By Nelly Loginova In Soviet times, millions of letters from the public flooded into newspaper offices. Today this flood has petered out. One day a young woman from the letters section of the national youth paper Komsomol'skaya pravda dragged a mailbag into our office, tipped... MORE

By Aleksandr Buzgalin Throughout last year the pages of Russia's newspapers and magazines were filled with innumerable articles on the subject of educational reform, and a great deal of attention has been paid to this issue in the first few months of this year as... MORE

By Nabi Abdullaev The restoration of civilian and business institutions in Chechnya, which Russian officialdom is trying to present as already having been pacified, is inevitably colliding with the absence of qualified personnel around the country as a whole. The problem is not just a... MORE

By Igor Rotar A FAULT LINE?

By Volodymyr Zviglyanich The political crisis rocking Ukraine is a system crisis, with deep roots and uncertain prospects. It is the product of Soviet-era stagnation, which progressed smoothly into post-Soviet-era stagnation (known as "stability") and has now reached its culmination. Ukraine is now paying, belatedly... MORE

By Elena Dikun On March 14 President Vladimir Putin's political staff suffered their first major defeat. As far as levels of embarrassment are concerned, their attempt to engineer the dismissal of the State Duma was equal only to the Kremlin's ignominious exposure of Prosecutor General... MORE

By Aleksandr Tsipko Putin is becoming increasingly bogged down in the mire of Russian political life. Over the last two months, Russia's political analysts have been saying with increasing frequency that his political will and desire for change are ebbing away. They mainly associate his... MORE

By Sergei Kolchin Recent economic events in Russia have been viewed mainly from the perspective of paying off Russia's debts to the West, and where to secure the funds to do so. There are two main sources of finance to cancel the debt: Extra budget... MORE

By Igor Rotar TBILISI PUNISHED FOR ITS RELUCTANCE TO FIGHT THE CHECHENS From March 1 full visa requirements came into force between Russia and Georgia. On the same day, Moscow and Tbilisi signed a protocol establishing a number of special concessions to the visa policy.... MORE

By Elena Chinyaeva In 1927, when the transformation of the Soviet Union into a real unionist state was gathering momentum, the Russian emigre historian Georgy Vernadsky asserted that the Soviet Union was bound to disintegrate. A proponent of the idea of rhythms in history, Vernadsky,... MORE