Russia has only rarely been a democracy and certainly is not one now, Vladimir Pastukhov says; but the fusion of the state and the criminal world that occurred in the 1990s and continues to this day is something new and is if anything more...
The recent coverage of the system of torture and rape in Russian penal institutions has had two important consequences as far as Russian public opinion is concerned. On the one hand, it has revealed significant support among the population...
Vladimir Osechkin, head of the Gulagu.net project which has provided video tape confirmation of torture in Russian prisons, says that Moscow which this evidence shows created a system of torture in its prisons and camps has now lost...
Prisons and even their reputation for brutality are an important support for the Putin regime because Russians do not want to risk falling into them and thus are more willing to go along with what the regime wants. But for that threat to...
The portal GULAGU.Net (“No to the GULAG” – a volunteer project against corruption and torture in Russia) has obtained 40 gigabytes of Russian penal system video archives documenting Penal Service and FSB agents...
Two high-resonance processes have been simultaneously unfolding in Europe in the last few weeks: the sharp increase in the prices on natural gas (see EDM, August 11) as well as the fierce contestation in the parliamentary elections in...
The Russian-American commentator argues that the West’s sanctions regime is based on the false assumption that Moscow will react to sanctions the same way it would in seeking to avoid the impact of the sanctions on Russia as a whole...
But a consideration of them collectively shows that what Putin is about is not just subordinating Ukraine to his will but forcing the West to recognize his power and right to do so, a recognition that would represent a far greater victory...
Yury Shulipa, author of How Putin Kills Abroad, says that Putin has two reasons for doing away with his political opponents. On the one hand, he wants to spread fear among both others who oppose him and the international system as a whole....
Drawing on his contacts that he had developed with the criminal world during his first years in the KGB, Vladimir Putin in 1998 when he was head of the Russian FSB created the mixed intelligence-criminal group that blew up the apartment...
Putin’s goals and philosophy Sławomir Sierakowski: What is Putin’s ultimate goal in this war? Timothy Snyder: That’s no big secret: to destroy Ukraine as a state and exterminate Ukrainians as a nation. I’d...
![Vladimir Putin's wrestling coach, the person who reportedly helped him get admitted to the Leningrad State University using his connections, was one of the city's top criminals, had served 20 years in prison, and died in a gang battle at 57. Putin admiringly wrote about him in his memoirs called "From the First Person" without using the coach's surname or mentioning his criminal links (for obvious reasons). As the engraving on his grave stone states, the coach Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov composed the epitaphs himself. [Translator: Please note that in the original Russian the epitaphs crudely rhyme, but the translation did not attempt to reproduce rhyming prioritizing accuracy instead.] The epitaph on the front panel says: "A grave and on the grave there is an epitaph: 'I am dead, but mafia is immortal.'" The back panel is engraved with the following epitaphs: "Hooray! I finally died!!! All of my life I worked for broads like a slave. Now I won't spend a kopeck on this liver sausage anymore." "I gave her my two final bangs and then was carried away on a hearse." "Let's drink to us all, because the curtain will soon fall." (Image: openrussia.org)](https://static.euromaidanpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/4bbcb9a683811.gif)
