Thirty years after the explosion at the nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, one Russian expert argues that, by using American fuel in Soviet-built reactors and pushing the power-producing capabilities of its nuclear plants, Ukraine is putting itself at potential risk of another disaster. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – ANDREI RETINGER, SPECIAL TO RBTH – […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, April 24, 2016) Given the longstanding servility of the Russian people, Vladimir Putin can be deprived of popular support only by showing how weak he in fact is, according to commentator, something that requires the opposition within Russia to unite and the West to reduce to a minimum any contacts with him. […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 21, 2016) More than half of Russians would like to see the restoration of the Soviet Union, according to a poll released Tuesday. Although 58 percent of respondents said they would like to see a new socialist system, only 14 percent believed that it was likely to happen, the report by the independent Levada […]
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(Interfax – April 20, 2016) The share of Russian citizens who positively assess the historical role of Vladimir Lenin has grown from 40 percent to 53 percent in the past ten years, the Levada Center told Interfax. The opinion was mostly voiced by pensioners (67 percent), Russians older than 55 (66 percent), people with primary education (59 percent), people with […]
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… Stalin and … Putin … are very different leaders living in very different times. I just cannot help noticing that they seem to follow the same playbook for being a successful autocrat. … Rule No. 1 calls for attributing all victories to oneself — regardless of who or what contributed to the perceived success. … Rule No. 2: Failures […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Carl Schreck – April 1, 2016) In the summer of 1985, a young commercial attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow sat down with two representatives of the California computer company Apple who were visiting the heart of the Soviet empire. One was an “older guy,” the attache, Mike Merin, recalls. The other was “this lanky, […]
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Why is Russia’s intellectual, spiritual and cultural strength concentrated in Siberia? What is happening today at this world-renowned research center? Why do people here refuse to believe in a new brain drain? (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – MARINA MOSKALENKO, SPECIAL TO RBTH – March 28, 2016) Akademgorodok was created in 1957 by decree of the Soviet leader, Nikita […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Peter Hobson – March 24, 2016) The year is 1941, and hundreds of miles from Germany, Nazi armored divisions gather speed along newly-frosted soil. They are almost within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviet capital. Eventually, the charge is halted before the city by a series of bloody, desperate battles. Famously, 28 members of the […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Leonid Bershidsky – March 4, 2016) Many Russians feel the U.S. and their country are much alike. Both are vast, they share a sense of adventure, along with underlying lawlessness and violence, and in both, the infrastructure often is an afterthought. So what is keeping Russia from turning into another America — a democratic nation and […]
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MOSCOW. March 7 (Interfax) – Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has expressed grief over the death of former U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan. “It was with deep sorrow that I learnt the sad news and I can rightfully say: well done, Nancy! She said to Ronald Reagan: when you quit the post of U.S. president, you need to go as […]
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On March 2, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR and the man who began perestroika in the Soviet Union, turns 85. RBTH presents a selection of quotes about the Soviet leader by his contemporaries. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – ALEXEY TIMOFEYCHEV, RBTH – March 2, 2016) Hans-Dietrich Genscher, German Foreign Minister, 1974-1992: Mikhail Gorbachev opened a […]
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(Interfax – January 26, 2016) Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he still likes the ideas of Communism and that he has not ditched his party member ID card. “You know, just like millions of Soviet citizens – 20-odd million people – I was a member of the USSR Communist Party, and not just a Communist Party member, but […]
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(Kremlin.ru – Stavropol – January 25, 2016) Vladimir Putin took part in a plenary session of the Russian Popular Front public movement’s interregional forum. The Russian Popular Front’s first interregional forum addressed specific issues the regions face in their work to implement presidential executive orders of May 2012 and instructions issued following ONF meetings. More than 600 people took part […]
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(Interfax – January 21, 2016) The Russian president’s press secretary Dmitriy Peskov has said Putin is entitled to have a personal opinion about Russian Revolution leader Vladimir Lenin, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 21 January. Peskov was commenting on a statement made by President Putin, who compared Lenin to a nuclear bomb which had destroyed historical Russia. “The […]
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The leader of the revolution has turned into an ordinary historical figure for younger Russians. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – MARINA OBRAZKOVA, RBTH – January 21, 2016) Today’s generation of Russians have rather mixed feelings when it comes to the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. The issue of burying Lenin’s body, which is still kept in a mausoleum […]
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(Interfax – January 21, 2016) Vladimir Putin has criticized the ideas and actions of the leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin, which he thinks led to the ruin of historical Russia. He was responding to the head of the Kurchatov Institute, Mikhail Kovalchuk, who at a meeting of the presidential council for science and education quoted Boris Pasternak’s poem […]
