Clips
Featured Essay/Review: “Devilish Forces,” VQR, Winter 2009
In early October 2007, almost three years to the day after I began my career as a journalist in Russia, a conversation with a former CIA agent brought it to an end.
He was a longtime friend I’d joined in Scotland for a weekend holiday. We were on a train hurtling through the countryside east of Edinburgh after a morning rain; the hills were so vivid it hurt to look at them too long. Idly at first, I told him about a series of encounters I’d had in Moscow with a former agent of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency that runs more spies abroad than any other branch of the country’s secret services.
The Russian agent, who called himself Alex, had appeared as though out of nowhere earlier that year and struck up a friendship—only weeks after I’d gotten the attention of the FSB (the reconstituted KGB) with some aggressive reporting in Dagestan, the unstable Russian republic that borders Chechnya in the Northern Caucasus…
- Devilish Forces: On “Putin’s Labyrinth” by Steve LeVine - December 2008.
News and Analysis on Russia and the CIS
From Agence France Presse
- Putin Tells Asia: Russia Is Here to Stay - September 2007.
- Islam’s Rapid Rise Giving Russia Growing Pains - April 2007.
- Muslim Freedom Fighter Stirs Pride, Fear in Russia - March 2007.
- Russian Mountains Cradle Hoard of Ancient Languages - March 2007.
From The Moscow Times
- How Russia Got In to the Democratic Club - July 2006.
- A New OPEC in the Making? - June 2006.
- The Man With the Plan for Russia, Inc. - June 2006.
- Surkov Counters Western Critics - June 2006.
- Iran Crisis a ‘Win-Win Situation’ - May 2006.
- Kremlin Spells Out Gas Link to WTO - May 2006.
- Caspian Complicates Iran-Russia Relations - May 2006.
- Two Years on, Rose Euphoria Has Faded - December 2005.
- Foreign Policy Under Spotlight - October 2005.
Essays and Op-eds
- The New Red Scare - AIDS Invades Eastern Europe - Winter 2006.
- A Patronizing Putin’s Missed Opportunity - June 2005.
- Intellectual Cowboy on a World Bank Crusade - March 2005.
- Listening to the True Voice of the Iraqis - February 2005.
- Whitman’s War From Meridian issue 11, Spring/Summer 2003.
Book Reviews
- White on Black, by Ruben Gallego. From The Moscow Times, March 2006.
- Weird Tales: A Daniil Kharms Festival. From The Moscow Times, July 2005.
- Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk. From The Chicago Review, Spring 2005.
- What Is What Was by Richard Stern. From Meridian issue 11, Fall/Winter 2002.
- Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin, translated by Graham Hettlinger. From VQR, August 2002.
- Dostoyevsky the Thinker, by James P. Scanlan. From VQR, August 2002.
