A compelling argument can be made that the Soviet Union died when it did and not much later as its supporters hoped because Joseph Stalin violated his own understanding and annexed the Baltic countries, western Ukraine, western Belarus and...
On January 20 twenty-nine years ago, Soviet forces attacked the people of Baku, killing and wounding hundreds and illegally arresting many more. That date remembered in Azerbaijan to this day as Black January is less well-known to many now...
Twenty-eight years ago today, Moscow sent troops to Lithuania and killed 13 people in the vain hope of blocking that Baltic country from recovering its independence. The Soviet government even timed this operation while the West was...
Twenty-seven years ago on December 8, 1991, the presidents of the RSFSR, the Belarusian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR signed the Belavezha Accords that annulled the 1922 Soviet union treaty and thus put a de jure end to the de facto...
There are some things no one in Russia must say or even think. Perhaps the most important of these is the idea that the Russian Federation will disintegrate just as the Soviet Union and all other empires have. But the Kremlin hasn’t...
There are three reasons why the Russian Federation is unlikely to fall apart in the near future, Ukrainian political analyst Vitaly Portnikov says. First among them is that while Russia hasn’t been able to establish a contemporary...
Arguing that “there is no truer path to the collapse of a system than the hyper-centralization of authority,” Moscow blogger Elena Galkina says that the Kremlin has now taken a step that shows its denizens think that “if they tighten...
Vladimir Putin’s plans to spend more money on rearmament is “a squandering of valuable natural and labor resources, Mikhail Bobryshev says. But more than it, “an arms race led to the collapse of the USSR and the same thing will...
Three specific and even unique characteristics of the Russian Empire in the past have not disappeared in the Russian Federation of today but instead continue to drive both the foreign and domestic policies of the Kremlin, according to...
In yet another manifestation of what Guillermo O’Donnell described as “the powerlessness of the all-powerful,” Lilia Shevtsova argues, Vladimir Putin and his entourage are making a repetition of the events of 1991 ever more likely...
Is the conflict domestic or international? In December 2018, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Ukraine-related part of their “Report on Preliminary Examination Activities” has repeated the...
