Skip to content

Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Georgia/Russia: Remnick surfaces, with a roar

The New Yorker editor must have cursed the way his magazine’s publication schedule popped out a double issue during the busiest two weeks in the summer. So he’s had to watch, a little helpless, for two weeks while Solzhenitsyn died and Russia launched its first shooting war on foreign soil in decades. This has been more than a busy couple of weeks to David Remnick, who was a great Moscow bureau reporter for the Washington Post and whose book Lenin’s Tomb is one of the definitive chronicles of the Soviet Union’s collapse. I have been waiting to see what he would make of all this. His column is now up on his magazine’s website. It has been worth the wait.

Georgia/Russia: A good cop emerges, but is that a tin badge?

This business of a U.S. ballistic-missile defense system in Poland is a long story, but if you’re still reading my posts on the Georgia conflict, you will almost certainly have noticed the bellicose reaction of a senior Russian general, who said: