Happy Holidays from Russia Profile!

By Andrei Zolotov Jr. Russia Profile 12/29/2011

Dear Readers! For most of you, the main winter holiday – Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar – has already passed. For us, the winter holidays begin with the coming New Year’s Eve, followed by the Nativity of Christ according to the Julian calendar. I would like to take this time to recap the past year at Russia Profile and wish you a prosperous 2012.\

The past month has been particularly busy and exciting for us. The publication of the Russia Profile Special Report dedicated to the future of the media nearly coincided with the dramatic State Duma elections, followed by a series of mass protests that seem to be changing Russia exactly 20 years after the Soviet flags over the Kremlin and the White House were lowered in 1991. We have covered both the elections and the rallies to the best of our ability, in cooperation with our colleagues from the RIA Novosti English news service.

The developments of the past month have been so dramatic – and their outcome is so unpredicatble – that it is hard to look back and recall what the important milestones of 2011 had been beyond September 24, when outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev nominated his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, to run for president – something many saw coming, but that nonetheless upset Russia’s “irritated urban residents,” as the former chief Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov deftly called them.

For our publication, the main achievement of 2011 has been the new version of the Russia Profile Web site that we launched in February – something our team had worked on, on and off, for three years. Among other new features, it allows us to publish videos, and Dan Peleschuk’s report from Prospekt Sakharova last Saturday, when a mass protest rally took place, was one of the first such video reports produced by Russia Profile reporters.

In 2011 journalists Daniel Peleshchuk and Andrew Roth joined what is now our team of seven people producing Russia Profile. Our workflow has changed considerably since the time when we launched the publication a staggering eight years ago (the prototype of the Russia Profile Magazine came out in the beginning of 2004, and the Web site went live in April of that year). Today, just like our colleagues all over the world, we have learned to shoot videos, take photographs and often produce two or more versions of the same story – first a quick recap for the more time-sensitive English News Wire, and then a longer, more analytical version for RussiaProfile.Org.

It is in this capacity of multimedia journalists that Russia Profile reporters went to cover two of the most tragic developments of the past year – the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the massacre on the Norwegian island of Utoya.

Looking back at these events, as well as at what came to be known as the “Arab Spring” – the disturbing events in Libya and Syria – together with the euro crisis, the current protests in Russia and the upcoming presidential elections in the United States, the scale of global uncertainty can certainly be overwhelming. It is easy to get scared and lose temper, as some people have done, predicting all sorts of doomsday scenarios, both literal and figurative.

We at Russia Profile are a small team sometimes intimidated by the grandeur of the topics we undertake to cover. But we abide by the simple Russian principle: “Do what you ought to, and come what may.” So we do our best to provide you with quality reporting and analysis of what promise to be interesting times in and around Russia – even more interesting than usual. And that is something we love to do.

At the time of winter holidays, which is a time of wonders and of hoping for miracles, let me wish for the turmoil that our world is experiencing to take place at the lowest cost to human lives and wellbeing, even though this might render the developments less newsworthy. Let us have a happy 2012!

Yours sincerely,
Andrei Zolotov, Jr.
Editor