Staunton, March 26 – Vladimir Putin is “not Yeltsin’s successor but Stalin’s,” and Sergey Lavrov is the successor of Stalin’s commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, Slava Rabinovich argues. Consequently, the world must “begin the difficult but necessary process of excluding Russia from the UN Security Council” just as the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. […]
Staunton, March 25 – Moscow is beginning to recognize that it cannot control Islam in Russia via its preferred method of creating a single hierarchical structure, Aleksey Malashenko says. Islam in Russia like Islam in the world at large is simply too diverse for such a structure to work. For the past two decades, leaders […]
Staunton, March 23 — Budget documents may seem dry reading most of the time, but they often provide clearer indications than anything else of what the priorities of rulers are. Vladimir Putin’s new budget numbers show that for him, propaganda is more important than the Russian people and even more important than national defense. Given […]
Staunton, March 23 — As Russians become aware of the costs that Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine entail, ever fewer of them in the Russian Federation itself say they support what he has been doing. But backing for Putin’s policies remains high in the Russian diaspora where its members have easier access to information sources […]
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 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 […]
