Staunton, March 15 — “The only ‘color revolution,’ which is likely in Russia at the present moment,” Vladimir Pastukhov says, would be “brown,” a color Russians use to refer to fascist or even Nazi-like politics, something that would be a tragedy not only for that country but for the entire world. In a Novaya Gazeta […]
Staunton, March 20 — Vladimir Putin deserves and takes credit for “’pulling’” Russia out the 1990s, Vladislav Inozemtsev says, but his failure to institutionalize the mechanisms he used means that the stabilization he achieved during the first decade of this century could not last and that the lack of institutionalization opens the way to the […]
Staunton, March 20 — Bellona-Murmansk, the Russian branch of the international environmental monitoring group, has been declared a foreign agent nominally because it receives funds from abroad but in fact because it has exposed the Russian government’s complicity in destroying the environment in northwestern Russia. On March 19, the Russian justice ministry updated its list […]
Staunton, March 20 — In the USSR, it was sometimes said, there was no sex because that subject could not be addressed directly in the media. However that might have been, a new truth is emerging, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there will be no suicides by those who cannot get the medicines they need to […]
Staunton, March 20 — It has become a commonplace to blame Kremlin-controlled media for the upsurge in anti-Americanism and hatred of a supposed “fifth column,” but two Russian sociologists say that hatred has been on the rise among Russians for a long time and at most this generalized hatred is now being channeled by the […]
Staunton, March 20 — Since the Maidan, a new Kyiv poll shows, the share of Ukrainians favoring EU integration has risen from 41 percent to 47.2 percent since the Maidan, while the share of those backing integration with Moscow has fallen from 35 percent to 12.3 percent. At the same time, the portion of Ukrainians […]
Staunton, March 2 — Putinism is first and foremost the restoration of the “left fascism” that Nikita Khrushchev launched with his attacks on the cultural avant-garde in December 1962, that spread to Poland under Gomulka, and that was overthrown by perestroika and the 1991 revolution, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. Influenced by the arguments of Umberto […]
Staunton, March 17 — Akhmed Zakayev, who was a close aide to Dzhokhar Dudayev and who leads the anti-Moscow Chechens from London, says that Moscow’s suggestion that Chechens were responsible for the murder of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov last week is “pure propaganda which has nothing in common with reality.” Any thinking person can […]
Staunton, March 2 — Vladimir Putin’s disappearance from public view quickly sparked a variety of explanations for his absence; now, his return has led to the wholesale rejection of all of those by many. In fact, it is worth noting, the Kremlin leader’s reappearance has dispelled with certainty only two: that he is dead or […]
Staunton, March 2 — The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, having offended many Russian liberals by its obscurantism and slavish subordination to the Kremlin and having angered many of Russia’s Muslims by its backing for missionary work among them, now appears set to offend a group it had hitherto largely ignored: Russia’s Buddhists. […]
