Staunton, June 14 – “Reconciliation is a good thing, and hostility is bad,” Igor Klyamkin says. “But there are reconciliations and reconciliations,” some of which open a path to a better future and others of which point to the return of the evils of the past. Unfortunately, the one on offer in Russia today is […]
Staunton, May 25 — Given the recrudescence of Soviet institutions in the Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbass, ever more people are playing the game of “what if” – “what if” the August 1991 putsch or October 1993 clash in Moscow had ended another way or “what if” the anti-Bolshevik White Russians had defeated Lenin and returned […]
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, October 31 – In the century and a half since the first Crimean war, Russia has experienced three waves of Bolshevism, Vladimir Pastukhov says, the result of the unresolved clash between the Slavophiles and Westernizers and the special role of the Russian religious impulse as the bridge between them. But now the third wave […]
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 19 – Putin’s promotion of a “special path” for Russia not only is setting his country on the path to isolation and decay but also triggering a new clash of civilizations in Europe by shifting “the civilizational border” in Europe westward away from its borders, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a 3,000-word essay […]
Staunton, July 16 – Because Vladimir Putin has chosen to turn toward the past rather than the future as shown most recently by his “having unleashed a war in Ukraine,” the Kremlin leader has become “the last soldier of the Empire, who will shoot his last bullet even as the Empire draws its last breath,” […]
Staunton, July 5 – Russia currently is confronted by five socio-cultural crises at one and the same time, and any effort to solve them quickly by force will lead to the disintegration of society and the state, much as such efforts have done elsewhere, according to Moscow commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov. Indeed, he suggests in an […]
Staunton, June 9 – “Russia is part of Europe but it never will be part of the West,” a psychological pattern that has remained “unchanged” over the course of the last 500 to 600 years and one whose continuity leads to the modification of any system it has adopted to fit the Russian mentality, according […]
Staunton, May 19 – Vladimir Putin’s plan to “organize administered chaos” in southeastern Ukraine is proving to be far harder than his promotion of separatism in “religiously and ethnically united enclaves like Abkhazia or South Osetia and consequently he appears likely to be deeply disappointed, according to Vladimir Pastukhov. That is to say, the St. […]
