Politics, Government, Protests, Elections
“… Imagery of Russian forces assembling near the [Ukrainian] border is just one of … several indicators to consider …. Russia is … a semi-authoritarian ‘managed democracy’ …. The Russian population does not live in a constant state of war readiness. A significant state-controlled media effort would be required to prepare the population and ensure public support for the invasion […]
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The country’s biggest businesses will be asked to contribute even more to Russia’s development […]
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Pukhayev and other local Stalin critics are left casting around for explanations …. “Stalinism is our national Stockholm syndrome,” he said, referring to a psychological condition in which hostages develop an emotional bond with their captors […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Dec. 29, 2021) For six reasons, Russians do not have a long time horizon when it comes to planning, Denis Volkov of the Levada Center says on the basis of his conversations with participants of focus groups. And while their optimism about the future has risen over the past year, few are […]
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Experts forecast continuing pressure on what’s left of the opposition, but no protests […]
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Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward […]
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“In a televised address broadcast just before midnight in each of Russia’s 11 time zones, Putin said the nation … has faced ‘colossal challenges … ‘ … Russia’s state coronavirus task force has registered … about 10.5 million confirmed infections and 308,860 deaths, but the state statistics agency … [using] broader criteria … has reported nearly 626,000 virus-linked deaths in […]
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“… [A]mid a sweeping crackdown on Russian rights groups, independent media and opposition supporters[,] [t]he Moscow City Court’s decision to shut down the Memorial Human Rights Center came a day after Russia’s Supreme Court revoked the legal status of its sister organization, Memorial, … that drew international acclaim for its studies of [Soviet] political repression …. Russian authorities previously declared […]
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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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Putin held his annual end-of-year press conference as soaring tensions with the West over Ukraine have sparked fears of an all-out war. Media outlets were not able to apply for accreditation. The Kremlin hand-picked around 500 international and domestic journalists […]
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Russia is massing forces near its border with Ukraine and calling for “security guarantees” that would block NATO enlargement. Meanwhile, Russian authorities are in a major crackdown against independent media, civil-society groups, and political opponents […]
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… [W]e remain gravely concerned with the large and unprovoked Russian buildup on Ukraine’s borders. … We are also concerned about Russia’s increasingly harsh rhetoric and pushing a false narrative […]
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Kremlin critics and experts on Russian politics say authorities use the prospect of bonuses as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to get teachers, and other state workers whose low pay makes them vulnerable to pressure, to vote in elections […]
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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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“Pressure grows on foreign social media platforms after state-run group’s takeover of Russia’s Facebook.” “The takeover … of VKontakte … by companies tied to … Gazprom has the feel of a final act in a long saga of creeping state control over the company. … [T]he Facebook lookalike’s trajectory has mirrored … the Russian internet … from the freewheeling Ru-net […]
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Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and longtime sidekick to Vladimir Putin, has won a new five-year term as chairman of the ruling United Russia party […]
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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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A court in Moscow on Tuesday began hearings into a request by prosecutors to shut down a key center of Russia’s leading rights group Memorial […]
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In recent weeks, Russia has regularly reported record coronavirus-related deaths amid a surge of infections […]
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“You wait all the time in prison. Any prisoner will tell you that the term breaks down into large and small waiting periods. In the endless groundhog day, there are certain regular events … It is clear that people here keep count of their total term too. Most prisoners can immediately answer “I have 583 days left.” But my prospects […]
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[W]e found that despite Russia’s high levels of corruption, Russian university students with a propensity to act dishonestly or corruptly self-select out of public sector employment and into the private sector …. These findings present something of a puzzle […]
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Russia, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has historically relied on its vast oil and gas reserves to bolster its economy […]
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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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Subject: Link to recording: Russia’s National Idea (S. Weil Center) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2021 From: Paul Grenier <psgrenier@gmail.com> In case you missed it, here are links to the recording of today’s seminar on the Russian National Idea: SimoneWeilCenter.org: simoneweilcenter.org/conferences On YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=b_yMM7606XI Thursday, Oct. 28 What is Russia’s National Idea? A discussion with Marlene Laruelle, author of Is Russia […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Angela Stent – Oct. 27, 2021) Angela Stent is senior adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor emerita of government and foreign service at Georgetown University, and a member of the Russia Matters editorial board. This year’s session of the annual Valdai International Discussion Club was organized in hybrid fashion, […]
