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Symposium: When an Evil Empire Returns By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | June 23, 2006  The Cold War is back. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, is leading his country back into the dark ages of Soviet totalitarianism and instigating a global confrontation between Russia and the United States -- as well as between Russia and the West as a whole. The Russian President has consistently rolled back democratic freedoms. And he is proving that the genie can be placed back into the bottle: he has centralized authority and suffocated dissent in the media and in the nation at large. Reformers making efforts to build...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

I will never forget New Year's Eve 1999. I was working as a producer in the BBC's Moscow bureau. Suddenly there was breaking news: Russia's President Boris Yeltsin had stepped down. His decision to resign took everyone by surprise, including the British press corps in Moscow. When the news broke there was no correspondent in the office. That meant I had to step in to write and broadcast my first BBC dispatch. "Boris Yeltsin always said he would see out his full term in office," I wrote. "Today he told Russians he'd changed his mind." It was the start of...

The official website of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia had announced that it will be putting forward a motion in the Russian State Duma to relieve Ilya Ponomarev of his duties as an MP. Ponomarev became the only lawmaker out of 446 who voted against ratification of the treaty annexing Crimea. "On April 7th, the faction will introduce a motion before the State Duma to recognize that Ilya Ponomarev had lost the authority of a deputy, because he opposed the interests of the state, blindly obeying the Nazis who want to split the country " – was said in...

The proposed sale by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, of his estim-ated $10bn (£5.5bn) stake in the Sibneft oil company to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas group, looks like a neat way of settling accounts with his country. He sails off into the sunset, free to buy yachts and football clubs, while the Kremlin virtually completes the renationalisation of Russia's core energy assets. Smiles all around, not least among the bankers involved. The truth is far less pleasant, for Russia and for Mr Abramovich. This deal, if it goes ahead, will be the latest development in the untransparent privatisation of Russia's...

The newly revealed exploits of spies who operated in underground tunnels The CIA dug a tunnel under the Kremlin and installed a hi-tech bugging system to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's most senior figures, according to the former US intelligence officer who executed the plan. The device was put in by a US agent who had to wear a protective suit and was guided by satellite and sonar images of Moscow's underground. The bugging formed part of audacious operations to rescue a key defector, a KGB officer with responsibility for eavesdropping, and to alert Boris Yeltsin to the attempted coup...

<p>Russia has added a new chapter in the post-Cold War Europe under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. His decision to invade Ukraine on February 24 has altered the US-led global liberal power calculus. The quiet “Spy Guy” Putin, who took over as the Prime Minister in ailing Boris Yeltsin’s Government in 1999, was largely unnoticed by the West. Probably, the policymakers in the Western capitals could not visualise how this man would pose a serious threat to both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the days to come. Putin’s was a solo journey laced with a hidden agenda of reclaiming the lost Soviet empire. Thus, he quickly took up the reins as the second President of the newly created Russian Federation in the year 2000, immediately after Yeltsin left the scene as he was seriously unwell.</p>

Russia upped the ante Monday in its dangerous standoff with Ukraine, openly warning of military action if President Biden and America’s NATO allies ignore a list of demands Moscow announced late last week — a far-reaching list that some key U.S. lawmakers have dubbed a “pretext to war.” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said his country is fully prepared to respond through “military-technical means” if Western powers fail to address those demands. He said NATO must not expand to include Ukraine or Georgia and the U.S. must not base additional military assets in former Soviet republics in Central Asia....

09/16/1989 - Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the meat selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement. A post earlier this year on Houston’s Reddit that mentioned late Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to a trip to the Houston Chronicle archives, where a batch of photos of the leader were found. It was September 16, 1989 and Yeltsin, then...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. [Snip] FP: What inspired you to write this book? Tyrrell: The rogue himself. He is one of the most preposterous figures in American political history. [Snip] FP: Illuminate for us a few of the ingredients that make Bill Clinton a tortured man in his retirement. Tyrrell: He senses that he has failed as a President—there are many examples of this in the book. Hence you see his angry outbursts in the book. But he also, being a sociopath, cannot perceive that...

It is impossible to evaluate events in Russia today without understanding the mysterious series of bombings in 1999 that killed 300 civilians and created the conditions for Vladimir Putin to become Russia’s dictator for life. The bombings changed the course of Russia’s post-Soviet history. They were blamed on the Chechens. In the wake of initial success, Russia launched a new invasion of Chechnya. Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, was put in charge of the invasion and his popularity soared. Six months later, he was elected president. On July 14, 2016, I filed a request for documents on...

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

Caputo called for an “investigation of the investigators” and said he wanted to know who was “coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump.” “Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election,” Caputo said. “I want to know because God damn you to hell."

Moscow, April 26, Interfax - Former Russian prime minister Sergey Stepashin told how in 1998 acting Russian president Boris Yeltsin gave him an order to demolish Lenin's mausoleum. "Boris Nikolayevich charged me with demolishing the mausoleum. It was 1998," Stepashin said in his interview with Istorik magazine. Then Stepashin chaired the Ministry of Interior and made an official visit to England. "When I came back, I went to his cabinet and Yeltsin said: "Sergey Vadimovich, I made a decision to demolish the mausoleum." I told him: "Well, but how does it relate to the Ministry of Interior?" "The Ministry of...

Communists waving Marxist pamphlets and Twitter storms praising the Soviet Union are probably not what the thousands of Russians who rallied in 1991 against a coup by hardliners expected to see 25 years later. And yet as Russia marks the symbolic anniversary of the August 1991 putsch this week, pro-Kremlin media have concentrated on nostalgia for the Soviet era, while officials have barred a rally by those who manned the barricades. On August 19, 1991, a group of security chiefs and Communist bosses who opposed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms declared themselves in charge, ushering in three days of turbulence. Calling themselves...

Compassion Play: Pope Francis vs. Boris Yeltsin by Daniel Clark In 1989, Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston-area supermarket, and was amazed by the variety of meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables that were available to the general public in the United States. According to biographer Leon Aron, the future Russian president sat with his head in his hands after that experience, before finally remarking, “What have they done to our poor people? … I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” Yeltsin, who died in...

<p>Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”</p>

After a September 1989 tour of Houston's Johnson Space Center, Boris Yeltsin -freshly elected to the new Soviet Politburo- made an impromptu visit to a typical American grocery store -'Randalls'- in Clear Lake, Texas, to have himself a look around... And more than anything he'd seen at the advanced NASA facility, what really blew Yeltsin away was the sheer variety of goods at the supermarket. The fact that such stores where to be found in just about any town in America was said to be beyond comprehension for the Soviet politician- the pictures tell a thousand words- A mesmerized Yeltsin wandered the isles, marveled...

Many Western experts today portray Russia as a country spiraling down into totalitarianism, slowly (or not so slowly) following the path of the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian regime crumbled under growing pressure from an emerging civil society. Prevailing opinion attributes this authoritarian U-turn to the nature of the contemporary Russian political elite. Members of this elite (as argued by many Western analysts, including Ian Bremmer) are recruited disproportionately from the so-called siloviye structury, that is, the law-enforcement bodies and security services, which trace their roots to the Soviet-era military and secret services.1 These assumptions join to offer what is on...

California's Joe Shumate, who left an indelible mark on the politics of the Golden State and spun his magic around the globe as consultant to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, has died at the age of 69. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family, and we'll be hearing and writing much more on this in days to come from friends and associates. Shumate, the former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Pete Wilson, was advising the GOP campaigns of U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina and also Attorney General candidate Steve Cooley.