Russia

In many ways, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney are rather similar characters. Both are highly intelligent, but both see the world above all through the restrictive prisms of security and national power.

Both are patriots, but like so many leaders with a tendency to see national power and their own power as one and the same thing. Both are capable of great ruthlessness in defending what they see as the vital interests of… more

I was terrified when the mailman showed up, straining under the weight of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis's new book. The paper galleys clock in at four pounds and the title is imposingly simple: The Cold War. Likely the country's most esteemed historian of this particular topic, Gaddis has already churned out the following works: Origins of the Cold War, Rethinking Cold War History, and Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. What could be new and fresh in… more

Historians of the future will look back with amazement at U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the millennium, especially with regard to Russia.

It's true, of course, that the Soviet Union once posed a severe threat to the United States and its allies -- a global challenge that tied up American energies for 50 years and cost tens of thousands of American lives in anti-communist proxy wars. But that struggle ended in 1989 with a Western… more

A measure of western hostility to Russia is justified, given both the nature of Russian external policies and the crude, clumsy way in which they are often executed. Unfortunately, this hostility can take on an irrational and hysterical tone absent from western attitudes to China, for example.

In recent years one reason for this particular western attitude has been growing dislike of the semi-authoritarian character of the Putin administration. A good deal of hypocrisy is involved here. The west made… more

Russia and Ukraine have ended their spat over natural gas prices. Ukraine will pay more, but much less than Russia originally demanded. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the outcome owed little to Western diplomacy. Ukraine, a budding democracy, deserves Western support. Europe squawked when Russia cut its gas supplies, but that hardly amounted to a coherent policy of backing Ukraine against what was a huge--albeit spectacularly inept--Russian power play.

When the quarrel began last week, it looked… more

What's the main problem in Russia today? Most people have a ready answer: President Vladimir Putin's strangulation of democracy. Yes, but there's a bigger one. That's whether Russia is stable enough to hold together.

Few Russia watchers would suggest the country is on the verge of disintegration. Yet it could be. Certainly, its present boundaries are likely to be altered. The epicenter for change is the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus, consisting of seven ethnic republics (Adygea, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North… more

The last several days have been gruesome ones for Russia. On Aug. 24, two airliners crashed, apparently blown up by terrorists laden with explosives. On Tuesday, a female suicide bomber -- most likely one of the "black widows," women who have lost husbands, brothers or sons in Chechnya's war against Russia -- blew herself up at a Moscow subway station, killing nine bystanders.

The latest incident of bloodshed is even more chilling. In Beslan, in the southern republic of North… more

In 1904 the Romanov dynasty was in trouble. Russia's industrialization had accelerated in the last decades of the 19th century but could not forestall the widening of the economic and military gap between Russia and Europe's other powers. To save the regime, Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve reportedly recommended a "small victorious war." But Russia's rout in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war fueled a revolution. The Romanovs, who had reigned for almost 300 years, would soon… more

Had Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov been born in Chicago rather than Chelyabinsk, he'd likely be well on his way to joining the geek elite. His three-page resume lists computer skills that would dazzle any Silicon Valley headhunter. According to his employment history, Ivanov began working at a regional telephone company in Russia while still in his mid-teens, installing Web servers and Cisco routers. His programming talents include tricky languages like C++ and Perl, and he has mastered 18… more

The war in Afghanistan could become a defining event not just for the fight against terrorism but for NATO and US-European-Russian relations. Already the war has brought changes that just a few months ago would have been unimaginable. For the first time in its history, NATO has invoked Article 5 of the Washington treaty establishing the alliance -- not to defend Europe, as was originally envisioned, but to support a US war in a region far from the European theater.… more