Conversations with Vladimir Putin, P.69 Back to Text 28
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
My Favourite Pieces: Alexandra Tolstoy Blends Fashion and Heritage
My favourite pieces: Alexandra Tolstoy blends fashion and heritage The collection is a tale of symbolism, stolen heirlooms and tsarist traditions Alexandra Tolstoy © Alan Knox/FT Few names are so intertwined with Russian culture as that of Leo Tolstoy, the writer best known for his 1,200-page tome War and Peace, first published in 1869. His family was part of the old nobility and was politically active in imperial Russia. Their fortunes turned, however, with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917 and the ensuing civil war. Among wider family members who fled the Bolshevik repression in 1920 was Alexandra Tolstoy’s grandfather Count Dmitri Tolstoy, a distant cousin of the illustrious writer. He sought refuge in England, where Ms Tolstoy was born and raised. The countess, who presented the BBC series ‘Horse People’, now arranges adventure trips to Russia. She says it “feels funny” that she was unable to speak Russian until the age of 18, when she spent a year in Moscow before university. “I speak it every day [to my children] and it feels so much a part of me,” she says. The Russian Orthodox cross is a staple of Ms Tolstoy’s apparel. She pairs this with other traditional Russian symbols such as matryoshkas, or Russian dolls, which represent motherhood and fertility. She says symbols and aesthetics are more important to her than monetary worth. Jewellery and clothes should “work together harmoniously”, she says, and her collection seamlessly blends in with her signature clothing style of mix-and-match folkloric patterns. But despite her love of clashing contrasts, she strictly obeys one rule — “never to mix gold and silver”. -
This Central Play and Contrast
VOLUNTEERS, ENTREPRENEURS AND PATRIOTS: YOUTH AS NEW SUBJECTS OF STATE POLICY IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA An NCEEER Working Paper by Julie Hemment University of Massachusetts National Council for Eurasian and East European Research 1828 L Street NW Suite 1200 Washington, DC 20036 [email protected] http://www.nceeer.org/ TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information* Principal Investigator: Julie Hemment NCEEER Contract Number: 828-07 Date: September 30, 2014 Copyright Information Individual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). However, the NCEEER and the United States Government have the right to duplicate and disseminate, in written and electronic form, reports submitted to NCEEER to fulfill Contract or Grant Agreements either (a) for NCEEER’s own internal use, or (b) for use by the United States Government, and as follows: (1) for further dissemination to domestic, international, and foreign governments, entities and/or individuals to serve official United States Government purposes or (2) for dissemination in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act or other law or policy of the United States Government granting the public access to documents held by the United States Government. Neither NCEEER nor the United States Government nor any recipient of this Report may use it for commercial sale. * The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). -
Supreme Soviet Investigation of the 1991 Coup the Suppressed Transcripts
Supreme Soviet Investigation of the 1991 Coup The Suppressed Transcripts: Part 3 Hearings "About the Illegal Financia) Activity of the CPSU" Editor 's Introduction At the birth of the independent Russian Federation, the country's most pro-Western reformers looked to the West to help fund economic reforms and social safety nets for those most vulnerable to the change. However, unlike the nomenklatura and party bureaucrats who remained positioned to administer huge aid infusions, these reformers were skeptical about multibillion-dollar Western loans and credits. Instead, they wanted the West to help them with a different source of money: the gold, platinum, diamonds, and billions of dollars in hard currency the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and KGB intelligence service laundered abroad in the last years of perestroika. Paradoxically, Western governments generously supplied the loans and credits, but did next to nothing to support the small band of reformers who sought the return of fortunes-estimated in the tens of billions of dollars- stolen by the Soviet leadership. Meanwhile, as some in the West have chronicled, the nomenklatura and other functionaries who remained in positions of power used the massive infusion of Western aid to enrich themselves-and impoverish the nation-further. In late 1995, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development concluded that Russian officials had stolen $45 billion in Western aid and deposited the money abroad. Radical reformers in the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet, the parliament that served until its building was destroyed on President Boris Yeltsin's orders in October 1993, were aware of this mass theft from the beginning and conducted their own investigation as part of the only public probe into the causes and circumstances of the 1991 coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. -
ASD-Covert-Foreign-Money.Pdf
