End of 1995. It is very difficult for the old president to relinquish power - especially when his entourage assures that no one but him can cope. Even lying in a hospital bed after a heart attack, Boris Yeltsin decides to run again. These elections will mark a watershed in the history of Russia. The president's supporters will make every possible and impossible effort to preserve freedom. And...

David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union in June, 1976 as the correspondent of the Financial Times of London and entered a country that was a giant theater of the absurd. After 1982, he was banned from the Soviet Union but allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled in 2013 on the grounds that the secret police regarded his presence as 'undesirable.'

Once you accept that the impossible is really possible, what happens in Russia makes perfect sense. In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. The Moscow Times said it was not surprising he was expelled, 'it was surprising it took so long.' Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999,...

There are about a thousand political prisoners in Russia. These brave people were deprived of the right to live and act in freedom. But it turned out that it was impossible to deprive them of either internal freedom or the right to express their own opinions. Their voices are the freest voices within today's Russia. They sound from courtrooms, in letters, blogs, social networks. They are not...

In the book, the famous political scientist Alexander Panarin analyzes the long-term consequences of a fatal event - the world war started by the USA for the possession of the resources of the entire planet. It is not only about resources: will they be the common property (the universalist project of the Enlightenment) or will they become a monopoly of a select minority (a new racist project),...

Published with the Gorbachev Fund.

The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena...

New Adversaries and New Opportunities. This volume aims to inspire students, researchers and citizens around the world to critically engage with Open Society values and to defend them wherever they are at risk.

This book is a tribute to the memory of Victor Zaslavsky (1937–2009), sociologist, émigré from the Soviet Union, Canadian citizen, public intellectual, and keen observer of Eastern Europe.In seventeen essaysleading European, American and Russian scholars discuss the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. They revisit and reassess what Zaslavsky considered...

Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new...

The twenty-five essays accompany, illustrate and underpin the conceptual framework elaborated in Post-Communist Mafia State, published in conjunction with this volume. Leading specialists analyze the manifestations of the current political regime in Hungary from twenty-five angles. Topics discussed include the ideology, constitutional issues, social policy, the judiciary, foreign relations,...