Press TV (Iran): Russia-Iran joint maritime drill in the Caspian
Last night’s chat with Press TV presenter Marzieh Hashemi about the ongoing Russian-Iranian naval exercises in the Caspian was perhaps too much of a good thing for me. Normally the format of The Spotlight calls for two panelists, but for technical reasons my counterpart was unreachable and I faced non-stop questions for 20 minutes which was fairly stressful.
Nonetheless, as Gogol once wrote, из всякой дряни можно добро получить, which may be freely translated as ‘from any old thing you can extract something good.’ I filled the time with more frank and open discussion of the potential for Russian-Iranian mutual defense and of the history of U.S. interference in management of the Caspian Sea going back 20 years to the time of the ‘gas pipeline wars’ when Washington tried to use the waterway for pipelines or LNG transshipment of Turkmenistan gas that would be carried to Europe outside the borders of the Russian Federation and to the detriment of Russian exports.
Now that I have viewed the video, I find it most interesting how the presenter pursued the question of whether Moscow would and should reconsider its relationship with Teheran to include mutual defense.
Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write.
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975).
After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility.
From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.
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Gilbert Doctorow 