Latest articles

A couple of articles by me have appeared in print this week.

The first contains my thoughts on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech announcing the death of the ‘rules-based international order’. You can find it on the website of Canadian Dimension magazine here.

The second is rather more substantive, and is an academic article titled ‘Rights and Freedoms in the Thought of Ivan Ilyin’. It is available free online in Northwestern University Studies in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. You can read it, along with other articles in the journal, here.

As always, your comments and thoughts on my work are appreciated!

Émigré Shenanigans

‘Oh, those Russians!’ (Boney M)

As I mentioned in my last post, there has been some bitter infighting in recent months among the ranks of Russian émigrés. Some of these people have the ear of Western politicians and so are not entirely unimportant. Therefore, while these émigré shenanigans may appear to be the pointless squabbles of the powerless, it’s worth taking a look at them. So here goes.

A Little Town

‘Bсе так ненавидели друг друга, что нельзя было соединить двадцать человек, из которых десять не были бы врагами десяти остальных. А если не были, то немедленно делались.’ (Teffi – Gorodok)

The last few months have seen growing rifts in the already divided ranks of oppositionist Russian émigrés. On the one hand are the Navalnyites – one-time supporters of the late Aleksei Navalny. On the other hand is what I call the ‘defeatist’ faction, whose most prominent members are Gary Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Leonid Nevzlin. I may do a deeper dive into all this in the weeks to come. For now, though, I offer you something else. For whenever I read of these émigré shenanigans, it reminds me of a (very) short story by interwar Russian émigré author Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) titled A Little Town (Gorodok). I can’t find a copy of this in English on the internet, so I thought that I would do a small public service by publishing my own very crude translation here. I always enjoy reading this. I hope that you do too.