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…
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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…
Putin and the “Problem of 2008”
An Annotated Overview of Quotes about Putin’s Decision to Head United Russia’s Party List in the Coming Elections As political analysts endlessly mulled the “Problem…
Kyrgyzstan’s Energy Alternatives: Between Scylla and Charybdis
Russia has often been accused recently of “energy blackmail,” using its large hydrocarbon reserves to gain political influence in countries which are dependent on energy…
Russia’s Shrunken Air Defense Perimeter
In recent months political disputes between Russia and the United States have grown to include sharp differences over Washington’s expanding plans for ballistic missile defense…
The Rediscovery of the “Russian World”
During the last few weeks, the term “russkiy mir,” which can roughly be translated as “Russian world,” suddenly gained increasing prominence. It became the center…
Layers of Identity: Self-identity in U.S. child immigrants from the former Soviet Union
Geography and history have made Russian identity hard to define. Russia spans both Europe and Asia and is split between East and West. The Soviet-era…
The ‘Norman Problem’ in Historiography: Nationalism and the Origins of Russia
Within the realm of history, several old controversies persist, taking on new meanings within the context of today’s political and cultural imperatives. One of these,…
Empire, Nationalities, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Michael Doyle defines empires as follows: “Empires are relationships of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies.”[1]…
US-Russian Energy Security in the Caucasus: The Prospects for Conflict in the National Interest
It has taken energy (namely coal and oil) to produce the industrialized and economically prosperous nations of today. That is certain to change in the…
From Vixen to Victim: The Sensationalization and Normalization of Prostitution in Post-Soviet Russia
Since the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, the Moscow nightclub “Golodnaya Utka,” or “The Hungry Duck,” has been dubbed “Moscow’s first rape camp.”[1]…
Disillusionment on the Grandest of Scales: Finnish-Americans in the Soviet Union, 1917-1939
From the time of the Russian Revolution onward, the Bolsheviks were often portrayed in mainstream American media as the “enemy.”[1] Many Americans, however, chose to…
US-Russia Relations After September 11, 2001: A Game Theory Analysis
Forward from the editors: While the following is highly informative without understanding such finer subtleties as the difference between realism and neorealism, etc. we recommend…