Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine has hit museums in the Russian Federation hard. Long-planned foreign exhibits have been cancelled, and the Kremlin has insisted that Russian museums carry more propaganda about the war. But some curators have come up with a strategy to resist, although it is costing them dearly as well.             That strategy is to avoid changing existing exhibits because official pressure to introduce propaganda messages is g ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have been making progress in the delimitation of the state border between them, despite the difficulties left over from Soviet times and the opposition of many in Armenians to any concession of territories Yerevan has controlled to Azerbaijan.             But even if the two countries do agree on a line, that will not be the end of border questions because the activities of one on its side of the border involv ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – The number of murders per 100,000 population is far higher in Russia than it is elsewhere in Europe, Anastasiya Kokourova and Yegor Shkurko say. That is true if one relies only on official statistics, but these statistics for various reasons seriously understate just how many murders Russians are carrying out.             The problems begin, the To Be Precise investigators say, with the law defining murder that is used by Moscow to report how m ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Since coming to office in 2000, Vladimir Putin has made almost everything a question of national security and used that to destroy all the institutions that had restrained him and opened the way to dictatorship and war, according to Andrey Kazantsev-Waisman.             The Russian political scientist who lives in Israel draws on the work of British scholar Barry Buzan and his Danish colleague Ole Wæver in the 1990s on what they called “the sec ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Commentators have been examining the recent rash of appointments to the government and the Presidential Administration for an indication as to who is likely to emerge as Putin’s successor. But as long as Putin is alive, Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name El Murid says, the Kremlin leader will never name anyone as his successor.             Putin knows better than anyone else that were he to do so, an alternative power center would ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Not surprisingly, commentators have focused on the ways in which Moscow’s burgeoning alliance with China is directed against the West; but they should also focus on the fact that this “alliance of dictators” is in fact directed “against the interests of the residents of the Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation,” the Region.Expert portal says.             According to the Tallinn-based regionalist site, “the Far East for a long time has ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 16 – Sergey Naryshkin, head of the SVR, says that Russia should draw on the experience of the Communist International (Komintern), a Soviet-led union of communist parties between 1919 and 1943, to unite and strengthen all those in favor of overthrowing the existing world order that was created and remains dominated by Western countries.             Speaking to a roundtable devoted to the history of the Komintern, the Russian spy chief says that “tod ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 14 – Ever fewer people are inclined to see the Putin years as a clear break from the Yeltsin ones, and now Igor Eidman adds a new dimension to that understanding by suggesting that post-Soviet politics has always been a contest between what he calls “the foxes” and “the wolves.”             The Russian commentator takes as his framework the ideas of Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto who spoke about politics being a struggle between foxes and lions ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 14 – Vladimir Putin has reduced the governors of Russia’s federal subjects from being independent actors in the Russian political system to being Moscow’s agents in an increasingly centralized country. That is common ground, but relations between Moscow and the governors is more complicated than that, given where they come from and where they then go.             Recent elevation of governors to the central government and the appointment of new gove ..read more

Paul Goble             Staunton, May 14 – Facing problems inside Russia, in the former Soviet space, and in relations with churches in Europe, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church is following the Kremlin and making its own turn to the East; but its presence in that region is small and thus the Russian church is unlikely to recoup its influence anywhere by this step.             That conclusion is suggested by Russian religious affairs journalist Milena Faustova in th ..read more