By A.I. Kolganov (This article makes use of materials from the RNISiNP analytical paper "Russians on the fate of Russia in the 20th century and on their hopes for the new century," presented by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.) The consciousness of the members of Russian... MORE

By Sergei Kolchin There have been perhaps three main themes to recent events in Russia's oil and gas complex. The first is the growth in world oil prices. Overall, Russia's oil companies have received an unexpected bonus. And there is unlikely to be a fuel... MORE

By Yevgeny Melnichenko Forty of Russia's eighty-nine regions will elect chief executives in the coming months. In December it will be the turn of voters in Volgograd Oblast, who will go to the polls to elect their governor. This article sets the scene for that... MORE

By Elena Dikun As the political season came to an end, Vladimir Putin hosted a meeting with the oligarchs. The official version suggested that the get-together in the Kremlin was a hugely important political event. Yet the impact of this meeting has been minimal; a... MORE

By Aleksandr Tsipko The question serving as the title to this article was indirectly formulated by the "father of privatization" Anatoly Chubais. In an interview with the weekly Kommersant Vlast (30 [381], July 28) he stated that Putin, who is currently quite taken with Solzhenitsyn's... MORE

By Igor Rotar Azerbaijan is the only Muslim republic in the former Soviet Union where the Shiite branch of Islam is dominant. Various estimates put the number of Shiites at between 60 and 70 percent of the republic's Muslims. Geographically speaking, the Shiites form a... MORE

By Volodymyr Zviglyanich ILLUSIONS OF A SUBJECT-FREE ECONOMY The title of this article should more properly be formulated as "the economy of national identity", because the disjunctive conjunction "and" implies the coexistence of economic processes and the lives of the people, who act as the... MORE

By Peter Silantyev The West, as represented by "financial-industrial circles," the United States and NATO, is Russia's main enemy. This is what most Russian citizens believe, according to surveys conducted by authoritative Russian pollsters. This signifies the need to "build up economic and military might... MORE

By Elena Dikun Almost immediately after Vladimir Putin's inauguration, the court oligarch Boris Berezovsky--one of the architects of the president's victory--went into direct opposition with him. "Berezovsky versus Putin" was such an unexpected and gripping story that it has been a major sensation for several... MORE

By Aleksandr Tsipko The new political realities in Russia are as yet in the early stages of assessment and cognition. There is a general sense that since the parliamentary elections of December 1999 and the early presidential elections of March 2000 we have been living... MORE