Staunton, July 7 The Kremlin it appears “does not believe the ratings” it routinely distributes about the support the Russian people are showing for Vladimir Putin and his regime if one judges by the Russian government’s new effort to give the FSB expanded powers to fight mass protests, according to the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. […]
Staunton, July 4 The word khokhol must not be used “in official or public speech,” Aleksandra Olkhovskaya of Moscow’s Pushkin Russian Language Institute says, because it denigrates those to whom it is applied and thus is offensive. It can only be used, she says, when those employing it know those with whom they are speaking. […]
Staunton, July 6 NB: As longtime readers of Windows on Eurasia know, there is no commentator on Russian politics for which I have greater respect than historian Irina Pavlova. Her 70 essays written between 2006 and 2014 and which appeared on Grani.ru and Rufabula.com are among the most insightful commentaries we have on the nature […]
Staunton, July 6 Vladimir Putin’s statements about the need of the Russian state to come to the aid of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation shows that he has no confidence in the ability of these people to survive more than a generation or two without the intervention of the Russian state, […]
Staunton, July 6 – Those who serve as informers for the Russian secret police will now receive pensions, according to a new law. By this action, Vladimir Putin simultaneously corrects a shortcoming in Soviet legislation – until now, informers couldn’t count their “service” toward a pension – while offending ordinary Russians who see their own […]
Staunton, July 6 – There are three reasons why support for Vladimir Putin is so high even among educated Russians: fear that their country might descend into chaos without him, their lack of a positive image about the future, and a traditional Russian deference to the state on foreign policy issues, according to Kseniya Kirillova. […]
As the readers of this blog know perfectly well, the Kremlin is actively cooperating — sometimes financially — with European far right parties. However, Moscow may also be engaged in even more sinister activities, namely whipping up racial hatred in the West in order to discredit democratic societies that have taken a strong position on […]
Staunton, July 3 – Russian moderate opposition parties are losing support while “the activity of parties advancing more radical positions is growing,” according to Aleksandr Kynyev, a specialist on regional development, reporting on the findings of the first report on the current election cycle prepared by the Committee on Civic Initiatives. In an article in […]
Staunton, July 1 The passing of Yevgeny Primakov “unexpectedly unified Russian society no less” and quite possibly more than the Crimean Anschluss, and the basis of this – an “indisputable faith in the greatness of the old Soviet nomenklatura” represents “a real diagnosis of the illness of Russian or more precisely post-Soviet society,” Vitaly Portnikov […]
The current and continuing demonstrations in Armenia over price hikes by the state electricity company contain many lessons for us and Russia. First, they highlight the continuing economic and political pathologies of the neo-Soviet or Putinist experiment where the state retains the controlling interest in the economy. Under these autocratic conditions state ownership remains a […]
