The collection’s story begins in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks turned what was once the Rumyantsev arts museum into the country’s national library. As the newly anointed Lenin Library began amassing new literature, it also opened a rare book department to house compromising materials, acquired primarily from confiscated noble libraries. Read Here – Moscow Times
The arrival of Hamid Karzai, on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2001, promised Afghans a break from the recent bloody past. Karzai’s lack of involvement in the long, brutal civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989 raised the possibility of a unified country after a decade of battling fiefs. Read Here […]
The United States’ new rivals and enemies all lack the element that made the Soviet-American struggle so consequential during the Cold War. Read Here – Tabletmag
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
Ferghana is the hotspot of Central Asia. It is an ethnic soup with hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz and Tajik living in Uzbek Ferghana and vice-versa. Ethnic tensions, sporadic violence and in 2010 the region erupted in violence when hundreds were killed. Read Here – The Hindu
“The water in Afghanistan,” General Zia-ul-Haq had told his spymaster in December 1979, “must boil at the right temperature.” India still has time to learn from the lessons of the war that was lost 25 years ago, and work to make sure the pot doesn’t boil over, writes Praveen Swami Read Here – The Hindu
Indeed, once the winds of war start blowing, they are impossible to tame. Even if Ukrainians and the West force Putin to retreat, this is not the end of Putin’s revanchism. He is stubborn, determined and vengeful. He may at some point back down, but he’ll be back later. Read Here – Moscow Times
Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is why Barack Obama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making. Read Here – The Guardian
Ukraine has become a battleground for western influence and Vladimir Putin’s dream of an expanded Russian sphere of influence Read Here – DNA
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
looking beyond borders 