(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Oleg Sukhov – April 28, 2014) Last week, the State Duma gave its final approval to a bill introducing criminal penalties for “spreading lies” about the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. The legislation, under which offenders face up to five years in prison, has prompted renewed allegations that the Kremlin is imposing a […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, April 17, 2014) Some see the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Western attitudes in Russia as a recrudescence of the Cold War, but in fact, the attitudes that the Putin regime is promoting now are very different and much worse than those which his Soviet predecessors sponsored, according to Georgy Mirsky. In […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Dan Pototsky, RBTH – April 7, 2014) This year marks 20 years since the internet first appeared in Russia. The first Soviet internet user, the well-known Soviet-American scientist Anatole A. Klyosov, speaks about the internet in the USSR, espionage and the surreal logic of history in an exclusive interview with RBTH. Anatole A. […]
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MOSCOW, April 1 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – The Crimean situation has put an end to Cold War stereotypes, a Russian political expert believes. “Crimea joining Russia renders [Cold War thinking] obsolete. The peninsula’s position provides control over the Black Sea and Ukraine,” said Kirill Koktysh, a political scientist at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. The real US […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, February 27, 2014) An increasing share of Russians say they are nostalgic for the Soviet system with the number indicating that they support for democracy and free markets or the political system they now live under has fallen in recent years, according to the results of a new poll by the Levada […]
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SOCHI, February 17 (Kevin O’Flynn and Howard Amos, RIA Novosti) – It was once the pride and joy of Stalinist Sochi, a grandiose palace for workers to recover from their labor in mines and factories, a mythical showcase resort for a society that didn’t truly exist. But the Ordzhonikidze Sanatorium stands empty now, a metal sign declaring “Entry Forbidden” strung […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Artemy M. Kalinovsky – February 15, 2014) Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). Twenty five years ago today, Soviet General Boris Gromov oversaw the final withdrawal from Afghanistan. How will the International Security […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – D. Garrison Golubock – February 12, 2014) A statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky or Iron Felix, a Bolshevik revolutionary and founder of the Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB, will not be restored to its erstwhile location on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, the Moscow Duma’s committee on monuments announced Tuesday. “Restoration of the monument is impractical at the […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, February 11, 2014) Even before he was chosen to lead the CPSU and hence the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1984 said he opposed the kind of megaprojects Soviet leaders had used up to then and favored instead more balanced development, a shift in attitude that informed his subsequent decision to block […]
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MOSCOW. Feb 11 (Interfax) – The Moscow City Duma’s monumental art commission unanimously decided on Tuesday not to return a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, a prominent Soviet statesman and founder of the Soviet security services, to Lubyanskaya Square in central Moscow. “Taking into account the current circumstances in society, I propose refraining from returning the monument. This is more of […]
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MOSCOW, February 3 (RIA Novosti) – Vasily Petrov, one of two remaining marshals of the Soviet Union, the highest Soviet military rank, died on Saturday at the age of 98. “We’ve suffered a great loss,” the head of the Russian Military Commanders Society, Nikolai Deryabin, told RIA Novosti. Petrov, born in the Russian Empire’s North Caucasus just months before the […]
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MOSCOW, January 30 (RIA Novosti) – Staff of an online TV station in Russia face a threat of up to two years in prison after prosecutors announced an “extremism” investigation Thursday into an opinion poll concerning World War II. The liberal Dozhd (“Rain”) channel triggered the ire of conservatives by asking on its website whether the Soviet Union should have […]
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MOSCOW, January 27 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin honored the victims of the Siege of Leningrad, including his brother, at a ceremony in St. Petersburg on Monday. Putin walked with several dozen siege survivors in a procession through the Piskaryovskoye cemetery as part of a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Marina Obrazkova, RBTH – January 21, 2014) The leader of the revolution has turned into an ordinary historical figure for younger Russians. 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, 2014) Russian human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said a decision on the transfer of the body of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin from the mausoleum and the elimination of the necropolis on the Red Square may be made in the nearest future. “The Red Square is not a place for a cemetery. A decision on this matter […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – January 8, 2014) A publishing house run by the Russian Orthodox Church has released a 2014 calendar devoted to Josef Stalin, unleashing a flurry of indignation among Russian bloggers and a discussion about the Church’s ties to the former Soviet dictator. The calendar, published by the Moscow-based patriarchal printing house of the […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Yan Shenkman, RBTH – January 4, 2014) The legendary opera singer admired by Stalin, yet always resented being told what he could sing and what he could not. Ivan Kozlovsky (1900-1993) was a legendary opera tenor and a soloist at the Bolshoi Theater. He sang more than 50 operatic roles, and was particularly […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Oleg Sukhov – KIEV December 25, 2013) As street protests in Kiev over President Viktor Yanukovych’s U-turn on a planned deal with the European Union appear to be waning after several weeks of fervor, one sentiment voiced by pro-EU demonstrators is still ringing in analysts’ ears: “The Soviet Union did not fall in 1991; […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – D. Garrison Golubock – December 23, 2013) In his famous 1994 essay “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” Yury Slezkine chronicles the rise of nationalism in the Soviet Union, likening the state to a communal apartment in which each “recognized” ethnicity has their own private room in which to flourish. For the West, the 1990s […]
