Staunton, March 30 — Many are taking comfort in the notion that just as Russians appear to have reduced their hatred of immigrants when encouraged by the Kremlin to hate Ukrainians instead so too their hatred against the latter could be ended relatively easily if Moscow changed course — and in any case won’t expand […]
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. After President Vladimir Putin attended the annual meeting of the Prosecutor General, the Prosecutor requested immunity be removed from MP Ilya Ponomarev, and that Jen Psaki […]
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 20 — Vladimir Putin deserves and takes credit for “’pulling’” Russia out the 1990s, Vladislav Inozemtsev says, but his failure to institutionalize the mechanisms he used means that the stabilization he achieved during the first decade of this century could not last and that the lack of institutionalization opens the way to the […]
Staunton, March 20 — In the USSR, it was sometimes said, there was no sex because that subject could not be addressed directly in the media. However that might have been, a new truth is emerging, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there will be no suicides by those who cannot get the medicines they need to […]
Staunton, March 20 — It has become a commonplace to blame Kremlin-controlled media for the upsurge in anti-Americanism and hatred of a supposed “fifth column,” but two Russian sociologists say that hatred has been on the rise among Russians for a long time and at most this generalized hatred is now being channeled by the […]
Staunton, March 16 — A Russian nationalist with a long track record of hatred toward Belarus says that, on the basis of the logic Moscow has used to annex Crimea, Moscow should take back the portions now within the borders of the Belarusian Republic that were once part of the RSFSR. Not only does his […]
Staunton, March 16 — In scathing terms, Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina denounces the ways in which the Putin regime has promoted Russian national pride in order to conceal the way in which those near the throne are stealing the country blind and to suppress any concerns about human rights and individual dignity. In a commentary in Moskovsky […]
Staunton, March 12 — It is an article of faith for Vladimir Putin and many Russians as well that, despite what he and they are sometimes willing to concede were Joseph Stalin’s excesses, the Soviet dictator was absolutely necessary in building up a strong Soviet Union that was then capable of defeating Nazi Germany. But […]
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: […]
