When a professor and police colonel were arrested and charged for printing a book in memory of the victims of Stalinist Terror, many believed officials would soon recognize the absurdity of the case. A year later, however, the Archangelsk affair shows no signs of being dropped. Is it a case of loc
On Thursday evening, prominent TV journalist Leonid Parfyonov broke with the etiquette of live award ceremonies, and made an unannounced and sensational attack on the state of Russian journalism. Russian TV bosses have become slaves to government bureaucrats, he said, and in so doing are complicit
Was the Crimean War really a crusade or was it motivated more by Russia’s need to have access to the Black Sea? Dominic Lieven reviews Orlando Figes’ new history of the conflict.
Will Kyrgyzstan’s progress towards democracy, initiated after the April Revolution, be undermined by victory of the non-democratic parties at the recent parliamentary elections? Or might possibly these parties surprise everyone and accept the changes? Asel Doolotkeldieva weighs up the probable out
A series of recent international conferences have pushed the Circassian question on to the international agenda. Sufian Zhemukhov considers the historical background to the relationships between Georgia and the North Caucasus and possible future developments.
President Medvedev may have declared his support for a museum complex outside St Petersburg in memory of Soviet political repression, but a year later the project is no further forward and there are plans to build over the site. Catriona Bass wonders how can words be turned into actions.
Government attempts to modernise Russia are doomed because the Russian mindset remains stuck in an unchanging peasant mentality, laments film-director Andrei Konchalovsky. No change will be possible without reloading our spiritual software, but do we want to change?
The recent arrest of Ukrainian museum director Ruslan Zabily provoked an outcry. Did he actually leak state secrets or is the Yanukovych regime just trying to undo all Orange achievements, including the revival of Ukrainian historical memory?
Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the USSR in the 1930s led to famine, repression and widespread family tragedy. Oleg Pavlov visited a school in the capital of Tartarstan to find out how this period is being taught now
Rather than emphasising friends and allies, today's Russian leaders prefer to single out their enemies, writes Alexei Levinson. It is an approach that plays on Russians' traditional psychological comfort zones, while at the same time allowing politicians to evade responsibility at home.
Russia’s Duma has been trying to draft a ‘memory law’, in order to protect the Soviet version of the events of World War II from revisionist interpretations. The historian Nikolai Koposov deconstructs the attempts so far. His view is that the proposed law is not only misconceived, but would be unw
The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi threatens to be overshadowed by a centuries-old row between Russia and the disposessed Circassian nation, writes Sufian Zhemukhov. Russia should take the opportunity to engage and impress its way to a lasting solution.
