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 13 – Most commentaries on Russian attitudes since the Crimean Anschluss have focused on the role of the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus in creating a new sense of Russian national identity. But Yevgeny Ikhlov argues that what is going on has deeper roots than that. In a commentary October 13, the Moscow commentator says […]
Staunton, June 17 – No Russian is surprised to learn that Soviet-era archives are more accessible in Belarus, which the West routinely calls “the last dictatorship in Europe,” than they are in Russia, a reflection of underlying weaknesses in Russian society that mean it will not become part of Europe for at least a generation, […]
Staunton, March 29 – Many have drawn parallels between what Vladimir Putin is doing and how the West is reacting with the Cold War or with the appeasement policies of Munich. But now that Putin has carried out the Crimean Anschluss, a far better analogy for today may be to “the phony war” between the […]
