Stephen comes from Dundee. He has lectured in Russian language and literature at Leeds and St Andrews Universities and was for many years head of Russian at a leading Yorkshire independent school. He is currently a part-time language consultant.
If we in the West seem currently beset by terrible problems, spare a thought for those inhabiting post-Soviet space where currently social tensions, political conflicts and outright war exist in at least seven of the 15 former Soviet republics. In Belarus, the stand-off between Lukashenko’s increasingly thuggish administration and the opposition continues, with hundreds of […]
Russia’s President Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko, the self-proclaimed victor of Belarus’s disputed election of 9 August are meeting today (14 September) in Sochi, in a bid to agree how closure can be brought to the accelerating demands of the Belarusian people for the incumbent president to go. Despite a campaign of intimidation and brutal violence […]
The stand-off between the official ‘winner’ of Belarus’s rigged presidential election, Aleksandr Lukashenko, and the growing coalition of opposition groups has been continuing this week in Minsk and other towns and cities throughout the country. While the opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has begun to set up a broad-based coordination council to oversee a peaceful transition […]
One week after the election that, according to the regime, saw Aleksandr Lukashenko re-elected for a sixth term, the political crisis continues to escalate. On the morning after last Sunday’s vote, the main opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, lodged a complaint at the offices of the Central Electoral Commission in Minsk, challenging the result which gave […]
There were no surprises in yesterday’s presidential election in Belarus with the ‘resounding victory’ of the incumbent, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has been elected for the sixth time to the office of president of the former Soviet republic. While none of his previous victories could have been described as ‘free and fair’ by western standards, this […]
The end of the USSR in 1991 came as a surprise to most western observers and even to the majority of Soviet citizens. Now, nearly three decades later, the man credited with returning stability to the USSR’s successor state, the Russian Federation, appears in increasing trouble. In power since January 2000, Vladimir Putin has technically […]