Abkhazia seems set to become a "second Chechnya" for both Russia and Georgia, Prism's correspondent reports from the region By Igor Rotar June 7-20 saw a massive "Abkhazian invasion" of Moscow. On June 10, the leader of the self-proclaimed republic, Vladislav Ardzinba met with the... MORE

Corruption is an endemic feature of federal transfers to Russia's regions By Lev Segal The great eighteenth-century Russian general Aleksandr Suvorov once said that any army quartermaster, after a year of service, could be shot for theft on a colossal scale. At the present time,... MORE

The Fortnight in Review Russian Government on the Offensive The administration of Russian president Boris Yeltsin launched a simultaneous attack against two of its most stubborn opponents over the past fortnight: the Communist-dominated parliament and Russia's headstrong regional leaders. The Kremlin's newfound assertiveness seemed to... MORE

Russia's post-Soviet ideologists are trying to identify a new set of common values By Ilya V. Malyakin On May 23, a group of presidential staffers, headed by Yeltsin aide Georgi Satarov, arrived in Saratov from Moscow. Such visits are generally received with great caution by... MORE

The Russian government and the opposition have both tried to co-opt the Cossack revival By Vasily Andreev (Part 1 of this article appeared in the May 16 issue of Prism) Ever since Russia returned to independent statehood in 1991, the government has declared its intention... MORE

Polls show that many Ukrainians are disappointed with the state of democracy in Ukraine By Volodymyr Zviglyanich The Institute of Sociology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Democratic Initiatives Foundation have been conducting nationwide public opinion polls since 1991. Polling is carried out... MORE

The Fortnight in Review Russia signed two important agreements during the past two weeks: a historic political agreement with the NATO alliance, and a charter of union with neighboring Belarus. Springtime in Paris: the Russia-NATO founding act In a ceremony that its participants hailed as... MORE

Russian organized crime spreads beyond Russia's borders, squeezing out the local competition By Stanislav Lunev Organized crime in Russia is attracting ever greater attention nowadays, not only from specialists in the field, but also from the general public all over the world, which is uneasy... MORE

Russia's SVR: the leaner, if not meaner, successor to the KGB's First Directorate By Michael Kozakavich The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is successor to the former First Directorate of the Soviet KGB, responsible for the gathering of foreign intelligence through open and covert means.... MORE

The Fortnight in Review Three documents, accorded vastly differing levels of coverage in the Western press and reflecting equally divergent levels of Russian foreign policy, won the Kremlin's consent over the past fortnight. One, the long-awaited political agreement between Russia and NATO, will shape --... MORE