“Voroshilovgrad” and “Stalino” On 16 April, Leonid Pasechnik, head of the Russian occupation administration of Luhansk, signed a decree named “About using the name Voroshilovgrad City” that orders to use...
Given all the changes Vladimir Putin is making in these days in the Russian constitutional order, ones that legalize the presidentialist dictatorship he has already created, many may have failed to notice that a law he signed restoring a...
The recent arrests of Russian government officials Abyzov and Ishayev like the earlier ones of Belykh, Ulyukayev and Serebrennikov are harbingers of still more arrests and clear evidence that “any effort to establish a dictatorship...
All too often, Lev Ponomaryev and Yevgeny Ikhlov warn in a new commentary, observers focus on one or another Moscow action in isolation and do not connect the dots; but if one does, they say, it becomes obvious that the Kremlin is...
A “new GULAG” is emerging in Russia “right before our eyes,” opposition politician Gennady Gudkov says. For the moment it is “still small” but if will grow and metastasize if the Russian people do...
Roman Romanov, the director of the GULAG History Museum in Moscow, says that one of his researchers, Sergey Prudovsky has discovered that in September 2014, a classified order went out to destroy card files on GULAG victims, making the use...
A core element of Vladimir Putin’s worldview is that the Russians are “a divided people,” German historian Wilfried Jilge says, a perspective that underlies his continuing aggression against Ukraine and that lays the...
Many in the West following the decision of more than 20 countries to expel Russian diplomats to show solidarity with the British think that Vladimir Putin has been driven into an untenable position and soon will be forced to back down in...
“Stalinist,” like many epithets, is not so much an explanation as something that needs to be explained, US-based Russian historian Irina Pavlova says; and in a new post, she argues that Stalinists are best understood as...
Many expected that with the passage of time, new generations of Russians would reject the worst aspects of their country’s past such as Stalinism, but new polls show that support for Stalin and forgiveness of his crimes is greater...
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...
