In an interview with Italy's La Stampa published on Friday, Gorbachev said President-elect Barack Obama needs to fundamentally change the misguided course followed by President George W. Bush over the past eight years.
Gorbachev said that after transforming his country in the late 1980s, he had told the Americans that it was their turn to act, but that Washington, celebrating its Cold War victory, was not interested in "a new model of a society, where politics, economics and morals went hand in hand."

He said the Republicans have failed to realize that the Soviet Union no longer exists, that Europe has changed, and that new powers like China, Brazil and Mexico have emerged as important players on the world stage.

He told the paper that the world is waiting for Obama to act, and that the White House needs to restore trust in cooperation with the United States among the Russians.

"This is a man of our times, he is capable of restarting dialogue, all the more since the circumstances will allow him to get out of a dead-end situation. Barack Obama has not had a very long career, but it is hard to find faults, and he has led an election campaign winning over the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton herself. We can judge from this that this person is capable of engaging in dialogue and understanding current realities."

Former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of now defunct Yukos oil giant, who is in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges, also used the word perestroika in discussing the future course of the Obama administration.

In an article published in the business daily Vedomosti on Friday, Khodorkovsky said Obama's election win was not merely another change of power in a separate country, but was important for all states.

He said that, "being a liberal himself, he thinks that the world will take a left turn," and that "a global perestroika would be a logical response to the global crisis."

"The paradigm of global development is about to change. The era inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago is over."

What?  Misha's not a fan of the Free Market anymore?!  Maybe Obama is the Messiah....


"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

But within Barack Obama's name there is a strange task for the Russian system of cases - his first name is masculine, ending as it does on a consonant, while his last name is feminine, ending on the vowel a. In Russian thus Барак Обама. According to the rules of Russian grammar, we must decline his first name as a masculine noun, but his last name as a feminine one. This can and will surely mess with your mind in the way of «Дядя Ваня пришёл» [Uncle Vanja came] or «Врач Смирнова пришла» [Doctor Smirnova came] can and do. Such are the fine and finite rules of Russian grammar - here the 'hidden sex' of the words is what counts, not what letters the words actually end on. The problem that arises because of this does so not because we, ambitious yet simple mortal learners of Russian as a foreign language, are unintelligent and think that just because he's uncle Vanja, then all the verbs connected with him should also end on -a, no! The problem is caused by our brain and its burning desire to make things make sense.

I find, when dealing with Russia in general, all problems are caused by our brains and their burning desire to make things make sense.  When you stop expecting things to make sense, they suddenly do!  Magic of the Russian Mind!

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

Russian citizens and news agencies are closely watching the American elections today, and... participating in them. Virtually, of course. As of noon U.S. Eastern Standard Time, nearly 3,000 Russian "voters" had cast their votes in a Gazeta.ru-sponsored poll. Barack Obama was defeating John McCain in a landslide: 68 to 32 percent. Russian voters also learned promptly about the death of Obama's grandmother, Canadian comedians' prank on Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, former actor and current California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's support for John McCain, and Obama winning the first vote recorded today in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. The Russian media overall has praised the openness of the American electoral system.

I encourage the Russian electoral system to be more open, so that I can cast my votes in it.


"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

Keep writing about Russia - the US is - um - fairly well covered in Eurotrib - as in the media in general. We get very little about Russia - except when it swats down a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. There was a sympathetic doc on Russia on BBC World recently - a rarity. I AM prepared - resignedly - to put up with your continued drooling over Putin :-)

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

(Although rumour has it his IQ is only 130...)

Only on ET. :)

Congratulations for your victory!

And thanks for the hard work you did for us!

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

In polite company this last week, Chicagoans of all political stripes have been falling over each other to declare how elated and inspired they feel by the election of Barack Obama, one of our own, to the office of president of the United States.

But once some of us are alone in the dark with our mistakes, regrets, lousy choices and personal failings, there's another emotion that comes to the fore. It has just not been politically acceptable to talk about it.

Jealousy.

Be honest. Bet you've felt a few pangs. Especially if, like me, you are dangerously close in age to Barack and Michelle.

Take the situation in downtown Chicago on Friday afternoon. Obama was planning for nothing less than the economic salvation of the world, along with fixing health care, solving an intractable situation in Iraq and leading the fight against global warming.

And what were you doing, perhaps just a few blocks away? Arguing over some dull and pointless legal deal? Lecturing but not being heard? Sitting immobile on an expressway?

Wondering why your office has no supplies?

I remember what I was doing. I was arguing over the placement of a trivial story on a trivial topic and, once again, not getting the respect I so richly deserve.

With most past presidential elections, one could explain away the winner as having enjoyed far greater privilege than oneself. George W. Bush (and his father) had a crucially useful last name. Ronald Reagan was a movie star.

Yet Obama offers none of those comforts. Many of us would have to admit that, by any objective standards, we started out with far greater advantages.

Sure, there have been past presidents like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter who also came from humble circumstances. But their rise seemed to come from a milieu--rural and southern--quite different from our own. We urbanities could take comfort in that. We can tell ourselves we could never have conjured that kind of popular, small-town appeal.

Yet the Obamas lived and worked among us here in Chicago. Some of us ran into them from time to time--at school, on campus, at the gym, in the neighborhood, at the office, on committees, with the kids, at the theater. They seemed quite similar to us. They seemed to like to chat about the same kind of things. They eat at Spiaggia, a place where we'd like to eat, too, if only we could get and afford a table.

You could try to justify your own lack of comparable achievement by claiming that you chose to focus on family. But that doesn't work. The Obamas seem to have managed that too. They fit in a parent-teacher conference Friday before taking on the world's problems. And they have the nicest possible family. Potential hypoallergenic puppy and all.

You could try to justify your lack of success based on your decision to forgo the traditional paths toward money and power to do socially meaningful work instead. Oops. They seem to have done that too.

You could say that you aren't willing to do all the sleazy things you have to do to gain such an office. (That's one of my favorite self-serving excuses: I tell myself that I'm just too nice a guy to have climbed my way into a position of real power and influence.)

But Obama got himself elected without doing those things. He never rose to the usual bait. And, incredibly, it still worked.

My last defense is my pride at being a writer. Obama, who already wrote two books, rips that into shreds. I can barely hack out a column; he penned fluid best-sellers on the side.

So as you lay there staring at the flicking digital clock, you've really got no way out of the personal malaise. And even in your darkest moments, you can't secretly wish for your more successful doppelganger to fail, because that would, of course, take you and your 401(k) down too. Not to mention the rest of the globe.

So thanks, President-elect Obama. We couldn't be happier for you. Honestly

To answer the question, I have no idea why some people have more hair than others.  Putin is old and fair.  Barack may or may not wax - who knows?  Frankly, thinking about the hairiness of world leaders is not appealing to me.  

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

I had not prepared for my name to become obsolete.

So what's your new name going to be?  Shall we start a competition?  You didn't deem to like the Manta Ray appellation, so what is it that best captures your new poetic dialectical bipolar fascination with Obamaputin?

notes from no w here

Where, pray, do you plan on directing your gaze next?

Perhaps you should call yourself Helen of Troy: the face that launched a thousand quips...

notes from no w here

I wasn't prepared to cry that night.  But I did.  When the call flashed across the tv screen, I did.  When I saw all those people in Grant Park, I did.  When he came out with his little girls, I did.  

This totally destroys my argument.  So I am just going to ignore it, pretend it didn't happen.  Lalalalalala...  

Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.