Chaika: a criminal drama in five acts
Watched by over 5 million people in less than two months, the Anti-Corruption Foundation is now releasing the English version of a documentary that has shone the light on… Read more »
Category: Russia
Oil price collapse good news for Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts
The global collapse of oil prices is good news for Ukraine, says Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How… Read more »
Russia’s economic ills fuel radicalism in Central Asia
Central Asia’s authoritarian governments have rarely found it easy to keep a lid on social discontent or to inoculate their countries against chronic instability in Afghanistan. Ethnic tensions and religious… Read more »
Putin says Lenin was wrong, Stalin right: US says Putin ‘corrupt’
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday criticized Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, accusing him of placing a “time bomb” under the state, and sharply denouncing brutal repressions by the Bolshevik government,… Read more »
Authoritarian trendsetters’ antidemocratic toolkit
Authoritarian trendsetters have created a modern antidemocratic toolkit that in many ways serves as the mirror image of democratic soft power, the National Endowment for Democracy’s Christopher Walker writes… Read more »
Russians ambivalent on democracy, civil liberties?
Russians are more concerned about economic and political stability than democracy, according to a new poll conducted by the Levada Center: The poll asked 1,600 Russian respondents to rank issues they viewed… Read more »
Poison Puzzle: Kremlin Critic’s Mysterious Illness
Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, Jr., is the latest of several Kremlin antagonists, both at home and abroad, who have died or become violently ill in suspected deliberate poisonings during Vladimir… Read more »
Alexey Navalny’s very strange form of freedom
The strangest thing about Alexey Navalny is that he is walking around Moscow, still, Masha Gessen writes for The New Yorker: Here is what has happened to the other men… Read more »
The revenge of history: authoritarian narratives
Some 25 years after the Cold War, passions grounded in history are increasingly an essential feature of international relations, and dangerously so, argues Bruno Tertrais, a Senior Research Fellow at… Read more »
How the West’s normativists misjudged Russia
The expert community both in the West and Russia is retracing the steps that Sovietologists made in the 1980s, when they turned out to be completely unprepared for the disintegration… Read more »