Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor, and Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister, each of whom has forged close links with Putin.

The first Soviet secret police force was called the Cheka , and those who served in it, Chekists . The KGB and its successor, the FSB, still pride themselves on their connection with the Cheka . The author is here using the term disparagingly, linking it with religion – which the Cheka persecuted mercilessly – to describe Vladimir Putin.

https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/2477-konservativnaya-revolyutsiya-smysl-kryma. ‘The Conservative Revolution. The Meaning of Crimea’ (in Russian), 17 March 2014.

A number of cities in the USSR were given the title of ‘hero-city’ because of the battles that took place there during the Second World War (or ‘Great Patriotic War’, as Russians call that part which involved the Soviet Union). Sevastopol is one such city.

The favourite of Empress Catherine the Great, Grigory Potemkin, is credited with conquering the southern territories and incorporating them into the Russian Empire, including Crimea and a region therein called Taurida. As a result, he was given the name ‘Potemkin-Taurida’. Prokhanov believes that Putin should have similar recognition for seizing back Crimea from Ukraine.

Samuel Huntington was an American political scientist, best known for his 1993 theory, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. He argued that post-Cold War, future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to world peace.

The Young Pioneers organization educated children between the ages of nine and fifteen to be loyal to the dictates of the Communist Party and the Soviet motherland. Most children belonged to the Pioneers.

The euphemism, ‘the final charge to the south’, was used by the nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as the title of his book on the invasion of Afghanistan, which began at the end of 1979, and which he foresaw as ending with Soviet soldiers ‘washing their boots in the Indian Ocean’. In fact, it ended with the Soviet Army pulling out of Afghanistan in February 1989 with its tail between its legs and a legacy of disillusion and discontent, which contributed to the collapse of the USSR a little over two years later. See note 17 for a reference to Zhirinovsky.

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was the first political party to register after the Communist Party’s monopoly on power was removed from the Soviet Constitution in February 1990. Led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fanatical Russian nationalist, the party was reportedly created by the secret police, the KGB, with the express aim of discrediting in the eyes of the Russian people the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. The party was and remains neither liberal nor democratic.

http://www.kph.npu.edu.ua/!e-book/clasik/data/mmk/cathedra.html.

‘Pulling up their pants and chasing the Komsomol’ is a line from the Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, as he tried to reconcile himself with the new Soviet life in the early 1920s. The Komsomol – the Young Communist League – was the next stage after the Pioneers. It encouraged social activism and further indoctrinated Soviet youth.

Sometimes known as the DNR, from the Russian original, Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika . It should be noted that neither this designation nor the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR/LNR) are recognized internationally as separate republics.

8 March was always marked in the USSR as International Women’s Day. It is now celebrated more widely around the world. It was one of the dates of the ‘Red Calendar’, introduced by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution as a replacement for the church calendar, with its feast days and saints’ days. The Red Calendar devoted specific days to workers in different areas of society, such as ‘Miners’ Day’, referred to a little later.

https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/5329-22-dnya-v-dnr. ‘22 Days in the DNR’ (in Russian), 11 November 2014.

Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev led peasant revolts. In Soviet times these were idealized into early examples of uprisings of the common people.

Nestor Makhno was commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which fought for an independent Ukraine during the Civil War. Alexander Antonov led an insurrection in the Tambov Province in Russia against the Bolsheviks.

Pavlov was assassinated in 2016.

‘Kofemaniya’ is a popular chain of coffee shops in Russia.

https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2013/10/29/obschestvo-ne-spravlyaetsya-s-pritokom-migrantov. ‘Integration: Society Can’t Cope with the Flow of Immigrants’ (in Russian), 29 October 2013.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (Panther Books, St Albans, 1966; trans. Michael Scammell, pp. 148–9).

The Belovezha Accords were so called because, on 8 December 1991, the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, meeting in the Belovezha Forest Reserve in Belarus, signed the deal setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The establishment of this organization signalled the end of the USSR, although it was only seventeen days later, on 25 December, that Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigned as Soviet President.

The Maidan – Freedom Square – as the main square in Kiev was named after the break-up of the Soviet Union, was the centre of the protest movement that eventually brought about the fall of the regime of the pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused an ecological disaster in the surrounding areas of Ukraine and Belarus. It remains the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

In the classic Russian bath-house – the banya – while in the steam room people beat each other with eucalyptus or birch branches to stimulate circulation. Eucalyptus is supposed to be a sign of better quality.

Places in Pokémon Go that allow players to collect items such as eggs and more Poke Balls to capture more Pokémon.

The State Duma is the lower house of the Russian Parliament. The upper house is the Federation Council, members of which are referred to as ‘senators’. The two houses together are called the Federal Assembly.

https://www.interfax.ru/russia/519453. ‘Medinsky says computer games are evil’ (in Russian), 19 July 2016.

The Customs Union gives customs-free travel for citizens of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

Following allegations of rigged elections for the State Duma in December 2011, there were mass demonstrations in Moscow, the like of which had not been seen since the last days of the Soviet Union. These demonstrations seemed to convince President Putin that he needed to have a stronger grip on society.