Word: kremlins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hath been of yore. Summits between the leaders who live in the White House and the Kremlin once transfixed the world, as competing superpowers, ideologies and worldviews clashed. But when Barack Obama visits Moscow on July 6, it will be something of a rarity for the U.S. President: a rather dull trip. Obama will encounter no cheering crowds or overly excited local media. His hosts, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, will be no more than coolly polite. The end of the visit is unlikely to be marked by grand declarations of friendship or announcements of breakthrough...
...different views, understand the various motivations and then focus on the commonalities, not the differences. He repeats these refrains everywhere he goes. "The United States and Russia have more in common than they have differences," Obama said last week, shortly after meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in the Kremlin. At an April press conference in Trinidad, the President elaborated on his thinking, describing the more collaborative approach to diplomacy as one that can clear away "old preconceptions or ideological dogmas." "Countries are going to have interests," he said, sounding very much the community-organizing theorist. "And changes in foreign...
...city has set aside a small plot overlooking the harbor and next to another memorial, a lighthouse dedicated to sailors who died in peacetime. (This memorial also mentions the Kursk sailors, but Vitaly Poborchiy, a local businessman and ranking member of the regional branch of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, says townsfolk want a monument dedicated solely to the Kursk...
...There is a contradiction here: The people spearheading the memorial are Kremlin loyalists who do whatever Moscow tells them to do, while the memorial they are building appears to conflict with Kremlin interests. Poborchiy nicely captures this incongruity. At 51, he admires Putin, who may no longer officially run the Kremlin but is assumed to orchestrate the every move of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends...
This is the kind of remembering the Kremlin has yet to embrace. Memorials in Soviet times were monuments to national greatness: towering monoliths like Lyosha, the 115-ft. (35 m) statue of a soldier down the road from the future Kursk memorial. These Soviet-era monuments were designed to inculcate belief in (and fear of) the regime. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has shown a distaste for acknowledging weakness or tragedy. "In the Russian mentality," says Anna Kireeva of the environmental group Bellona, which investigated the Kursk sinking out of concern that nuclear waste might seep from the submarine, "there...