Nina L. Khrushcheva
Nina Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, teaches international affairs at The New School and is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York.
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2011-12-19
| Vladimir Putin plans to return to the Russian presidency in March 2012, but his extravagant vanity has radically damaged the strongman image that he spent the last 12 years building. Indeed, Russians heckle Putin not because he has turned Russia into an industrial banana republic, but because he no longer inhabits his role convincingly.... read |
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2011-09-30
| The sad truth is that, in Russia, history does indeed repeat itself, but, in a twist on Karl Marx’s dictum, as tragedy and farce at once. That principle will be on full display in 2012, when Vladimir Putin returns to the presidency.... read |
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2011-08-12
| Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born, and 20 years ago this month, hardliners in the Soviet government attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. The instinct for imperial preservation that underlay both efforts remains strong in Russia to this day.... read |
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2011-06-30
| In his decade in power, Vladimir Putin has consolidated and strengthened the security forces, intimidated and jailed opponents, and muzzled the media and courts. But if he doesn’t step down or aside so that Russia can move forward, the system he has created may turn his own methods against him.... read |
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2010-09-28
| Even Russia's supposed "modernizers," like President Dmitri Medvedev, share the belief, common to the country's political elite, that Russians are not ready to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Once again, all the formulas for Western-type democracy depend on the will of an enlightened and benevolent czar - the role that Medvedev now seeks.... read |
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2010-04-13
| 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 say with certainty who the culprit is: history.... read |
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2010-02-02
| Because Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 turned out to be a seeming unending series of disappointments, most Western leaders are acting as if it makes no difference whether Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko or her rival, Viktor Yanukovich, wins on February 7. They are wrong: a victory for Yanukovich now may be the last free vote Ukraine sees for a long time.... read |
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2009-12-07
| Vladimir Putin’s political genius is that he understands that, for Russians, being perceived as powerful is even more important than actually being powerful. That is why neither he nor his presidential factotum, Dmitri Medvedev, will have to make good in 2010 on promises to modernize Russia decrepit economy and backward society.... read |
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2009-11-16
| Today, the contemporary version of the KGB, the Federal Security Bureau, runs Russia’s energy businesses in much the same top-down way that the KGB once ran the Soviet Union, with business always subordinate to the regime’s political needs. The result has been not only widespread corruption and under-investment, but also an inability to modernize and diversify the economy.... read |
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Two Funerals and Our Freedom
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Nina L. Khrushcheva 
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The recent deaths of Béla Király, who commanded Hungary's freedom fighters in 1956, and of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whose break with Stalinism inspired many intellectuals to abandon communism, recalls their legacy for today's Europe. They, together with Nikita Krushchev, paved the way for the Continent's freedom and unification.... read
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2010-02-02
| Because Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 turned out to be a seeming unending series of disappointments, most Western leaders are acting as if it makes no difference whether Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko or her rival, Viktor Yanukovich, wins on February 7. They are wrong: a victory for Yanukovich now may be the last free vote Ukraine sees for a long time.... read |
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2005-06-30
| Russia’s split personality – symbolized by its Tsarist coat of arms, a two-headed eagle – has been on open display recently. One minute, President Vladimir Putin’s regime is on a charm offensive, desiring a settlement to its six-decade-old territorial dispute with Japan over the Kurile Islands and reassuring investors following the conviction of oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The next moment Putin balks at removing Russia’s military garrison from Moldova’s secessionist Transdniester region while prosecutors talk ominously of putting more oligarchs in the dock. ... read |
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2006-08-17
| It is now 15 years since the failed coup of August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev. At the time, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost were seen by Soviet hardliners as a sell-out of communist Russia to the capitalist West. But it is now clear that the KGB and the military who launched the coup were not defending the idea of communism. Instead, they were protecting their idea of Russia’s imperial mission, a notion that had given the Kremlin commissars greater control of the vast Russian empire, and of Russia’s neighbors, than any of the Tsars had ever enjoyed. ... read |
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2010-02-02
| Because Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 turned out to be a seeming unending series of disappointments, most Western leaders are acting as if it makes no difference whether Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko or her rival, Viktor Yanukovich, wins on February 7. They are wrong: a victory for Yanukovich now may be the last free vote Ukraine sees for a long time.... read |
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2006-10-09
| It is time to end the fiction that Vladimir Putin’s “dictatorship of law” has made postcommunist Russia any less lawless. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s bravest and best journalists, a woman who dared to expose the brutal murders committed by Russian troops in Chechnya, is final proof that President Putin has delivered nothing more than a run of the mill dictatorship with the usual contempt for law. ... read |
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2004-07-30
| Once again, everyone wants to know, where is Russia heading? The trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the possible bankruptcy of his company Yukos, Russia's biggest company, have incited cries that President Putin is returning the country to the bad old days of dictatorship. But in assessing where Russia is heading, political and economic analysis are of little help. It is Russia's social culture that is determining the country's fate. ... read |
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2010-04-13
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| 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 say with certainty who the culprit is: history.... read |
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2007-01-16
| 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 death of a long-term dictator. ... read |
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2007-09-13
| It’s that time again – Russia’s pre-election season when prime ministers are changed as in a game of musical chairs. The last one seated, it is supposed, will become Russia’s next president. ... read |