overt C Foreign Covert Money Financial loopholes exploited by AUGUST 2020 authoritarians to fund political interference in democracies AUTHORS: Josh Rudolph and Thomas Morley © 2020 The Alliance for Securing Democracy Please direct inquiries to The Alliance for Securing Democracy at The German Marshall Fund of the United States 1700 18th Street, NW Washington, DC 20009 T 1 202 683 2650 E [email protected] This publication can be downloaded for free at https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/covert-foreign-money/. The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the authors alone. Cover and map design: Kenny Nguyen Formatting design: Rachael Worthington Alliance for Securing Democracy The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a bipartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, develops comprehensive strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the costs on authoritarian efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions. ASD brings together experts on disinformation, malign finance, emerging technologies, elections integrity, economic coercion, and cybersecurity, as well as regional experts, to collaborate across traditional stovepipes and develop cross-cutting frame- works. Authors Josh Rudolph Fellow for Malign Finance Thomas Morley Research Assistant Contents Executive Summary �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Introduction and Methodology �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� -
2016 Veth Manuel 1142220 Et
This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Selling the People's Game Football's transition from Communism to Capitalism in the Soviet Union and its Successor State Veth, Karl Manuel Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 Selling the People’s Game: Football's Transition from Communism to Capitalism in the Soviet Union and its Successor States K. -
Accountability by Numbers: a New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)
Article Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016) Genevieve Bates, Ipek Cinar, and Monika Nalepa In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project. e live in an era of democratic backsliding: fragile have access to temporally organized data on how states deal W new democracies are at risk of reverting back to with outgoing autocrats, their collaborators, and perpe- dictatorship. To see examples of this, one need trators of human rights violations. -
In the Lands of the Romanovs: an Annotated Bibliography of First-Hand English-Language Accounts of the Russian Empire
ANTHONY CROSS In the Lands of the Romanovs An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of The Russian Empire (1613-1917) OpenBook Publishers To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/268 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. In the Lands of the Romanovs An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917) Anthony Cross http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2014 Anthony Cross The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt it and to make commercial use of it providing that attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Cross, Anthony, In the Land of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917), Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/ OBP.0042 Please see the list of illustrations for attribution relating to individual images. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. As for the rights of the images from Wikimedia Commons, please refer to the Wikimedia website (for each image, the link to the relevant page can be found in the list of illustrations). -
The Unfinished War
#3 (85) March 2015 Can Ukraine survive the next Mobilization campaign: Reasons behind the sharp winter without Russian gas myths and reality devaluation of the hryvnia CRIMEA: THE UNFINISHED WAR WWW.UKRAINIANWEEK.COM Featuring selected content from The Economist FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION |CONTENTS BRIEFING The New Greece in the East:Without a much bigger, long- Branding the Emperor: term investment program, Ukraine’s economy will continue to New implications of Nadiya flounder Savchenko’s case for Vladimir Putin 31 Let Bygones be Bygones: Attempts to preserve the Russian 4 market for Ukrainian exporters by making concessions in EU- Leonidas Donskis on the murder Ukraine Association Agreement hurt Ukraine’s trade prospects of Boris Nemtsov 32 6 FOCUS SECURITY Kyiv – Crimea: the State of Fear of Mobilization: Uncertainty Myths and Reality Has Ukraine learned the An inside look at how lessons of occupation? the army is being formed 8 34 Maidan of Foreign Affairs’ NearestR ecruiting Station: Andrii Klymenko on Serhiy Halushko, Deputy Head Russia’s troops and nuclear of Information Technology weapons, population substitution and techniques to crush protest Department of the Ministry of Defense, talks about practical potential on the occupied peninsula aspects of the mobilization campaign 12 38 Freedom House Ex-President David Kramer on human rights SOCIETY abuses in Crimea, the threat of its militarization and President Catching Up With Obama’s reluctance in arming Ukraine the Future: Will 14 the IT industry drive economic POLITICS development -
How Russia Is Ruled—1998
How Russia Is Ruled—1998 DONALD N. JENSEN Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may suffer twenty defeats and still keep return- ing to their capitals. I cannot. I am an upstart soldier. My rule will not survive the day on which I have ceased to be strong and feared. Napoleon to Metternich, 18131 oris Yeltsin approaches the end of his second term as Russian president with B the character of the country he leads the subject of wide—and often bitter— dispute. Observers trying to answer the two central questions about politics— Who governs? To what ends?—describe Russia as a democracy, a republic, an oligarchy, a criminalized state, or simply a mess. To those interested in compar- isons, Russia has been likened to nineteenth-century America, Germany in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, France in the 1950s, Spain in the 1970s, Colom- bia, and even Pakistan in the 1990s. There is general agreement only that there will be no return to Soviet communism and that the road since the end of the USSR has been unexpectedly and painfully rocky. Such varied impressions reflect the complex processes simultaneously buffeting the country—the contin- ued collapse of the remnants of the Soviet system; the renewal, although not always along Western lines, of key parts of the state and society; the stagnation of still other elements, which remain largely untouched by change—and conti- nuity with key elements of the Russian past. In this article, I will examine these complex processes and attempt to answer the questions, Who governs Russia in 1998, and moreover, what difference does it make who governs? These questions can be answered, I believe, only by link- ing the analysis of government institutions and political processes to an explana- tion of how and why major policy decisions are made as they are. -
