Staunton, March 25 – Moscow is beginning to recognize that it cannot control Islam in Russia via its preferred method of creating a single hierarchical structure, Aleksey Malashenko says. Islam in Russia like Islam in the world at large is simply too diverse for such a structure to work. For the past two decades, leaders […]
Staunton, February 1 — It is unclear which should disturb the Kremlin more — that Muslims in the Russian Federation are now sufficiently angry that they are thinking about taking part in public protests or that these same Muslims feel that they should ask not what Russian law says about such meetings but rather what […]
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. According to a source in the investigation, Zaur Dadayev, the former Chechen policeman charged in the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, has claimed his motive […]
Staunton, December 6 – The violence in Chechnya this week has led many Russian and Western commentators to suggest that the unrest there is about to spread to other parts of the North Caucasus, but such analyses are wrong: unrest throughout the region has been there all along. It has only been exacerbated in recent […]
Staunton, November 16 – Prisons in many countries have often become seedbeds for radicalism, but rarely have those in charge done more to make that so that the Russian Federal Penal Service, which is now putting materials on jihad in prison libraries in the mistaken hope that learning more about radical Islam will dissuade prisoners […]
Staunton, July 25 – Russian prison officials are marking Ramadan in their own distinctive way by intensifying their longstanding discrimination against and active persecution of Muslim prisoners, according to a survey by Kavpolit.com’s Gulya Arifmezova of posts by the relatives and friends of these prisoners on the Internet. Because Islam requires fasting during the day […]
Staunton, July 22 – More than two out of every three Dagestani men between the ages of 20 and 24 living in rural areas of that North Caucasus republic are unemployed, a situation that is leading to their radicalization and providing new recruits for both anti-Russian militants and the criminal world, according to official data […]
Staunton, July 21 – Russian officials have often argued that the amount of government support for the titular nationalities of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation should reflect their share of the population rather than the fact that these republics are the national homes of those nations. But in fact, a Muslim commentator says, […]
Staunton, April 17 – If current trends continue, half of the population of the Russian Federation in its current borders will consist of immigrants, according to a new Moscow study, a conclusion clearly intended to feed anti-immigrant feelings and, more speculatively, designed to promote a discussion of what can and should be done, including the […]
