Staunton, October 5 – One of the characteristics of Vladimir Putin’s behavior — just as has been the case with other dictators in the past — is that he has often signaled what he intends to do by blaming those he intends to attack for something they have not done and have no intention of […]
Staunton, September 4 – The sharpening clash between Russia and the West is not a new cold war because it does not have the ideological content that the earlier conflict did, Viktor Krasilshchikov says, but that does not mean that it is simply a contest between the national interests of the countries involved. Instead, the […]
Staunton, September 2 – With the Crimean Anschluss, a new “cultural type” has emerged, “Homo Crimeacus,” people who think “fundamentally differently than “’post-communist’ Russians” and who are pursuing a doomed effort to restore the “Homo Sovieticus” of the late USSR, according to Vladimir Pastukhov. In an essay posted on Polit.ru today, the St. Antony’s scholar […]
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s gutting of Tatarstan’s 1990 sovereignty declaration has cost every resident of that Middle Volga republic not only his or her rights and dignity but also has meant that some 70,000 US dollars earned from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural resources that should have gone to each of them has […]
Staunton, September 1 – “Crimea never was pro-Russian – it did not know and could not know post-Soviet Russia,” Pavel Kazarin says. “Instead, over the course of the last quarter of a century,” the Ukrainian peninsula was “pro-Soviet,” something that is going to create problems for Moscow there in the near term. That confusion is […]
Staunton, August 18 – Unless it discriminates against non-Russian peoples on the basis of cultivating hatred against them, an empire like Russia remains cannot survive and will collapse, according to Ukrainian commentator Oleg Shro. And because that is the case, Russia today is best described so much as “the evil empire” but rather as “the […]
Staunton, August 1 – Thirty-nine years ago today, the leaders of 35 governments signed the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an event that Soviet officials viewed as a triumph but one that in fact put in motion forces that triggered the end of communism and the disintegration of […]
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 2 – Moscow should consider the problems that overly ambitious expansion has brought to both the European Union and NATO and not seek fall victim to the notion that it must expand the Eurasian Union as quickly and as far as possible, according to Aleksandr Krylov, a leading Russian specialist on the Caucasus. […]
Staunton, June 30 – Three unwritten laws which governed the lives of Soviet people have resumed operation in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and increasingly set the terms for the interaction between his country’s population and the state, and they are “just as universal and all-embracing,” a Russian blogger suggests,” as the laws of Newton. These three […]
