The KGB and its predecessors were not the highly disciplined professionals and successful managers Vladimir Putin and the numerous state-controlled media outlets want Russians to believe, according to a new book on the organization’s...
The role of Russia’s security services changed in the last year, Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan say. It was no longer to be “the new nobility” as had been true earlier in Putin’s time – that term itself disappeared from public...
Experts from the countries of the Eastern Partnership spoke about access to the archives of the communist secret services in their countries during a press conference held at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center in Kyiv. Samvel Martirosyan,...
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...
Free independent media is a necessary condition for democracy to function in any country. Censorship, on the other hand, is rampant in all its forms in dictatorships. These definitions may be relevant in a black and white world; in...