03371101.Pdf
C/64-10 RADIO AND TELEVISION IN THE SOVIET UNION F. Gayle Durham Research Program on Problems of International Communication and Security Center for International Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts June, 1965 Table of Contents Prefatory Remarks I. The Broadcasting Network.............. A. Radiobroadcasting.. .................... B. Broadcasting Stations................... .6 C. Television Broadcasting.................. .8 D. Number of Television Stations............ .13 E. Radio and Television in Rural Localities. .15 II. Production and Repair of Radio and Television Sets.21 A. Radio Se s . .. .. .. .2 C. Future Radio and Television Sets...............34 D. Subscription Fees..........................,..41 E. Repair of Radio and Television Sets........,...42 III. The Administration of Soviet Radio and Television..47 A. Structural Apparatus of the Broadcasting BAFudton o eAinistration................. B. Functions of the Administration................50 IV. Programs and Hours of Broadcasting........ .54 . .54 B. Television................ .57 C. Educational Television in the USSR..... .59 D. Radio and Television in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR...................... * a ... 62 E. Recording of Broadcasts.................. .. .. .64 V. INTERVISION............................... ... .68 VI. The Soviet Audience....................... .74 A. Size of the . Audience..................... .74 B. Nature of the . .0 . Audience.................. .75 C. Audience Feedback and Listenincg Behavior. .0 . .77 Maps, Tables -
Russia and Asia: the Emerging Security Agenda
4. Domestic developments in Russia Nodari Simonia I. Introduction The system of international relations is shaped by the totality of states’ foreign policies. In the long run the foreign policy of each country is determined by the state of its home affairs at the particular stage of its development. The state of peace means reasonable and mutually acceptable compromise among the mem- bers of the world community—compromise that takes into account the diversity of domestic situations of different countries and dampens its explosive influence. This is why in analysing the foreign policy of any state it is vital to recognize the roots that feed it. Russia, which is still in the early stages of the formation of its new statehood, is faced with the choice of the set of values that will determine its further evolu- tion. Both inside and outside Russia there is heated controversy between the proponents of a ‘Western’ and an ‘Asian’ orientation. There are also voices which stand up for some ‘special’ Russian way of development which, to be more precise, can be defined as a special synthesis of separate elements of Western and Asian development models with the Russian ‘soil’, but they are few and far between and their voices are usually lost in the noisy chorus of adherents of extreme positions. The international community, and especially the West, has not yet managed properly to comprehend Russian realities. This is not an easy matter. The dyna- mism of change in Russia—not only in the political sphere but also in the social and economic spheres—is so intense that sometimes even a native observer might fail to keep pace with it. -
Initial Evidence of Corruption Risks in Government Oil and Gas Sales
Briefing June 2016 Initial Evidence of Corruption Risks in Government Oil and Gas Sales Aaron Sayne and Alexandra Gillies In many oil-producing countries, the government receives a physical share of production, and that oil is then typically sold by the national oil company (NOC). These trading transactions are currently subject to limited regulation and even fewer reporting requirements. NRGI has argued for some time that these physical oil trading transactions merit greater transparency and oversight, for two reasons. First, the sales are economically important. For countries such as Iraq, Libya and Nigeria, oil sales have in past years generated over half of total government revenues. From 2011 to 2013, oil sales by the governments of Africa’s top ten producers totaled $254 billion, an amount equivalent to 56 percent of those countries’ total public revenues.1 Second, as with other high-value transactions in the extractive sector, the sales are susceptible to corruption.2 To illustrate what these corruption risks look like in practice, this briefing summarizes 11 real-world situations where corruption or the perception of corruption arose around NOC oil and gas sales.3 While achieving a comprehensive understanding of corruption risks in NOC commodity sales requires further analysis (as detailed in our conclusion), this briefing provides some initial evidence that these risks are real; subdivides the risks into three distinct stages of the sale process; and offers preliminary ideas about the type of policy response that is warranted. Global recognition of the need for trading transparency is growing. Some initial steps toward advancing extractive sector transparency, such as the original Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) requirements as well as mandatory payment reporting rules recently legislated in the US, EU, Norway and Canada, did not incorporate trading transactions.