Thirty years ago, on December 8, 1991, the U.S.S.R. was declared defunct by the leaders of its Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian constituent republics during a hastily convened meeting. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – RM Staff – Dec. 16, 2021) Thirty years ago this month, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially ceased to exist. The 15 republics which had made up the Soviet Union were confronted with uncertain paths as they endeavored to establish political structures and reform economic systems. They faced unresolved territorial questions, socio-economic crises and […]
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Putin, a former agent of the Soviet KGB security service, has previously lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union […]
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“The threat to liquidate the research group Memorial is an assault on a brave outpost of post-Soviet civil society.” “… Putin’s crackdown on dissent is inextricable from a desire to control Russia’s past. … Memorial has [painstakingly] compiled a database of more than 3m victims of Soviet political repression, mostly … executed, imprisoned, sent to labour camps or exiled during […]
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Situated outside the small village of Sennoy, Phanagoria, now one of Russia’s best-resourced and highest-profile digs, shines a light … on the region’s long-lost Ancient Greek heritage […]
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“… many Russian democrats, desperate to get Yeltsin’s successor [Putin] out of the Kremlin, find themselves voting for the Communists. … aware of the irony. … With nearly all forms of politics banned and [] Navalny behind bars, the Communist Party … [has benefited the most from Navalny’s] ‘smart voting’ strategy. … Had … votes been counted honestly in parliamentary […]
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The 9th Pushkin House Book Prize was awarded to Archie Brown, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, for “The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War,” published by Oxford University Press.
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Emily Couch – Oct. 17, 2021) The path taken by Catherine Belton’s “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West” is a well-trodden one. For those who have read Masha Gessen’s “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” Ben Judah’s “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell […]
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How important was the true-believing communist son of Stavropol peasants, the actor son of a Midwestern traveling salesman, or the staid, provincial daughter of a Lincolnshire shopkeeper? […]
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According to data from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Russia ranks fourth in the world for annual carbon emissions. But if overall emissions since the pre-Industrial period are taken into account, Russia [reportedly] moves to third […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Sept. 24, 2021) The Russian elite does not have an explicit ideology but it does have a shared set of beliefs that guide its actions, an ideology that has “grown out of political practice rather than from any philosophy,” Pavel Luzin says. But that does not make it any less influential. Indeed, […]
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(PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo – DMITRY GORENBURG, Senior Research Scientist, CNA – Sept. 20, 2021) In December 2020, news broke that Russia had signed an agreement with Sudan to build a naval base on the Red Sea. Given the refurbishment of its existing base in Syria and rumors of other potential bases abroad being negotiated, on the surface, Russia appears […]
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Anastasia Bryukhanova thinks Russia’s political institutions, and its leader, are showing their age […]
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Thirty years after the failed August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the country four months later, it is hard to avoid asking: What led to the demise of that superpower and are the same factors relevant for its successor, today’s Russia?
