Free Republic

When a trainload of tanks, guns, and other military hardware supposedly seized from the Syrian battlefields pulled up at Kursk railway station on a cloudy afternoon this week, a jubilant crowd was there to greet it. An orchestra belted out Soviet war songs. A state-funded paramilitary youth movement performed a dance for world peace. A World War II veteran in battered shoes lauded Russia's armed forces. And officials in slick suits delivered the obligatory praise for the president and commander in chief, Vladimir Putin. "The next generation must understand that the enemy is not far away," said Acting Regional Governor...

US State Secretary Mike Pompeo's quest to scare Hungary away from dealing with Russia and China appears to have turned sour, as Budapest said it's fed up with lectures about its foreign policy. Pompeo is on a five-day massive charm offensive in Eastern Europe seeking to "make up" for the time the US "shunned" the nations of the region "in a way that drove them to fill a vacuum with folks who didn't share our values," as he himself put it. He did not focus his attention solely on the Kremlin, though, and promptly warned his Hungarian counterpart about the...

At least six times more Russians are leaving the country than officially estimated, a comprehensive study conducted by the Proekt news outlet said on Wednesday. Proekt’s report highlights discrepancies between official data from the Rosstat federal statistics agency and data compiled by countries where Russians emigrate to. Rosstat estimates 377,000 Russians left the country in 2017, the latest period for which figures are available and a six-year record. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security counted six times more Russians arriving in 2017 than Rosstat recorded leaving,” Proekt said. “Six times more people left Russia for 24 OECD countries, where foreign...

MOSCOW - The number of Russians who regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has risen to its highest since 2005, amid rising economic concerns and nostalgia for the Soviet welfare system, the Levada pollster said on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin famously dubbed the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century and he and many Russians have long lamented the blow its demise dealt to Moscow’s great power status. In the survey, 66 percent of Russians said they regretted the Soviet break-up, a level not seen since 2005 when Levada recorded 65 percent and...

Russia has completed an elaborate air defense system in Syria that curbs the operational capabilities of both the United States and Israel, according to a report by the Washington- based Institute for the Study of War. The deployments throughout the conflict-ravaged country include variations of the advanced S-300 and S-400 systems in addition to other cutting-edge technologies. Moscow long ago exported such systems to Syria, however, they remained under the control of its own army. Only after the accidental downing in September by Syrian forces of a Russian reconnaissance plane, an incident the Kremlin blamed on Jerusalem which minutes earlier...

Russian Ambassador to Israel Anatoly Viktorov told the Times of Israel on Nov. 9 that Russia does not view Hamas a terrorist group, but consider it part of Palestinian society. “We are keeping contacts with Hamas,” he added, saying the group “is a legitimate political force in Palestine.” Viktorov said labeling Hamas as a terrorist group undermines the political process, suggesting that the movement “should be involved in a possible political solution.” He further said that Israel should engage with Hamas. These statements are important for two reasons. First, the Russian ambassador is in Tel Aviv and represents the policy...

Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, said during a discussion aired by public broadcaster TVP Info that the West decided when the Cold War was over that there was no threat from Russia. It pinpointed terrorism as the greatest threat, resulting in most intelligence and counterintelligence services focusing on combating terror, Zybertowicz said. “This resulted in the activities of Russian agents, including those of agents of influence, cutting through the elites of Western countries like a knife through butter." "We have here is the limited capacity of Western leadership elites to oppose aggressive policies. This could have...

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Erdogan, Mr Abbas, members of the clergy, foreign guests, friends, Let me congratulate you from all my heart on the opening of Moscow’s rebuilt Cathedral Mosque. This is a big event for all Muslims in Russia. One of Moscow’s oldest mosques stood on this historical site and has undergone reconstruction that now makes it the biggest in Europe. It was given a magnificent modern new look worthy of the capital of our united, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country. This new mosque is worthy of Russia, in which, I want to stress, Islam, under our country’s...

For President Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church does not have the same significance that the Ukrainian church has for Ukrainian politicians. For Putin, the Orthodox Church is a global, not a national, project. Orthodoxy has always been part of Russian rulers’ global designs, and today’s Kremlin is no exception. The Russian church also serves as a proxy for most Russians’ identification as Russians. The share of those polled who call themselves “Orthodox,” about 75 percent, routinely coincides with the share of the ethnically Russian population of the Russian Federation. “Orthodoxy is a substitute for ethnic identification,” the sociologist Natalia Zorkaya...

It’s not every society whose ideals are embodied by a corpse. But in the Soviet Union, the never-decaying body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was meant to freeze his ideals in time: a promise to citizens that they were on the collective path to the bright communist future. Opened to visitors on August 1, 1924, his mausoleum became a key symbol of Soviet power, from the saint-like aura around Lenin’s remains to the Politburo’s tradition of standing atop the structure on holidays. Today, the unburied body remains a lingering element of the Soviet legacy, representing Russia’s inability or unwillingness to bury...

