Carnegie Moscow Center
The study of the Soviet drive toward collectivization in Kazakhstan and the resulting famine comes with a particular set of challenges.
The Russian empire is over, but the belief that Russia is finished as a serious global player might be premature. Today, Russia’s goals include modernizing, creating a nation-state, and finding the country’s new role in the world.
Today, Russia is peripheral to many of the major conflicts in the world. While this gives Moscow an opportunity to take care of its own affairs, Russia also needs to define and fulfill its new international role.
Women in modern Russia still face a number of challenges, but Russian women and their Soviet counterparts have always been rather independent and active.
Eurasia today is much broader than two decades ago, but it is also more interconnected. In this new environment, Russia should define its post-imperial role in ways that are appropriate for the 21st century.
As Russians move toward the long New Year and Christmas holidays, they hope that the coming year will offer positive change.
If the growing Russian popular movement remains committed and tenacious, organized political challenges to Vladimir Putin’s power will eventually follow.
The recent rallies in Russian cities may indicate that, twenty years after the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, post-imperial Russia is beginning to emerge as a nation.
By its example, the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution encouraged the West to improve the labor conditions of their workers in the hopes of averting similar social unrest in their own countries.
Vladimir Putin’s plans to create an economically integrated Eurasian Union could give Russia an opportunity to become a real regional leader, so long as Eurasian economic is voluntary and Moscow’s partners do not see the process as an attempt at political domination.