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Aug. 28, 2021) Many think that Russians long for the Soviet system as a whole, Vladimir Khotinenko says; but in fact, they are longing for a normal life, one in which human beings rather than money and machines are in control, as all too many of them are convinced is the case […]
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Thirty years on, The Moscow Times spoke to surviving participants in the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of a new Russia. (Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Felix Light – Aug. 18, 2021) In the center of Moscow, hidden behind two lanes of heaving traffic on the New Arbat commercial thoroughfare, stands a […]
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MOSCOW. Aug 18 (Interfax) – Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev blames the organizers of the coup attempt of August 1991 and the signatories to the Belavezha agreements for the collapse of the Soviet Union, calls for defending the principles of democracy, and believes that Russia can develop and solve any problems only on a democratic path. “I believe that the […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, June 2, 2021) Twenty-five years ago, Russia had its last presidential election in which the outcome was not ordained. But after Boris Yeltsin’s orchestrated victory, Konstantin von Eggert says, the country entered yet another non-democratic era in which the rise of someone like Vladimir Putin was inevitable. In that sense, the independent […]
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From: On Behalf Of Michael Berry Sent: 16 April 2021 18:32 Subject: Professor R.W. (Bob) Davies 1925-2021 I am sorry to have to report that Professor R.W. (Bob) Davies the eminent economic historian of the USSR and director of CREES at the University of Birmingham for many years died earlier this week. His knowledge and wisdom will be missed by […]
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The crackdown is being seen as a sign that the Kremlin is playing closer attention to local power structures ahead of fall elections […]
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The month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Academician Andrey Sakharov who developed the hydrogen bomb … then became the leading spokesman for humanism and democracy against the Soviet regime […]
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… And so, more than two decades after NATO’s original 16-member Cold War composition was first enlarged to take in three former Warsaw Pact states, and with Putin poised to potentially stay in office into the 2030s, the past is very much present […]
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Subject: THE INCONVENIENT SAKHAROV Date: Thu, 20 May 2021 From: DDGlinski <DDGlinski@alumni.harvard.edu> THE INCONVENIENT SAKHAROV His legacy is a moral challenge to the Kremlin, to Western elites and to many of Russia’s oppositionists by Dmitri Glinski Dmitri Daniel Glinski, Ph.D., a member of the council of the Democratic Russia Movement in the early 1990s and of Russia’s Constitutional Consultative Assembly […]
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… Lipman kept a diary … enough to trigger … memories, often aided by his wife, Nahid. He has compiled them into … “Moscow Memories: Memoirs of a Medical Diplomat,” … describ[ing] the day-to-day life not only of diplomats, but of Soviet citizens […]
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The current fight to identify “who is fascist” is a struggle to define the future of Europe and whether or not Russia has a legitimate role to play in it […]
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Poroshenko, in his social media criticism of the original post, linked it to Russia’s “imposing lies on the world, its alternative outlook on history and imperial narratives” […]
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… Russia’s transition to a market economy is at least partially completed, though estimates point to the state holding between 33 and 46 percent of the economy … concentrated in “strategic” sectors such as energy and banking […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton – Feb. 17, 2021) In most other former Soviet republics, people favor taking down statues of Lenin or renaming any place or street bearing his name – Ukraine, for example, has completed these tasks (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/01/last-lenin-statue-in-ukraine-falls.html). But a new Public Opinion Poll suggests Russians have a very different view. It found that while […]
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Subject: Steve Cohen’s Anecdote Lecture — December 6, 1983/ via John/ JohnBatchelorShow.com podcast Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 From: Katrina vanden Heuvel <kat@thenation.com> Steve Cohen gave an annual anecdote lecture in his Soviet Politics class, first at Princeton starting in 1980, and running through his ten years at NYU — until about 2012 — Here is the 12/6/83 Lecture broken […]
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… Putin resembles a local “ward boss” with nuclear weapons and a UN Security Council veto … Obama wrote […]
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The historic 1986 Reykjavik summit between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan will be the backdrop for a new satirical film […]
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“It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our friend and colleague, Stephen F. Cohen. …” Click here for: “The Passing of Stephen F. Cohen” – NYU Jordan Center/ Maya Vinokour
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“The blast was over 3,000 times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” “… [D]eclassified Russian footage [features] the 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb test … [of] the largest bomb … detonated on Earth …. a 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220[,] … [set off] late October 1961 … during the height of the Cold War[,] …. 26 feet long […]
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“… Putin forced through a plebiscite to zero out … constitutional limits on his rule. … [H]e can run again, in 2024, for two more six-year terms, until 2036, when he will turn eighty-four. …. Putin could have … move[d] Russia onto a stable path of institutional pluralism. Russia’s would-be democrats … Gorbachev and … Yeltsin, started out … popular […]
