is gleefully following in Russia’s stead). This task still seems vital to me, although I know too well that it is unlikely to achieve much. The monumental efforts of the historians and philosophers of the twentieth century have not prevented state violence from resurging.

Craig Murray:

Abandoning the primacy of freedom of navigation is absolutely a radical policy departure for the UK – driven, like so many other changes to traditional British legal positions, by the Starmer regime’s extreme support for Israel.

…

The incredible hypocrisy of Western states pointing fingers at Russia for running “Flags of convenience” is breathtaking.

The West has spent decades building and profiting from the global flags-of-convenience system. Russia is simply using the same system that Western companies created and still dominate.

On the Straßenbahn this morning.

Regime and personal survival are often overlooked as pundits and scholars alike try to build elaborate models of an ideology that drives Russia’s elite. But all the way back to the first unfairly contested reelection of Putin in 2005, perpetuating rule to avoid the repercussions of ill-gotten gains is a much better diagnosis of the regime’s impetus.

…

After the global financial crisis of 2008, Russians saw some of the worst income stagnation in Europe, staggering wealth concentration (far higher than the USA or China), and high levels of extreme poverty. By 2018, real incomes had likely declined by 11 percent since 2014. The true, and staggering, extent of high poverty and inequality levels in Russia is likely not adequately captured by statistics, but it is reasonable to say that as of 2025, incomes are no higher in real terms than in 2013. What makes Russia exceptional is that the post-1991 political economy was designed with wealth concentration in mind.

—Jeremy Morris, „Russia’s Vanguard Authoritarian Neoliberal System“, in Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, (London: Pluto Press, 2026), 126-127.

Therefore, to make the theoretical assumption that criminal groups do something other than commit crimes, that law enforcement agencies do something other than enforce laws, and that there is no hierarchy among coercive agencies is to posit a Hobbesian state of nature rather than a Commonwealth, the state. In 1995, I was not wholly unjustified in positing the state of nature and its logic as the starting point for sociological research, even though my passport certified that I was a citizen of the Russian state. At that time, those who were supposed to enforce the law—employees of the justice and security systems—themselves acted informally as private enforcers or joined private protection companies. They were as numerous among violent entrepreneurs as their alleged adversaries from racketeering gangs.

…

I suggest that a conscious project of state building, which has become increasingly important in Russia since the end of 1998, was preceded by a consolidation of violence-managing agencies, the capitalization of their incomes, and a partial delegation of their enforcement capacity to state agencies.

—Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, (London: Cornell University Press, 2002), xi-xiii.

„Moscow is a fairly safe city, provided you’re not an opposition parliamentarian“

—Matthew Stevenson

Russia is in fact the posterchild for full-blown authoritarian neoliberalism and in many respects the neoconservative and neo-traditionalist discourse emanating from the center is intended to distract and displace opposition within the country to the terrible life-chances of all but a tiny, privileged percentage of the population

—Jeremy Morris, „Russia’s Vanguard Authoritarian Neoliberal System“, in Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, (London: Pluto Press, 2026), 123.

„They“ really are „us“ – the feeling of familiarity I get in Russia can be disconcerting. It’s like looking at oneself through a sort of distorted mirror.

Red Threads Research Center Superstructure Manifesto:

In post-Soviet conditions, the production of knowledge detached from technocratic tasks is considered a dangerous excess. States are systematically weakening universities—the key institutions for the production of critical knowledge. They are underfunding the social sciences and humanities and imposing ideological obligations on them, designed to legitimize the authority of the ruling regime and the global capitalist order comprising a constellation of nation-states. Under such conditions, research free from pressure and censorship becomes increasingly impossible within university walls.

Leading capitalist countries create conditions under which researchers from peripheral countries—whether voluntarily or not—find themselves drawn into imperialist conflicts. By allowing a critique of colonialism within certain theoretical frameworks, (post-)empires directly or indirectly polish their reputations. Attention is thus shifted away from the key issue—the structural role of capitalism in the reproduction of imperialist relations. Often, this is not a subversion of imperialism, but a new attempt at normalization; not a critique of it, but a way to neutralize it.

A rough-hewn Smolensk Lenin stands satisfied and confident. Lenin is often depicted holding a document or his hat, or holding his coat against the wind. Here he seems to give a thumbs up, and while the wind does seem to catch his coat, his left hand is relaxed in a pocket.