Black January in Baku – the time and place the Soviet Union died
On January 20 twenty-nine years ago, Soviet forces attacked the people of Baku, killing and wounding hundreds and…
Browsing Tag
Boris Yeltsin
8 posts
24 years ago, Moscow attacked Chechnya, triggering a war that changed everything
Most people today are focusing on bidding farewell to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the great human rights activist that Vladimir…
Putin’s rise had 13 ‘fathers’ and 12 serious opponents, Illarionov says
Vladimir Putin and the Russian political system known as Putinism did not emerge out of nowhere, Andrey Illarionov…
Putin elites want ‘Stalinism without Stalin’ and ‘repression with a human face,’ Rubtsov says
Russians do not, by their nature, “love Stalin,” Novaya gazeta commentator Aleksandr Rubtsov says; instead, they “are being…
For the chekists, Navalny is the Yeltsin of 1987, Portnikov says
Many have forgotten that in May 1987, Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Moscow city committee of the…
Ukrainians discover stories of repressed relatives in newly opened KGB archives
Russia and Ukraine hold the world’s largest documentary collections of Communist secret services that ceased to exist in…
Russians in 1990s sought freedom not democracy and now risk having neither, Tsipko says
Russia’s current problems reflect the fact that in the 1990s, Russians sought freedom and not democracy and thus…
‘What do French prostitutes, Kremlin media and Duma deputies have in common?’ and other neglected Russian stories
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often…