On 30 January 2022, the Russian website Echo of Moscow published an open letter from the Russian Congress of the Intelligentsia, signed by thousands of Russians. The letter criticizes Putin’s military policy against Ukraine while...
One of the most beloved and effective arguments of those who favor a softer approach to Moscow regardless of what it does is that such an approach will help liberals in the Kremlin win out. But as two leading Russian analysts point out in...
One of the most important and influential books about the Soviet leadership was Nathan Leites’ The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951; a free PDF download available here). His study traced the ideas...
Many of the apparent contradictions in Russia today, Lilia Shevtsova says, can be explained by the fact that Vladimir Putin and his regime have entered what Argentinian political scientist Guilliermo O’Donnell once called...
Russia today is in far worse shape than was the USSR at the end of the first Cold War, Konstantin Sivkov says, and unless it takes radical measures now, the forces that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union will have “fatal...
Despite his efforts, Vladimir Putin is not a remake of Stalin and thus could be overthrown in a coup because he has not only violated the social contract he had with the Russian people but has with the murder of Boris Nemtsov shown that he...
In the classic film about Watergate, “All the President’s Men,” Deep Throat warns that in unmasking a conspiracy, it is important not to go too fast but rather to build from the outer rings into the center. Otherwise,...
One bank official from Cyprus* explained to me why top Russian officials, such as Medvedev, Kostin, etc., responded so nervously and irrationally to reports of a possible disconnection of Russia from SWIFT. The fact is that while the other...
First stereotype: Ukrainians are very poor Some Europeans viewed Ukraine as extremely poor. Many Ukrainian refugees were surprised to learn that. “They perceived us almost like we are cave people who do not know and have not seen...
