... August 2015
The current year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. This anniversary has special significance for Russia and China. Our countries fought Nazism and Japanese militarism together, they bore the brunt of the aggression and sustained ... ... 1937, served as a preamble for World War II. The Soviet Union became the only state to provide real assistance to China. The USSR delivered modern warplanes, tanks, artillery systems, small arms, machine guns, communications and various types of military ...
The 40th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe passed almost unnoticed in Russia. Probably because the date falls during the most systemically unstable period in Europe since the declaration was signed.
The Final Act was a large-scale compromise, not so much in terms of concrete details, but in the agenda itself. The Soviet ...
... have passed on.
Iron Ore and Steel Logistics. A history of price volatility and conflict.
As it stands, BRICS nations dominate the world of basic iron ore and steel production by sheer volume. They have great influence over the costs of logistics. Russia, while not the top dog, is an important part of that mix.
But the large volumes presented by available open source statistics on the BRICS are reminiscent of the Glasnost days of Mikhail Gorbachev and the impending collapse of the USSR command economy. You can't be competitive producing, an award winning volume of, for example, porcelain dinner plates by kilo weight when the rest of the world is measuring the items by units. This is the situation with bulk iron ore and ...
... Russian ruble suffered a dramatic collapse. In an interview with RBTH at the Gaidar Economic Forum in Moscow, Rector of the Russian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration, Vladimir Mau, who was one of the brains behind Russia’s economic reforms of the early 1990s, said that the current situation is similar to what the USSR experienced in its later years.
RBTH:
Due to falling oil prices and the sharp decline of the ruble, the Russian economy now finds itself in fundamentally new territory. How would you characterize this new reality?
Vladimir Mau:
As the director of ...
The world has changed enormously in the nearly 23 years since the collapse of the USSR. Can we finally breathe a sigh of relief and stop drawing scary parallels with World War I?
World War I, one of the greatest ... ... century, broke out a hundred years ago, in August of 1914.
Apart from the millions killed, the war destroyed four empires – Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German. It sparked a genocide (the Armenians in Turkey), and saw the first use of weapons ...
... turn the region into a zone of cooperation of civilizations, rather than one of conflict. Georgia’s relations with Azerbaijan is an example of this.
It would be wrong to put the blame for the failure of Shevardnadze’s multi-vector policy on Russian intransigence. In the early years after the collapse of the USSR, the United States pursued a unipolar policy that caused resentment on the part of all the other civilizations, including Europe. It took the Russian-Georgian war to realize that the alternative to a bipolar world was a multipolar – not a unipolar ...
... the KGB and the Defense Ministry’s Chief Intelligence Directorate, all of which has definitely helped
NATO avoid more substantial losses
during their more than decade-long presence in Afghanistan. At the same time,
despite advice
from their Russian counterparts, the White House and the DoD gave little regard to rebuilding the Afghan economy, infrastructure projects, and modernizing the country’s agriculture sector, which is currently focused on narcotics. The USSR left the country after building 150 facilities, with the same number underway. It built the
2.7-kilometer-long Salang tunnel
– a world record at the time – through a strategic pass in the Hindu Kush Mountains to link the northern and ...
... trade interests in the USSR. The latter was particularly important at the height of the Great Depression in the U.S. Finally, many people were puzzled by the very fact that the United States had remained the only Great Power that did not recognize the USSR for such a long time. Thus, the need to address the "Russian issue" as early as possible was dictated by the times themselves.
Roosevelt intended to act through his two personal intermediaries: Henry Morgenthau Jr., the future U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and William Bullitt, a diplomat, Special ...
... Forum, 2013). Basically, Ukraine’s choice has not been mostly about political or economic factors, but it was based on image and PR. Russia is loosing the PR battle to EU and NATO in most cases as our PR is not 'sexy'. In 20 years Russia has not been able to turn around and wipe off its USSR’s stains. I am going to personally add here by saying that it will be interesting to see if Russia’s recent approach to the Syrian crisis has helped its image, as we cannot deny that its less hawkish conduct could have struck with many....
... modern Russia. A major factor was its geographical location, as it was too far from the centres of oil consumption at the time and many of the major customers did not fall within geopolitically acceptable lines of this power. However, the main reason for USSR and now Russia being a price taker is the fact that neither wielded reserve capacity. Hence, it could not lower or increase its production to influence global prices, even if it produces sufficient amount out of the total global production. Moreover, USSR’s ...
