Staunton, December 4 – Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Muslims of Russia have erected 7,500 mosques or slightly more one per day, a statistic in which the Islamic community of that country can take great pride but one that may disturb some of Putin’s supporters who believe that he is committed to making Russia […]
Staunton, November 25 – The unwillingness of Russians to make a sharp break with the Soviet past and accept that Russia today is “a new independent state” and the efforts of Vladimir Putin and his regime to present Russia as a country with a single unbroken history has left Russia without a present or a […]
Staunton, November 25 – The Russian-Ukrainian war now going on could have begun in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fact that it didn’t says a great deal about the attitudes of Russian political leaders then and how much they have changed in the intervening period, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a post on […]
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s gutting of Tatarstan’s 1990 sovereignty declaration has cost every resident of that Middle Volga republic not only his or her rights and dignity but also has meant that some 70,000 US dollars earned from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural resources that should have gone to each of them has […]
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin is often accused of wanting to restore the Soviet system or at least its core values, but in fact, the Kremlin leader is interested in promoting the its “imperial-militarist” element and not its “revolutionary” component, a pattern that has the effect of limiting Russia’s ability to deal with the […]
Staunton, June 5 – Vladimir Putin has more support in the predominantly Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Chechnya than he does in Orthodox Christian Moscow, a reflection of the reality that “in terms of its content, Putin’s policies are Asiatic” rather than Christian, according to Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of Kazan’s Zvezda Povolzhya. The Russian […]
Staunton, April 24 – The Russian language and Russian culture are today “the main unifying factor[s]” for the citizens of the Russian Federation, unlike history which continues to be a source of divisions given that different groups have different understandings of past events, according to the Valdai International Discussion Club. The Moscow Higher School of […]
Staunton, April 22 – Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” project of “empire instead of a nation state and dictatorship instead of democracy” is far more popular his country than calls for the development of a civic nation, Mariya Snegova says, but it will end, as all other such projects in Russian history have, with “a catastrophe” […]
Staunton, April 3 – In the wake of Crimea, Moscow is likely to increase pressure on Belarus to cooperate, but experts say there is little chance that the two countries will unite any time soon. Instead, Putin’s Crimean Anschluss is likely to make Belarus and other former Soviet republics even more leery than they already […]
Moscow’s mayoral election is today, and opposition candidate Alexei Navalny is behind in the polls. Digging through some of the latest polling, it appears that Navalny, while he has growing support, also has very high unfavorability ratings among many who think he’s too radical. This assessment is a translation of an article by a political […]
