Everywhere you look, Russia's election campaign appears covered in mud. Yesterday, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who today heads the anti-Kremlin Fatherland-All Russia election coalition (OVR), charged that members of the Kremlin administration were behind attempts to bribe some of the coalition's candidates into dropping... MORE

The latest scandal in Russia's increasingly scandal-ridden parliamentary election campaign broke out yesterday, and it involves ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The Central Election Commission (CEC), which in October denied registration to the list of candidates running on the ticket of Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of... MORE

More generally, reports of the talks between Russian leaders and Arafat this week highlighted the usual expressions of friendship between Russia and the Palestinians, while those describing the Russian-Israeli talks made surprisingly little mention of issues which have divided the two countries in the past.... MORE

While Russia's ongoing war in Chechnya continued to dominate headlines in the West, this past week was also notable for the stream of visitors arriving in Moscow from the Middle East. These visits too had some connections to developments in Russia's North Caucasus region. But... MORE

Russian pressures on Georgia in connection with the North Caucasus war have acquired a new and more dangerous dimension. Official propaganda has until now claimed that Georgia--along with Azerbaijan--is being used by "international terrorism" for supplying and reinforcing Chechen forces (see the Monitor, October 5-6,... MORE

Almost every major international conference involves tradeoffs of varying degrees of expediency or morality; and it was clear before the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit that the Western powers, set for a facedown with Moscow on some issues, were also prepared... MORE

If the threats to remove Moscow police chief Nikolai Kulikov are part of a Kremlin plot to undermine Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and the Fatherland-All Russia coalition prior to the December 19 State Duma elections (see the Monitor, December 1), they may be just one... MORE

Almost as if by magic, Unity, the pro-Kremlin electoral coalition headed by Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu has made a breakthrough among potential voters in the State Duma elections, which are scheduled for December 19. That, at least, is one finding among the results... MORE

In another indication of Moscow's continuing defiance of the West, a top Russian general said yesterday that Russia will not participate in several upcoming meetings involving talks between Russian military and diplomatic officials with their Western counterparts. Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, a notorious hardliner and... MORE

The seeming determination of the Russian political elite to recreate a climate of Cold War-style confrontation with the West has continued apace this week. On November 30, in the midst of mounting tensions between Russia and both Europe and the United States over Moscow's bloody... MORE