Russia

The key political question in Russia over the past two decades has not been about the relationship between democracy and dictatorship, but between different kinds of oligarchy. The oligarchy that has taken shape under President Vladimir Putin is far more coherent, close-knit and disciplined than Boris Yeltsin’s collection of feuding magnates. It has a common culture and ethic drawn from the common origins of many of its members in the Soviet security services. Its comparative success is due to these… more

...Russia held wargames last week in the Urals involving troops from Russia and China and four central Asian states. Moscow has infuriated Georgia after a Russian missile landed on the outskirts of its capital, Tbilisi. Much of the military posturing is for internal consumption, ahead of parliamentary elections in December and a presidential poll in spring. Pictures showing a shirtless Mr Putin on a fishing trip have been a source of national pride.

The U.S. appears relaxed about this… more

News report these days opine with tiresome regularity that Russia and the United States are headed for a new Cold War. But don’t believe the hype.

It’s true enough that Moscow and Washington have been exchanging cross words. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 7 that Russia’s military modernization constitutes a threat; the assessment went largely unnoticed here, but not in Moscow.

Things got really nasty three days later. At an international conference in Munich,… more

The present crisis in relations between the European Union and Russia is being exaggerated on both sides. Part of the problem is that too many Western commentators still set as their standard for good relations the utterly Western ambition of the early 1990s -- a ‘‘democratic’’ Russia that would be completely subservient to the West.

Russians too are often still reacting to their experience of humiliation and exploitation in the 1990s with a counterproductive prickliness, arrogance and suspicion. Both sides need… more

When Kestutis Dziautas enrolled in Moscow's KGB college in 1985, he wasn't aware, he says, of the Soviet secret police's role in executing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of fellow Lithuanians decades earlier. Likewise, he says, he didn't know that KGB agents were still the feared foot soldiers of a ruthless regime.But neither his claim of naivete, nor the fact that he spent only four months working for the KGB before the fall of communism, was enough to… more

KAI RYSSDAL: Boris Yeltsin first truly got the West's attention in August of 1991, when he jumped up on that tank in front of the Russian Parliament building. But it wasn't until January of the following year that he really turned communism upside-down — when he lifted 75 years of Soviet price controls.Yeltsin died today at the age of 76. And that shove that he gave Russians toward a market economy is still shaking itself out.Rajan… more

The museum of the Khanti and Mansii tradition is intelligently and attractively designed, with vaguely New-Ageish references to Khanti and Mansii religion, but also genuinely interesting and informative about their beliefs.

Among these, following the Russian conquest of the 17th century, was a conflation of Jesus Christ with their traditional principal object of worship, the bear.

For anyone with a sense of Russian history, Khanti-Mansiisk has a certain heartbreaking quality. This was the dream of the Soviet reformers… more

Last autumn, I found myself by invitation of some very respectable investors in a high-class Moscow night-club shaped like an amphitheatre. The rake-thin, huge-eyed “models” perched in the tiers above me, and under the flashing strobe-lights, adopted in my inebriated imagination the forms of exquisitely beautiful, slightly predatory roosting birds.

My previous, sober after-dinner speech on Russia’s economic prospects to these international investors had been succeeded by a line of can-can dancers clad only in feathers and led by a… more

According to much recent commentary, Russia is back as a major power. The cover of the July 15, 2006 Economist, a magazine noted for its measured tone and sober assessments featured a phtograph of President Vladimir Putin, with a confident air and stern visage, next to the words "Living with a Strong Russia." New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman quipped that "Russia has gone from the sick man of Europe to the boos man." And in the Holidays (November/December)… more

This letter is an appeal to Democrats, now a congressional majority, to propose a ore positive, constructive relationship between the United States and Russia-less for Russia than for the United States.At virtually any point between 1947 and 1991, if any serious thinker had proposed that we could form a strategic relationship with Russia but should refuse to do so, he or she would have been considered misguided at best and slightly deranged at worst. Yet that has happened… more