The Last Reaction

Announcement of Departure from The Unz Review

The Wheel Turns, Ages Come and Go, And Thus Dies the Russian Reaction

10 Years of Blogging

It has now been three years since I moved to the Unz Review, and ten years since I started blogging. Retrospective here. There is a more complete account of my writing history, including lists of my best posts, at this page. My main hope for 2018 is to wrap up my Russia watching career – […]

Links 2017

I Will Now be Blogging at The Unz Review

Tomorrow the Russian Reaction blog at https://akarlin.com/ will go live, so please reorient your bookmarks and feed subscriptions. The Unz Review is a webzine dedicated to publishing “interesting, important, and controversial perspectives that are largely excluded from the American mainstream media.” You may know Ron Unz, its owner and chief editor, from my old discussions with him at this blog about […]

The End of Da Russophile

I feel the time has come to bid a dignified farewell to this blog that I have lovingly labored on for many a year. Between the dopamine-fueled attractions of 140 character quickfire tweets, and the chronic lack of time for writing the far more detailed posts demanded as part and parcel of writing not one but two blogs in an era […]

The End of the Russia Debate. (For Real, This Time)

I should have never allowed myself to be talked out of it in the first place. The primary reasons are the same as before: Low activity rates, to the extent that genuine discussions are once again being overtaken by spam in terms of volume. This is in spite of substantially increased security measures since then. […]

AKarlin 2.0

As you can see the site has had a major redesign, and new blog posts will start appearing as of this Monday. Here are the major changes: (1) Back to self-hosted, after a year and a half at WordPress.com. There will be no repeat of the pharma hack that torpedoed the old Sublime Oblivion. My […]

The Russia Debate is Back From the Dead

Due to the popular outcry, my prior decision to close down the Russian politics and history forum is now formally reversed. Come on people – let’s make it work. Stop spamming each other in email newsletters. Refrain from creating thousands of off-topic comments on blog posts that will get lost in the Internet’s recesses as soon […]

The (Abortive) End of The Russia Debate

Its failure is so stark that I hardly need post a notification on the actual site. To the extent that I visit it nowadays it is mostly just to clean spam, which is just depressing. It has not achieved critical mass, despite the initial incentives on offer, and in my experience if a forum fails […]

The Social Thaw: Change in Facebook Policy

My response to Snowdengate, the new Graph Search, its inevitable integration with Google Glass? I will be minimizing my privacy settings and for all intents and purposes making my Facebook public. So good ahead, look up my profile. Friend me. Whatever. I don’t mind. Sounds counter-intuitive, huh? There’s a logic behind the madness. It’s now a […]

Roundup of Russia Stuff

I’m writing this from an Internet café in Seattle, so I’ll be brief. (1) Congratulations to SWSPires – the winner of the promised $25 Amazon gift certificate for participating in The Russia Debate during its first month! Incidentally, he was only the sixth member to be drawn by lot from the members pool; it’s just […]

The Russian Spectrum: An Inosmi In English

You’ve had to wait too long for this. But it is finally here. The Russian Spectrum – translating everything worth translating from the Russian media. I’ll keep it brief. (1) We need translators! If you can proficiently translate from Russian into English, I will be very happy to have you on board. First, the bad […]