Staunton, January 12 – The Soviet Union’s role in defeating Hitler in what Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War has always been a central element of Russian national pride, but under Vladimir Putin, it has taken on the form of a religious cult, one that is helping to push the country from authoritarianism […]
Staunton, November 20 – Sectoral sanctions are not enough to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and no one in the West wants to fight a war against Russia. But because of the nature of the Russian elite, including Putin, the West has a means of stopping Putin in his tracks, a means it has […]
Staunton, October 13 – Many people in Ukraine and the West have convinced themselves that if Vladimir Putin were to leave the scene, Russian aggressiveness would also end. But that view, Russian writer Viktor Yerofeyev says, is dangerously “naïve” because it ignores present-day Russian realities. In an interview to Ukrainian outlets that has been reposted […]
Staunton, October 19 – Russia’s 25-year-long era of freedom, which began in 1989 with the Congress of Peoples Deputies, has come to an end and the prospects for the future are extremely bleak, according to Academician Yury Pivovarov. If Russians do not transform themselves, their country risks becoming part of the third world. In an […]
Staunton, September 26 – Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of the Kazan weekly Zvezda Povolzhya, says that Vladimir Putin’s promotion of the idea of a “Russian world” is the death knell for a civic Russian identity and that this, combined with his authoritarian and great power chauvinist approach, is exacerbating ethnic identities of Russians and non-Russians […]
Staunton, July 4 – That Putin has intervened in Ukraine at least in part to overcome the political challenges he faced in 2011-2012 and that he has made Russian more authoritarian in the process is largely common ground. But a new book gives remarkable details about these links and these trends and suggests that Putin’s […]
Staunton, April 5 – Given the nature of Vladimir Putin’s regime and reflecting the Kremlin leader’s own understanding, “Russians do not exist,” émigré writer Boris Shumyatsky says. Instead, “people from the former Soviet Union are united [by] their experience of life under a dictatorship.” In a comment to Die Zeit this week, the writer argues […]
