... cost of abandoning material benefits that could come in exchange for a more pragmatic policy towards the former hegemon of the region. It has been considered to be naive to recognize in the general assessment of the reasons behind the collapse of the USSR that the main reason was the crisis of legitimisation of the system, ie the moral and ideological factor; on the contrary, the brutal diagnosis of Zbigniew Brzezinski has been accepted, and it was proving that Russia is simply a defeated country ...
... whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).
Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution ...
Should the West be concerned about the Eurasian Economic Union? Is it a disguised attempt to resurrect the Soviet Union?
Does Vladimir Putin want to restore the Soviet Union? Nobody can irrefutably prove that he does not. However, nobody can prove either that Barack Obama does not want to turn the United States into amonarchy or that Bill Bailey has no wish to become the new Dalai Lama. It is apparent that Putin feels nostalgic about the Soviet past, which is only natural for a person of his age...
... actions. Many of these same failures are all too apparent in the ongoing NATO-Russia confrontation, in particular the lack of empathy and critical self-assessment.
Taking place as it did in a period of particular hostility between the USA and USSR, effective strategic communication relaying the scope and explicit purpose of Able Archer should have been paramount. Instead the report reveals that the US intelligence community routinely dismissed the concerns raised by the Soviet leadership relating ...
... revenue that involved the construction and financing of Trump’s marquee SoHo property in New York City. The main partner driving this project way Bayrock, was a company run by Tevfik Arif, a man who in the Soviet-era was an economic official for the USSR. His point man for the deal, Felix Sater, was a convicted Russian mobster; financing involved money from an Iceland firm known for drawing money from Putin-linked Russians, as well as from a financier hailing from the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan ...
Having never officially observed an election in Brazil former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and the organization he founded to promote ethical democracy have given unequivocal support to president (sic) Michel Temer and his team in their efforts to safeguard Brazil's democratic values.
The endorsement, signed by Carter, congratulated prominent electoral law specialist Torquato Jardim on his appointment as Temer's new Transparency Minister. It went on the official government website...
This year will see the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s breakup and the emergence of new Russia on its ruins. Time is ripe for taking stocks and mapping a road into the future.
A group of members of Russia’s Council on Defense and Foreign Policy (CDFP) has presented to the state and society its vision of the country’s future foreign policy. We believe that resuming a creative foreign policy discussion will be useful. Amidst massive worldwide propaganda it is easy to fall into...
The disintegration of the Soviet Union created a decade-long illusion that the era of ideologies and ideological struggle was over and the world was moving towards a single system of values based on Western liberal democracy and capitalism. Europe and America fascinated the world with their freedom and winning political system.
The perception about the final victory of Western values was backed up by America’s massive military supremacy but most importantly by Western countries’ affluence...
... albeit for different reasons: progressives and democrats had one set of motives; retrogrades and communists had a contrary set of motives. Neither the Baltic nor the South Caucusus republics, nor even Ukraine could have caused as big a country as the USSR to disappear so quickly. Only the will of the Russian establishment – the old one that was trying to hold onto the reins of power by distancing itself from Gorbachev, the experimenting General Secretary, and the new one that wanted to assume ...
Putting the State Together Again and External Assistance: Losses or Gains?
More than two decades after the collapse of the USSR, the phrase “the post-Soviet space” is still widely used in expert and political discourse, despite attempts to replace it with another definition”
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such as the “Newly Independent States” or “Eurasia”.
At first glance, the concept ...
