Many in the West following the decision of more than 20 countries to expel Russian diplomats to show solidarity with the British think that Vladimir Putin has been driven into an untenable position and soon will be forced to back down in...
Russians do not, by their nature, “love Stalin,” Novaya gazeta commentator Aleksandr Rubtsov says; instead, they “are being taught to love Stalin because the Putin regime really is functioning according to this regime prototype and...
Vladimir Putin’s fascism, the first “post-modern” fascism, is able to include under its banner so many radically different people because it is not an ideology – no basic text could be prepared about it – but rather a set of...
In his 1896 novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G. Wells describes how a doctor on a small and isolated island in the Pacific manages to create “human-like hybrid beings” by doing surgery on animals. British critics at the time...
Aleksandr Golts, a Moscow specialist on military affairs and the deputy chief editor of Yezhednevny zhurnal, says that Vladimir Putin’s greatest fear is that the FSB will refuse to open fire on Russians who may seek to overthrow his rule...
“A fish begins to rot from the head,” Russians say, “and society descends into insanity following its dictator. His personal paranoia become that of society and propaganda infects the entire country with it,” Igor Eidman says....
The Stockholm syndrome, the situation in which a captive begins to identify with his or her captors, is widely recognized as a danger. But there is another related phenomenon, Moscow commentator Igor Yakovenko argues, which he calls “the...
Vladimir Putin has achieved a real but Pyrrhic victory with his policy of hybridity: domestically – by transforming Russia into “one gigantic and bestial special service” and internationally – by infecting other countries...
There has been a dramatic increase in the influence of pro-Putin forces in the West in recent months, Yevgeny Ikhlov says; but at the same time, there has also emerged in Western societies a real horror about what the Kremlin leader is...
It is fashionable to compare the Putin regime of today with that of Leonid Brezhnev, but such comparisons are deeply mistaken because the Kremlin now “is not a rickety ideological regime but a bold and self-confident one,” Aleksandr...
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...
