Russia’s Caspian Policy Under Primakov
This memo addresses the general prospects for Russia's policy in the Caspian Sea, particularly in light of the ongoing financial crisis and domestic political turmoil. After touching on uncertainties regarding…
Who Won and Will Win Russia?
According to conventional wisdom, the United States "lost" Russia in the 1990s. This assessment can be found on the pages of The Nation, The Washington Times, The New York Times…
Lessons from Russia’s Experience with Market-Oriented Reform
What does the Russian experience with reform teach us about transitions from state to market-based economies? Several scholars have argued that the reform program upon which Russia embarked in late…
Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Applying Lessons from Soviet Disintegration to the Russian Federation
The economic meltdown of 1998 has renewed fears that Russia is doomed to disintegrate like the star-crossed union from which it sprang in 1991. The history of the Soviet collapse…
Russian-US Relations in the Post Post-Cold War World
Other than coining of clever titles and claiming something new, is there any value to asking whether Russian-US relations are entering a post-post-Cold War world? I think so, because we…
Food Aid to Russia: The Fallacies of US Policy
For the past nine years, the United States has provided large amounts of free and highly subsidized food to Russia. Some of this aid has come in the form of…
The Company They Keep: Some Observations on Russian Management
In recent remarks delivered at Harvard University, Boris Brevnov, former Chief Executive Officer of Russian energy utility giant Unified Energy Systems (UES), noted that Russia's greatest challenge since 1991 has…
The Dissonant Concert: US-Russian Relations in the UN Security Council
How can we best understand the ambiguous relationship between the United States and Russia in the United Nations today? On the one hand, their debates and disagreements are heated, and…
Evaluating Democracy Assistance to Eastern Europe and Eurasia
Little is known–although much is believed–about the impact of democracy assistance on institutional development in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, carried out on a transnational level by Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs)…
The IMF-Russian Negotiations and Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
The continuing standoff between the Russian government and the IMF threatens the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Dialogue with the Russian government, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (also known as Nunn-Lugar), sanctions…
Russian Political Attitudes and Political Parties
The fact that the Russian Duma is not an institution designed to encourage small political parties will come as a surprise to no one, with the possible exception of the…
Russia and the Rest: Economic Reform and Western Assistance
What can we learn about Russia by comparing it to the other post-Communist countries? In particular, what can we learn about the wisdom of applying the brand of economic reform promoted by…