United Russia: A House Divided
United Russia is the powerhouse of Russian politics. At its base is the influence of the paternal Vladimir Putin, two-time President and one-time Prime Minister,…
Read MoreUnited Russia is the powerhouse of Russian politics. At its base is the influence of the paternal Vladimir Putin, two-time President and one-time Prime Minister,…
Read MoreI believe no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death, that small motives will…
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…
Chechnya 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…
Moscow is very cold in the winter. There isn’t a lot that would motivate a large crowd of people to stand outside in the freezing snow and…
For several weeks up to the elections for State Duma, flyers and newsletters were handed out throughout Irkutsk by representatives from many different parties, primarily…
While I wasn’t able to sit down with my family for a traditional Thanksgiving Day meal, I was treated to a certain Thanksgiving Day surprise. …
In a Komsomolskaya Pravda article dated April 13, 1993, O. Karmaza wrote that “in recent times, we have destroyed everything that could be destroyed. This applies to…
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…