ANECDOTALLY SPEAKING: the Russian street and Israel-Gaza war

The following text is a translation of the post published by the resident of St Petersburg, a theatre critic and a journalist, Elena Volgust, who decided to walk the streets of St Petersburg with an Israeli flag. *************BEGINNING*************** “I followed the route Moscow boulevard -Kuznetzovskaya-Brother’s Strugatskiye square-bus-trolleybus-Zagorodny boulevard-Vladimirskiy boulevard- corner of Nevsky and Liteiny-trolleybus-bus. All the way -I travelled silently. I did not talk to anyone and did not ask anything. All that time I simply held a flag in my hand, vertically. Reactions: A boy on a bicycle shouted : ”Jews!” A woman in a mask: “An activist..ugh” Two aged men: “Well done” Four people smiled at me on the street, size people smiled-on public transport Many looked intently but did not express any view One significant conversation happened, with a woman who initiated it, at a bus stop near Vitebskaya station. She approved of the flag, said that watches news day and night and all sorts of clever commentary, worries about Israelis, wishes them victory. Another woman,...
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Putin, Gaza and the siege of Leningrad

For all those who are interested in the evolving position of Russia regarding the most recent developments in the 2023 Gaza war, below is an (almost) literal translation of positions publicly expressed by Putin on this matter. The link to the original video is here. The formulations employed show a degree of continuity with the late Soviet policy in essentials but not in detail. Israel and Zionism are not presented as a settler-colonialist enterprise, for example,  but as a side with legitimate and justifiable claims. The commitment is a very ‘general-purpose’ rather unspecific one to the creation of the independent Palestinian state. There is a degree of grievance towards the one-sided American mediation and abandonment of the ‘Quartet’ effort.  In particular, the comparison of the ‘siege of Gaza’ to the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War is not meant to draw ‘Israel-Nazis’ parallel but to hint at the devastating, for civilians, consequences of such a measure. All, or almost...
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Friday sermon at the Moscow Memorial Mosque, by Imam Shamil Alyautdinov, 13 October 2023

First, why to talk about it? Why to consider and listen to something as (deceptively) esoteric as a Friday sermon to Muslims in Moscow? Well, the historical conflict that is coming to a crescendo as I am keypunching, is between Israel and some surrounding Arab populations but it echoes across the world. Islamic communities across the globe, albeit many not all, seem to align with or at least produces voices of support for Palestinians. Muslims in Russia are a genuine ‘black whole’. If Russia is not well understood and known to the average and above-average Westerner, then Russian Muslims ten times so. Yet, it is an important community. It is big, as I am going to show in a minute. It is also situated in the midst of the country that is itself at war. And it lives and thinks and operates from the larger Russian society, with its peculiar collectivism, a degree of reverence towards leadership figures and a...
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