Aleksandr Buzgalin
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Articles by Aleksandr Buzgalin
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Is Russia's economy expanding or contracting? The indicators point both ways. Today's apparent equilibrium is unstable, and the government, out of caution or fear, hesitates to act....
THE FORGOTTEN SPEECH
By Aleksandr Buzgalin At the time of writing, almost a month has passed since Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation...
RUSSIA AND AMERICA: A NEW TWIST IN THE CONFRONTATION?
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Ever since the recent war in Yugoslavia (though that now seems to belong to a different era), almost every public opinion poll in Russia has shown increasing...
RUSSIA, THE WTO AND THE GROWING ANTIGLOBALIST MOVEMENT
By Aleksandr Buzgalin In the final years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the so-called "antiglobalist" movement has begun to attract worldwide attention. Born in the...
TEN YEARS WITHOUT THE SOVIET UNION: LOST ILLUSIONS
By Aleksandr Buzgalin The break-up of the Soviet Union, which began long before 1991, is only now beginning to be recognized as one of the most important events of the...
THE MYTH OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Throughout last year the pages of Russia's newspapers and magazines were filled with innumerable articles on the subject of educational reform, and a great deal of attention...
OLIGARCHS, INTELLECTUALS AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN RUSSIA
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Two events prompted the writing of this article. The first was the latest arrest of Vladimir Gusinsky, who controls (or perhaps "controlled" would be more accurate) a...
THE LEFT-WING OPPOSITION AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS OF 2000
By Aleksandr Buzgalin NEW PRESIDENT, NEW CONDITIONS It was already clear from the presidential election campaign itself that President Vladimir Putin's rise to power would alter the conditions in which...
ECONOMIC GROWTH AGAINST A BACKDROP OF CATASTROPHE
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Late summer and early autumn often bring tragic surprises for Russia. In August 1991 the State Committee for the State of Emergency staged a coup which spelled...
THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING?
By Aleksandr Buzgalin There was a special present for the people of Russia on December 31, 1999: President Boris Yeltsin finally announced his resignation, which analysts had been forecasting for...
1999 RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: JUST BEGUN OR ALREADY OVER?
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Civil war among nomenklatura clans eclipses parliamentary elections Late autumn 1999 in Russia (and particularly in Moscow, the center of the political and economic life of the...
FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA: GOVERNORS OF ALL OBLASTS, UNITE?
By Aleksandr Buzgalin It is no coincidence that this year has seen such intense activity in the formation of gubernatorial blocs prior to the Duma elections scheduled for December 1999....
DIFFERENT PRESIDENTS, DIFFERENT HOBBIES: CLINTON CHANGES HIS WOMEN, YELTSIN HIS PRIME MINISTERS
By Aleksandr Buzgalin The latest cabinet dismissal--that of former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, who had had barely three months in the job--was greeted with little more than a sarcastic smile...
RIGHT CAUSE: YOU ARE NOT RIGHT, GENTLEMEN!
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Russian politics regularly takes some unbelievable turns. One might have thought that the three failed attempts by Yegor Gaidar to form a party of power to proclaim...
RUSSIAN CITIZENS ON THEMSELVES AND SOCIETY: AFTER SIX YEARS OF RADICAL REFORMS
By Aleksandr Buzgalin The late 1980s and the 1990s were turbulent years of change for Russia.
ANTI-SEMITISM: THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCE OF A CRISIS IN THE SYSTEM
By Aleksandr Buzgalin A PRETEXT FOR ANTI-COMMUNIST HYSTERIA More than three weeks ago the press carried brief--and imprecise--reports of a pronouncement by Albert Makashov, an official of Russia's Communist Party...
RUSSIA: CAPITALISM’S “JURASSIC PARK”
By Aleksandr Buzgalin Today, it has become almost a cliche to say that the Russian economy, and Russian society in general, are the place where the largest financial-industrial groups collide....
LEBED: JUST ONE BULLET OUT OF A BIG CLIP
By Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrei Kolganov One cannot say of General Aleksandr Lebed that "if he hadn't existed, one would have had to invent him." There are more than enough...
KIRIENKO–THE SAME AS GAIDAR, ONLY THINNER: RUSSIA AFTER FIVE YEARS OF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE LEGISLATURE AND THE EXECUTIVE
By Aleksandr Buzgalin The dictum that everything in history repeats itself, not in the form of tragedy, but as farce, is frequently quoted in Russia, both aptly and ineptly. But...
YABLOKO: IS THE “APPLE” TOO GREEN?
By Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrei Kolganov The bloc with the beautiful name of Yabloko [which means "apple" in Russian] (the source of the name is the first letters of the...