St. Petersburg St. Petersburg is a dramatic city built around islands, rivers, canals, and bridges and somehow we ended up yesterday in sunshine even as the temperature turned slightly more crisp. Little did we realize what a rare blessing this might be until we found that on the Baltic and at the same …
Month: September 2007
Big and Small Russian Labor
St. Petersburg The delegation from the Organizers’ Forum (www.organizersforum.org) shifted venue from Moscow to St. Petersburg, though I am still sorting through all of the meetings and information from those first days. We also seem to have moved in time from the combination of “soviet block” and historic construction around the Kremlin and …
Tightening the Screws on NGOs
Moscow Part of what had drawn the Organizers’ Forum (www.organizersforum.org) to visit Russia was the widely reported series of new rules imposed on non-governmental organizations almost a year ago by the Putin administration. We had heard contrary reports, but none of the information encouraged us to believe that something was happening that might …