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Moscow
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Moscow

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Vkusvill Jumps the LGBT Shark
•�July 10, 2021
•�400 Words •�141 Comments
I wrote about Woke Capital making inroads into Russia after Netherlands HQ'ed Yandex.Taxi fired a driver who refused service to a rude Black foreign student last year. However, not all such corporate attempts to signal fealty to progressive values are paying off. Vkusvill is a nice chain of grocery stores that are somewhere in between... Read More
Pilgrimage to the Fortress-Monastery
•�May 9, 2021
•�1,400 Words •�75 Comments
I visited the Central Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, just slightly less than a year after its consecration. It is quite rare that reality exceeds visual media. But the Fortress-Monastery does so, in spades, and that despite its already superlative neo-Byzantine steampunk aesthetics on screen, which are like something out of a Maxim Bedulenko... Read More
Crimea & Donbass Tell Navalny to BTFO
•�April 19, 2021
•�500 Words •�108 Comments
The Navalny campaign is calling for nationwide protests on April 21 after the failure of their campaign to even get half a million people (quick arithmetic: 0.3% of Russia's population) to register and commit to coming out and protesting on their website. I don't see much coming out of it. I correctly said that the... Read More
HABBENING: #FreeNavalny Protest
•�January 30, 2021
•�200 Words •�269 Comments
Second Free Navalny! protest will take place in 10 hours. The location, Lubyanka Square, is an escalation, being adjacent to both the Lubyanka Building that hosts the FSB HQ: ... and the even more critical "regime object" that is the Presidential Administration. As of the present time, a total of 1,800 people say they are... Read More
HABBENING: #23январяЗаСвободу Protests
•�January 23, 2021
•�200 Words •�245 Comments
RT journalist Bryan MacDonald collating protest turnout data - mostly from Kommersant, a paper that is marginally opposition-leaning, but by not means pro-regime. Data from Far East and now from the Volga suggests 0.2% of population is protesting in the more "agitated" cities, this tallies with my prediction this will be bigger than ~7,500 at... Read More
Navalny Children's Crusade
•�January 22, 2021
•�1,200 Words •�59 Comments
Plus ça change... Just like three years ago on March 26, 2017, the protest "Freedom to Navalny!" tomorrow is to start on Pushkin Square (see above) and march down the central Tverskaya Boulevard down to Manezh Square, which is right next to the Kremlin. I attended that prior protest (as an informal observer, not a... Read More
Snowden Getting Russian Citizenship
•�November 2, 2020
•�400 Words •�55 Comments
Well, good for Snowden on making use of Russia's reformed citizenship laws, which as of April 2020 no longer obligate you to give up your previous citizenship in return for a Russian one. It also legally rules out the possibility of Russia extraditing him back to the US, remote as the possibility may be right... Read More
Black Hundreds Return to Moscow!
"Listva" Bookshop Opens Up in Russian Capital
•�August 10, 2020
•�700 Words •�33 Comments
Black Hundreds CEO Dmitry Bastrakov giving the opening speech. On August 8, 2020 Moscow saw the opening of the bookshop Listva in Moscow. This is their first expansion outside the original Listva bookshop in Saint-Petersburg, where - incidentally - I had been invited to give a lecture on dysgenics last November. There will now be... Read More
Open Thread 113
•�August 7, 2020
•�300 Words •�39 Comments
Not many good recent photos, so reaching back to winter in my archives. Anyhow, the Museum of the Russian Diaspora is very good - strong recommend. *** I talked to Robert Stark on Scott Alexander's idea of the "Gray Tribe" and other topics on his podcast: Anatoly’s article No Country for Gray Tribesmen Gray Tribe... Read More
The Wealth & Masks of Nations
•�May 24, 2020
•�2,400 Words •�94 Comments
There are at least many views on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of lockdowns. The balance of the evidence suggests that they do work, though the effect is confounded in complex ways by people spontaneously engaging in risk-reducing (but GDP-lowering) behavior. Be that as it may, the point is becoming moot, since they are ending across... Read More
Skier Patrol
•�March 25, 2020
•�400 Words •�12 Comments
Steve Sailer has been banging the drums on how skiers seem to be extremely overrepresented amongst the ranks of early COVID-19 victims: Why Skiers Instead of Golfers? Once Again, the Skier Menace Rich Skiers Step Up to Say: Let's Get the Data Black Ski Group Hit Hard by Virus Commenting on the rise in Moscow's... Read More
Moscow Corona
•�March 24, 2020
•�300 Words •�57 Comments
Here's a map of Moscow's coronavirus cases to date: Notice something interesting? Although it's not a particularly clean demarcation, there is a higher density towards the center and south-west, while there's much fewer cases in the prole-ish south-east. This corresponds with: Property & rental prices "Racism" in house listings Liberal opposition's share of the vote... Read More
Will Russia Succumb to Corona-Chan?
