Staunton, April 5 – The annexation of Crimea is already becoming “a powerful catalyst” for serious changes in Moscow’s nationality policy and even on the current principle of the national-territorial division of the Russian Federation, according to Margarita Lyange, head of the Guild of Inter-Ethnic Journalism. In an essay on the Nazaccent.ru portal yesterday, Lyang […]
Staunton, March 27 – The Chukchis, a numerically small nation in the extreme far northeast of the Russian Federation on the Bering Straits, have long been the object of Russian humor. Some “Chukchi jokes,” as they are known, focus on the absurdities or problems of Soviet or Russian life, but others make fun of the […]
Staunton, March 19 – Vladimir Putin’s push to transform Ukraine into a genuinely federal state and his invocation of the state of ethnic Russians as the reason for his intervention in Ukraine is having an impact at home, leading some to ask why federalism should be only “an export good” and others to demand that […]
Dan Kaszeta is a chemical weapons expert, but he has also spent many years of his life studying Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc. He raises many good points about the deep internal divisions within Ukrainian society. As Ukraine is now in the midst of its second period of major popular unrest in less […]
News of the stabbing death of a 25-year-old ethnic Russian by a non-Russian, and the subsequent rioting in Biryulyovo, a district of Moscow, was not particularly surprising – Russia has been experiencing inter-ethnic violence and subsequent protests with alarming frequency. What set the Biryulyovo pogroms apart was both the extreme nationalist catharsis that characterized the events […]
