Modern Russia

Two stories I read recently regarding modern Russia.

Workers were trained on how to stuff ballots, each a thin sheet roughly the size of standard letter paper. [The Commission Chairman] demonstrated how a stack of up to 30 or even 50 ballots could be folded in half, hidden inside a jacket and slipped into the ballot box without making any noise.

An Insider’s Account Of Vote Rigging For Putin. Vote-rigging during the Russia election earlier this month, and how it was done.

As the trio enjoyed their lunch, an assassin calmly walked up and shot Burlakov in the head; the bullet fragments seriously injuring his wife… Most journalists whose lunch interview had been so brutally curtailed would have been given time off and counselling for post-traumatic stress. But in Russia, the treatment is simply a couple of shots of vodka and straight back to work.

Who runs Russia? Stunning piece in the FT about the Russian mafia and its inseparable links to the Kremlin.

As a side note, I’ve just loaded Mafia State by Luke Harding onto my Kindle. It’s the true story of the former Guardian foreign correspondent’s time in Moscow, being bugged, having his flat broken into and generally upsetting the Russian authorities.