•�March 8, 2020
•�800 Words •�105 Comments
People have been asking me what's going on in Russia with respect to the Corona situation. I am a Russia blogger, and I am quite obsessed with Corona, so I certainly need to write about this intersection. As of March 8, there were 17 confirmed cases in Russia (two Chinese - both several weeks ago,... Read More
Warmest January in Moscow
•�February 3, 2020
•�200 Words •�167 Comments
This January has been Moscow's warmest by a significant margin since records began, clocking in at stunning +0.1C; in all likelihood, it is the first time it has slipped above zero since at least the Medieval Warm Period. The previous maximum was -1.6C just a bit more than a decade ago, in 2007. Saint-Petersburg likewise... Read More
30 Years of McDonald's in Russia
•�February 1, 2020
•�300 Words •�122 Comments
Yesterday, something much more important than Brexit took place. It was the 30 year anniversary of McDonald's opening its first restaurant in the USSR and selling Big Mac Meals for three rubles to massive throngs of famished Soviet citizens. That was the price that your average samogon-swilling sovok was willing to sell away the country... Read More
The Siege of Leningrad in Long-Term Perspective
•�January 27, 2020
•�400 Words •�54 Comments
Source: Direct comparison of Moscow vs. Saint-Petersburg populations. On the eve of World War I, Saint-Petersburg was bigger than Moscow: 2.1M to 1.8M. It had a more developed and sophisticated economy, and was drawing in more people, though this was partially canceled out by the higher fertility rate in more religious and traditionalist Moscow. SPB... Read More
"Beyond Meat" Is A Big Broccoli Psyops
•�November 11, 2019
•�300 Words •�163 Comments
After an epic search for one of the ten Teremok restaurants in Moscow that serve the Немясо (Beyond Meat) patty... ... I finally found one and sampled it. It was OK, I guess. Quite edible. Might even be good with condiments. But it tastes *nothing* like meat, contra MSM pundits. Consequently, I am now convinced... Read More
Navalny's "Smart Vote" Won the Moscow Opposition Just 3 Seats (Out of 45)
•�September 9, 2019
•�1,600 Words •�22 Comments
As I wrote in my post on the Moscow Duma elections, which took place on September 8, the electoral strategy of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) - the main pro-Western opposition front to Putin headed by Navalny and his campaign manager Leonid Volkov - was the so-called "Smart Vote." Claiming that many of their candidates had... Read More
"Russian Nationalist" Navalny Endorses Commies Over Actual Nationalists in Moscow Elections
•�September 7, 2019
•�1,200 Words •�36 Comments
One curious point of agreement between anti-imperialist "Western Russophiles" and the most deranged Russophobes (e.g. Arkady Babchenko, who had called him Russia's "future liberal Fuhrer") is the idea that Navalny is a nationalist. This is despite almost no actual, self-identified Russian nationalists considering him as such, and Navalny himself energetically signalling against Russian identity and... Read More
Reality Check
•�August 3, 2019
•�200 Words •�24 Comments
I can't summon any interest in following the Moscow protests. What was interesting in 2011-12 (when I covered the Bolotnaya protests in detail, and produced what is perhaps the most comprehensive popular English language account of Russian electoral fraud), and a novelty for me personally in 2017 (when I personally attended a couple of those... Read More
The Jewish Museum & Center of Tolerance
•�July 28, 2019
•�2,100 Words •�353 Comments
I am not exaggerating when I say that the Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance might just be the single best museum that I have ever visited. This isn't because I identify with Jewishness, consider myself an outstanding philo-Semite, or am particularly moved by its spiritual gravitas. I admire it because it does absolutely everything... Read More
Some Gay Protests in Moscow. Visit Teremok Instead.
