Staunton, November 8 – What Russians now have in the Russian Federation is a Soviet system without communism and its administrative arrangements, and what they dream of is “a Soviet empire without communists,” an entity not equivalent to the tsarist empire as some think but one that reflects their memories of the USSR. That is […]
Staunton, October 3 – Deputies of the Kabardino-Balkarian parliament have appealed to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to include the Ubykhs, a subgroup of the Circassian nation, on the official list of numerically small indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation and thus take the first step to the revival of a language which has been […]
Staunton, October 2 – The underlying premise of Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea is false: Crimea has not been part of Russia from time immemorial. Instead, it has had a complex history, one in which Russia’s role has been remarkably brief. As a result, it is important that the future of the peninsula be decided […]
Staunton, July 24 – The central Russian narrative on the emergence of the three modern nations of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, a narrative on which Vladimir Putin relies, is that there was a single Russian nation a millennium ago and that Ukrainians and Belarusians were byproducts of Russian ethnogenesis, the result of outside interference. That […]
Staunton, July 23 – Europe will do everything it can to avoid taking a hard line against Vladimir Putin even after the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner lest that lead to a break with Russia and in a remarkably short time, the governments and publics in the West will forget about this crime, Vladimir […]
Staunton, June 22 – With the occupation of Crimea and with the encouragement of the Kremlin, many Russians believe they are on their way to becoming a super power once again, but the most thoughtful among them recognize that Russia lacks two if not three of the elements a super power must have. For a […]
Staunton, June 22 Russia has been able to defend and then expand its empire only when it has “recruited new and good people,” according to Vitaly Averyanov, the director of the Institute of Dynamic Conservatism and a leader of the influential Izborsky Club headed by Aleksandr Prokhanov. Averyanov told a St. Petersburg meeting of that […]
Staunton, May 13 – Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine which to so many appears only as an act of aggression is in back “profoundly defensive,” an effort to stop the disintegration of the Russian empire by injecting “patriotic morphine” into the veins of Russians, according to Vladimir Pastukhov. But like the use of any drug […]
Staunton, May 11 – Vladimir Putin’s demands for the federalization of Ukraine not only are hypocritical because of the absence of federalism in Russia but dangerous for both countries because it would convert the east of Ukraine into “a Palestine,” according to Ekho Moskvy commentator Yuliya Latynina. Such a project, she said on her “Access […]
Staunton, April 29 – The Kremlin thought it had a winning propaganda theme offered up by some in the United States by “the sacramental question: ‘Do you want to die for Narva?’” Andrey Pionkovsky says, because in fact no one in the West “will ever go to war with Russia in the defense of Estonia” […]
