The essence of President Vladimir Putin‘s annual address to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 12 was that his enchantment with state capitalism and Soviet economics is continuing. Rather than promoting higher economic growth, he wanted to go after the remaining prominent private businessmen Read Here – Moscow Times
Last year, Israel topped the list of arms suppliers to India—just as India officially became the globe’s largest arms importer. And it’s not just missiles and drones: India has increasingly leaned on Tel Aviv for high-tech warfare, scooping up the Phalcon airborne radar and advanced electronic surveillance systems along with equipment to retrofit now-rickety Soviet-era weaponry. Read […]
For some 45 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in a deadly embrace of the Cold War. Then, communism lost the war of ideologies, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the two superpowers went in different directions. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how the two countries still seem to be joined at the hip, with the U.S. at times imitating and at times almost […]
VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book […]
U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White is best known as one of the leading architects of the Bretton Woods system that shaped the global economy after World War II. But he was also a spy for the Soviet Union, providing secret information and giving advice on economic issues. Why did he do it? Newly uncovered […]
oday’s Russia is a strange paradox. The country and its people are better off than at any time since at least the Bolshevik Revolution. But its great financial wealth coexists with remarkable weakness. True, it still has a large army and a nuclear arsenal capable of ending life on Earth. But by most measures of modern power, Russia is a lightweight. It has almost no influence in the world […]
Recent developments in Russia have evoked memories of a famous line by Vladimir Lenin: “The courts should not do away with terror … but should give it foundation and legality, clearly, honestly and without embellishments.” In just the six months since he reseated himself as president,Vladimir Putin has been busy creating a legislative framework that might make Lenin proud. Under the Soviet legal system, the court […]
Greatness is an odd word because it signifies both quantity and quality. In the case of Russia, the two are easily confused. Even after the huge territorial losses incurred with the Soviet collapse, Russia still accounts for one-seventh of the Earth’s surface. Therefore, it has a geographical imperative to think big. Russia is unlike Britain and France, which shrank back to their middle-sized home nations after losing their […]
It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in Mongolia, the large country of high desert plains sandwiched between China and Russia, and much has changed. Some, education and food supply, is for the better, and a lot – including urban sprawl and rising inequality – is for the worse. Much of the change has to […]
U.S. President John F. Kennedy‘s skillful management of the Cuban missile crisis, 50 years ago this autumn, has been elevated into the central myth of the Cold War. At its core is the tale that, by virtue of U.S. military superiority and his steely will, Kennedy forced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to capitulate and remove […]
looking beyond borders 