Video: Russia’s Post-Authoritarian Future: A Conversation with Ksenia Sobchak

Readers looking for something fresh and real about world affairs as a wholesome alternative to matters of memos and military parades are invited just to watch this video. Readers who want to know what they are getting into are invited to scroll past the video and see what else RantWoman has on her mind.



RantWoman's morning Twitter fix unexpectedly supplied two threads that took longer than RantWoman usually allows for such pursuits. The first thread was about Russia and elections. More importantly it was in Russian and Talkback was reading the Russian.

The thread had two strands: Russians on #TrumpRussia, Russian oligarchs, the US elections... and the thread excerpted here, about the upcoming Russian elections. RantWoman presents this video of an address by Ksenia Anatolevna Sobchak at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Sobchak says she is not planning to run until the next Russian election. That was only one of several, um, interesting perspectives expressed. RantWoman presents the video without further comment except for two points:

RantWoman spent basically a summer in DC while in college. RantWoman went into and out of many buildings. Very occasionally there was some kind of security issue, but RantWoman finds the evacuation route commentary at beginning of the video, um, interesting. RantWoman notes tartly that the evacuation route includes stairs. Enough said?

RantWoman also recalls, from being in St Petersburg around the time of the elections,  that Sobchak's father got elected mayor of Leningrad / St. Petersburg after an election campaign where the first round campaign focus was to cross out the name of the Communist party hack who was to be the only name on the ballot. RantWoman has no idea whether the provision of the Russian electoral code allowing for candidates' names to be crossed out still exists. RantWoman thinks probably not and considers its disappearance a great loss.

A question came up about participating in the upcoming elections or boycotting them as Alexander Navalnyi advocates. Sobchak says the Navalnyi movement is too small to matter and she plans to participate. RantWoman considers it unfortunate that people have only one choice on the Russian Presidential ballot.

Oh, and RantWoman had been looking for things to distract her from the latest Presidential embarrassments.