Leon Aron is a resident scholar and Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, specializing in Russian politics, democratization, and U.S.-Russia relations. He contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard from 1998 to 2015, writing analyses of Russian political developments from the Yeltsin era through the Putin regime. He is the author of several books on Russia, including a noted biography of Boris Yeltsin.
Traveling recently in what might be called “new frontline” states—Estonia, Ukraine, and Moldova—I was struck by the depth of concern I encountered about Russian propaganda. And not just propaganda aimed at the Russian population and neighboring countries. At a conference in Tallinn, a Politico…
Last week’s Minsk agreement, by which France and Germany in effect codified the cession to Russia of Kiev’s sovereignty over southeastern Ukraine, has temporarily taken the issue of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine off the table and thus off the conscience of the West. But the question whether the…
ONE OF THE MOST POTENTIALLY significant events in Russian politics this year was the national conference of the Republican party of Russia (RPR). It witnessed what may prove to be the last credible attempt to create a democratic opposition with broad enough appeal to contest the Kremlin's control…
SUDDENLY YUKOS, Russia's largest private oil company, is in the eye of the worst political storm of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The firm's CEO and largest shareholder is sitting in a Moscow prison, charged with assorted offenses from tax evasion to fraud, its company archive and computers raided…
PRIOR TO September 11, 2001, few would have predicted that Russia would back the United States so firmly in its response to the terrorist attacks. Now, after a remarkable show of solidarity and even crucial assistance to Washington and its allies, the question remains, why did Russia do it? Were…
THE POST-COLD WAR ERA has produced something new in world history: an abundance of poor democracies. There are now some 70 nations with a gross domestic product below $10,000 per capita and with the basic attributes of democratic government. These regimes have been greeted in the West mostly with…
TWO DAYS BEFORE Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, a retired captain in the Russian navy, Alexander Nikitin, was acquitted of espionage in a St. Petersburg courtroom and released from custody. Nikitin's alleged crime was passing information about Russian nuclear submarines to a Norwegian…
THE DECEMBER 19 Russian parliamentary elections marked a remarkable shift to the center-right -- toward acceptance of capitalism and market reforms -- across virtually the entire Russian political spectrum. It broke the Communists' controlling plurality in the Duma, brought forth a new generation…
Suddenly everyone is asking, Who lost Russia? The New York Times Magazine posed the question in a cover story last August, and it has since been the subject of long articles in the Times and the Washington Post, as well as of innumerable columns in major newspapers. The op-ed pieces in the New York…
Is there a usable free-market past somewhere under the debris from Russia's financial meltdown? If the recent flood of media pontificating is to be believed, the answer is a resounding no. This summer's financial crisis, we are told over and over, means the obliteration of all that has been…
The Russian financial crisis marks a watershed in that country's six-and-a-half-year-old attempt to build capitalism on the ruins of a giant, obsolete (mostly 1930s and 1950s vintage), urban, non-monetary, militarized, autarkic, state-owned economy, and to do so within the political framework of a…
Few propositions about today's world can be stated with greater certainty: Never in its nearly 450 years has the modern Russian state been less imperialist, less militarized, less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more receptive to Western ideals and practices than it is in 1998. This…