On Sunday, 18 March 2018, Vladimir Putin ran for the Russian presidency for a fourth time and won easily in the first round, claiming 77% of votes cast (by 68% of the electorate), in a contest that was neither free nor fair.
Following the murder of Boris Nemtsov, early in 2015, his most prominent opponent was Alexei Navalny, who was not allowed to register as a presidential candidate and take part in the 2018 elections.
In a set of 15 theses, drawn up and published some years earlier, VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY argued that the popular campaign against corruption (Navalny famously denounced the United Russia as the party of “conmen and crooks”) did not address the main problem posed by the Putin regime. That had its roots in the issues not tackled in the early 1990s, after the demise of the USSR.
As a consequence, an unreconstructed KGB lieutenant-colonel, became President of Russia in 2000 and has led the country since the beginning of the 21st century.
The “struggle for peace” has always been a cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy. Indeed, the Soviet Union itself rose out of the ashes of World War I under the banner of “Peace to the People! Power to the Soviets!” Probably from the very first, Bolshevik ideologists were aware of how powerful a weapon for them the universal craving for peace would be—how gullible and irrational people could be whenever they were offered the slightest temptation to believe that peace was at hand.
matic of our times, times in which the highest achievements of human thought, science, and technology have suddenly boomeranged against man, putting his very existence in doubt. The rapid development of technology threatens to break down our ecology, and the discovery and exploration of atomic energy have made possible the complete destruction of life.