Staunton, July 8 – One of the most cynical methods the Soviet government employed to divide and rule non-Russian nations was the establishment of republics with two titular nationalities because such arrangements guaranteed that the two were more likely to view the other as a problem and threat than to see Moscow as responsible. At […]
Staunton, July 8 – Fifty-three percent of all books published in Russia last year were issued in print runs of under 1,000 copies, with the average tirage of the 112,100 books published there now standing at 4,330 copies, continuing downward trends of the last six years and isolating many of these works from their audiences […]
Staunton, July 8 – After a brief attempt to escape from its past in the 1990s, Russia under Vladimir Putin is “again returning to militarism…the model of existence in which Russia had existed for centuries” in order to prepare for war. No other such civilization exists in the world now, but Russia “cannot militarize as […]
Staunton, July 5 – Since the peoples of Altay learned that the elections staged to ratify the Kremlin’s choice of their governor showed that he failed to win in electoral districts dominated by the non-Russians, their leaders have been struggling to unite in order to put pressure on the government there in the name of […]
Staunton, July 3 – Two United Russia Duma deputies have introduced legislation that would require all schools in the Russian Federation to use a single set of textbooks for basic courses, a step they say is necessary to ensure the defense of “a common educational space” in the country. But officials of the State Council […]
Staunton, July 5 – “Putin has finally decided” to block all of the ways out from “the dead end into which he has driven himself and Russia,” Andrey Illarionov says, prompting the West to oppose him more vigorously, creating a disaster for Russia, and setting the stage for the ultimate restoration of Ukrainian control over […]
Staunton, July 1 – A call by some Duma members for the Russian government to review and declare illegal the Soviet government’s recognition of Baltic independence in September 1991 has attracted widespread attention and concern as an indication of Moscow’s intentions but ultimately ridiculed as otherwise meaningless grandstanding. But there are other straws in the […]
Staunton, July 7 The Kremlin it appears “does not believe the ratings” it routinely distributes about the support the Russian people are showing for Vladimir Putin and his regime if one judges by the Russian government’s new effort to give the FSB expanded powers to fight mass protests, according to the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. […]
Staunton, July 4 The word khokhol must not be used “in official or public speech,” Aleksandra Olkhovskaya of Moscow’s Pushkin Russian Language Institute says, because it denigrates those to whom it is applied and thus is offensive. It can only be used, she says, when those employing it know those with whom they are speaking. […]
Staunton, July 6 NB: As longtime readers of Windows on Eurasia know, there is no commentator on Russian politics for which I have greater respect than historian Irina Pavlova. Her 70 essays written between 2006 and 2014 and which appeared on Grani.ru and Rufabula.com are among the most insightful commentaries we have on the nature […]