•�July 28, 2019
•�200 Words •�116 Comments
So I hear that there have been some protests in Moscow regarding the Electoral Commission's refusal to register some of the liberal candidates, despite getting the requisite signatures. TBH this is so banal by now that I can't even be bothered writing much about them, let alone personally reporting on them as I did in... Read More
Moscow Geek Picnic 2019
•�July 16, 2019
•�1,300 Words •�31 Comments
The past weekend saw the ninth Geek Picnic. This is an annual Russian science/sci-fi festival where technologists and futurists come together to hear lectures presentations, see tech exhibits, and do other futuristic things. I decided to come to this one to see what's it's all about. Some of you may have followed my Twitter thread... Read More
Russia's Uber Gets Better
•�March 12, 2019
•�1,000 Words •�11 Comments
There are a number of transport network companies [TNC] operating in Russia - apart from Uber, there is also the more popular Yandex.Taxi, as well as the taxi hailing Gett and a few others. These companies are a vast improvement from the days of the old gypsy cabs, many of them illegally run by Caucasian... Read More
The Samurai Fears the Burger
•�January 28, 2019
•�400 Words •�167 Comments
The dawn of Russia's era of mass restaurant outings - which began in the early 2000s, in line with an unprecedented expansion in Russian personal prosperity - was dominated by sushi. But when I returned in 2016, it was already clear that era was in decline. Sure, there were - and are - still plenty... Read More
Moscow: Scenes of SWPL
•�September 28, 2018
•�100 Words •�58 Comments
VDNKh is best known for its eponymous Soviet-era exhibitions center (which features the famous worker and kolkhoz woman statue) and the Museum of Cosmonautics. While I recommend visiting both, I was more amused by the concentrated SWPL in the VDNKh, which is the area where I'll be working from October. As in the rest of... Read More
The Pensions Protests in Russia
•�September 10, 2018
•�600 Words •�17 Comments
1. There were no more than 2,000-3,000 people protesting in Moscow about the raising of the retirement age (at most). This is the definition of "storm in a teacup." 2. Navalny bandwagoning on this issue is particularly implausible, since he is an economic neoliberal. Which, to be sure, is one of the exceeding few good... Read More
The Moscow Elections 2018
•�September 8, 2018
•�600 Words •�76 Comments
On September 9, Moscow is electing its Mayor. The undoubted winner will be Sergey Sobyanin, who is poised to achieve about 70% of the vote. The main "challenger" is KDPR candidate Vadim Kumin, who is slated to do at least twice better than LDPR candidate Mikhail Degtyarev. There are two factors favoring him. First, there... Read More
Book Review: Vladimir Voinovich - Moscow 2042
•�July 29, 2018
•�1,300 Words •�13 Comments
Vladimir Voinovich (1986) - Moscow 2042 Rating: 2/5 TLDR: Good perspective on sovok-liberal Russophobia. Vladimir Voinovich died the other day. In the Anglosphere, this only seems to have been noticed by RFERL, where this Serb/Jewish literary dissident worked during his exile from the USSR in the 1980s. Like Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich opposed the Soviet regime -... Read More
Soviet Arcade Machines
•�July 8, 2018
•�300 Words •�72 Comments
One of the quainter, more obscure attractions in Moscow is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines. The post-Stalinist USSR aimed to provide a good material living standard to its people, and technologies were bought from the West towards that end (e.g. the classic Lada was a copy of an Italian Fiat car). Ergo for arcade... Read More
Yaroslavl Brights, Buryat Patriots
•�November 15, 2017
•�700 Words •�28 Comments
Just came back from a workshop on "Intelligence and Culture as Factors of National Competitiveness" organized by the Institute of Psychology RAS. The most interesting presentation was by Konstantin Sugonyev, which may be published in a forthcoming paper. It concerned the following test: This is a test on the Russian Defense Ministry's website, where potential... Read More
Moscow World's Safest Megacity for Women
•�October 17, 2017
•�100 Words •�91 Comments
Reuters poll: Here is what they found: In an earlier post I noted that Moscow is the last and only megacity in the world where Europeans remain a solid majority.
