One of my colleagues once remarked that Russia is what the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called a frozen culture. This does not mean that Russian history merely repeats itself. But it does signify the recurrence of many patterns confirming Mark Twain’s observation that while history does not repeat itself it does rhyme. Vladimir Putin’s current […]
A new leak of the text messages originating from a hacked smartphone of a high-ranking officer of Russia’s Presidential Administration sheds further light on the relations between the Russian authorities and their far-right allies in France. The hackers from the Anonymous International have disclosed thousands of text messages sent to and by Timur Prokopenko, deputy […]
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 […]
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 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. […]
