The Komsomol(s)
The Komsomol was founded in 1918 as the Russian Young Communist League. Originally, it was an organization independent from, but supportive of, the Communist Party,…
Read MoreThe Komsomol was founded in 1918 as the Russian Young Communist League. Originally, it was an organization independent from, but supportive of, the Communist Party,…
Read MoreChechnya is a predominantly Muslim region nestled among many turbulent republics in the Caucasian Mountains. Though the deep ethnic, tribal, and religious divisions of the…
Editorial note: the following resource first appeared in Russian in Bolshoi Gorod, an independent, Moscow-based Russian-language newspaper that provides considerable coverage of political issues, social…
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…
President Dmitry Medvedev officially nominated Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the 2011 United Russia convention to replace him as president. In explaining why Putin was…
The following bilingual Russian MiniLesson is meant to build your vocabulary by providing Russian phrases within English text. Hover over the bold Russian to reveal…
The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), it is often said, is neither liberal nor particularly democratic. They advocate nationalizing most of Russia’s major industries…
Most western observers put substantial hope in Yabloko during the 1990s. Yabloko was an early, strongly pro-West, pro-democracy party that also strongly opposed Yeltsin’s administration….
A Just Russia was formed in 2006 from a merger between three parties. The first, a nationalist party called “Rodina” (Fatherland) had won 9% of…
Have you ever wondered how a Communist might write the history of the fall of the Soviet Union? While history is usually written by the…
Constituting over one-third of Russia’s territory, home to major natural resource deposits, and essential to maintaining increasingly valuable Asian trade routes, the Far East Federal…
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is generally acknowledged as being the successor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which…
The People’s Freedom Party, also known as “Parnas,” was founded on September 16, 2010. It is a coalition of four organizations: Russian People’s Democratic Union;…
Tatarstan is a semiautonomous republic within Russia, located about 500 miles east of Moscow. Roughly the size of West Virginia, but with nearly twice the…
Nashi is by far Russia’s best-known political youth movement. Founded in 2005 shortly after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the group is against “those who…
Vladimir Putin announced the creation of an “All-Russia People’s Front” at a regional congress of the United Russia party in Volgograd on Friday, May 6,…
The following is the pre-election program published by United Russia in preparation for the 2011 Duma elections. While most political parties use the term “Political…
A solemn but reverent air of respect hangs over Volgograd. Long a small military garrison, then a rapidly growing center of commerce and transport, Volgograd…
(Continued from Part II) United Russia came under fire after the October 2009 regional elections. Despite the sluggish economy and an uptick in public protests…
(Continued from Part I) After this, many independents flocked to join the party over the next year, despite Unity having no concrete policy agenda besides…