Staunton, June 7 – In these days 70 years ago, British forces forcibly returned to Soviet control more than 30,000 Cossacks and other Russians at the Austrian city of Lienz. Many but far from all fought on the German side during the war. At Yalta, Stalin demanded their return, and the Western allies agreed fearful […]
Staunton, March 1 — The ongoing “zombification” of Russian society and especially of young people and intellectuals is “a guarantee of the continued rule” of the Putin regime, but it is destroying the prospects for the development of Russia now and in the future, according to Dmitry Strovsky, an outspoken professor of journalism at the […]
Staunton, January 25 – Ninety-six years ago, the Soviet government launched what became a decade-long campaign to “de-Cossackize” Russia, a campaign that Cossacks remember as “yet another genocide” in the Caucasus and a reminder that relations between the Cossacks and the state are more complicated and conflicted than most assume. As portrayed in Hollywood movies […]
Staunton, January 19 – Over the past year, Ukrainians have torn down more than 500 memorials to Vladimir Lenin, actions that reflect their revulsion at the Soviet past but ones that have had the unintended consequence of transforming Lenin into a conservative figure for many Russians and making the destruction of Lenin statues in their […]
Staunton, January 7 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s very public invocation of religion and his tight embrace of Patriarch Kirill, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has fallen over the last year, the result of government policies which could be called “covert secularization” and the spread of the notion of “Orthodox atheism,” according to Boris […]
Staunton, January 14 – Ukraine’s drive to become a European country is forcing Russians to recognize that their country isn’t one, a reflection that helps to explain why many Russians are so angry at Ukraine and so willing to accept the Kremlin’s version of events there, according to Artemy Troitsky. In a commentary in Novaya […]
Staunton, November 28 – Russian aggression in Ukraine has opened a new divide in the West between those who take freedom for granted and those who know that it must be defended or it can be lost, according to Vladimir Vyatrovich, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. Many in the West have […]
Staunton, September 29 – Following the Crimean Anschluss, Russians have stopped focusing their anger on Nikita Khrushchev, who transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine, as a primary source of their problems with Ukrainians and shifted attention to the role Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin played in creating the current tensions between the two nations. […]
Staunton, August 30 – Speaking in at the Seliger youth forum yesterday, Vladimir Putin said that today, as during World War I, there are people inside Russia who are seeking its defeat, a resuscitation of Adolf Hitler’s “stab in the back” theory about why his country lost that conflict and the basis for his attacks […]
Staunton, April 22 – Vladimir Pastukhov suggests that Ukraine now faces the choice of concluding a humiliating “Brest peace” with Moscow, in which it would yield an enormous portion of its territory and population to preserve itself in the hopes of recovering its losses in the future, or risk the possibility that it disappears altogether. […]
