MOSCOW: History's milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's leader, allowed his East German counterpart, Walter (...)
MOSCOW: In Russia, somewhere behind every event lurks the question: Who is to blame? In the tragedy that claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other Polish leaders, we can answer that question with certainty in at least one (...)
MOSCOW - "A pox on both your houses may be an appropriate individual response to frustration with the political candidates on offer in an election. But it is a dangerous sentiment for governments to hold. Choice is the essence of governance, and to (...)
Prophets, it is said, are supposed to be without honor in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the dissident and once-exiled author of the Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan (...)
When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall Hitler's goose-stepping storm troopers are (...)
The question that has dominated Russian politics, and world discussion of Russian politics - "Will he (Vladimir Putin) or won't he stay in power? - has now been settled. He will and he won't.
The election of Putin's longtime acolyte and (...)
The campaign for Ukraine's parliamentary election of September 30th is scarcely underway and yet Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich is already trying to steal it. Yanukovich was the man who sought to falsify the result of the presidential election of (...)
Next week's Group of Eight summit will probably be the last such meeting for Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. Seven years ago, at their first meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Bush looked into Putin's eyes and somehow spotted the soul of (...)
The death watch for Fidel Castro is something that only Gabriel Garcia Marquez could get right. His novel "Autumn of the Patriarch captures perfectly the moral squalor, political paralysis, and savage ennui that enshrouds a society awaiting the (...)
It is time to end the fiction that President Vladimir Putin's "dictatorship of law has made post-communist Russia any less lawless. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia's bravest and best journalists, a woman who dared to expose the (...)