On the morning of Wednesday, April 28, the former head of Russia's Federal Bankruptcy Service, Georgy Tal, was shot on the street outside his office in downtown Moscow. The 48-year-old Tal headed the Federal Bankruptcy Service from January 1998 to February 2001, and helped write... MORE

On April 29, representatives of a recently-formed youth movement filed documents with the Moscow City Election Commission to register an initiative group whose aim would be drumming up support for holding a national referendum on whether to extend the presidential term from four to ten... MORE

In the mid-1980s then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made the building of a "common European home" the central plank in a radical new foreign policy initiative aimed at drawing Western European governments closer to Moscow while simultaneously undermining the NATO alliance and broader ties between... MORE

The end of April saw a ratcheting up of tensions between Russia and Latvia. This happened despite the fact that Russia and the EU agreed on April 27 to extend their Partnership and Cooperation Agreement to the ten new EU member states (see previous article).... MORE