Meeting a collection of Russian dissidents in Union Square in Manhattan on a crisp October day, who speak openly and honestly about their home country, certainly can get adrenaline pumping. Billed as a protest against the rise of Vladimir Putin’s attempts to reassume duties as Russian president, these protesters in New York were strident in their views and clever in their derision of Russia’s oligarchic personalities...

...stumbled upon by an Avtorevue magazine expedition to the Altai area

"A lad in a private security guard uniform was standing in front of a steel cable slung across the road.

What do you mean? There is the road. Beyond the steel cable was a strip of excellent asphalt with freshly painted markings; a villa could be glimpsed in the middle of the valley and, a little closer, a helicopter pad, outbuildings and railway flats for builders. No walls or fences, no signs forbidding entry. We can’t drive? OK, we’ll walk. The guard became fidgety: you can’t walk either, this is private property..."

It is not easy to diagnose the current situation. Can we now say that a political crisis has been triggered by the appearance of the people known on the web as i-Decembrists? No, because the question of power is not at stake yet. Is it a social crisis? No. In effect what we are witnessing is a crisis of expectations. In terms of the new political economy, it is a crisis of the social contract...

A massive scandal has broken out in Moscow. Several days before the start of the new school year, directors of dozens of Moscow schools (we have confirmed information about forty) received an odd directive: sack all their catering personnel and dismantle all the equipment. The reason was that the tender to provide school meals had been won by a company called Сonсord, but its triumph turned out to be a failure...

An Internet poll gave him a resounding victory in the Greenpeace-organised Enemy of Baikal competition; the Golden Tick award went to the prime minister for winning the competition. To mark Putin’s triumph, scuba divers planted a commemorative sign on the bottom of Lake Baikal right next to the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant’s (BPPP) waste-discharge pipe. Greenpeace says that the banner, listing off the competition’s three finalists, was put up “with the hope that the prime minister, having himself already dove to the bottom of Baikal, would halt the plant’s operations and dive down to remove the banner”...

The drug police send grocers to a high-security prison for 13, 10 and five and a half years... several episodes of direct “sales” were registered in the case: when drug addicts supposedly bought poppy seeds from the tent to use as drugs; however, later during the trial, none of the “drug addicts” were presented.

The clear lack of desire to find at least some words of sympathy for an entire nation mourning over Havel's death is a perfect example of the moral impurity of the group of people who for some reason decided that they are the state. The horror of it all, however, is that it's as if they are maintaining their silence on behalf of us as well. Now, what's left for us is to remember, speak and act. Renaming Bolotnaya Square in honour of Václav Havel could be the first step down this road...

Novaya Gazeta special correspondent Elena Kostyuchenko reports from the rebellious Kazakh prairie: Zhanaozen, or just Uzen, is a city home to 100 thousand people in the Mangystau Province of Western Kazakhstan. The province is believed to be the most expensive and unhealthy to live in throughout all of Kazakhstan, while Zhanaozen is considered to be the most expensive and unhealthy city in the province...

Narcissus and Christopher is a play about “a different person”, as they are called here. “Special people” also act in the production: they are diagnosed with “autism”, “Down syndrome”, mental illnesses and mental retardation. The studio they work in integrates both actors with and without these diagnoses...

About a million people are languishing in jails and prison camps in Russia. In this new series, however, we will turn the spotlight not on those on the inside, but on those on the outside waiting for them. What happens to the wives in the...

A senior official spoke of the unprecedented exodus from Russia in the late 2000s for the first time. Back in January, Accounts Chamber Chairman Sergei Stepashin cited the following figure: 1.25 million members of the economically active...

It’s late March 2011. Urgent repairs are being made to the most damaged sections of the main road leading from the Dityatka checkpoint inside the 30-kilometre exclusion zone and similar repairs are under way in the city of Chernobyl. At...

Can you imagine a government in which the head of the healthcare system is friends with a major drug dealer? In which drugs that are guaranteed to kill a person in two years and irreversibly alter their brains immediately are sold in...

The emergency workers’ base at Japan’s Fukushima-1 Nuclear Power Plant has spread into a separate blocky building with thick concrete walls that are specially built to withstand even the most powerful earthquake. The building’s few windows...

You have remained far away from Russia for all these years, yet your voice is still heard. You left because you found it difficult to live there. In your opinion, what has changed in Russia over these years? I would like to make a few...