How the 2014 Economic Crisis Changed Russia’s Economy
Just about everyone in the United States knows something about the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. That particular crisis started in the U.S. housing and…
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Recycling and Waste Recovery in Russia: Policy and Infrastructure Challenges
“Municipal solid waste,” or “MSW,” is the technical term given to “garbage consisting of everyday items used by the public.” Managing MSW is increasingly a…
Russia’s Arctic Development: Problems and Priorities
What climate change and arctic development means for Russia, the environment, and the international community. The Arctic region is a vast area whose economic potential,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…