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А former Russian inmate who leaked a massive cache of videos showing evidence of rampant torture in Russian prisons said he believes prison guards were prone to using sexual assault against their victims “because it is the cruelest” […]
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“‘… you have to remember how every single ruble ended up in your account.’ If a report is deemed erroneous, a designated “foreign agent” could face a fine of up to 300,000 rubles ($4,250) or a prison term from two to five years […]
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Dobrenko, a professor at the U.K.’s Sheffield University … argues [that] Stalin’s twilight years — which see the rise of cultural puritanism, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and the nascent Cold War — set the cultural frames of reference on which the Soviet Union, and eventually Russia, continue to operate […]
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(Article text ©2021 RFE/RL, Inc., Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – rferl.org – Mike Eckel – Oct. 18, 2021 – article text also appeared at rferl.org/a/31517780.html) A native of the United Kingdom who later became a U.S. citizen, Hill, who has described herself as “a nonpartisan foreign-policy expert,” is a scholar and historian who has written several books on Russia, including […]
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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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His supporters have rallied to his cause, alleging that he fell victim to a criminal case that was opportunistically used to target a plucky school that some officials see as an incubator of dissent […]
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More Russians oppose same-sex relationships than they did nearly a decade ago, according to a new survey […]
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MOSCOW. Oct 11 (Interfax) – It is pointless to negotiate with the incumbent Ukrainian authorities, as they are not trustworthy; it is necessary to wait for the election of a reasonable leadership in Ukraine that would not aim at sweeping confrontation with Russia, verging on war, but would seek equal relations, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said. “Another […]
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A new opinion poll indicates that Russians’ trust in President Vladimir Putin has dropped to its lowest level in nearly a decade [. ..]
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Former Duma candidates Marina Litvinovich, Alyona Popova and Oksana Pushkina are launching a project to help women get elected to positions of power […]
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A prominent NGO that tracks abuses in Russia’s prison system says it has received “thousands” of leaked video clips showing inmates being beaten and tortured […]
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The elections are over, but the state keeps piling pressure on Kremlin opponents, independent media, and civil society […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Sept. 27, 2021) The KPRF’s surprising success in the recent Duma elections does not presage any threat of a communist resurgence – Zyuganov’s party is as far from Lenin’s as Patriarch Kirill is from early Christianity – but it does mean that the party now is confronted by a serious choice, Aleksandr […]
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Moscow authorities attempted to raid the Communist Party’s city headquarters … minutes before a group of party lawyers was preparing to file a lawsuit to challenge controversial online voting results from last week’s parliamentary elections […]
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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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MOSCOW. Sept 28 (Interfax) – The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against opposition activist Alexei Navalny, who is serving time in a penitentiary in Russia, and his close associates on counts of establishing and participating in the activity of an extremist network. “The Main Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case under Part […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Sept. 24, 2021) The ruling United Russia party retained a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, following elections that have been criticized as neither free nor fair by Russia’s opposition and the West. United Russia came away with 50% of the vote that took place Sept. 17-19, winning 324 […]
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Russia’s government has approved measures aimed at halving the number of abortions carried out in the country before 2025, according to a document published on its website […]
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Russia held controversial parliamentary elections last weekend that were marred by claims of mass fraud […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Aleksandra Srdanovic – Sept. 21, 2021) Aleksandra Srdanovic is a graduate student at Harvard University and a student associate with Russia Matters. The Levada Center recently polled Russians on their attitudes toward Russia’s general standing in the international community, as well as their attitudes toward strategic competitors and countries within the post-Soviet neighborhood. Polling shows […]
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In a separate development, tens of thousands of pro-government bloggers participated in a coordinated campaign to spread positive reports about the course of the parliamentary elections […]
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(Article text ©2021 RFE/RL, Inc., Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – rferl.org – Robert Coalson – Sept. 22, 2021 – article text also appeared at https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-communist-party-duma/31473164.html) Moscow polling station No. 151 was set up on the premises of the state Gulag History Museum, just a short stroll away from blood-curdling testimony of the crimes of Communist Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Yet, according […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Sept. 20, 2021) “If present trends continue,” Edvard Chesnokov says, “the next generation of Russian rulers will be even more anti-Western than the present one,” the result of the West’s double standards when it comes to Russia and recognition by Russia’s rulers that they must stand up to such pressure. The Komsomolskaya […]
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Nationwide statisticians have estimated that half of the official votes received by United Russia in the election could have been falsified [. ..]
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