Staunton, November 9 – Most people who predict the disintegration of the Russian Federation focus on ethnicity, but in fact, as the situation in Karelia shows, ethnicity plays a much smaller role in mobilizing the population to defend itself against Moscow than do competitive elections, Vadim Shtepa says. “Real regionalism,” the Karelian activist and commentator […]
Staunton, August 3 – There are all kinds of statistical measures about incomes and expenditures that show the situation Russia’s poor now find themselves as a result of Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign policies. But perhaps the most striking indication of how bad things really are for those at the bottom of Russia’s increasingly unequal […]
Staunton, June 19 – Not having found any evidence that the Young Karelia (“Nuori Karjala”) movement has taken money from Finland as anonymous sources had claimed, justice ministry officials in Petrozavodsk nonetheless argue that it should be declared “a foreign agent” because it had received a grant from the UN and hosted visitors from abroad. […]
Staunton, April 19 – Vladimir Putin’s efforts to exclude the people of the Russian Federation from voting on the heads of federal subjects may be backfiring because it is leading some citizens there to take to the streets to demand that their current regional rulers be ousted and gaining confidence in their power, a development […]
Staunton, April 13 – Karelian activists say that the recent suggestion by Russian National Security Council chief Nikolay Patrushev that Finnish “revanchism” is behind the upsurge in popular anger and activism in Karelia is absurd and that the real cause lies in Moscow’s heavy-handed Russification policy as carried out by incumbent republic head Aleksandr Khudilaynen. […]
Staunton, April 5 — Thanks to the help of Finnish friends, Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, got dial-up Internet service in 1997, even before Moscow did; and the links it has provided help explain the rise of the Karelian national movement since then, including the protests this week against the Moscow-imposed governor. The Internet not […]
Staunton, December 17 — Karelian nationalists who call for the independence of their republic and raise “unnecessary and harmful questions about additional state languages” there are being “seriously underestimated” as a threat to Petrozavodsk and Moscow, according to Sergey Pirozhnikov, a deputy in the republic legislative assembly. The reason that this small group is so […]