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MOSCOW. Dec 19 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin is opposed to the attempts to agitate or split society over attitude to monuments to certain historical figures. “We should respect every period in our history, and it is better not to agitate or blow our minds with certain premature actions that may split our society,” Putin said. He said he […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Olga Fedina, special to RBTH – December 12, 2013) The author of the acclaimed novel “The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years,” would have been 85 years old on Dec. 12. When I was finishing school in the late 1980s, in the anarchic and utopian times of perestroika, I remember discussing in […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Ivan Tsvetkov – November 22, 2013) Dr. Ivan Tsvetkov is an associate professor at the School of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University and an expert in U.S. domestic policy. Thanks to John F. Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which allowed the Soviets to save face, the reporting on his […]
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MOSCOW, November 22 (RIA Novosti) A spokesman for Russia’s state nuclear corporation said Friday that a facility for the disposal of Soviet-era radioactive waste is to be built in the country’s Far East. Officials said they made the announcement to quell media speculation that a site was being set aside for the dumping of nuclear waste from abroad. Those […]
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(Interfax – November 13, 2013) The system of staff training in which specialists had supervisors should be revived and every reservist should understand his prospects, Russian presidential administration chief Sergei Ivanov said. “The Soviet Union had very good staff policies. There were certain filters and stages that people went through. I will not deny that these people were supervised, in […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Chris Fleming, special to RBTH – November 7, 2013) Dr. Chris Fleming is a senior lecturer in Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. For much of the twentieth century, Russians celebrated the October 1917 Revolution the event which brought Lenin and his party to power. Russia no longer […]
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(Interfax – November 7, 2013) The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) marked the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution on 7 November with rallies in Moscow and other towns of Russia, privately-owned Interfax news agency reported the same day. The CPRF has collected over two million signatures asking for the dismissal of the government, the leader of the […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Julia Reed in Moscow – November 7, 2013) “Who was killed in your family?” A man in a beret in his early 60s asked me as he joined the long queue of people. We were both attending the annual recital of the names of the victims of political repressions in Russia by the Solovetsky […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – imrussia.org – Ekaterina Mishina – November 1, 2013) The early Soviet criminal norms formed the basis for arbitrary interpretation and selective application of the law, as well as for judicial arbitrariness. IMR Advisor Ekaterina Mishina, a prominent Russian legal expert, contends that the legacy of that era is still being felt. In the first years […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 31, 2013) Muscovites interested in ghosts don’t need to go to Transylvania. They can find plenty right at home this Halloween, even if many in the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian government denounce this holiday as alien and “extremist” (globalsib.com/18692/ and religiopolis.org/publications/6936-hellouin-2013.html). In an article on Chaskor.ru yesterday, Artur Mulyukov and […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 31, 2013) Events were held around the country Wednesday to commemorate the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, which is devoted to those affected by political persecution in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of people held a rally in central St. Petersburg near the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to victims of political […]
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Moscow, October 29, Interfax – The body of Vladimir Lenin, the mastermind of the Great October Socialist Revolution, which lies still in the Mausoleum on the Red Square, should sooner or later be buried, the Synodal Department for External Church Relations’ head Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said. “Debates on this issue will certainly continue. Probably, some harsh movements may cause rejections […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Dmitry Babich, special to RBTH – October 21, 2013) Dmitry Babich is a columnist for Voice of Russia radio. Is the former NSA analyst a modern-day dissident? There are many interesting similarities between Edward Snowden and the famous Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). The most recent example of these is the interview […]
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(Interfax – October 21, 2013) Russia’s representative at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has welcomed the court’s ruling on Russia’s handling of its investigation into the 1940 Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners-of-war by the Soviet secret police, the privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 21 October. Earlier in the day the ECHR ruled […]
