Tag: Stalin

Staunton, December 9, 2015 Ever more people are drawing parallels between Vladimir Putin and Joseph Stalin, but there is one parallel that has attracted less attention than it should, Irina Pavlova suggests, and that is this: Putin now is using his anti-terrorist campaign in the same way Stalin used his anti-fascist one, not to defeat […]

In the last few weeks Russia vetoed a UN resolution commemorating the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide and strongly hinted that it would veto a UN inquiry into the downing of the Malaysian Flight MH17 by pro-Moscow forces in Ukraine a year ago. Even for Moscow this is quite […]

One of my colleagues once remarked that Russia is what the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called a frozen culture. This does not mean that Russian history merely repeats itself. But it does signify the recurrence of many patterns confirming Mark Twain’s observation that while history does not repeat itself it does rhyme. Vladimir Putin’s current […]

Staunton, March 26 – Vladimir Putin is “not Yeltsin’s successor but Stalin’s,” and Sergey Lavrov is the successor of Stalin’s commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, Slava Rabinovich argues. Consequently, the world must “begin the difficult but necessary process of excluding Russia from the UN Security Council” just as the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. […]

Staunton, March 5 – Two weeks ago, Vladimir Putin named Aleksandr Levintal to head the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the Russian Far East, an action that Konstantin Kalachev says has reopened talk about the future of a region rich in natural resources but which “in fact is cut off from the rest of Russia” […]

Staunton, February 5 — Some in the West and even in Ukraine are urging Kyiv to accept Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and its formation of “peoples republics” in the Donbas in order to resolve the crisis, but such calls are dangerously wrong because if Kyiv agrees to Moscow’s demands, Moscow will only make more, […]

Staunton, November 30 – Seventy-five years ago, Moscow launched what became known as the Winter War against Finland. It used much the same propaganda and tactics it is using against Ukraine now. It faced far greater resistance than its vast disproportion of forces had led it to believe. And thanks to that resistance, it achieved […]

Staunton, November 29 – The continuing decline in oil prices, a political move by the West against Moscow, should cause Russians to recall Stalin’s warning in 1931 that “we are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries and must catch up within ten years. Either we will do that or they will crush us,” […]

Staunton, November 20 – Russian civic identity “does not contradict” ethnic identities either of ethnic Russians or non-Russians, Leokadiya Drobizheva says, as long as economic and social conditions are good. But when they are deteriorating as now, ever more people in Russia connect that development with ethnic factors and the two identities begin to split […]

Staunton, November 19 – The Crimean Tatar Resistance Organization has launched an online petition drive to gain international recognition as the indigenous people of the peninsula, a step that Ukraine did not take earlier and that Russia has not taken since the Anschluss, and one that the organizers say is necessary to preserve their national […]