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A pattern true in Soviet times appears to be returning at least in some places – greater freedom in smaller regional media markets than in larger central ones.

Many Russians have drawn the wrong lessons from the events in Turkey because in that country, the military has traditionally been the promoter of Westernization and secularism.

Reports that people in the Donbass are protesting pro-Moscow forces there, that desertions among those forces are increasing, and that their members are even shooting at one another provide fresh support for the proposition that the pro-Moscow forces there are a new version of “the atamanshchina.”

The phenomenon of “disappearances” as the result of the actions of government or its allies, long a characteristic of life in the North Caucasus, is now spreading throughout the Russian Federation.

Putin Propaganda Based on Rejection of Possibility of Rational Thought, Shekhtman Says 2016-07-19 16:23:44 Staunton, VA, July 19, 2016  – Vladimir Putin’s propaganda is intended to destroy “all the rules of rational thought” just as those who support pseudo-science do, Pavel Shekhtman argues at the Kasparov portal; but it does so in exactly the opposite way than […]

Soviet Sexual Repression Continues to Cast a Dark Shadow on Russia Today, Baier Says 2016-07-18 17:47:57 Staunton, VA, July 18, 2016 –  Sexual repression, which was an inherent and inalienable part of the Soviet system of control, continues to cast a shadow on Russia today, according to Aleksey Baier, who grew up in Moscow but […]

Is RBC’s report on the elite village at Valdai its last investigative report? With the top three editors dismissed and replace by TASS editors, and 20 reporters departing, it increasingly looks like a purge.

According to the Moscow Academy of Labor and Social Relations, “the exodus of [Central Asian and Caucasus] migrants from Russia as the result of the decline of the ruble has freed up jobs which Russians have begun to occupy,

Some Ukrainians were disappointed that NATO’s Warsaw Summit did not move further toward integrating Ukraine and Georgia into the Western alliance, but they should take heart from signs NATO has “come out of its coma.”

During the Cold War, officials in many Western capitals often remarked that “we send Moscow diplomats and the Russians treat them like spies, while Moscow sends us spies and we treat them like diplomats.”