This article was first published in The eXile on August 10, 2007.
I am one of 100,000 Chechens in Moscow. There are another 30,000 Ingush living here. Together, we belong to the “Vainakh” ethnolinguistic group and make up roughly one per cent of Moscow’s population. (more…)
April 19th, 2013 | Comments (15)
On December 5, the day after Russia’s Duma elections, the anti-corruption crusader and popular blogger, Alexei Navalny, told a raucous crowd, “I want to say to you: Thank you. Thank you for playing you part as a citizen. Thank you…
December 26th, 2011 | Comments (28)
“The West let Russia down, and it’s a shame,” said Meadowcroft, a former British MP and veteran of 48 election-monitoring missions to 35 countries.
In a recent telephone interview with The eXile, Meadowcroft explained how he was pressured by OSCE and EU authorities to ignore serious irregularities in Boris Yeltsin’s heavily manipulated 1996 election victory, and how EU officials suppressed a report about the Russian media’s near-total subservience to pro-Yeltsin forces.
December 9th, 2011 | Comments (11)
A little secret you won’t hear much about: Libya under Qaddafi wasn’t that bad for most people. And that’s according to the CIA. Take a look at the CIA factbook on Libya under Qaddafi and you’re in for a shock.
Subsidized medical care, subsidized education, one of the highest average incomes in Africa, a life expectancy of 77 point something, and rankings in the 90s, pretty low, on most of the bad stuff like infant mortality.
August 30th, 2011 | Comments (43)
Update: You MUST watch today’s Ratigan performance. If we’re not going to riot against all this crap like the rest of the world is doing, Ratigan will riot for us. [Video below] Exiled Online editor Mark Ames went on MSNBC’s Dylan…
August 9th, 2011 | Comments (37)
An American correspondent stationed in Moscow just forwarded me a WikiLeaked diplomatic cable about me, The eXile, and the Kremlin media-stomping in mid-2008 that killed my newspaper and sent me fleeing home. The June 16, 2008 US Embassy cable–marked “CONFIDENTIAL”–correctly put the crackdown on The eXile in the context of a wider (and scarier) crackdown on other Russian media outlets that coincided with the handover of power from Vladimir Putin to the newly-”elected” President Dmitry Medvedev.
May 25th, 2011 | Comments (34)
Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar…
May 25th, 2011 | Comments (10)
Years ago I got an angry email from somebody claiming to be in one of the Baltic militaries. Whoever he was, he wrote in grammatically perfect English so he just had to be from Northern Europe. We can’t talk English…
April 28th, 2011 | Comments (82)
The biggest story of the past year—the takeover of America by the billionaire Koch brothers—was first reported by eXiled Online editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine over two years ago, in a controversial article for Playboy. Dylan Ratigan sets the…
March 24th, 2011 | Comments (17)
This article was first published in Alternet. Now that the shock of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting is starting to wear off and the country is returning to its normal insanity again, we’re back to facing a far worse, far more…
January 26th, 2011 | Comments (53)
Exiled Online editor Mark Ames delivers an address to the nation on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show. The subject: A quick history lesson on why “austerity” is the worst, most insane idea imaginable to solve America’s economic woes–and how John…
January 6th, 2011 | Comments (54)
Mark Ames appeared on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show to talk about the Tea Party slave mentality, how Ames and Levine scooped their journalism peers on the billionaire Koch brothers’ furtive sponsorship of the Tea Party campaign, and how America’s…
October 20th, 2010 | Comments (37)
This classic “prank” first published in the summer of 1999 ranks as one of the eXile’s least-successful pranks (which paradoxically made it x-tra annoying) on our longtime nemesis Michael McFaul–formerly a top Clinton USAID official in Moscow, Carnegie Endowment and…
August 25th, 2010 | Comments (9)
This article first appeared in The eXile on June 1, 2007 For months now, our overseas readers have been asking us, “What’s a gopnik?” They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page:…
July 22nd, 2010 | Comments (26)
June 24th, 2010 | Leave Comment
Mark Ames joins Vanity Fair writer James Verini for an interview on the NPR radio show “Here & Now” with host Robin Young in Boston. They talk about the incredible 11-year history of the Moscow newspaper “The eXile” which was the…
March 25th, 2010 | Comments (19)
Faced! Wheelchair-bound eXiled Editor Yasha Levine finds out that in Russia, provincial clubbing ain’t for cripples Editor’s note: We reprint this eXile Classic, first published in The eXile on September 25, 2007, to commemorate Russia’s recent triumph in the Vancouver Winter…
March 23rd, 2010 | Comments (9)
Today is March 8, meaning it’s International Women’s Day in the former Warsaw Pact nations. It brings back mixed emotions–gagging, for starters, just remembering the revolting cheesiness of those fat, vain Russian TV hosts showing off their toasting skills in…
March 8th, 2010 | Comments (15)
This article first appeared in The Nation.com… If you’ve been wondering what ever happened to that wonderful Orange Revolution in Ukraine–because let’s face it, it was probably the last feel-good moment America collectively experienced in an otherwise bummer-packed decade–Sunday’s presidential…
February 15th, 2010 | Comments (47)
Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the arrest of one Jamal Yousef of the Syrian military, who tried to trade a buttload of machine guns and high grade explosives in exchange for 2,000 lbs. of high grade cocaína.
August 20th, 2009 | Comments (5)
A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail wrote about a low-ranking British diplomat named James Hudson who was caught on hidden camera by the FSB (formerly the KGB, formerlier the MVD, formerlierer the NKVD, formerliest the Cheka) getting it on with two Russian hookers in…
July 28th, 2009 | Comments (15)
[Interview with Ames starts at 2:00 mark] Mark Ames appeared on MSNBC earlier this week as a guest on Dylan Ratigan‘s new “Morning Meeting” show. Ames squared off against Jack Matlock, ex-American ambassador to the Soviet Union, now known as perhaps the…
July 9th, 2009 | Comments (38)
Nikolai Usatykh, serving 22 years in Arkhangelsk (or is he just 22 years old?) Twitter may be all the rage here in the United States, but social networking over the World Wide Web has just jumped over a 15-ft. fence…
April 21st, 2009 | Comments (12)
The reigning czarina of Russian sluts, the ever-ambitious Karina Barbie, released a poorly-edited video of herself practicing her poledancing moves when she was 17. Note that she’s poledancing in her parents’ home, with her babushka walking back and forth sans…
February 23rd, 2009 | Comments (21)
From the moment Georgia launched its invasion against the breakaway region of South Ossetia this past August, sparking a wider war with neighboring Russia, the New York Times‘s news coverage depicted Georgia as an innocent victim of Russia’s neo-imperialist evil….
December 22nd, 2008 | Comments (11)
This article was first published in The eXile on November 5, 2007 FRESNO, CA — By the time you finish this column you will be able to destroy huge buildings, kill hundreds of people in a few minutes, and strike terror…
When you look back at Obama’s wars, you get a pretty clear idea what went wrong over the last four years…Obama just doesn’t understand his job as war chief of this big crazy tribe…
I think I’ve finally found a religion I can convert to. I’m thinking of turning Sikh. And we’ll just slide right by all the puns popping into your little heads, if you don’t mind. The Sikhs are just the coolest warrior tribe around. Take their scripture.
This article is a War Nerd Classic Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena and I’ll bet Toyotas to Subarus the Christian’ll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: lions are…
But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.
There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few. I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every…
Some of the weirdest, longest wars around have been on the other side of the Big River, but for some reason most American war nerds would rather read about Eurasian battles. Not sure why, except I remember when I was…