The Two Worlds of Moscow
•�October 13, 2017
•�100 Words •�123 Comments
Regular readers will know I live in the prole area of Moscow. As it turns out, my flat is ghetto as fuck. Drug overdose a few months ago. A murder a couple of days ago. 14/88 graffiti on the walls. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Higher School of Economics - Russia's top economics institution,... Read More
Russian Liberals Are the Nomenklatura's Children
•�September 13, 2017
•�500 Words •�41 Comments
Liberal electoral victories in Moscow compared to the prevalence of those ultimate SWPL status symbols, bike sharing stations... ... the upscale organic food store Azbuka Vkusa... ... and concentrations of nomenklatura housing as of 1989. At first glance, one of these is not like the others. But that's not all that surprising. Dig into the... Read More
The Moscow Municipal Elections 2017
•�September 11, 2017
•�600 Words •�179 Comments
On September 10 there was a round of gubernatorial elections in Russia, as well as elections to local councils in Moscow. There's a lot of confusion on account of whether it was a victory for United Russia. On the one hand, the low turnout - which traditionally favors more motivated liberals - allowed them to... Read More
The Myth of Moskvabad
•�June 29, 2017
•�1,100 Words •�32 Comments
Credit: Ivan Musinov. There is this strange dichotomy with respect to Russia. The Western elites like Hillary Clinton and many Russophile right-wingers believe that it is a paragon of fascist/conservative and white supremacist/traditionalist values, respectively. (The main difference being that the former think that this is Bad, while the latter think it's Good). On the... Read More
Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Navalny
•�June 13, 2017
•�1,300 Words •�63 Comments
The Russia wide protests organized by Navalny on June 12 were a flop. This was not unexpected, given the lack of enthusiasm on social networks - in Moscow, there were 20% fewer people expressing interest in going to this event relative to the March 26th protest on Facebook. The earlier event had translated into 8,000... Read More
Bayonetting Putler with Navalny
•�June 11, 2017
•�900 Words •�32 Comments
Navalny has just moved the planned June 12 protest from Prospekt Sakharova, a fairly central and very spacious location, to Tverskaya, which is minutes away from the Kremlin, at the last minute. The former event was officially sanctioned by the city authorities. The new one is *not*. Navalny claims that this was done because the... Read More
Open Thread: Limonov Mindset
•�June 5, 2017
•�1,100 Words •�70 Comments
The National Bolshevik (NatsBol) meeting was at the Monument to the Heroes of the Revolution of 1905-1907, festooned with the black-red flags of movement, though the chiliastic chic of Limonov's monthly rant was somewhat checked by the Mickey D. golden arch and the skyscrapers of the Moscow financial district in the background. Eduard Limonov is... Read More
One City, Three Protests
•�May 25, 2017
•�1,200 Words •�82 Comments
There have been three significant political protests in Moscow in the past few months, and each in their own way - and in their relation to each other - say a lot about the state of Russia today. It's not that great for the Kremlin. But not for the reasons the Western media would have... Read More
Moscow Property Prices
•�May 1, 2017
•�900 Words •�43 Comments
In recent weeks I've had cause to look at Moscow property prices. There are basically three major socio-economic regions in Moscow: The center - Upper middle class, very high property prices (300-400,000R/sq m), cosmopolitan, tilted against Putin and towards liberal parties like Yabloko, full of cafes with Macbook toting hipsters, do not discriminate against immigrants... Read More
Moscow Protests: The Tumult on Tverskaya
•�March 26, 2017
•�800 Words •�42 Comments
