Russia

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It has created a refugee crisis, the scale of which has not been seen since World War II in Europe. The toll of civilian casualties is in the thousands, with countless others missing, injured, trapped, or lacking in essential medicines, food, and water.

In this public lecture, Bill Browder, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hermitage Capital Management, gives a firsthand critical analysis of the Russian economy–—particularly the absence of the rule of law–—with insights derived from his...

Russian spies held a morbid fascination in the minds of Americans dating back to the Red Scare in 1919, following the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the Communist International, of which the Communist Party of the USA became a constituent...

Mikhail Gorbachev defied every expectation at home and abroad by permitting the Berlin Wall to be breached in November 1989. He had finally allowed the imbalance of military power in Europe, which had stood provocatively and overwhelmingly to Soviet...

We should not assume that making sense of post-Soviet Russia was ever going to be easy. Great Powers that lose empires bear grudges and the speed with which an empire is lost can exacerbate the problem. No one can expect that a powerful country run...

Jonathan Haslam, George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has authored Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet...

Several years ago, I was increasingly disturbed by the direction taken by American foreign and domestic policy. It seemed to me that many key actions were inspired by mistaken notions about the way the Cold War ended and the causes and implications...

On November 20, 1958, J. Robert Oppenheimer (right), Director (1947–66) of the Institute for Advanced Study, and George F. Kennan (center), then Professor in the School of Historical Studies and former Ambassador to Russia, conferred with nine...

Pierre first started visiting Moscow in the 1970s, deep in the USSR era; at the time, such visits from a foreign mathematician, while not expressly forbidden, were quite non-trivial to arrange, and all the more valuable for that. He has continued to...

In this presentation, Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the emergence and interrelated fates of Rome, Constantinople, and Moscow. Rome became the capital of a great Mediterranean empire, which tried...