The Daily Vertical is an RFE/RL 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 Daily Vertical can be found here.
Staunton, November 11 – The Kremlin’s revival of a campaign against what it calls “Russophobia” constitutes a threat not only to Western countries but to Russia’s future as well, according to two Polish experts. As such, they argue, it can properly be described as “a weapon of mass destruction.” In a new study, Russophobia in […]
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, July 6 Vladimir Putin’s statements about the need of the Russian state to come to the aid of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation shows that he has no confidence in the ability of these people to survive more than a generation or two without the intervention of the Russian state, […]
Staunton, April 30 – Vladimir Putin and his supporters have made the struggle against what they see as Russophobia a cornerstone of their ideology, Yevgeny Ikhlov says; but if one examines the characteristics they offer for this phenomenon, it is clear that Russophobia as such does not exist. At the same time, fear and hatred […]
Staunton, April 13 — Moscow’s decision to ban the film Child 44 for its supposedly anti-Russian treatment of World War II is only one of the decisions the Russian authorities have made to restrict the right of Russians to view what they want. But these prohibitions are going to blow up in Moscow’s face: bans […]
Staunton, December 21 – Aleksandr Zhilin, head of the Moscow Center for the Study of Applied Problems and a leading Russian military commentator, says that Vladimir Putin has now changed the country’s military doctrine in such a way that it will now allow for consideration of a pre-emptive military attack on the West in response […]
Staunton, July 20 -Eurasianism, which has acquired enormous influence in the Kremlin, is playing “a destructive role” in relation to Russian society and its real culture and on the political level is rapidly evolving toward “Russian fascism,” just as Berdyaev, Likhachev, and Solovyev warned, according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor. In a wide-ranging 5,200-word essay […]
Staunton, July 16 – Because Vladimir Putin has chosen to turn toward the past rather than the future as shown most recently by his “having unleashed a war in Ukraine,” the Kremlin leader has become “the last soldier of the Empire, who will shoot his last bullet even as the Empire draws its last breath,” […]
Staunton, July 13 – In the summer of 1942, during the height of fighting on the eastern front, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg issued a series of attacks on German soldiers that mirror imaged Nazi propaganda, describing German soldiers as less than human and calling on Soviet citizens to kill them wherever and whenever they found […]
