A Moscow blogger has suggested that Russians now, when thinking about the Soviet past, should reflect on what he calls that country’s “inexplicable paradoxes” not only when thinking about their own relationship to it but also about...
Many in the Baltic countries and elsewhere still celebrate the US non-recognition policy which specified that Washington would never recognize Stalin’s “forcible incorporation” of the three Baltic states into the USSR, a policy that...
One of the most important features of Moscow’s behavior but one that at the same time Western leaders typically fail to recognize and incorporate in their responses is that the Kremlin employs regularly employs the same strategy and...
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...
The massacre of striking Novocherkassk workers by Soviet military units 55 years ago this week initially spread fear throughout the USSR but then helped power the rise of the dissident movement and thus played a key role in the collapse of...
Many analysts in Russia and the West are now openly talking about how the regime of Vladimir Putin could come to an end, making predictions that in many cases appear to be more an expression of their preferences than of the actual...
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....
Among the many messages the Kremlin wants Russians to take away from its celebrations of Victory Day is that Moscow has arranged things so that they have lived in peace for 72 years. But in fact, Arkady Babchenko points out, the Kremlin...
A casual consumer of Russian propaganda outlets in advance of Moscow’s commemoration of Victory Day this year could be excused for thinking that the USSR defeated Hitler all on its own and that the Russian people were the only component...
In yet another manifestation of what Guillermo O’Donnell described as “the powerlessness of the all-powerful,” Lilia Shevtsova argues, Vladimir Putin and his entourage are making a repetition of the events of 1991 ever more likely...
Four years since the start of its ‘Euromaidan’ revolution, Ukraine is fighting for its survival as an independent and viable state. But this report is not only about Ukraine’s struggle to hold together and resist Russia’s...
