The first thing you need to understand about the building that, until very recently, housed the Russian Consulate in San Francisco — a city where topography is destiny, where wealth and power concentrate, quite literally, at the top — is its sense of elevation. Brick-fronted, sentinel-like, and six stories high, it sits on a hill […]
The most striking thing about the building was, and is, its history. In the nineteen-thirties, during Stalin’s purges, the House of Government earned the ghoulish reputation of having the highest per-capita number of arrests and executions of any apartment building in Moscow. No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the […]
Recent meetings between Beijing and Moscow – at the Belt and Road Forum last month and at a two-day summit last week in Russia – are the latest in a string of efforts to strengthen Sino-Russian ties, especially along the border. However, like many nations, Russia has found that working with China can be a double-edged sword. Read […]
The crusty shell of Russia’s Communist Party may be associated with pensioners, but the movement is undergoing a face-lift. Read Here – The Moscow Times
The Russian military that the United States faces in 2017 is not the poorly equipped and uncoordinated force that invaded Georgia in August of 2008…Following reforms launched in October 2008, and a modernization program in 2011 valued at $670 billion, the armed forces have become one of Russia’s most reliable instruments of national power. Read […]
For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s […]
Russia has already made its turn towards Asia, and the important question now is how deep and successful it will be. It is also critical what forms and substance it will assume, what costs and benefits it will bring, and whether it will be accompanied, in the best tradition of Russian political maximalism, by an […]
At a time when Russian relations with the United States and western European countries are growing cold, the relatively warm ties between China and Russia have attracted renewed interest. Scholars and journalists in the West find themselves debating the nature of the Chinese-Russian partnership and wondering whether it will evolve into an alliance. Read Here […]
Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put mountains in eastern Ukraine?” If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is […]
After deploying its ground and air assets across Syria, Russia entered into an agreement with the Shiite leaders of Iran and Iraq to coordinate military efforts. At the podium of the United Nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin looked as if he had pulled off a masterful power play in the Middle East. But Putin seems […]
looking beyond borders 