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MOSCOW. July 13 (Interfax) – The Russian Orthodox Church condemns racism, but believes that modern people should not bear responsibility for what their ancestors once did. “Those white people who live on earth now cannot bear responsibility for what their ancestors did a long time ago. Nevertheless, when the state authorities of countries apologize for mistakes made in the past, […]
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In her deeply researched new book, Catherine Belton tells a dark tale of … Putin’s rise to power and … 20 years as [Russian] leader …. ‘Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West‘ […]
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Subject: New book: SOVIET JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG – A New History of the International Military Tribunal // Pub. July 2020 Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2020 15:05:20 +0000 From: PAYNE, Sarah <Sarah.Payne@oup.com> Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ffJmId Standard Western accounts of The Nuremberg Trials fixate on key figures like Justice Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. chief prosecutor and Supreme Court judge, as well as […]
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“… Moscow has publicly supported the current U.S.-Taliban peace talks … [yet] has a very different perspective from the U.S. … influenced by geography and history. Russia’s current strategic posture is informed by a long history of relations with Afghanistan and above all … the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, a strategic and military failure … still fresh in […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, June 22, 2020) Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the KPRF which is the only parliamentary party that has come out against approving the constitutional amendments by referendum, says that Vladimir Putin’s recent actions have been “not simply disappointing but depressing.” In the course of a wide-ranging 3,000-word interview with Anastaya Melnikova of […]
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“A rocket scientist in the Soviet Union, he became a U.S. citizen long after the Cold War ended. ‘I’m not a defector,’ he said. ‘I like this country.’” “Sergei N. Khrushchev … former Soviet rocket scientist … son of Nikita S. Khrushchev … died … June 18 at his home …. He was 84. The Rhode Island medical examiner’s office […]
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The Kremlin has denied it has any territorial claims on former Soviet republics after … Putin appeared to question the redrawn borders of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union […]
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… The Kennan Institute has selected four 20th century influencers and invites you to take this quiz to see which one you match most closely with. […]
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“In the 80 years since Alexander Alekhine became World Chess Champion in 1927 until Vishy Anand took the title from Vladimir Kramnik in 2007, Russian or Soviet players held the title for all but five years – Max Euwe (1935-37) and Bobby Fischer (1972-75) were the only players to disturb the dominance. … FM Andrey Terekhov looks at those years, […]
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“A new study has revealed … a 14,000-year-old tooth belonging to a close cousin of today’s Native Americans … thousands of kilometers from the landmass that once connected Eurasia and the Americas. … suggest[ing] the Siberian ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples were more widespread and mobile …. Sometime about 20,000 years ago, people began to cross the eastern tip […]
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“Largely unseen footage of the funeral and official mourning following the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin is featured in a new documentary, State Funeral, by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. It’s being shown on Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. The mourning events were held at factories, on collective farms, town squares, and in […]
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… 75 years ago, U.S. and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River in Germany at the end of the European phase of World War II. The anniversary prompted current leaders of the U.S. and Russia to transcend … frosty relations … and issue a rare joint declaration ….
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“The pandemic has derailed Vladimir V. Putin’s plans for a big military parade and a referendum extending his rule – and now knocked out his prime minister – as the Russian leader struggles to find his stride.” “This was supposed to be a moment of triumph for … Putin, a celebration of his grand successes … restoring the Russian state […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Michele A. Berdy – April 29, 2020) Michele A. Berdy is the Arts Editor and author of “The Russian Word’s Worth,” a collection of her columns. On Tuesday Pushkin House in London announced its short list of nominations for the 2020 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. The prize has been awarded annually since 2013 to […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 24, 2020) Starting at 4 p.m. on Sat., April 25 until May 9 – Victory Day in Russia – the Russian Ministry of Culture and several other organizations are launching an online marathon to mark the 75 anniversary of the end of the war. On the special site, you can find a tremendous amount […]
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A meticulous account of Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia. “… as [Catherine] Belton shows [in Putin’s People], the continuity between the Soviet agency that nurtured … Putin as a young officer, and the security-based behemoths that bestride today’s Russia lies less in institutions than in mentality. … that believes anybody can be turned; that advantage can be sought […]
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