Creating a Dam National Space: Rakhmon’s Socialist Realist Promotion of Roghun
What we have inherited is the nation state as conceptualised later on in the Soviet period. It is an ethnic nationalism centered on statehood, the…
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Russia’s Forest Sector and International Trade in Forest Products: Export Taxes on Roundwood, Priority Investment Projects, and WTO Accession
Wood, well made into buildings and furniture and well cared for, can last hundreds of years, but it is now routinely manufactured into products that…
Matt Robertson: From Russian History to Environment
Matt Robertson is the Programs Director at Tahoe Baikal Institute (TBI), an NGO that connects two of the world’s unique lake ecosystems and, in doing so, promotes…
The Varieties of Capitalism Dichotomy (and Beyond) in Post-Communist States
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave rise to fifteen independent states, as well as a challenge for those who study national political…
Mikhail Prokhorov: A Real Future
Mikhail Prokhorov was the only applicant out of a dozen to successfully register as an independent presidential candidate for the 2012 Russian presidential elections. Most…
Talent Development and Economic Growth in Russia
2007 is an exciting time to be involved in Russian business. The ruble has become increasingly more valuable and stable, and the government has emphasized…
Fantasy Islands: New Lands Built for St. Petersburg
On the tenth of September, a massive Italian ocean liner, the Costa Mediterranea, with seventeen decks, three hundred meters in length, and sixty meters high…
Politics in the Former Soviet Union: A Personal View from an American born of Russian Immigrants
On December 3, 2007 I awoke with a hangover, even though I had not imbibed the night before. The evening of December 2 was my…
The Medvedev Economy
The Russian economy is due for a major shift. Much of the rapid growth from the past eight years has come from something called “unused…
From the Silk Road to Chevron: The Geopolitics of Oil Pipelines in Central Asia
Kazakhstan has received much press recently as a result of the success of the comic film Borat. However, that movie got everything wrong in its depiction…
Personal Reflections on Russian Offshore Outsourcing
Three of my four grandparents emigrated from Minsk to New York City more than 100 years ago. So I guess that I was destined to…
The Growth of Russia’s IT Outsourcing Industry: The Beginning of Russian Economic Diversification?
Summary of a speech given by Daniel Satinsky, B.E.A Associates The information technology (IT) outsourcing industry in Russia is one of the few non-natural resource…
Snapshot of the Russian Economy
The Soviet economy developed under Communist ideals for some seventy-five years. These ideals kept that development focused on what had been the centerpieces of 19th…
The Greening of Moscow
Once upon a time, T&B would fly to Paris or London for a breath of air, and our friends would take turns inviting us to…
Privately Enforced Capitalism: The Rise (and Fall?) of Russia’s Oligarchs
Today in Russia, a small group of men called the oligarchs control a disproportionate portion of the Russian economy. In a capitalist environment, a large…
Variations of Community: The Kommunalka and Gated Communities
The following was originally presented at the International Summer School “Comparative Research in the Social Sciences: Operationalizations” in Sofia, Bulgaria, September 2004, organized by UNESCO and…
Democracy, Anarchy, and Siberian Resources
Russia is a land whose boundless possibilities are matched only by its perpetual troubles. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the resource rich…