Tag: Gulag

Staunton, June 14 – Seventy-five years ago today, the Soviet Union began to occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, act the West never recognized as legitimate but that lasted until 1991. Despite the distance in time from those events, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite says that the Baltic peoples must remain vigilant with regard to the Russian […]

Prison riots in Nizhny Novgorod Region and Bashkortostan in the last week have left one convict dead and more than a dozen injured. Welcome to our column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here. UPDATES BELOW Russia […]

Staunton, March 23 — Not all, but “the overwhelming majority of Germans sincerely believed” what Hitler said, just as not all but the overwhelming majority of Russians sincerely believe what Vladimir Putin says, according to Semyon Gluzman. But when the Kremlin leader falls, most Russians will say as the Germans did in 1945: “’We didn’t […]

Staunton, March 12 — Yesterday, Nikolay Patrushev, secretary of Putin’s Security Council, warned that Russia will face a serious terrorist threat if and when militants from Russia who have been fighting with various Islamist groups in the Middle East return home. But he said nothing about what may be a more immediate and serious threat: […]

Staunton, February 1 – Myroslav Marynovich, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group who spend a decade in the Soviet GULAG and is currently vice rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University, issued the statement below about how Ukrainians feel about what is happening to them now. It deserves to be read in full and is […]

Staunton, October 16 – Aleksei Orlov, the head of the Kalmyk Republic says that Russians like all the other peoples who were deported by Stalin should be compensated, a proposal that some will see as an act of simple justice given how many ethnic Russians in fact suffered but that others will view as a […]

Staunton, September 18 – The Russian government is about to introduce a bill that would allow jailers to use more force, including lethal force in some cases, against prisoners and to avoid being held accountable by the courts, an action that led Russian ombudsman Ella Pamfilova to appeal to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to kill […]

Staunton, August 31 – Seventy-three years after their republic was disbanded by Stalin and 24 years after the two Germanies were reunited, some of Russia’s remaining Germans have been inspired by the creation of a Crimean Republic within the Russian Federation to increase their efforts to restore a German Republic within Russia. Given the radical […]

Staunton, June 28 – Sixty years ago this week, non-Russian prisoners rose up in Kengir against their Soviet GULAG jailors. They were crushed by Soviet tanks, with at least 600 losing their lives in the process. But this rising, despite its defeat, in fact showed the power of the powerless and forced Moscow to change […]

The Russian judicial system is a service that can be extremely intrusive. As the case of Sergei Magntisky shows, exceptions are not even made for the dead. Neither are they made for accused people chained to hospital beds. But why talk about some “system”? Here is a specific judge from the Tverskoy district court in […]