A new national survey by the independent Levada Center indicates that social tensions across the country are rising at levels not seen since the eve of Russia’s 1998 financial collapse. Seventy-two percent of Russians say they worry about rising prices, 52 percent cited growing impoverishment, and 48 percent say one of the nation’s biggest problems is unemployment. In the past year, Russians have become roughly 33 percent more likely to talk about economic crisis, environmental deterioration, and rising crime, the Levada Center director Lev Gudkov told the newspaper Kommersant. Sociologists say it’s still hard to know if rising panic will...

Members of an opposition party running for office outside Moscow have reportedly been beaten and had their cars torched before regional elections scheduled for Sept. 9. Voters in 22 different regions across Russia, including Moscow, will elect mayors and local legislative assembly deputies on Sunday. Seven regions will also be holding special elections for seats in the State Duma. Parnas opposition party member Sergei Balabayev was beaten by a masked assailant who was allegedly plastering Parnas-branded flyers calling for an election boycott, the party said. “As soon as the deputy entered the vestibule, he was immediately kicked and punched in...

The following telegram from Joseph Stalin to Czechoslovak President Klement Gottwald on 27 August 1950 raises new questions about the origins of the Korean War. Did Stalin purposefully seek to entangle the United States in a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula? Did Stalin expect an intervention by the Chinese communists from virtually the beginning of the conflict? First published in the original Russian in Novaya I Noveishaya Istoriia in 2005, two experts, Beijing University Professor Donggil Kim and University of Georgia Professor William Stueck, provide an initial assessment of this potentially significant new finding. Kim argues that the document...

Russia's poisoning of a former spy in Britain is part of a Kremlin strategy to divide the West by conducting covert operations and then fomenting doubt and disagreement over who's responsible, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said. It was part of a pattern seen in Russia's actions, Mattis said, starting in Ukraine in 2014, where he said Moscow sent armed men without insignias into Crimea and has provided fighters and weapons under cover to Ukrainian separatists. Mattis said Russia's subterfuge continued through covert efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "They take the insignia off soldiers' uniforms and...

When it comes to support for President Vladimir Putin’s international positions, the South African (SA) Government has been among the most consistent and enthusiastic of any in the world. However, Russian policy in South Africa has been damaged by the behaviour of Russian oligarchs and state businesses implicated in the corrupt schemes of former SA president Jacob Zuma; he is now facing multiple indictments for seeking and taking bribes for himself and his family. Putin’s landing in Johannesburg on Thursday ought to have been the signal for a fresh start. Ahead of his departure from Moscow, Putin’s advisor on foreign...

Ten years ago, Vitaly Mokrushin became the pastor of a Mennonite church in the town of Sol-Iletsk, in Russia’s Orenburg region, leading a small congregation of 20-25 people. The 42-year-old former locomotive mechanic found God in 1996. In the mid-2000s, he regularly visited the “Black Dolphin” prison colony. He visited prisoners on a weekly basis for several years, holding services, singing religious hymns, reading sermons, and using the prison’s PA system to communicate with inmates who weren’t allowed to gather in the same room. Roman Lunkin, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy, told Meduza...

Tuesday, Aug. 21, marks the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring, an attempt by local reformists to establish “socialism with a human face.” More Russians have said that they approve of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 than view it as a mistake, an independent Levada Center poll has said. Czechoslovakia remained under Soviet influence for the next 20 years until change came peacefully in the 1980s. Thirty-six percent of Levada’s respondents said the decision to quash the Prague Spring was “definitely” or “rather” correct, while 19 percent said the Soviet Union...

For decades, Russia has suffered a brain and youth drain: According to federal statistics agency Rosstat, more than 300,000 people left the country in 2016. A recent survey conducted by the state-funded pollster VTsIOM shows that 1 out of 10 Russians want to leave the country. Notably, one out of four of those questioned in the poll could name a relative or acquaintance who had moved away from Russia in recent years. Young Russians were especially keen to move: Among those aged 18 to 24, almost one-third (31 percent) of respondents said they wanted to leave the country. VTsIOM said...

A battle for the future shape of Russia's education system is under way. Not only is the Kremlin increasing its control over what it considers the correct version of the country's history, there are also signs of a gradual ideological turn towards promoting the glorification of Joseph Stalin. In 2015 the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was celebrated in grand style. During that time, a larger than usual number of Stalin monuments was erected in several cities especially in south-western parts of the country. A 2014 law passed by the Duma introduced a criminal penalty for...

Svetlana Alexievich’s magnum opus Second-Hand Time (first published in Russian in 2013), is an attempt to understand where Putin came from and why he has such a hold on the Russian people. In her Nobel lecture of December 2015, Alexievich described Russia as “a space of total amnesia”. The way she puts it, things now are getting even worse. “Lawmakers say we should put Gorbachev on trial, a Solzhenitsyn monument has been vandalised, and they’re putting up more and more statues to Stalin,” she says. “But it’s not Putin telling people to do that — the initiative is coming from...