Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]
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 11 – The new cold war that has begun in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not have the formal ideological shape of its predecessor, but Vladimir Putin very much has an ideological vision, Igor Eidman says, and it is one that tragically makes it more likely that this cold war […]
Staunton, March 9 – In the increasingly Orwellian world that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, one in which the lie is the truth, it is important to remember that “with rare exceptions,” the murders of those the authorities don’t like are “not solved. Sometimes, those who carried the out are found, but those who ordered them […]
Staunton, March 5 – Two weeks ago, Vladimir Putin named Aleksandr Levintal to head the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the Russian Far East, an action that Konstantin Kalachev says has reopened talk about the future of a region rich in natural resources but which “in fact is cut off from the rest of Russia” […]
Staunton, February 18 – On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler explained to his entourage why he thought he could get away with mass murder by saying that “nobody talks about the Armenians nowadays,” despite the fact that they had been the victims of a mass murder only 24 years earlier. Hitler’s sweeping cynicism in this […]
Staunton, January 12 – The Soviet Union’s role in defeating Hitler in what Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War has always been a central element of Russian national pride, but under Vladimir Putin, it has taken on the form of a religious cult, one that is helping to push the country from authoritarianism […]
Staunton, January 5 – Following Vladimir Putin, who suggested Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by a clutch of “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites,” commentators in Russia and sometimes in the West suggested that anti-Semitism was widespread in Ukraine. Indeed, they have made it a major theme in their presentations. But Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko deputy in […]
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 […]