As one of the world's leading activists against the Putin regime, I had no choice but to show up on Tverskaya Street today, to fight for your freedom and mine. As expected, turnout wasn't particularly high. Although the area around the Pushkin Monument was crowded, it only extended to half a block in every direction.... Read More
Russia's Protest Season About to Kick Off
•�March 25, 2017
•�700 Words •�32 Comments
With a bit less than a year left to Russia's Presidential elections in 2018, the general contours of this cycle's protest movement against Putin are already coalescing. Alexey Navalny has called a march for tomorrow along Tverskaya Street, a central boulevard that leads to the Kremlin. The Moscow mayoralty refused to allow it, and Navalny... Read More
Open Thread: Nutria & Witte
•�January 27, 2017
•�600 Words •�15 Comments
I was privileged to meet one of the columnists at The Unz Review. Feel free to guess who. Ironically, we met up at Jean-Jacques cafe on Nikitsky Boulevard, the favorite watering hole of the rukopozhatnaya kreakl crowd (handshake-worthy/"respectable" "creative" hipsters). It's a solid enough place, though - slightly pretentious French style lunch with wine for... Read More
Open Thread: The Trumpen King's Coronation from Moscow
•�January 20, 2017
•�300 Words •�50 Comments
I watched the God Emperor's ascension to the Golden Throne at a bar night for American expats in Moscow. The mood there was largely pro-Trumpist, though obviously there was a self-selection mechanism involved. Everyone disliked HRC, though there were a fair number of Bernouts. I got into a discussion with a reasonably influential official from... Read More
Open Thread: Zvezda Chamber
•�December 29, 2016
•�1,500 Words •�68 Comments
Not even a week in Moscow, and I get contacted by a Zvezda TV journalist requesting an interview about life in America and why I returned to Russia. In a deserted billiards room, I began talking about my theory that there is a civility-friendliness spectrum, with Britain on one end of it, Russia on the... Read More
Open Thread: The Moskvabad Missive
•�December 23, 2016
•�800 Words •�82 Comments
Rapidly becoming who I am. So I have fulfilled the demands of some of my most committed detractors and self-deported myself back to Russia. My first sociological observation on landing in Domodedova this Tuesday, and perhaps the one most germane to Unz.com readers, was that about 100% of the airport cleaning stuff were Uzbeks and... Read More
Mapping Moscow's Tolerance
•�June 4, 2016
•�300 Words •�13 Comments
A few days ago the Russian urban lifestyle magazine Afisha commissioned some big data geeks to visualize the percentage of Muscovite landlords specifying "Russians only" ("Slavs only," "No Caucasians," etc.) in their home rental listings. Here is the resulting map (red is more "xenophobic"): The range of landlords making ethnic requirements varied from 0% in... Read More
Were the 2013 Moscow Elections Falsified?
•�September 10, 2013
•�800 Words •�7 Comments
1. The CEC results Here they are. The turnout was 32%. Sergey Sobyanin – 51.37% Alexei Navalny – 27.24% Ivan Melnikov – 10.69% Sergey Mitrokhin – 3.51% Mikhail Degtyaryov – 2.86% Nikolai Levichev – 2.79% Invalid ballots – 1.53% 2. Pre-elections opinion polls: Navalny's support - among those who indicated a clear preference for one... Read More
Moscow Exit Polls: Sobyanin ~50%, Navalny ~30%
•�September 8, 2013
•�300 Words
According to a roundup of all the major exit polls by Kommersant, it appears that although Navalny's performance was massively better than expected, Acting Mayor Sobyanin still managed to avoid a second tour. In Moscow, voting has finished for the new Mayor. According to exit polls carried out at the doors of the election stations... Read More
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Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.