Boris Yeltsin related content 

Today's protests against Russia's leadership have strong echoes of the demonstrations of 20 years ago. The Russian Federation of today is not the Soviet Union of 1991. But...

Why a row over Austria's release of a Soviet commander is more than a dusty historical question. Who bears responsibility now for the crimes of the Soviet past? This is the...

Russia's presidential election may prove messy for Russia but unusually quiet for the EU. Vladimir Putin has not been a frequent visitor to Brussels. In almost 12 years as...

Russian challenges to the official account of 11 September 2001 may be intended to deflect attention from other attacks. Mysterious terrorist attacks prompt public panic,...

Small-scale savers and well-connected tycoons have little to worry about, but others might end up in the morgue. Seen through the framework of Western logic, the conclusion...

A little-known man who nonetheless needs no air-time. Back in 2000, not long after Boris Yeltsin had appointed him as his successor, Vladimir Putin refused to participate in...

The list of questions over which Russia and the EU disagree appears to be getting longer by the week. Russian backsliding on democracy, most recently exhibited in its...

Last Sunday (2 December) millions of Russians voted ostensibly for a new parliament (Duma). But in reality they were voting for the man who has dominated Russian politics for...

Rare is the politician who feels in his element while counting either litres of milk or laundered money, but Viktor Zubkov has an unquenchable passion for both. Just days...

Weak signals usually go unnoticed by the great public and by most experts. But they indicate events somewhere below the surface and can be harbingers of big changes. Take the...

A lot of nonsense is talked about Russia and particularly about the West's relationship with it. Among the fatuous questions is ‘Who lost Russia?' (as if a careless western...

Wait until the 2008 presidential election and hope that sense prevails. That, roughly, is the West's strategy to deal with Russia. It has come at a high price. Russia has...

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted one of America's most Draconian smoking bans in 2003, nicotine junkies at United Nations headquarters were enraged. Many...

Brussels, 22 May 1997“WE are now in a new era. We will make the 21st century a century which will redeem the 20th,” proclaimed US ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter an hour...

Heroes are rare, and the greatest I ever saw, Boris Yeltsin, has just passed away. Heroes are outsized personalities who are not always easy to appreciate. Yeltsin stormed...

“The France I dream of is a France that leaves no one behind, a France which is like a family, where the weakest, the most vulnerable, the most fragile have the right to as...

If you joined or even just watched the revolutions in eastern Europe in 1989-91, life may have started to look rather dull soon afterwards. Any chance of recapturing the...

“Russia is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma.” This too often repeated definition by Winston Churchill is still surprisingly actual. No democracy survives...

Over the last 90 years Russia has been ruled by two types of men: short, malevolent cholerics or plump, bragging buffoons. Together with his great predecessors Vladimir...

It is one thing to feel uneasy about Russia. It is another to see clearly how things can go wrong in practice. During the 1990s, the nasty scenarios were based on Russia...