Free Republic

Speaking in Crimea on August 14, Vladimir Putin recalled that the peninsula had been the last refuge of the anti-Bolshevik White Russian army in 1920 before it fled Russia, bringing the Russian Civil War to an end. Formerly a site of fratricidal conflict, the Crimea should become a site of “reconciliation between Reds and Whites,” said Putin, a call which paralleled his appeal for an end to the conflict in Ukraine. The Soviet Union collapsed only 22 years ago, so there are still some old Reds floating about, but there certainly aren’t any of the original Whites, the last of...

Since the publication of Alexander Yanov’s 1995 book After Yeltsin: ‘Weimar’ Russia (Moscow: KRUK; New York: Slovo-Word), a number of Yanov’s predictions for the post-Yeltsin period have come true. Above all, during the last years, sections of the Russian elite have adopted a paranoid vision of the outside, above all Western, world which, in the 1990s, had been a minority view held by the extreme right and paleocommunists. Whether this makes Yanov’s sweeping equation of developments in post-Soviet Russia and inter-war Germany justified or not: It remains a fact that, in spite of relative political stabilization and impressive economic growth...

A Moscow court on 8 December found 39 members of the banned radical National Bolshevik Party guilty of staging mass unrest by forcing their way into a presidential administration building one year ago. A handful were given prison sentences, but most of them walked free. Defense lawyers and relatives of the defendants have welcomed the verdict as relatively soft, but maintain the young activists were innocent. The judges were expected to take two days to read the verdict, but the defendants did not have to wait that long. After just two hours, the court sentenced eight defendants to between 18...

For all the criticism that the Kremlin is reverting back to Soviet-era practices, the one thing the authorities are not doing is promoting “people’s friendship.” In Soviet times, authorities mocked racism in the West, and state television played up the inequality between blacks and whites in the United States. The state showcased racial and ethnic harmony, as seen in Moscow’s mammoth golden Fountain of People’s Friendship, and dark-skinned Russians got the roles of bumbling do-gooders in Soviet comedies. These days, state television allows nationalist politicians to spew their hatred for nonethnic Russians and serves up reality crime shows in which...