The New York Times is reporting that Russian venture capitalist, Yuri Milner, who earlier this year invested more than $200m in Facebook directly has been busy this holiday season. It was announced today that Milner’s Digital Sky Technolgies (DST) venture capital fund will invest $180m in Zynga, the hugely profitable developer of Facebook games such [...]
A native Bostonian, now living, working and enjoying life in Krasnodar Krai.
Tag Archive: russia
Keep Walking…..
Vodka may be one of Russia’s international icons but it is actually whiskey that young Russians drink when they out on the town at night. Whiskey with Red Bull is probably the most popular combination nowadays. When whiskey was first introduced it was whiskey and apple juice but that combo is kind of “girlie” and [...]
Snapshots of Modern Russia
While back in Boston last month for holiday, I kept getting asked the question by friends, and even by my family members, “Do you like living in Russia? What’s it like?”
My answer was, “Once you get settled into your daily routine, life in Russia is pretty normal. I have my friends, work, and family. Life [...]
The Best Defense is a Strong Offense
I just returned from a wonderful holiday back in Boston and while going through my Google Reader, I kept seeing indignant blog posts about the latest controversy in the Russia-Watcher blogosphere concerning GQ magazine and the Conde Naste’s corporate lawyers apparently killing a story about Putin and the apartment bombing 10 years ago in Moscow. [...]
Medvedev’s Opening Remarks
Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev posted a new entry to his video blog a few days before his meetings with President Barack Obama in Moscow. Medvedev’s address is translated into english and you can watch it below:
Kremlin RSS Feeds Not Validating
The Kremlin website offers its english language visitors the opportunity to subscribe to 5 separate RSS/Atom feeds. As all of you know, I thought it might be beneficial if Russia Watchers could subscribe to these RSS feeds through the mobile SMS platform of Twitter.com.
So I created the Twitter account called Kremlin_ru_eng and used the service [...]
List of Krasnodar Hotels
Here’s a pretty comprehensive lists of hotels in Krasnodar. 2009 is the last year Krasnodar will be without an international brand. The Marriott will open a hotel on Krasnaya Street (the Newbury Street of Krasnodar) in 2010. I will be interested to see the Intourist this Spring when their renovations are complete. While most of [...]
Putin Unfiltered
What a huge difference it makes when you remove the filter of the foreign press covering Putin, in particular, and Russia, in general. Putin does not get enough credit. He is well-prepared, knowledgeable, and quite reasonable. The following is the english language translation of Putin’s press conference today in Moscow with foreign journalists concerning the gas dispute in [...]
Gas Wars, A Primer
Like some of you, I don’t really know a heck of a lot about the nuances of the dispute between Moscow and Kiev. Most of us, who follow Russian current events, tend to habitually come down on one side or the other (i.e. Moscow’s being a bully or Kiev is a weasel a should pay for the [...]
Inter-Era Economics
There is a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding of the current economic crisis amongst most economists, government officials, and lay people. The vast majority of people believe that we are in an intra-era downturn of the normal business cycle. We are not. Actually, we are now leaving the era known as “post Bretton Woods” (i.e. Anglo-American post World War [...]
