On January 20 twenty-nine years ago, Soviet forces attacked the people of Baku, killing and wounding hundreds and illegally arresting many more. That date remembered in Azerbaijan to this day as Black January is less well-known to many now...
Most people today are focusing on bidding farewell to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the great human rights activist that Vladimir Putin is trying to coopt as one of his own, or to the centenary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose slogan...
Vladimir Putin and the Russian political system known as Putinism did not emerge out of nowhere, Andrey Illarionov says. Instead, it was promoted in the 1990s by 13 “fathers” who shared some of his and its core values, a...
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...
Many have forgotten that in May 1987, Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Moscow city committee of the CPSU, received representatives of the chauvinist and anti-Semitic Pamyat organization, thus sending a signal that he was someone the KGB and...
Russia and Ukraine hold the world’s largest documentary collections of Communist secret services that ceased to exist in the early 1990s but once had been extremely powerful and disposed the future of millions. These documents cover...
Russia’s current problems reflect the fact that in the 1990s, Russians sought freedom and not democracy and thus proved unable to escape from the autocracy that has long been their lot, Aleksandr Tsipko says. As a result, they risk...
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...
In 2014, after the first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, soldiers who had lost limbs in battle were seen for the first time in public as they returned home. Since the full-on invasion by Russia in February 2022, the...
