Category: Russia

Georgia elections: polarized but ‘pluralistic, competitive and well-run’

     

The ruling Georgian Dream party won a decisive victory in weekend elections, Transitions Online reports: Georgian Dream captured about 48.6 percent of the vote, and the opposition UNM a distant second… Read more »

Power shifts in Putin’s Kremlin

     

In recent months, there have been significant shifts in the Kremlin’s usually static leadership structure. Many of Vladimir Putin’s long-time allies have been removed from power and replaced with younger… Read more »

Russia urged to find masterminds of 2006 Politkovskaya murder

     

Colleagues of slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya gathered Friday at the office of her paper Novaya Gazeta exactly 10 years after the crusading reporter was shot dead, AFP reports: A… Read more »

Moldova official says Kremlin meddling in presidential race

     

The speaker of Moldova’s parliament has accused Russia of meddling in the country’s politics ahead of a presidential election that could cement the former Soviet republic as a contender for… Read more »

Russia shows symptoms of old disease: totalitarianism

     

Long before the Russian state declared the Levada Center, Russia’s only reputable independent polling organization, to be a “foreign agent” in September, its director, Lev D. Gudkov (left), knew this… Read more »

Russia’s ‘uncivil society’

     

On Wednesday evening, Anton Belikov, an artist and lecturer at Moscow’s Surikov Academy of Arts, walked through an exhibition of photographs documenting the war in eastern Ukraine, and threw paint… Read more »

Political violence in Putin’s Russia

     

  The February 2015 assassination of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was only the latest and most dramatic example of the political violence that has been central to the Putin… Read more »

Putin’s Master Plan: Russian autocracy ‘will always threaten Ukraine’

     

Vladimir Putin is “a calculating master of geopolitics with a master plan to divide Europe, destroy NATO, re-establish Russian influence in the world, and most of all, marginalize the United… Read more »

Legacies of Totalitarianism – all too evident in CEE

     

Ironically, it was not the end of communism, but the disintegration of post-communism, that has ushered in a time of deeply unsettling global uncertainty, notes Stephen E. Hanson, director of… Read more »