Staunton, October 29 – Members of Russian elites see Vladimir Putin as the only person who can maintain the existing system in which they are beneficiaries and protect them from having to go head to head with the Russian people as a whole, Aleksandr Skobov says. Consequently, they will stick with him even if they […]
Staunton, October 29 – A Moscow Jewish writer who attracted international attention three years ago for a column which declared that antisemitism no longer was a problem in the Russian Federation now says that her own experiences show that tragically this ancient “fear and hatred” is returning alongside other national hatreds. Alina Farkash, whose 2011 […]
Staunton, October 29 – “Traditional” Islam in Russia is losing ground to its ‘non-traditional” competitor, especially among the young, but the division between the two is not insuperable and the future of Islam in the Russian Federation is likely to be “a hybrid” combining elements of each, according to Aleksey Malashenko. In an extensive article […]
Staunton, October 29 – Officials in Dagestan, the most linguistically diverse republic in the Russian Federation, are preparing a new language law that calls for official support of 28 languages and effectively makes the others “illegal” by depriving them of any chance for support and in some cases for survival, according to Kavkazskaya Politika. While […]
Staunton, October 29 – Even though only 12-15,000 Crimean Tatars were able to participate in the Ukrainian parliamentary elections and as a result only one of their number, Mustafa Cemilev, has been elected, the Tatars in occupied Crimea have great expectations from the new Verkhovna Rada, according to Nariman Celal, the deputy chairman of the […]
Staunton, October 29 – Vladimir Putin’s nuclear bluster reflects his conviction that the world is still as it was before he annexed Crimea: that Western governments will tolerate anything he says or does because their foreign policies are driven by fundamental business interests which want to make a profit in Russia, according to Mikhail Fishman. […]
Staunton, October 13 – Members of the Russian extreme right are taking part in the fighting in Ukraine on both sides, and they are returning from that conflict with increasingly radical notions of what they want and how they can use violence to take power, according to Nezavisimaya Gazeta. In a lead article October 13, […]
Staunton, October 28 – Russian officials are beginning to implement a law requiring that street signs be written in Latin script as well as Cyrillic by 2018, and the results so far in central Moscow are far from encouraging given that people now have to “Идти по ulicza, свернуть на street и выйти на ploshhad’,” […]
Staunton, October 28 – Moscow political commentator Stanislav Belkovsky says that Vladimir Putin has changed the nature of his “pact” with the majority of the Russian population and that unlike his old one, his new agreement requires that the United States be “the main enemy” just as it was in Soviet times. In a comment […]
Staunton, October 28 – Sixty percent of the population of the Russian Federation is either poor now or has had experience with living in poverty in the past, a figure that is no longer falling as it was a decade ago and one that means Russians may be more capable of coping with economic problems […]
