Evelina Zakamskaya had a new bob in her hair. She leaned forward in her chair. Her eyes shone brightly. Her lips glistened. Her white teeth flashed in the night. She hung on every word. She tittered at every attempted joke by her TV interview guest, Mikhail Prokhorov. Russia’s tall, lean, bad boy bachelor billionaire is […]

YEKATINERINBURG – In the gray twilight of a winter afternoon, the black and white photographs appear before the church walls like ghosts. These ghosts may well inoculate Russia against revolution this spring, when political passions may rise with the temperatures. The ghosts are Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, their son, Alexei, and their four […]

At 8pm Friday night, I decided to close up shop in VOA’s Moscow office and fly to Odessa, Ukraine, for the weekend. Moscow’s weekend forecast was -30C, my trip to Central Asia had been cancelled, and the Black Sea sounded like a good mid-winter break. I did not have an airline ticket, but I knew […]

Their backs to the massive Lenin statue on October Square, the Anarchists were spoiling for a fight. Dressed in black, the young men and women jumped up and down, straining at their rope lines, and chanting again and again: “Аста Ла Виста, беби!Аста Ла Виста, беби!” I asked a middle aged man who was detouring […]

Is Russia living its Suez moment? In October, 1956, France, Britain and Israel attacked Egypt in an attempt to reverse President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The United States and the Soviet Union strong armed the three attacking nations into pulling back. Today, that conflict is widely seen as the bitter, historical […]

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks transparency advocate and leaker of about 115,000 confidential U.S. government emails, has found a new home: a talk show on RT, or Russia Today, the English language TV channel funded by the Kremlin. Shortly after WikiLeaks released the American classified documents in 2010, Assange announced his next step: publishing confidential Russian […]

Countries without natural borders are like amoebas. Over centuries, they expand and contract, expand and contract. As the Western world wonders why Russia has such a nuanced policy toward Iran’s nuclear program, it is important to skip back over four centuries of history. Under Ivan the Terrible, Russia defeated the Tatars and Russia started to […]

PERM, Russia – On one wall, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin happily brandishes a pistol, as his arch-nemesis, Mikhail Khordokovsky, smiles enigmatically from behind prison bars. Nearby, identical Putin heads are superimposed on rows of neighborhood boys in a group photo. “Motherland” is the theme of the art show at the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, […]

My sons and I are in St. Petersburg, walking across Palace Square toward the green and white baroque façade of the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum. In my mind’s eye, I see images from Dr. Zhivago recreating in film that snowy Sunday of January 22, 1905. Tens of thousands of protesters are converging on […]