Staunton, May 15 – Russian activists in Samara are seeking to have the authorities there ban a production of Mel Brooks’ satire The Producers because it contains within it what they call the “fascist and homosexual play, Springtime for Hitler, which they insists “mocks” the great victory of the Russian people. Such a lack of […]
Staunton, May 15 – The pride the people feel in their country consists of two elements: a cognitively processed one in which individuals assess the actual past and present of their nation and a normative one which is imposed from above by governments and others to support their policies, according to two Moscow scholars. The […]
Staunton, May 14 – In a step that might seem absurd given the composition of Armenia’s population but that appears likely to send shockwaves through the Caucasus and perhaps further, the Assembly of Muslims of Armenia has created the position of mufti for the republic and named Arsen Safaryan, a graduate of an Iranian seminary […]
Staunton, May 13 – Ten years ago today, the Uzbek security services opened fire with automatic weapons on a demonstration in Andijan (Andizhan), killing more than 500, arresting more than 200 and driving another 500 into emigration, first into Kyrgyzstan and then into Europe, Australia and the United States. Tashkent continues to insist, and some […]
Staunton, May 12 – People of decency and good will around the world have been horrified by Vladimir Putin’s defense this week of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which made Hitler and Stalin allies, opened the way to World War II, and allowed the Soviet Union to occupy Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, portions of Poland and Bessarabia […]
Staunton, April 30 – The conflicts within the Russian Federation and across the entire post-Soviet space are occurring because of the decisions Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made from the 1920s through the 1940s, Badma Byurchiyev argues, and that heritage, “a real threat to the future” of all the countries in the region, must be rejected […]
Staunton, April 30 – Between 1994 and 2003, ethnicity was the most important factor involved in decisions by residents of the Russian Federation to emigrate, according to Mikhail Denisenko of the Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics. But from 2004 to 2013, other factors, including economics and education, have been more important. […]
Staunton, April 30 – Vladimir Putin and his supporters have made the struggle against what they see as Russophobia a cornerstone of their ideology, Yevgeny Ikhlov says; but if one examines the characteristics they offer for this phenomenon, it is clear that Russophobia as such does not exist. At the same time, fear and hatred […]
Staunton, April 30 – – Both Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov have a deep interest in avoiding a complete break, the former because a new Chechen war would be “a moral catastrophe” that would undermine his myth and the latter because he would not survive without the enormous sums of money Moscow currently sends him, […]
Staunton, April 30 – – “When Vladimir Putin or Sergey Lavrov talk about Ukraine,” Pavel Kazarin says, one has the impression that they think there is a pro-Moscow faction in Kyiv waiting in the wings to take power. That might have been true in 2005, but it is not the case now: Moscow has no […]
