The Daily Vertical is a video primer for Russia-watchers that appears Monday through Friday. Viewers can suggest topics via Twitter @PowerVertical or on the Power Vertical Facebook page. A transcript of today’s edition of The Daily Vertical can be found here.
Staunton, April 9 — Russian internal troops are currently conducting exercises in six of the countries federal districts — the North-West, Central, Volga, North Caucasus, South, and Crimean — to prepare them to counter any appearance of Maidan-like protests, according to an interior ministry press officer. The exercises which began on April 2 and will […]
Staunton, April 8 — During the first years of Soviet power, a Moscow newspaper published an article telling its readers how easy and potentially profitable it would be for them to form a national republic. According to the paper, they didn’t need a nation or anything like a set of institutions: they needed only paper […]
Staunton, April 6 — Tajikistan is being pressured to shut down the Islamic Rebirth Party, something that will drive its members into the underground and make the Islamist threat there greater; and Dagestani leaders want to adopt an earlier Tajik policy and call home those from that republic now studying in Muslim schools abroad, something […]
Staunton, April 3 — Vladimir Putin has chosen a Duma deputy from Sverdlovsk with an FSB background and service in the notorious Alpha Group during his Chechen wars to be the head of the new Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, an indication of how the Kremlin leader intends to use this new tool and why […]
Staunton, April 2 — Political developments come so thick and fast that they are often forgotten only hours or days after they occur — unless they leave traces in the language and thus redefine how people, who make use of words and phrases used to encapsulate them, view a larger range of events. Many Americans, […]
Staunton, March 31 — Foreign intelligence services are seeking to drive a wedge between the various peoples of Buryatia, a Kremlin official told a Novosibirsk meeting on ethnic relations and national security yesterday, a latest indication of Moscow’s increasing nervousness about that strategically important republic and a signal to Buryats of just how important they […]
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 12 — Andrey Illarionov, an economist who earlier served as an advisor to Vladimir Putin, says that future historians may describe what is happening in Moscow now as “a conspiracy of the generals” — or more precisely as a behind-the-scenes battle between a former lieutenant colonel (Putin) and three senior generals. As the […]
