Word: kremlins
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...mystery, inside an enigma continues to have force now that the Iron Curtain has long since been pulled back. Moscow's more muscular approach to the world has roots in its domestic politics. And there, a contradictory welter of good and bad developments contend for dominance, giving the Kremlin cause for both expansive confidence and prickly insecurity. The economy is booming. Since 1999, growth averaging more than 6% a year has produced a cumulative expansion of 65%. High oil prices are the main reason. Still, says Roderic Lyne, a former British ambassador to Moscow, "the boom doesn't stem from...
...been able to develop a foreign policy that seeks to re-establish its place as a key actor on the world stage, and which preserves what Russia thinks of as its traditional prerogatives in its immediate neighborhood. A senior Bush Administration official says the main message from the Kremlin is that "Russia's back, back like it hasn't been since the breakup of the Soviet Union." What does that mean for the rest of the world...
...Balancing Washington For putin's policymakers, the U.S. remains the instinctive adversary, the country whose preponderance the Kremlin yearns to balance. Russia, of course, is not alone in seeking that goal; French President Jacques Chirac regularly advocates a "multipolar" world (and compared to many other G-8 leaders, has been markedly uncritical of Putin's record). But the intriguing thing about Putin's policy has been the way in which he has aligned Russian interests with those of another natural rival to the U.S., China. Putin and China's President Hu Jintao meet frequently - five times in the last year...
...Soviet empire. To watch what were once coerced satellites like Estonia and Poland rush to join nato and the E.U. has been hard enough. But the nato membership likely to be sought by Ukraine, which shares a 2,063-km border with Russia, raises primal fears of encirclement. Kremlin propaganda already blames the sudden collapse of empire and economic dislocation on perfidy by ingrate "junior brothers" such as Ukraine, as well as hostile plots by the U.S. and nato. Moreover, a group of military officers and international-relations experts in Moscow is advancing new reasons for a buffer zone. They...
...Most spectacularly, after geologists in the Soviet Union came across a huge field of diamonds in the Siberian tundra in 1956, De Beers made an unprecedented offer: it would buy the entire run at a guaranteed price. The profits-estimated at $25 million a year-bolstered the Kremlin's treasury and helped fund the buildup of nuclear arms. The Russian gems went into the vaults under Charterhouse Street. When the Soviet Union unraveled in 1990, De Beers went back to Moscow, offering the transitional government $1 billion in exchange for part of the nation's stockpile of Siberian diamonds. Diamonds...