Andrew Osborn

Co-organizers of the Forbidden Art exhibition Andrei Yerofeyev and Yuri Samodurov Photo: EPA

In 1974, crusty Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s bulldozers infamously destroyed an exhibition of avant-garde art in Moscow. More than three decades later, the Kremlin has dispensed with the bulldozers in favour of the courts.

A judge on Monday found two well known museum curators guilty of inciting religious hatred. Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev were fined the equivalent of £7,500 and handed criminal convictions. Their crime: staging a tongue-in-cheek exhibition of modern art that poked fun at consumerism, religious iconography, Muslims, Russia’s dependence on oil, the police, and Russian fears of being overrun by the Chinese. Plenty of targets there then. Yet it was the increasingly… Read More

New York newspapers displaying Russian spy Anna Chapman (Photo: AFP)

To be outed as a Russian spy in the world’s most powerful country is embarrassing. To then have it revealed that you stole precisely no secrets despite years of covert activity is humiliating. When the ten self-confessed Russian spies return to the motherland today it will not be to a heroes’ welcome. On the contrary, Russia’s spymasters, including Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and a former KGB spy himself, will be crying into their vodka.

Make no mistake – the spies’ capture and return represents a spectacular failure for the Kremlin and for Russia’s feared and once respected intelligence services. In the early stages of the furore, Kremlin spin doctors worked hard behind the scenes to try to laugh it off,… Read More

Hillary Clinton's advice to the Georgians underlines America's impotence (Photo: EPA)

In Georgia for a brief visit on Monday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had some tough words for Russia, the mountainous country’s former imperial master. She denounced the Kremlin’s “occupation” of two Georgian regions that Russian troops seized during the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and said it was high time Russian forces were pulling back. She also blasted Russia’s ongoing efforts to install permanent military infrastructure in the two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Her words came at a sensitive time in the run-up to the war’s second anniversary when tensions are running high on all sides. The reaction was perhaps as you would expect. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili did his best to show he felt reassured that Washington… Read More

Dmitry Medvedev and Pres. Obama eat at Ray's Hell Burger restaurant, Arlington (Photo: Reuters)

Footage of US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev munching burgers in an American diner last week went down a storm in Russia. It was shown ad nauseum until every Russian must have known off by heart exactly what condiments the two world leaders had to choose from and how many ice cubes they had in their respective drinks.

News that eleven people in the United States have been accused of being Russian spies is obviously going to play less well. But more pertinently, it leaves the Kremlin with something of a public relations problem, with its own population. After years of spoon-feeding a largely receptive and embittered population oodle… Read More