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The BBC covers debates in Ukraine over the jettisoning of names recalling Soviet rule, including the effort to rename Kirovohrad as Inhulsk. Since pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in 2014, Ukraine has been removing all public vestiges of Soviet rule, from statues of Lenin to street names honouring other Communist luminaries. A parliamentary committee recently decided that Kirovohrad, which […]
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(Pravda.ru – January 19, 2016) Pravda.Ru editor-in-chief Inna Novikova sat down with historian Alexander Fursov to speak about Russia’s foreign and domestic policy. “In connection with the collapse of the world prices on oil, many analysts say that the times that we are living now are very similar to the times of the 90s when the Soviet Union broke up.” […]
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You can ban Ukraine’s communists, but you can’t beat them. (opendemocracy.net – Denys Gorbach – January 8, 2016) Denys Gorbach is a leftist activist and researcher working on the Ukrainian labour movement. On 16 December, Kyiv’s district administrative court approved a claim by Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice. It sought to ban the country’s Communist Party (KPU). Ukrainian society has come […]
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While the range of consumer goods available to ordinary Soviet citizens was notoriously narrow, some of those goods were – and still are – so dear to people that they couldn’t have imagined life in the Soviet Union without them. RBTH interviewed a number of people who lived through the era to find out what they miss the most. (Russia […]
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(Interfax – December 20, 2015) Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, 20 December: Russian President Vladimir Putin regrets that in the implementation of its policy with regard to Ukraine and the whole post-Soviet space, the West is guided by the erroneous notion that Moscow wants to restore the Soviet Union. “As for Ukraine and all the former Soviet Union, I am convinced that the position […]
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Subject: What is going on in Russia? The views and values of ordinary Russians Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015 From: Karen Hewitt <karen.hewitt@conted.ox.ac.uk> I am attaching the talk which I have given (with adaptations) to various groups of non-professionals who are interested in Russia. Some professionals in the audience, sometimes, but it was not intended for them. — What is […]
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The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace undertakes an overview of former Soviet states two-and-a-half decades following the USSR’s collapse. For nearly twenty-five years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the former Soviet lands now collectively referred to as Eurasia defied the best and the worst expectations of students of the region’s history. Unfortunately, […]
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November 25 saw the official opening in Yekaterinburg of a museum dedicated to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president. Besides documenting Yeltsin’s tenure as leader of the country, the museum also explores the turbulent history of the 1990s. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – MARINA OBRAZKOVA, RBTH – November 27, 2015) A museum to Boris Yeltsin has been unveiled in […]
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(NATO.int – November 17, 2015) It’s always a pleasure to be in Berlin, and I’m glad to be with you today to address the security challenges facing our Euro-Atlantic community – challenges that have been driven home anew by the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris over the weekend. For much of the twentieth century, Berlin symbolised the Cold War between […]
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(RFE/RL – Andrei Shary – November 15, 2015) As a youth growing up in Leningrad in the 1960s, Vladimir Putin was one of the few children in his school class who was not a member of the Soviet Young Pioneers. Now he seems determined not to let future generations of Russian children face such a fate. On October 29, the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Michele A. Berdy – October 29, 2015) If you think of the Soviet period in Russia as a culinary desert, a new book in English by the country’s most prominent food historians, Olga and Pavel Syutkin, may change your mind. “CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine” was commissioned especially for an English-speaking audience […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Howard Amos – November 5, 2015) [Photos here http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/new-museum-stakes-claim-to-russias-gulag-legacy/542211.html] Russia’s largest museum devoted to the horrors of the Soviet gulag has opened, even as many Muscovites remain unwilling to talk about political repression. Moscow’s new Gulag Museum opened Friday even as the country remains polarized by the legacy of its brutal system of Soviet-era prison […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Brian Whitmore – November 02, 2015) We picked the wrong metaphor. When Vladimir Putin announced four years ago that he was returning to the Kremlin, the comparisons to Leonid Brezhnev came fast and furious. If he served two more terms, the logic went, Putin would be in power until 2024 and his reign would end up […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – August 6, 2015) Staunton, October 3 – George Kennan’s famous “long telegram” of February 1946 was written to explain to Western leaders something they found difficult to understand: how Moscow could turn from being a wartime ally into an implacable enemy, a problem that some Western leaders are again finding it difficult to […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Yuval Weber of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics – September 30, 2015) At the mid-June opening of Russia’s “military Disneyland” – officially titled “Patriot Park” – President Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to announce that 40 new intercontinental missiles would be added to Russia’s nuclear forces and that the theme park itself would be […]
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