Showing Archived Posts

From Chernobyl to Fukushima: Nuclear Safety?

Posted March 31st, 2011 at 6:32 pm (UTC+0)
4 comments

Soldiers long ago shot the dogs and cats. Today, the only sound on Lenin Avenue is a chill wind blowing dead leaves. In the summer, thick vegetation obscures six-story apartment blocks, once homes for the city’s 50,000 residents. Once a model Soviet community built for Chernobyl’s nuclear power station, Pripyat now looks like a post […]

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Libya abstention – Kremlin’s post imperial foreign policy?

Posted March 23rd, 2011 at 5:56 pm (UTC+0)
3 comments

The Soviet Union vetoed. Russia abstains. Is Russia’s U.N. vote on Libya part of a wider, post-Imperial foreign policy in the Kremlin? That is the question Moscow is debating as Russians watch from the sidelines as needle-nosed Western jets bomb military targets in Libya, once a Soviet ally. Diplomats schooled in Soviet ways would have […]

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Saint Patrick: Subversive to Moscow?

Posted March 15th, 2011 at 4:31 pm (UTC+0)
2 comments

For the first time in almost two decades, Moscow authorities will not allow a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Every year, since 1992, the Irish community has led a street parade through the center of Moscow. Increasingly popular with Muscovites, the parade draws thousands of Russian revelers, many with their hair dyed green. But this year, […]

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Golden Chains Bind Chechnya to Moscow

Posted March 11th, 2011 at 3:55 pm (UTC+0)
2 comments

Grozny’s new mosque, The Heart of Chechnya, is modeled after the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and has minarets soaring 60 meters into the sky. Behind construction workers are building three office and apartment towers, the tallest towers in the Caucasus. On a field outside of this city of 350,000, finishing touches are being put on […]

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Gorbachev to Kremlin: Tear down these walls!

Posted March 2nd, 2011 at 9:34 pm (UTC+0)
6 comments

Mikhail Gorbachev turned 80 on Wednesday. In advance, Russia’s political bear gave himself a birthday present: he came out of political hibernation. After two decades of lying low and not tangling with the current occupants of the Kremlin, the last leader of the Soviet Union finally opened up. “Incredible conceit!” Gorbachev, still barrel chested and […]

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About

About

James Brooke is VOA Moscow bureau chief, covering Russia and the former USSR. With The New York Times, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Latin America, Canada and Japan/Koreas. He studied Russian in college during the Brezhnev years, first visited Moscow as a reporter during the final months of Gorbachev, and then came back for reporting forays during the Yeltsin and early Putin years. In 2006, he moved to Moscow to report for Bloomberg. He joined VOA in Moscow in 2010. Follow Jim on Twitter @VOA_Moscow.

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