Russia under Vladimir Putin resembles an oriental despotism in that all property belongs to the ruler and all people are dependent on him, Igor Eidman says. As a result, it is no surprise that the country’s social pyramid corresponds to...
It has long been a witticism among specialists on international relations that terrorists who succeed are no longer called terrorists either because by their actions, they have become the heads of governments or because they were already...
The “Territory of Terror” memorial museum in the western-Ukrainian city of Lviv is located in a place that experienced the horrors of both German Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes. The Lviv ghetto existed here during the German...
The fundamental contradiction in Russia today is that “externally Russia is trying to be an empire but internally it ever more resembles a colony” — albeit one in which the colonial rulers come from the same nationality as most...
A majority of Russians – 57 percent – say they want to live in a democratic state, according to a new survey conducted by Germany’s Friedrich-Nauman Foundation; but an equal or even larger number of them support government actions...
The removal of Sergey Ivanov as head of the Presidential Administration, whatever the proximate causes, “symbolizes a change in eras of the Putin administration,” from one of a kind of collective leadership to a one-man dictatorship...
For the last decade, Vladimir Putin has pursued a plan to isolate his country from the outside world by pursuing rearmament and confrontation with the West, Andrey Illarionov says. Now, there is evidence that the Kremlin leader is stepping...
Russian poet Sergey Gandlevskiy was recently arrested in the Moscow metro for tearing down a portrait of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Police threatened to punish him for “vandalism and hooliganism,” but eventually released him without...
One of the results of the Maidan is the transfer of the KGB archives to the National Memory Institute and access to the files for the Ukrainian public. A major step, considering the fact that Ukraine was the second largest Soviet republic,...
Vladimir Pastukhov says that Putin’s Russia is well on its way to “criminal neo-totalitarianism” with all the attributes thereof, including terror and a GULAG, and that Russia will have a chance to become a democracy only after a...
On 11 October, a three-day meeting of the Synod, or church council, of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, finished in Istanbul. It gave further confirmation that Ukraine is on the path to receiving church independence from Moscow – and healing...
