Paul Goble
Wikileaks case highlights crisis in journalism
December 01, 2010By Paul Goble What Wikileaks is doing has little in common with journalism or activism, two leading Russian specialists on the intelligence community say, but the case does highlight the increasingly serious crisis in journalism not...
Moscow Analyst: Yushchenko transformed Ukraine
January 19, 2010By Paul Goble Even as most Russian commentators are focusing on which of the two remaining candidates will become Ukraine’s president, one Moscow analyst is arguing that it is important to recognize that the incumbent leader, Viktor Yushchenko...
How Gorbachev contributed to the ‘Karabakhization’ of Azerbaijani politics
January 19, 2010By Paul Goble Twenty years ago this week, Mikhail Gorbachev sent troops into Azerbaijan to crush the popular front there, but what the Soviet president achieved by his actions was the further radicalization of Azerbaijan and the “Karabakhization...
In Russia, debates about alphabets are about more than letters
January 19, 2010By Paul Goble Eighty years ago this month, Stalin and the Politburo put an end to plans backed by Lenin and other Bolsheviks to change the alphabet in which Russian is written from Cyrillic to a Latin script, an indication, a Moscow commentator says...
‘Putin Zigzag’ fails to stop Russia’s decline
January 06, 2010By Paul Goble All the problems Russia had in the late 1990s remain unresolved because Vladimir Putin failed to use income from the rise in oil prices to address them, preferring instead to enrich himself and his friends and to pretend that the...
Georgia begins Internet TV broadcasts to North Caucasus
January 05, 2010By Paul Goble Yesterday, the Georgian government launched a Russian-language Internet television project directed at the North Caucasus, a program Tbilisi says it plans to expand in a few weeks via direct-to-home satellite broadcasting but one...
January 04, 2010By Paul Goble Provocations are by definition intended to provoke, and consequently, responding to them in exactly the way their authors hope is often the worst possible choice by those against whom they are directed. It gives those who are using them...
Russia-Ukraine tensions reflect different attitudes to History
November 11, 2009By Paul Goble Tensions between the Russian and Ukrainian governments are “not an argument between colonizers and the enslaved” but rather a dispute between those who see the state and its continuity as more important than the individual...
Re-Opening of Turkish Border: Transforming Armenian Mentality
October 09, 2009By Paul Goble The restoration of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey and the re-opening of the border between those two countries represents, in the words of one Russian commentator, “a test for the Armenian mentality” and an...
Molotov-Ribbentrop and Munich Not Equivalent Then or Now
September 02, 2009By Paul Goble Efforts by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials and commentators to justify the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Stalin’s ill-fated alliance with Hitler because of what British and French leaders had done in Munich...