Suchergebnisse

Interview with Sergei Guriev, Russian economist, professor of economics at Sciences-Po Paris and former rector of the New Moscow School of Economics (New Economics School). In mid-December 2014 the ruble experienced a brutal collapse, losing 20% of its value in a single day. The trend began in September when the euro was worth 46 rubles. Three months later it took 100 rubles to buy one euro! Sergei Guriev, long one of the most prominent economists in Moscow before seeking refuge in Paris in 2013 when the authorities began investigating him - he had the effrontery to publish a report on the Yukos affair whose conclusions were not what the Kremlin wanted to see - analyzes this currency crisis in detail. He explains that the first cause of the depreciation is the plunge in world oil prices. Western sanctions, which prevent Russian banks and businesses from raising funds on global markets, proved the final blow. If the price of black gold does not rapidly recover - and it does not look that way - the Russian economy is about to go through an extremely painful period. Adapted from the source document.

Ukrainian crisis and its many upheavals sparked interpretations many and varied. In countries of the European Union, the United States and, of course, in Russia and in Ukraine itself, debates are raging. Ukraine, say some, is democratically rid of a corrupt regime and clearly uttered his willingness to turn to the EU, which it shares the humanistic values; this thirst for freedom earned him the wrath of the bulky 'big brother' Russian who did not hesitate to seize by force of Crimea and to exploit the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine to destabilize the republic rebellious or for carving. How naive, exclaim others! According to them, a movement with fascist overtones, directed by officials at least as corrupt as those in the opposite camp and supported covertly by America always eager to push his pawns in this new 'great game', chased by force a legitimate president, threatened Russian speakers to deprive them of their rights, and launched the company against its own population. Adapted from the source document.

Russian journalist Tania Rakhmanova has made several documentaries and written a highly detailed book on the ascension of Vladimir Putin and how his system works. Here she analyzes the process that led this formerly obscure KGB agent to the summit of Russian power in 2000. She also explains how Putin, at the outset supposedly just a puppet in the hands of predecessor Boris Yeltsin's entourage, was finally able to put members of his own clan into positions at all levels of Russian society and government. Now heading the country's main ministries, companies and banks are long-standing allies of Putin, whether former comrades from the KGB, childhood friends, or colleagues from the Saint-Petersburg city hall, where he worked in the early 1990s. Reelected president on March 4, Putin now has but a single option, namely to stay in power as long as possible. After all, he guarantees the interests of "corporation Putin". Adapted from the source document.

The article examines the main themes of the work of Régis Debray, one of the most important French philosophers and writers of our time. Debray is familiar to Russian readers primarily as an associate of Che Guevara and a theorist of the Cuban revolutionary movement, as well as the author of works on mediology – a science he himself created on the study of the transmission of ideas and sym­bols. Central to his mature and late work are the ideas of sacred in human com­munities, the conditions of the emergence, transmission and disappearance of re­ligious, national and other forms of sacrality, and the related evolution of world civilizations. Debray is recognized by his peers as one of the most perceptive an­alysts of French political culture, and his article, Are you a Democrat or a Re­publican?, written in the year of the bicentennial of the French revolution in 1989, anticipates the processes that will unfold over the next thirty years. Debray describes these processes as a gradual desacralization of the Republic, the emas­culation of its basic principles and its transformation into "a common Anglo-Saxon democracy". As a result, the "one and indivisible secular Republic" is falling apart into communities, each of which establishes its own shrines. The dissolution of France's particular republican model is taking place in the background, and as part of a more global process of the decline of European civilisation and its dissolution into Western Atlantic civilisation.

An interview with Yves Ternon, historian and President of the International Scientific Council for the Study of Armenian Genocide. The term genocide, which you call 'crime of crimes', is fairly recent. It dates from 1943 and has appeared in Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin original. Its inclusion in international criminal law dates back to 1948 and had to wait fifty years to see the first convictions for genocide in 1998 (under the CFI for Rwanda). How did we get to the inclusion of this crime in international criminal law? Adapted from the source document.