Samuel Johnson famously advised James Boswell and his circle to “clear your mind of cant.” This is equally sound advice for students and commentators about Russia but it is not always followed. As a result much of contemporary writing about Russia falls prey to various mythologies. One of the pervasive and most stubborn of these […]
Staunton, May 25 — Given the recrudescence of Soviet institutions in the Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbass, ever more people are playing the game of “what if” – “what if” the August 1991 putsch or October 1993 clash in Moscow had ended another way or “what if” the anti-Bolshevik White Russians had defeated Lenin and returned […]
Russia’s 70th annual VE day celebration is now over. Therefore we can provide an objective analysis of he controversy around it. Predictably Russia’s claque in Europe, the UK, and the US attacked the political leaders who declined to attend this pageant of Russian military prowess. Those refusals were, of course, in large measure due to […]
Staunton, April 29 – Although few want to recognize that this is the case, the personality cult surrounding Vladimir Putin far exceeds the one that surrounded Stalin “by all measures” and has become what can best be described as “the religion of a pagan empire,” according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor. In a post on […]
Gazeta.ru has an exclusive interview today April 28 of Konstantin Malofeyev, the Russian Orthodox philanthropist and businessman associated with the cause of “Novorossiya” and supporting Russian-backed militants in Ukraine. The coverage confirms that far from having been thrown under the bus in any fashion in connection with “reining in” Russian-backed militants, Malofeyev continues to thrive […]
Western scholars habitually view Putin’s Russia as an authoritarian state. While this is true; it reflects political science’s methodological urge to compare phenomena and validate theories rather than to grasp the Russian state’s real nature. Russia today remains, as it was under Tsars and Communist rulers, a patrimonial state, much as Max Weber defined the […]
In the aftermath of the murder of Nemtsov there have been comparison’s to the murder of Kirov in 1934, marking the beginning of the Terror unleashed by Stalin. Despite the flagrant nature of this murder, and the circumstantial evidence linking it, if not Putin himself, to members of the political elite (such as Kadyrov in […]
Staunton, March 5 – On the 62 anniversary of his death today, Stalin continues to cast an ever darker shadow over Russia, sparking debates about how he should best be remembered. But beyond these symbols, the influence of Stalin on the thinking of Vladimir Putin and his regime is increasingly obvious and strong, as Moscow […]
This is turning out to be a bad week for Europeans hoping to resist the advance of Putinism. Ukraine continues to dither, rather than fight Russian invasion seriously. While Kyiv at last termed Moscow’s violence against their country “aggression,” they demurred from calling it a war, which it is, seemingly not realizing that if Ukraine […]
December 2014 is the month Putin’s Russia was plunged into undeniable crisis. Between the dramatic drop in oil prices and the collapse of the ruble, under Western sanctions pressure, Russians are going into the new year in a dramatically different, and lessened, economic situation than the one they enjoyed at the beginning of the year […]
