Mary Dejevsky

One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.

Mary Dejevsky: Take heart from the city that shaped Medvedev

For the best part of two months it has been possible to forget that Vladimir Putin would shortly cease to be Russia's president - which is, in its way, a compliment. This first-ever period of transition between an outgoing and an incoming president could have been a time of Kremlin troubles, fraught with destabilising in-fighting. In the event, the weeks passed smoothly.

Recently by Mary Dejevsky

Mary Dejevsky: So how fair are elections in this country?

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Sitting in a local restaurant recently, I caught snatches of a conversation at the table behind. Two women – middle-aged, white, if you think it relevant – had been discussing this week's London mayoral election, when they suddenly bolted down a side alley.

Mary Dejevsky: Women's rights cannot be forced on Arab societies

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

In a tentative lifting of the mystical curtain it has drawn around itself, Saudi Arabia recently permitted the estimable campaign group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), to conduct a survey inside the country. Its findings – reported in yesterday's Independent – are pretty much as you would expect.

Mary Dejevsky: You can call it saving the planet. I call it being a responsible citizen

Saturday, 19 April 2008

An almighty row has erupted, in the internet chatrooms where such things are discussed, about a BBC report on climate change that was edited after its first appearance. That the report was altered has been acknowledged. What is now at issue is why this was done. Was it to flesh out the detail, or was it – as some claim – to placate a pesky critic who complained that the original report would provide succour for global warming sceptics?

Mary Dejevsky: The people are waiting. So where are the politicians?

Saturday, 12 April 2008

How often in the past three months have we looked enviously across the Atlantic and asked why it is that we can't do grass-roots politics with the same healthy verve and populism that distinguishes the United States in a presidential election year? Hillary and Barack may have made 2008 a vintage primary season, but every US presidential contest has its rousing town-hall meetings, its lawn posters, its corny lapel buttons and its spectacular school-gym balloon drops.

Mary Dejevsky: A gender divide is increasing in the professions

Tuesday, 8 April 2008

Dr Brian McKinstry of Edinburgh University is a brave man. Writing in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, he described the increasing number of women doctors as "bad for medicine" and forecast a staffing crisis down the line.

Mary Dejevsky: The real lesson of the Heathrow humiliation

Tuesday, 1 April 2008

The Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, deftly evaded public association with the Terminal 5 disaster yesterday by dispatching her aviation minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, to the Commons to face the music. To an almost empty House – perhaps MPs, like so many others, were stuck at their weekend destinations, sans toothbrush, sans clothes, sans nearly everything – the hapless minister revealed that the latest tally of "stored" luggage was now 28,000 pieces, and expressed fervent hope that British Airways and the British Airports Authority would learn lessons from the debacle. But not, of course, before they had sorted it all out.

Mary Dejevsky: Scientists must try harder to win this debate

Wednesday, 26 March 2008

Australia is currently wooing tourists with a brazen, and briefly banned, series of adverts that combine langorous shots of deserted beaches with an indignant vernacular voiceover. "So where the bloody hell are you?" it asks. I recalled this advert a couple of days ago when 200 charities and scientists sent a letter to MPs in support of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Where the bloody hell had they been?

Mary Dejevsky: We're suckers for a 'deal'. And it's costing us dear

Monday, 24 March 2008

Among my cheeriest memories of reporting from the Soviet Union were the few occasions when I felt that, as a customer, I had beaten the perverse central supply system at its own game. You took for granted that anything worth buying you would have to queue for, so picking the right queue was the first victory. As it was not always apparent at the end of the queue what was being sold at the front – it could be anything from lemons to tinned frankfurters to imported children's pyjamas – the gamble was trickier than it might have seemed.

Mary Dejevsky: Work hard? Play by the rules? You're a loser...

Tuesday, 18 March 2008

Maybe it is the scale of it; maybe the sense that an extreme American mutation of capitalism is finally getting its come-uppance. Maybe it is that no one here in Britain – except a few unfortunate Northern Rock shareholders – has yet actually lost any hard cash.

Mary Dejevsky: Family businesses don't deserve persecution by tax

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

When the Chancellor stands up in the Commons tomorrow to deliver his first full-dress Budget speech, I will be watching for one item in particular: any change in the tax regime for family businesses. This is not because it affects me directly – it doesn't – but because the way in which governments treat the family is a gauge of their broader principles and motives. It signals whether they see themselves working with the grain of society, or – foolishly and counterproductively – against it.

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