On April 9 2010, after explosions in the Moscow metro killed 39 people, rumours were circulated of 1,000 ‘black widows’ who had been recruited by the militants. When the press published the names of 22, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch found that she knew some of these dangerous women : a seam
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
In the third of a series on drugs in Russia's regions, Oleg Pavlov reports from the Republic of Tatarstan, 400 miles east of Moscow. While the situation there is certainly not as desperate as it was ten years ago, even government officials suggest as many as 2% of the population are addicted.
If you want to understand what has motivated the uprising of Kyrgyzstan’s poor, you need look no further than the package of neo-liberal economic reforms imposed on the country by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation, comments Balihar Sanghera
The Oryol Region in central Russia has been fairly successful in dealing with its drug problems, but the approaches need coordinating, says Elena Godlevskaya, and not everyone has an interest in improving the situation
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t always solve it. Allocations for drug control have been increased on Sakhalin, but the addiction statistics remain uncomfortably high. Sometimes ordinary people could do more to help, says Kseniya Semyonova
A recently published book about President Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan confirms that the cult of personality is alive and well in the republic. After 15 years of independence Maria Yanovskaya could be forgiven for being surprised at the book’s excessively rapturous tone… but she is not.
The recent local elections in Georgia were deemed “free and fair”, but the opposition remains fragmented. Parliament is the proper forum for moving towards mature democracy, says Denis MacShane, but the world should not forget Georgia and its troubled relationship with its northern neighbour, Russ
Does President Saakashvili really deserve international plaudits for his party’s decisive victory in Georgia’s elections on 30 May 2010? What Jakub Parusinski saw himself, and heard from fellow election monitors, suggests that procedural violations and deliberate fraud were more widespread and org
On May 18, the Ukrainian Security Services paid a strange visit to Borys Gudziak, rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Their goal, it seems, was to ensure his students would not take to the streets to protest against the new President when he arrived in town the following day. Gudz
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.
Relief at being freed from the deadening Soviet tradition of grandiose literary anniversaries, and socialist realism’s didactic canonization of the Tolstoyan panoramic novel may have something to do with the comparatively muted Russian response to this year’s centenary of Lev Tolstoy’s death. But
