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 27 – Despite the growth of contract service, the decline in the size of the military, and the fall in the number of men the Russian army hopes to draft, Russian parents are still spending “billions of rubles” every year so that their sons can avoid performing military service, an indication that public […]
Staunton, April 29 – Although few want to recognize that this is the case, the personality cult surrounding Vladimir Putin far exceeds the one that surrounded Stalin “by all measures” and has become what can best be described as “the religion of a pagan empire,” according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor. In a post on […]
Staunton, April 29 – Russian polls, admittedly not the most reliable source, suggest that the more aggressive Vladimir Putin is, the more Russians love and support him regardless of the immediate impact of his policies on their lives, a vicious circle that history suggests could lead to a disaster especially given Moscow’s possession of a […]
Staunton, April 28 – Vladimir Putin’s use of Ramzan Kadyrov brought a kind of stability in the North Caucasus – professions of loyalty by the latter to the former and an unprecedented grant of money and power by the former to the latter – but now the arrangement is breaking down both domestically and internationally; […]
Staunton, April 27 – Totalitarianism can emerge in any society if conditions are created to promote the restoration of “social and cultural archaism” as a result of “a lack of choice in politics” and the promotion of “irrationalism in mass consciousness,” according to Moscow sociologist Emil Pain. Exactly that dynamic, one that promoted “barbarism” as […]
Staunton, April 28 – The Victory Day amnesty Vladimir Putin has promised “repeats all the mistakes of an analogous measure of 15 years ago, when the godfathers of organized crime along with repeat rapists and murders were released from prison” on an unsuspecting population, according to Versia journalist Ruslan Gorevoy and the experts he spoke […]
Staunton, April 28 – Russia is unlikely to develop into a fundamentalist country like Iran with Orthodox radicals playing the role of mullahs, but “the moral permissiveness [toward evil] in combination with permanent fear for one’s life and well-being is blocking the development of both [Russian] society and its individual members, according to Ekaterina Schulmann. […]
Staunton, April 27 -The 150-minute film The President about Vladimir Putin is mostly boring and predictable in that it insists that “without Vladimir Vladimirovich nothing in the country will work,” Kseniya Kirillova notes. But she points out that there are three “lessons” contained in the film that must not be ignored. First, she argues, despite […]
Staunton, April 27 – Yesterday, Yuri Lutsenko, the leader of the Poroshenko Bloc in the Verkhova Rada, said that the probability of the renewal of military actions in eastern Ukraine was “more than 80 percent,” a statement that underscores analyst Andrey Illarionov’s argument in Tallinn that “there is no non-military solution” for the war now […]
