The 40th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe passed almost unnoticed in Russia. Probably because the date falls during the most systemically unstable period in Europe since the declaration was signed.
The Final Act was a large-scale compromise, not so much in terms of concrete details, but in the agenda itself. The Soviet Union got what it initiated the whole process for — confirmation of its post-war European borders...
... preserving and developing modern society, including the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, which shattered the Soviet-American relationship. It is common knowledge that the situation was eventually resolved by the leaders of the two global superpowers, USSR and the U.S., but little is known about the activities of the KGB’s Washington station in those hours. RIAC met with Natalia Asatur-Feklisova, daughter of Alexander Feklisov who headed the station in 1962-1964, to find out why he also deserves ...
... logistics. Russia, while not the top dog, is an important part of that mix.
But the large volumes presented by available open source statistics on the BRICS are reminiscent of the Glasnost days of Mikhail Gorbachev and the impending collapse of the USSR command economy. You can't be competitive producing, an award winning volume of, for example, porcelain dinner plates by kilo weight when the rest of the world is measuring the items by units. This is the situation with bulk iron ore and ...
..., Rector of the Russian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration, Vladimir Mau, who was one of the brains behind Russia’s economic reforms of the early 1990s, said that the current situation is similar to what the USSR experienced in its later years.
RBTH:
Due to falling oil prices and the sharp decline of the ruble, the Russian economy now finds itself in fundamentally new territory. How would you characterize this new reality?
Vladimir Mau:
As the director of ...
The world has changed enormously in the nearly 23 years since the collapse of the USSR. Can we finally breathe a sigh of relief and stop drawing scary parallels with World War I?
World War I, one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the 20th century, broke out a hundred years ago, in August of 1914.
Apart from the millions killed,...
... the same – his time as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was then that his two goals as a politician manifested themselves:
to reform the Soviet (socialist) system (the USSR)
and
to make Georgia a fully fledged constituent entity of the Soviet Union
. He was well aware of the shortcomings of the system that had caused its stagnation, its lack of competitiveness in the world arena and, as a consequence, the aggressive ...
...
despite advice
from their Russian counterparts, the White House and the DoD gave little regard to rebuilding the Afghan economy, infrastructure projects, and modernizing the country’s agriculture sector, which is currently focused on narcotics. The USSR left the country after building 150 facilities, with the same number underway. It built the
2.7-kilometer-long Salang tunnel
– a world record at the time – through a strategic pass in the Hindu Kush Mountains to link the northern and ...
... Size), it makes this route reliant on shipping large hulls of natural resources in fewer vessels; hence the route rests greatly on the energy markets of both the Arctic and wider world, which are naturally volatile. In addition, historic successes of USSR leave a bitter after taste. As Vladimir Mikhailichenko of a Non-Profit Partnership points out, the recent jump is a mere hop in contrast to the volumes achieved in the peak years. In the historic peak of 1987 a total of 6.5 million tons of cargo ...
On the 80th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the USSR
Today marks 80 years since 16th of November, 1933, the day of recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States of America and of the establishment of diplomatic relations between them
[1]
.
The policy of non-recognition
Shortly after the Bolsheviks ...
... the EU aims to win Ukraine to make sure its gas is supposedly more secured and to continue its enlargement policy for both rational and questionable reasons. On the other, Russia aims to make sure it achieves its goal of restoring 80% of the defunct USSR’s market for likewise a myriad of reasons; with Ukraine being the final element in the formation, as Kazakhstan and Belarus are already sitting in the dugout. In this post we will explore this contest with fresh insight from this week’s ...
