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...
Many expected that with the passage of time, new generations of Russians would reject the worst aspects of their country’s past such as Stalinism, but new polls show that support for Stalin and forgiveness of his crimes is greater among...
Vladimir Putin “defends Ivan the Terrible and Stalin ‘from excessive demonization’ because unconsciously he feels himself” to share with them a common approach, Igor Eidman says, and views criticism of them like criticism of...
The current attacks on Alexei Navalny that suggest he will become a dictator if he manages somehow to defeat Vladimir Putin reflect the utopianism of the Russian intelligentsia and its failure to understand that anyone who succeeds the...
The Levada Center poll concerning whom Russians see as the most outstanding statesmen of all times and places has attracted most attention because it found that they list Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as number one with Vladimir Putin and...
Not only are the countries Russians identify as friendly more likely to be authoritarian and poor than those they list as enemies, Andrey Illarionov says; but the former are falling ever further behind the latter both in terms of GDP per...
Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin routinely denounce others as Russophobes, but most of those they target do not hate or fear the Russian people, Sergey Kornyev says. In fact, the real Russophobes are those in the Kremlin itself who seek...
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in...
Many commentators have discussed whether Vladimir Putin is a fascist in any serious sense, but most have failed to consider one area where fascism has clearly arisen in his Russia: in the aesthetics that increasingly inform Moscow’s...
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in...
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...
