Staunton, April 30 – The conflicts within the Russian Federation and across the entire post-Soviet space are occurring because of the decisions Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made from the 1920s through the 1940s, Badma Byurchiyev argues, and that heritage, “a real threat to the future” of all the countries in the region, must be rejected […]
Staunton, March 6 – The alliance of reformers in the CPSU nomenklatura and Soviet liberals who were prepared for various reasons to cooperate with them led to the defeat of the dissidents who rejected the system as a whole and condemned Russia again to suffer once again a return “to the ideology of Russian imperialism […]
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 12 – Both the tsarist and Soviet armies had at various points units consisting of Muslim soldiers, and these units fought well. But if Moscow allows Central Asians to serve in the Russian army and even forms “Muslim battalions,” it is far from clear whether these units would be willing to fight for […]
Staunton, November 25 – The Russian-Ukrainian war now going on could have begun in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fact that it didn’t says a great deal about the attitudes of Russian political leaders then and how much they have changed in the intervening period, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a post on […]
The Interpreter and the Institute of Modern Russia present a special report by Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, and our editor-in-chief, Michael Weiss, on the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, culture and money to achieve foreign policy goals and undermine opponents. In recent […]
Staunton, November 10 – The primitivism in the thinking of Vladimir Putin and his entourage reflects the fact that he and they are members of the generation that was “the most Soviet of all those who arose after 1917,” cut off from those who could remember pre-1917 conditions and fully socialized in the communist system, […]
Staunton, November 8 – What Russians now have in the Russian Federation is a Soviet system without communism and its administrative arrangements, and what they dream of is “a Soviet empire without communists,” an entity not equivalent to the tsarist empire as some think but one that reflects their memories of the USSR. That is […]
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 […]
