Many have forgotten that in May 1987, Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Moscow city committee of the CPSU, received representatives of the chauvinist and anti-Semitic Pamyat organization, thus sending a signal that he was someone the KGB and...
I. The Metropol gala It was 10 December 2015. Russia’s global propaganda television channel RT (formerly Russia Today) was celebrating its 10th anniversary with a lavish gala. The organizers had put great effort into hand-picking the...
Russia is on the way to acquiring a government institution fully capable of mass repressions, Tatyana Stanovaya says. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Guard is not yet there, but it is rapidly amassing the necessary authority and its leadership...
Vladimir Putin on May 24th gave his National Guard the right to assume control over and give orders to military units as may be necessary in the course of “fulfilling tasks laid on National Guard forces,” a grant of power that may...
In explaining why the new Russian Guard plans to restore the red banner and the name Feliks Dzerzhinsky in its operations, Col. General Sergey Melikov told Izvestiya that such moves were entirely appropriate because veterans have asked for...
Ukraine’s resolve to open the archives of the communist special services makes publicly available not only the files of persons who suffered from repression but also of those who, in a varying degree, cooperated with the Soviet regime....
Russia and Ukraine hold the world’s largest documentary collections of Communist secret services that ceased to exist in the early 1990s but once had been extremely powerful and disposed the future of millions. These documents cover the...
The Rosbalt news agency is reporting that the Kremlin plans to give the National Guard of Russia additional functions which will make it a full-scale force structure and one that will be “much more similar to the KGB” of Soviet times...
After the arrest of the Crimean Tatar lawyer Emil Kurbedinov and growing pressure on his Russian colleague Nikolai Polozov, after the capture of people who merely came to support the activist Marlen Mustafaev (himself suffering for helping...
On 17 January 2017, the CIA declassified more than 930,000 documents from the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) system and hosted them online. Previously, the reports were available to the public at the National Archives in Maryland, USA....
In Petrozavodsk on June 1 began the trial of one of the most amazing people I have ever known – local historian Yuriy Dmitriev. He has dedicated his life to the dead. He is accused either of producing child pornography or illegal...
