OMON’s first ever meet-the-press event, organized to change the special force’s image from brutal and incompetent to professional and deadly.

I boarded my platzkart wagon heading out of Izhevsk feeling like I could die. And that was BEFORE entering platzkart–the infamous Russian third-class railway carriage. The train car, packed to the brim with foul-smelling Izhevsk hicks, was like one giant…

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I’ve spent a…

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I’ve spent a…

STEPANAKERT, NAGORNO-KARABAKH — It took my taxi driver and me an hour to get out of Yerevan. Most of it was spent waiting in line to fill up his gas tank. Not with gasoline. No, it was the kind of…

All these years, I’ve been wondering to myself, “What’s wrong with Russians? What’s with their strange Byzantine ways? And what the fuck is the deal with that murse thing?” “Murse?” you ask. The stubby little word may sound unfamiliar, but…

Editorial pages on both sides of the Atlantic have been calling more and more aggressively for the expulsion of a former superpower from the G8 group of leading industrial democracies. For once, we here at the eXile couldn’t agree with…