politics
Notes: 24
The Phrase "Boys in Pink Pants"
Authorship of the phrase belongs to Russian Federation Vice President Alexander Rutskoy. This is what he called the team of young reformist…
Autonomy, Yeltsin-Style
In 1990 Boris Yeltsin urged Russia's regions to "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow," setting off a wave of sovereignty declarations. His…
Boris Grigoryevich Fyodorov (1958-2008)
Boris Fyodorov became one of the youngest ministers in Russian history -- at 32 he headed the RSFSR's finance ministry. His appointment came in the…
The State of Chechen Separatism in the Summer of 1993
A detailed account of Chechen separatism as of June 1993: the bloody events of June 4-6, the political crisis in Ichkeria, Dudayev's dictatorship…
Cooperative Restaurants in the USSR: a Breath of Freedom at the Twilight of an Era
The 1988 law that legalized private enterprise and spawned Moscow's first cooperative restaurants — a revelation for a country raised on state…
GKO Treasury Bonds: the financial pyramid Roman pulls Proma out of before the 1998 default
How Russia's GKO short-term treasury bonds turned into a financial pyramid scheme and triggered the 1998 default.
From the Rust affair to the 90s: gutting the Soviet-Russian officer corps
From the Mathias Rust affair to the 1990s: how the Soviet, then Russian, officer corps was gutted — and why ex-generals ended up driving businessmen…
Russia's Economic Growth After the 1998 Crisis: From Catastrophe to Revival
This note traces the economic processes that followed the August 1998 crisis, when industrialists' dreams of a ruble devaluation to 9-10 rubles per…
Sergei Borisovich Stankevich (b. 1954)
Sergei Borisovich Stankevich was one of the most prominent politicians and intellectuals of the transitional period from the late USSR to the new…
The "Yes-Yes-No-Yes" Slogan and the April 25, 1993 Referendum
The formula "Yes-Yes-No-Yes" became one of the most recognizable political slogans of early-1990s Russia, symbolizing the sharp standoff between…
The Report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences"
Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin — the moment Zhorik points to as the real start of a perestroika that, in his telling, still…
The Second Round of Russia's 1996 Presidential Election
The 1996 presidential election was one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern Russian history, held amid deep economic crisis and social…
The GKChP: an Attempted Coup in the USSR
The failed August 1991 putsch by Soviet hardliners — the event that broke the USSR's central authority for good and set the stage for the world Roman…
The Former State Duma Deputy: from Literary Image to Historical Reality
The history of deputies of Imperial Russia's tsarist State Dumas, and the fate of the character Kisa Vorobyaninov from the novel "The Twelve Chairs"…
The governor's campaign: how a billion rubles buys influence in a 1996 gubernatorial race
How gubernatorial campaign financing worked in 1990s Russia, and what a billion rubles could buy.
The May 1993 Demonstration: a Bloody May Day in an Era of Change
How a traditional May Day march turned into a bloody clash between riot police and a crowd that included the very same pro-democracy intelligentsia…
The Protests in Moscow: The Constitutional Crisis, October 2, 1993
By the end of September 1993 the constitutional crisis in Russia had reached its climax. After Decree No. 1400 dissolving the Supreme Soviet was…
"The Redhead": Anatoly Chubais's Nickname
Anatoly Chubais, architect of Russia's 1992-94 voucher privatization — the "even the redhead doesn't understand it" behind Zhorik's joke about a…
The Shelling of the White House: The Constitutional Crisis, October 4, 1993
On the night of October 3-4 Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Moscow. On the morning of October 4 the storming of the House of Soviets (the…
The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)
The Russian Empire's largest revolutionary party and its Combat Organization, notorious for political assassinations — and one of the past lives…
Voucher Auctions in Russia, 1993-1995
The mass-privatization mechanism that let a handful of insiders quietly buy out entire factories while most ordinary citizens, confused or simply…
The Constitutional Crisis in the Russian Federation, 1992–1993
The constitutional crisis grew out of fundamental disagreements between two political camps over the country's path forward. Boris Yeltsin and his…
Viktor Stepanovich: the real-life Chernomyrdin the provincial directors resemble
A biography of Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia's prime minister from 1992 to 1998 -- his rise through Gazprom, his brief stint holding full presidential…
Zionism: history, currents, and the Soviet conspiracy theory around it
Zionism's history and ideological currents, and how Soviet propaganda turned it into an antisemitic conspiracy theory equating it with fascism.