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Dmitry Shlapentokh
For Dmitry Shlapentokh's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 3, 2009
The Kremlin's renegade puppet in Chechnya
MOSCOW — Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, recently proposed to Ahmed Zakaev, a leader of the nationalistic and comparatively moderate Chechen opposition, that he return to Chechnya. Kadyrov promised Zakaev amnesty and various positions ranging from director of the local theater to minister of culture.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 1, 2008
The Dragon and the Bear
SOUTH BEND, Indiana — Second honeymoons rarely, if ever, recapture the zest of lost love. Yet ever since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Russia and China have sought to rekindle the close relations that once supposedly existed between the Soviet Union and Mao's China before Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Josef Stalin in 1956. But that renewed Sino-Russian marriage always smacked more of convenience — aimed as it was at checking American hegemony — than of true romance. Now Russia's invasion of Georgia has shattered even the illusion of attraction.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 8, 2007
Ruing the death of Russian womanhood
SOUTH BEND, Indiana -- Valentina Tereshkova, the first female Soviet cosmonaut -- indeed, the first woman to go into space -- recently celebrated her 70th birthday. In an interview, she stated her only wish: to fly to Mars, even with a one-way ticket. It was an implicit wish for a spectacular form of suicide, for a spectacularly prosaic reason: the loss, experienced by thousands of Russian women of her generation, of her life's existential foundation.

Longform

Historically, kabuki was considered the entertainment of the merchant and peasant classes, a far cry from how it is regarded today.
For Japan's oldest kabuki theater, the show must go on