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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The Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents in Moscow is the country’s primary repository of manuscripts and records dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond, but the story of the archive itself is not short on interest. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – NIKOLAI SHEVCHENKO, SPECIAL TO RBTH – February 23, 2016) [Text with links to sources here […]
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After more than a century of speculation, an international group of geneticists has conclusively proven that the Aztecs, Incas, and Iroquois are closely related to the peoples of Altai, the Siberian region that borders China and Mongolia. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – ARAM TER-GHAZARYAN, SPECIAL TO RBTH – rbth.ru – February 23, 2016) Scientists have suspected for a long time […]
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The political history of Russia’s neighbours can be described in terms of one long conflict between a presidential authoritarian tendency and democratic parliamentarianism. Parliaments are the key. (opendemocracy.net – Mikhail Minakov – February 22, 2016) Mikhail Minakov is Associate Professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and President of the Foundation for Good Politics, Kyiv. He is also director of the Krytyka Institute, […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Daria Litvinova – February 22, 2016) A young woman named Nikol looks to the camera, wiping away what seem to be tears of happiness. She has reason to be happy, having navigated through to the next round of the Russian television show “Battle of the Psychics.” Somehow, she had managed to select the one car […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, February 3, 2016) In a recent book review essay in the New York Review of Books, military historian Max Hastings cites a passage from Nicholas Stargardt’s “The German War” (Basic Books, 2015) to explain why Germans continued to “close ranks around Hitler” even after it became obvious that their country was going […]
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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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(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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In September 2015 the Russian Investigative Committee resumed an investigation into the death of the family of the last Russian tsar. Investigators exhumed the remains of the Romanovs, who had been buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and took DNA samples from Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. Official accounts states that the Romanovs were murdered on the night […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia Staunton, December 26, 2015) The number of people who speak Russian has declined by 100 million since 1989 or 27 percent, according to Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the Duma committee on compatriots and Eurasian integration. (In 1989, 370 million said they spoke Russian; now, 270 million do.) But instead of seeing this as […]
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Experts analyze the reforms and the mechanisms of the Yeltsin’s times to help creating a system of transformation for the future. (Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – NADEZHDA USTÍNOVA, SPECIAL TO RBTH – December 17, 2015) Nearly a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union and founding of today’s Russia, experts have met to discuss […]
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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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Writing in The New Yorker, Masha Gessen reports on the first three major exhibits at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre opening in Yekaterinburg. The core exhibit’s organizational principle is called ‘The Seven Days That Changed Russia,’ and it takes the visitor through a series of rooms that recall the earth-shattering events of the Russian nineteen-nineties. Click here for The New […]
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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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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, November 22, 2015) Anniversaries are occasions for recalling the past and thinking about the future, and they are especially instructive about both when two or more of them occur at the same time. That is the case this weekend when Ukrainians mark the second anniversary of the Maidan and Russians take note […]
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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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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anne Barnard, David Filipov – October 8, 1993) Moscow mourned the human cost of this week’s political bloodshed Thursday, as President Boris Yeltsin suspended the Constitutional Court he has accused of complicity in the violence. Several thousand friends, strangers and comrades in arms filed past the coffins of six policemen killed last Sunday and Monday […]
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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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Writing in The Washington Post, Daniel Treisman of UCLA, and the Russian Political Insight project, considers the roots and contours of Russian aggression. In part, he draws upon and reviews several new books, by Marvin Kalb, Walter Laqueur and Steven Lee Myers. A generation after the Cold War ended, Russian fighter jets are again probing NATO’s defenses in the skies […]
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MOSCOW. Sept 25 (Interfax) – The active stage of the new genetic tests in the assassination case of the tsarist family has begun, senior criminal investigator of the Main Criminal Directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee Vladimir Solovyev told Interfax on Friday. “Experts are doing very active work. Everything necessary is being done,” he said. The investigative committee resumed an […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Vasily Kolotilov – September 24, 2015) Russian investigators on Wednesday exhumed the remains of Russia’s last tsar and his wife, who were slaughtered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 together with their children and servants, after reopening the investigation into the century-old murder. The Investigative Committee said in a statement Wednesday it was reopening the probe […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – September 22, 2015) A high-ranking Russian senator has sought to combat the increasing promotion of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the country by introducing a bill that would criminalize attempts to justify the dictator’s totalitarian regime and political purges, state-run TASS news agency reported Tuesday. The bill introduced in the State Duma […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – BOOK REVIEW: Chris Weafer in Moscow – September 10, 2015) Chris Weafer is a founding partner of Macro-Advisory, which helps investors cut though the noise & focus on underlying trends, real political risks, & opportunities in Russia/CIS, Eurasia Union, & Mongolia. Follow him on @ChrisWeafer A great many books about Russia are published each […]
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