Россия
“”Russia is not between Europe and Asia. Europe and Asia are to the left and right of Russia. We are not a bridge between them but a separate civilizational space, where Russia unites the civilizational communities of East and West.
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| —Vladimir Yakunin, Russian oligarch[1] |
Russia is where invasions go to die[2] the largest country in the world, situated between Europe and Asia, or encompassing the majority of Europe, or taking up all of Northern Asia.[3]
As the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation includes 83 oblasts, republics, autonomous republics, territories, districts and federal cities. This is even more complicated than it sounds. Imagine if the US had 83 states that occasionally had shooting wars against each other (instead of just the one).
After experimenting with anarchy in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, Russia is, thanks to Vladimir Putin, an enlightened "sovereign democracy",[4] which has cut assassinations of journalists down to only two or three a year,[5][6] and doesn't cut off the gas supply every time a foreign country criticizes it. Their democracy is now so successful that the United Russia party scored 238 out of 450 Duma seats in the 2011 elections with only minimal widespread electoral fraud.[7] One of their many favorite pastimes is subsisting in the delusion that NATO is out to get them, while NATO's favourite pastime is trying to find some purpose (read: enemy) for a military alliance without one.
Apparently, the country is also adding the spectator sport of public creationist silliness, as demonstrated by a protest by Russian Orthodox YECs outside of Moscow's Charles Darwin museum.[8] In addition, the newer competitive events of passing laws against free speech in order to combat Teh Ev1l Gay and beating up detaining human rights activists[9] and Pastafarians[10] seem to be crowd favorites as well.
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[edit] Сибирь
Siberia is the Asian portion of Russia ("portion" being two thirds of the country, though one quarter of the population). It was notorious as the destination of prisoners of conscience exiled within the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. So notorious is the association of the words Siberia and prison that the place is routinely described as the destination of all Russian prisoners, even when they are sent to Mordovia, as far west of Siberia itself as London is from Warsaw.[11] And, beside that, Siberia is a major source of oil and gas. Siberia has almost every known natural resource to offer, from timber to diamonds to abandoned barrels of nuclear waste.
Today, Siberia is a mostly-settled region with several large cities connected by a network of highways and railroads; indeed, Novosibirsk, the unofficial "capital of Siberia," is the third largest city in Russia with a population of 1.47 million. Settlement far away from established urban centers is still impractical due to the harsh climate and long travel distances,[12] but at least the era of the phrase "send them to Siberia" in the sense of imprisonment or exile is almost over. However, the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a Siberian penal colony[13] shows that this assumption is a bit premature.
[edit] См. также
[edit] Внешние ссылки
- Russia Explained (And more!)
- The Dying Russians, The New York Review of Books
- Louis Potgieter would be proud.
- Dash cam videos are Russia's largest export, after vodka, oil, weapons and suicidal novelists
[edit] Сноски
- ↑ Vladimir Putin: The rebuilding of ‘Soviet’ Russia, BBC
- ↑ Though Batu Khan finds this hilarious.
- ↑ Take your pick; it's a subcontinent in its own right thanks to Siberia.
- ↑ Similarly, the Russian economy has developed from Yeltsin's crony capitalism to a stable and diversified economy under Putin.
- ↑ See Russian Journalist Assassination Comes After U.S. Congressional Resolutions Urging Protection for Media and Wikipedia's list of journalists killed in Russia
- ↑ Because that is how many it takes to intimidate the surviving journalists.
- ↑ Russians protest against election fraud, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
- ↑ Russian Creationists Denounce Evolution, Dispatches From the Culture Wars
- ↑ Russia: Investigate Violent Raid on Rights Group, Human Rights Watch
- ↑ Humor failure in Russia: Crackdown on 'Pastafarians' shows Kremlin-church ties, NBC
- ↑ "Mordovia, while Maria Alyokhina was shipped to a similar institution in Perm. The two cities, located in the freezing central region of Siberia..." So the Republic of Mordovia is a city now?
- ↑ Yakutsk, the saddest city in the world.
- ↑ Welcome to penal colony YaG 14/10. Now the home of one of Russia's richest men, The Guardian (He's since been freed and giving Rosneft a run for its money.)