Russia

May 2, 2009

Russia’s Central Asia Premium

During a trip to my birthplace of New York City some years ago, I had the pleasure of briefly meeting the impressive and talented Professor Jenik Radon of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).  Radon i...
May 1, 2009

Seeking Distance from the Khodorkovsky Case

Political advisory Gleb Pavlovsky has given an extensive interview resulting in two separate articles in the Financial Times, one of which includes commentary about how he believes President Dmitry Medvedev sees the second trial of Mikhail Khodork...
May 1, 2009

Russia’s Damaged System Still Working

I caught the following excerpt over on World Politics Review by Daria Solovieva, which takes a cursory look at the relationship between Russia’s economic boom times and the low level of political activity on behalf of citizens – more o...
May 1, 2009

An Intense Psychological Complex

Below is an excerpt of an article Miriam Elder – a journalist that many of us know from the pages of the Moscow Times – however this time she is writing for GlobalPost, a new news model which is taking a stab at creating a sustainable ...
April 30, 2009

Vera Buldakova: Russia’s Education Crisis

Note from editor:  These days, those of us who haven’t yet fallen into a catatonic stupor listening to the procurators’ voices droning away in a dingy courtroom in Moscow have been hearing a litany of fantastic crimes supposedly c...
April 30, 2009

Enduring Legal Nihilism

Susan Scholl, who is an author and the Moscow burueau chief of Austrian public television, has a comment piece on Project Syndicate (Daily Star is running it) about the ongoing abuses of human rights and deepening legal nihilism as characterized b...
April 30, 2009

Bribing Kyrgyzstan

A couple billion dollars can go a really long way in some Central Asian countries, and its a pity that the United States and other NATO members didn’t realize that President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was more or less “up for sale.” ...
April 30, 2009

Sechin’s Risks

For as often as we hear the pained and repetitive declarations from Gazprom officials about Russia being a normal, regular, and reliable supplier of energy, once in a while we still get threats like this one from energy czar Igor Sechin: Russian D...
April 30, 2009

Listening to Medvedev

European Voice has an editorial about the importance of continuing the dialogue that Dmitry Medvedev opened during his last visit to Finland – namely that proposals to draft a new Energy Charter Treaty and to put the energy trade into a rule...