Masha Gessen (a former director of RFE/RL's Russian Service) for "The New Yorker" in a piece called "The Weight Of Words," on Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya "confronting the state."
This year, Ulitskaya became the de-facto head of Russian PEN, the writers’-advocacy organization, whose Russian chapter had long been quiet. Under her leadership, it quickly turned into one of the few voices in Russia criticizing the war in Ukraine; its revamped Web site has become a repository of antiwar articles and statements. That, in turn, has made her the object of attacks. In late August, the president of Russian PEN, the seventy-seven-year-old novelist Andrei Bitov, who had not been active in years, issued a vitriolic open letter accusing Ulitskaya of having staged a coup. A few days later, a large banner went up on one of Moscow’s central avenues, featuring portraits of five people—two rock stars, a journalist, and two writers, one of them Ulitskaya—next to an American flag, with the words “Are You Living Off Their Bucks?” Within a few months, Ulitskaya had gone from being too popular for the prosecutor’s office to tangle with to being someone too dangerous to be allied with.
From our newsroom via Russian agencies:
A Russian parliament committee plans to boycott a meeting of the Russian-American Business Council in the United States next month.
Russia's "Izvestia" daily newspaper quoted Vladimir Dzhabarov, acting chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the parliament's upper chamber, the Federation Council, as saying on September 30 that the meeting scheduled for October 14-15 will be boycotted.
Dzhabarov said the decision was made at the recommendation of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
He said it was in response to Washington’s sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.
Interesting bit of forensic reporting by @CatFitz:
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