This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
The North Caucasus remains economically and politically a part of Russia, but the internal situation there is increasingly regulated by the region’s own local traditions.
After two decades of existence, the countries of the South Caucasus face the short-term threat of renewed conflict and the longer-term challenge of avoiding a slide into global irrelevance.
While Vladimir Putin is unlikely to give up power any time soon, the political and economic system he created is incapable of dealing with Russia’s rapidly changing conditions. Crises are likely unavoidable unless Russia changes and modernizes.
Two issues—military reform and interethnic relations in the Russian Federation—seem to have grabbed the most public attention since the Soviet collapse. They have had a big impact on Russia’s public and political life over the last twenty years, and affect the foundations for the country’s future development.
Told in eight parts, Eight Pieces of Empire follows the USSR’s disintegration and its aftermath through two decades of the author’s own reporting from the region.
On October 31, 2011, the world population reached 7 billion. However, for most of the post-Soviet nations, population levels have been declining.
Russia is no longer an empire, but it is not yet a nation-state either. To be seen as a great power in the twenty-first century, it has to reform its institutions and economy and become a great country.
Following the failure to reach a breakthrough at the June 2011 summit in Kazan, formal negotiations between political leaders in Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorny Karabakh conflict are again deadlocked.
More than three years after the August 2008 conflict over South Ossetia, the situation in the region remains deadlocked. However, some people-to-people contacts have resumed.
While the Eastern Partnership summit is unlikely to deliver many positive results, there are still important lessons that leaders from both sides can take away from the summit.