Staunton, April 24 – Andrey Piontkovsky, who in the past has warned that Vladimir Putin will continue to escalate his acts of aggression, now says that there is unlikely to be any massive Russian attack on Ukraine because “even Putin understands that such an adventure would be catastrophic for his personal power.” Of course, the […]
Staunton, April 24 “Russia looks in a mirror and sees the USSR and thinks that all those around it see it that way, tries to conduct itself as the USSR did and considers the threats which the Soviet Union did,” Pavel Kazarin says. “But the West looks at Russia as Russia, wants a return to […]
Staunton, April 24 – Many Russians make a clear distinction between “russky,” the Russian adjective for a member of the Russian ethnos, and “rossiyanin,” a noun designating anyone who is a subject of citizen of the Russian state. And many Russian nationalists dislike the former precisely because they say it demeans their ethno-national identity. But […]
Staunton, April 24 – Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s has made a statement that his forces should attack anyone, “Muscovite or Stavropol resident,” who might appear on the territory of the republic, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has suggested that the Islamic State is Russia’s main enemy may presage the opening of a third post-Soviet […]
Staunton, April 22 — Because of the nature of the conflict in Ukraine and the kind of people who have gone to fight there, Donbas veterans suffer from a special “Donbas syndrome” and constitute a bigger threat to themselves and to society when they return to Russia than did the veterans of the Afghan and […]
Staunton, April 22 – Four years ago, liberal Russians began to refer to the hurrah-patriots who opposed them as vatniki or “vatniks,” a reference to the padded jackets such people often wore but used to designate their slavish support of the Kremlin and their hostility to the West and civilization. But now, Pavel Shekhtman suggests, […]
Staunton, April 21 – Russian occupation officials are talking with the representatives of the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks and Germans, four numerically-small nationalities in Crimea who were deported alongside the much larger population of Crimean Tatars in a transparent effort to pressure the Crimean Tatars to cooperate with the Russians. With only some exceptions, the Crimean […]
Staunton, April 21 – The West and Russia’s liberal intelligentsia equate civil society with the liberal opposition, but this is a serious error, two Russian analysts say. Instead, civil society need not be an opponent of the authorities but “yet another ‘branch of power’” that can take on itself things that “other branches for one […]
Staunton, April 21 – There is a hoary Soviet anecdote about a group of very old Russian women marching through Red Square just after World War II. They are carrying signs saying “Thank you Stalin for Our Happy Childhood!” A secret policeman approaches and says “Grannies, you are so old that when you were children, […]
Staunton, April 21 — Since Vladimir Putin called for the creation of a new Agency for Nationalities Affairs, many have speculated that this decision will mark a turning point in Moscow’s approach to the increasingly numerous non-Russian portion of his country’s population. But a true measure of its meaning — which like so much Putin […]
