Christians, Jews and Muslims have lived side by side for generations in Tatarstan. The Soviet period cut a swathe through early 20th century cultural and spiritual developments like Jadidism, but this peaceful form of Islam has since re-emerged. It is more necessary than ever in the current age of
Russia has taken seventeen years of WTO negotiations to get to a stage that most candidate countries reach after six. Now, with the country finally on the verge of joining, there is no sign of any consensus at the top, write Rihards Kols and Nicolae Geaman.
Russian “political technologist” Gleb Pavlovsky is considered a master of political intrigue and backstage games, yet on April 27 found himself dismissed as a Kremlin advisor. His fall from grace was reportedly linked to indiscreet comments made about the 2012 presidential elections (and supposedl
The campaign to give Soviet Jews the right to leave their country brought two diasporas and a world superpower together in an unlikely alliance. Yet while it was a brilliantly fought battle, it could hardly be described as a total triumph for human rights, writes Oliver Bullough.
The Russian experience in Afghanistan is not a simple story. Far from being the imperialist expansion it is sometimes caricatured to be, the Russians stumbled into Afghanistan reluctantly, beset by ideological neuroses, incomplete intelligence, conflicting advice and the pressure of events. oDR is
Pavel Galitsky spent fifteen years in the brutal labour camps of Kolyma, Siberia. Against the odds, the 100-year old dissident is still alive and Skype'ing, having outlived both his contemporaries and tormentors. He recounts the full horror of his experience to oDR writer Ekaterina Loushnikova.
Twenty-five years after the Chernobyl disaster, Barys Piatrovich recalls the tension of unknowing that gripped him and those around him during the days that followed. Today, barely any of the Chernobyl evacuees are still alive. Spread throughout the country, they died alone and unnoticed, statisti
Ukrainian identity has historically been defined in opposition to Russia, but an anti-Russian agenda is unable to bind together a state with a large ethnic Russian population. With the Yanukovych administration now taking a neo-Stalinist approach to history and education, airbrushing out nationali
Despite its position out on Europe’s eastern flank, Belarus has historically and culturally been at the heart of European civilisation. Sooner or later, its time will come to rejoin the family of democratic nations, writes Uladzimir Arlou
In the opinion of film director Andrei Konchalovsky the true herald of liberal reform in the Soviet Union was Yury Andropov, not Mikhail Gorbachev. Irina Borogan asks if this is the same Andropov who headed the KGB through two of its darkest decades, who crushed dissidents by incarcerating them in
Wikileaks has finally settled the controversy over who attacked whom first in the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, with papers firmly pointing to a miscalculation by Georgia and its superpower friend. For Hans Mouritzen, however, such historical details are dwarfed by a more significant subseque
