Grozny’s new mosque, The Heart of Chechnya, is modeled after the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and has minarets soaring 60 meters into the sky. Behind construction workers are building three office and apartment towers, the tallest towers in the Caucasus. On a field outside of this city of 350,000, finishing touches are being put on […]

Mikhail Gorbachev turned 80 on Wednesday. In advance, Russia’s political bear gave himself a birthday present: he came out of political hibernation. After two decades of lying low and not tangling with the current occupants of the Kremlin, the last leader of the Soviet Union finally opened up. “Incredible conceit!” Gorbachev, still barrel chested and […]

One thousand days from now, television cameras from around the world will focus on Krasnaya Polana, Russia’s new ski resort complex on the western end of the Caucasus Mountains. The ski and snowboard events of the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held on slopes now under construction. Last weekend, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President […]

I had dinner the other night with Alexei Navalny, Russia’s sandy-haired, impassioned, anti- corruption activist. At 34 years of age, Alexei is using his internet campaign to build a place for himself in Russia’s political future But over dinner, at Moscow’s trendy Red October arts complex, every third sentence of Alexei’s discourse was punctuated by […]

Marching on an embankment between the ice-bound Moscow River and the snow-bound British Embassy, a pro-Kremlin youth group demonstrated last month for the freedom of Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks. The march featured a top hatted Uncle Sam leading a submissive John Bull on a leash. In bold white letters, a red banner demanded […]

It was Friday night at the Assa. That’s the top hotel in Ingushetia, a republic in Russia’s heavily Islamic Caucasus region. There were two tables of visiting journalists. And in one corner, at a third table: six ethnic Russian men, eating dinner and quietly nursing their vodkas. Something did not add up. Russian men, Friday […]

I traveled through a Moscow airport this weekend. Security checks were tight, but the passenger flow was normal. Indeed, on the evening of last week’s suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedevo Airport, passenger jets continued landing and taking off. At the main entrance, ambulances continued ferrying away the 35 dead and 168 wounded. The bomb blasted […]

US and EU diplomats stayed as far away as possible from Friday’s inauguration of President Lukashenko. But in Moscow, Vladimir Putin posed Thursday with his visiting counterpart from Belarus. Turning to the microphones, he announced $4 billion in energy subsidies to Belarus, plus a brand new $6 billion nuclear power plant. Is Belarus, Russia’s North […]

Kremlin leaders regularly say they want to increase tourism in order to diversify a Russian economy that is overly dependent on oil and gas. Tourism is labor intensive, geographically dispersed, and carries the potential to promote trade and investment. That may sound like a good plan, but Russia’s bureaucracy doesn’t always cooperate. As an accredited […]