Staunton, April 9 — Russian internal troops are currently conducting exercises in six of the countries federal districts — the North-West, Central, Volga, North Caucasus, South, and Crimean — to prepare them to counter any appearance of Maidan-like protests, according to an interior ministry press officer. The exercises which began on April 2 and will […]
Staunton, April 8 — During the first years of Soviet power, a Moscow newspaper published an article telling its readers how easy and potentially profitable it would be for them to form a national republic. According to the paper, they didn’t need a nation or anything like a set of institutions: they needed only paper […]
Staunton, April 9 — In what appears to be a response to Alexander Lukashenko’s recent declaration that Belarus will never become the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, a Moscow journalist says Belarusians must vote this year to become just that or face “the liquidation” of their country and “the fate of Ukraine.” In the […]
Staunton, April 7 – Just as the notion of a liberal Soviet Union proved to be a contradiction in terms, so too the Russian Federation in its current borders cannot become a democracy, according to Lech Walesa. It must first disintegrate and then some parts of it might be able to come back together in […]
Staunton, April 7 — Moscow officials are asserting and some in the West are accepting the notion that local officials in Crimea are to blame for any problems with the registration of Crimean Tatar media outlets such as ATR television, but that is a lie in the case of the former and a self-deception on […]
Staunton, April 7 — Eurasianism by definition is diverse because it argues that Russia to one degree or another has roots in both Europe and Asia, with some of its advocates stressing one and others the other. But few ever went as far in stressing the Asian nature of Russia as Erendzhen Khara-Davan whose ideas […]
Staunton, April 7 — One of the most notorious practices of the Soviet system in its last decades was the incarceration of perfectly health dissidents in psychiatric prisons under the pretext that they were suffering from “sluggish schizophrenia” and treating them with mind-altering drugs in the name of “curing” them of their proclivity to dissent. […]
Staunton, April 7 — Many members of the Russian intelligentsia do not support Vladimir Putin and his repression at home and aggression abroad, but a significant and surprising number of them do, the result of a complex combination of their experiences over the last generation and Putin’s actions as well, according to Kseniya Kirillova. In […]
Staunton, April 7 — Vladimir Putin stopped using the preposition “v” or “in” Ukraine in 2004, reverting to the older form “na” or “on,” in official government documents, an indication that the Kremlin leader did not view Ukraine as a country but rather as a Russian borderland, according to Andrey Illarionov. From the time he […]
Staunton, April 6 — Tajikistan is being pressured to shut down the Islamic Rebirth Party, something that will drive its members into the underground and make the Islamist threat there greater; and Dagestani leaders want to adopt an earlier Tajik policy and call home those from that republic now studying in Muslim schools abroad, something […]
