Staunton, October 19 – One of the most memorable passages of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is when one GULAG inmate explains to another that Moscow has decided what time it is — regardless of where the sun is located in the sky — prompting the latter to speculate that the […]
Staunton, June 11 – The reduction in the role of non-Russian languages and their being driven out of many public spaces even in their homelands is “no accident and no indication that a multi-lingual society cannot be built but rather evidence of the existence of an intentional state policy for building a Russian nation state,” […]
Staunton, April 13 – Karelian activists say that the recent suggestion by Russian National Security Council chief Nikolay Patrushev that Finnish “revanchism” is behind the upsurge in popular anger and activism in Karelia is absurd and that the real cause lies in Moscow’s heavy-handed Russification policy as carried out by incumbent republic head Aleksandr Khudilaynen. […]
Staunton, March 6 – The disappearance of non-Russian cultures as a result of Moscow’s assimilationist policies continue to attract attention, but there is another trend which may prove to be equally or even more important: the revival of groups Russians had only incompletely assimilated and their reconstitution as separate peoples. One of these, says Neyola […]
Staunton, January 15 – Many in Russia and the West are celebrating Yevgeny Primakov’s argument presented at the Mercury Club this week that hyper-centralization, a policy associated with Vladimir Putin, is a threat to the Russian Federation and its economic recovery and his call for devolving more powers to the regions of the country. But […]
Staunton, October 21 – As a result of events in Ukraine, a Kyiv commentator says, “a large number” of Belarusians has “suddenly come to understand that to be a Russian speaker living outside of Russia is becoming dangerous,” given that Moscow will send “little green men” to “defend” them even without their asking. On an […]
Staunton, July 31 – Moscow is directing predominantly ethnic Russian refugees from the fighting in southeastern Ukraine into non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation in a transparent effort to change the ethnic balance in those republics and further Russianize them, according to Marat Kulsharipov, a historian at Bashkortostan State University. In an interview to RFE/RL’s […]
Staunton, July 28 – More than 19,000 residents of Tajikistan have de-Russianized their names so far this year, dropping the “–ov” or “–ev” endings that had been de rigueur in Soviet times, according to Rustom Shohmurod, the Central Asian country’s minister of justice. The current effort to restore Tajik spellings began following the publication of […]
Staunton, May 6 – In what is simultaneously a measure of fears that the minority languages of Karelia may die out and an indication of the commitment of republic officials to prevent that, officials at Petrozavodsk State University have announced that students who take courses in Karelian and Wepsy will be paid a 3,000 ruble […]
Staunton, April 13 – Vladimir Putin has attacked Muslims in the Russian Federation to divert attention from his goal: “the final solution of the nationality question” in that country “on the basis of [Stalin’s] well-known dictum that where ‘there is no person (in this case, a group of people or nation), there is no problem,” […]