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(Interfax – VLADIVOSTOK, Russia. September 21, 2013) The Kremlin’s chief of staff, in comments on a recent find in Syria, has dismissed suspicions that a Cyrillic inscription on a splinter of a rocket that apparently carried a chemical charge was evidence that the Syrian government was the perpetrator of last month’s chemical attacks near Damascus. “A marking in Cyrillic has […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Ben Aris – September 11, 2013) How much does the rest of the world hate Russia? Answer: a lot. This excerpt below is part of an internal memo by a major US bank, which will remain nameless, to clients on the results of the Moscow mayoral elections at the weekend. What is supposed to […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – September 6, 2013) The October Revolution will be considered a “process” and the term “bloody butcher” won’t be applied to Soviet leader Josef Stalin or his henchmen. Russian historians are on their way to creating a single standard for how history is taught to schoolchildren. Historians from the Russian Academy of Sciences reached several agreements […]
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Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 Subject: New book: Why Communism Did Not Collapse From: Martin Dimitrov <martin.k.dimitrov@gmail.com> Martin Dimitrov Associate Professor of Political Science Tulane University New Orleans, LA TITLE: Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe EDITOR: Martin K Dimitrov PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press (2013) ABSTRACT: This volume brings together a distinguished group […]
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(RFE/RL – August 27, 2013) More than two decades ago, at a time when the world was witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy, as well as the triumph of the free market and democracy, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted that liberalism would sweep away competing ideologies. But in an exclusive interview with RFE/RL’s Belarus […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, August 27, 2013) Russian human rights group Memorial has expressed support for Tuesday’s refusal of the Russian Supreme Court to rehabilitate Yakov Agranov, a top figure in Stalin’s NKVD secret police who is believed to have been one of the architects of the 1930s reign of terror. Agranov was executed in 1938. In January 2013 the office […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, August 25, 2013) Most people in Moscow and the West see Russia’s current political problems as a working out of the events of 1991, a view that very much defines what they are doing and what they expect to happen next, according to Vladimir Pastukhov, perhaps the most penetrating analyst writing on […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Joy Neumeyer – August 5, 2013) Across from the sprawling Gazprom offices on Moscow’s southern fringes, there is a forest. It is quiet, full of mushrooms and dead leaves. The only people usually there are a pair of monks, who live by a church built on the property. The forest is part of a village […]
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(RIA Novosti – TBILISI, July 31, 2013) Georgia’s Culture Ministry said Wednesday it did not authorize the reinstallation of the six-meter (20 foot) statue of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that was torn down overnight three years ago in his hometown of Gori. The Gruziya Online website reported Tuesday that the ministry had decided to re-erect the landmark statue outside […]
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(Kremlin.ru – July 27, 2013) Vladimir Putin took part in the conference called Orthodox-Slavic Values: The Foundation of Ukraine’s Civilisational Choice. PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon, friends, I just said goodbye before to President of Ukraine Mr Yanukovych. You also sent him your best wishes. Unfortunately, he has a strict schedule with a lot of events to attend: […]
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(Pravda.ru – Margarita Troitsyna – July 24, 2013) On July 24, 1993, 20 years ago, the Central Bank of Russia announced the withdrawal of Soviet banknotes from circulation. From that day, Soviet cash was no longer valid on the territory of Russia. The reform was carried out to curb inflation in the country, but it caused huge panic in the […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Joy Neumeyer – July 22, 2013) On July 19, Moscow marked the 120th anniversary of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the rebellious Futurist poet who rose from a childhood in Georgia to become the voice of the October Revolution. The commemorations came on the eve of the controversial renovation of Moscow’s Mayakovsky Museum, which some fear will remove […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Yan Shenkman, RBTH – July 16, 2013) In the night between the 16th and 17th of July 1918 the family of Russia’s last Emperor, Nicolas II, was killed in Ekaterinburg. RBTH investigates the identities and lives of the killers of the tsar. Even now, 115 years after the murder of Russia’s last czar, […]
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(Interfax – PROKHOROVKA, July 12, 2013) The Russian Defense Ministry has not yet identified 4.6 million Soviet soldiers, whose remains are buried in Russia and abroad, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said. “A total of over 32,000 burial sites of over 7 million people are registered by the ministry. A total of 2.6 million are known by surname. Unfortunately, the […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Andrey Arkhangelsky, film critic, special to RBTH – July 10, 2013) There is a new trend in Russian cinema: biopics about famous people from the past. Films about Gagarin, Vysotsky and Kharlamov are not only educational, but ideological too. There is a new trend in Russian cinema: biopics about famous people from the […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, June 5, 2013) The supporters of Stalin and those who want to continue his political approach have in fact “triumphed” in today’s Russia, and these people consist not of the older generation but of the young who have grown up in the course of the re-Stalinization of the country during the last […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Des Brown – May 28, 2013) “How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution,” rockets the reader back to the stagnant times of the Brezhnev era, when the Beatles’ music was illegal in the Soviet Union, yet at the same time, bootleg recordings of Paul, George, John and Ringo were […]
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