Today, as Memorial receives the 2009 Sakharov Prize, Lyubov Borusyak talks to Ludmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, about the birth of Russia’s human rights movement. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, Russia’s people started talking once more, and circulating ‘samizdat’.
The independence, or lack of it, of the Russian judiciary has been much discussed, but Emmanuil Gushansky makes an impassioned plea for the role of mental health experts to be more clearly defined and strengthened
Employees of the private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, directly participated in CIA counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. European leaders threaten Iran with imminent sanctions. North Korea announces that it is ready to co-operate with the United States. All this
Presidential elections are looming in the Abkhazia, the breakaway republic which Russia recognised as an independent state after the Georgia war. This time, Russia has backed off from playing a candidate, says Ivan Sukhov. But whatever the outcome closer integration with Russia will continue.
The region is gripped by swine flu panic, much of it orchestrated, in the opinion of Elena Strelnikova. But every cloud has a silver lining – we’re all having unscheduled holidays
Why is Russia resisting international help with its spiralling drugs problem, asks Susan Richards? While the Kremlin's rhetoric reveals a profound insecurity, its policies are failing to deal effectively with the situation
Could historical enemies Armenia and Turkey be moving towards reconciliation? Despite the potential pitfalls, Turkey's acknowledgement of the 1915 "genocide" being the most serious, compromise could be achieved, says Sergei Markedonov
Listen to a podcast of the openDemocracy Russia evening on 2 July 2009 in London. The editor of openDemocracy's Russia Section, Susan Richards discusses her new book Lost and Found in Russia with the scholar Anatol Lieven. The evening was also part celebration of the first anniversary of openDemoc
The bodies of a prominent Kazakh opposition figure and two of his aides were found in a car in the foothills near Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city and former
The election in Kazakhstan on Sunday 4 December returned the longstanding president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to power in a landslide victory. The preliminary figures from the central electoral commission released on
In Chechnya there is no crime committed by a member of the Russian armed forces against a Chechen national which would be likely to result in punishment
Despite all the differences between the two wars, and the countries prosecuting them, the parallels provide a tool with which to investigate the potential consequences of the American occupation of Iraq
