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 […]
Staunton, July 6 Vladimir Putin’s statements about the need of the Russian state to come to the aid of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation shows that he has no confidence in the ability of these people to survive more than a generation or two without the intervention of the Russian state, […]
Staunton, July 6 – Those who serve as informers for the Russian secret police will now receive pensions, according to a new law. By this action, Vladimir Putin simultaneously corrects a shortcoming in Soviet legislation – until now, informers couldn’t count their “service” toward a pension – while offending ordinary Russians who see their own […]
Staunton, July 6 – There are three reasons why support for Vladimir Putin is so high even among educated Russians: fear that their country might descend into chaos without him, their lack of a positive image about the future, and a traditional Russian deference to the state on foreign policy issues, according to Kseniya Kirillova. […]
Staunton, July 2 – Moscow in March 2015 confirmed the statute for military police in the Russian armed forces as part of an effort to fight dedovshchina and modernize the military, but three months later, the creation of this critical network has been blocked, the victim of infighting among various agencies, according to an article […]
Staunton, July 3 – Russian moderate opposition parties are losing support while “the activity of parties advancing more radical positions is growing,” according to Aleksandr Kynyev, a specialist on regional development, reporting on the findings of the first report on the current election cycle prepared by the Committee on Civic Initiatives. In an article in […]
Staunton, July 2 – The post-Soviet world is entering its own version of 1968, Aleksandr Shmelyev says, “and everything which is taking place in Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Russia and so on can be conceived as a wave of ‘secondary anti-communist revolutions,’ as attempts to put the authorities under the control of society.” In 1968, […]
Staunton, July 2 – For the first time since the 1990s, the number of Jews emigrating from Russia to Israel has gone up dramatically, doubling between 2013 and 2014 to 4685. But this new wave is different from its predecessors in that its members are younger, better educated, and almost exclusively from Moscow. Moreover, this […]
