Today is one hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. The armed uprising against the provisional government, led by the Bolsheviks, began on the night of November 6/7, 1917 (October 24/25 according to the Old Style) and culminated in the storm of the Winter Palace th

Forty years ago this day my family (and I with them) left the Soviet Union on our way to America. Our first stop was in Vienna, where, by a curious coincidence, I am today (visiting at the Complexity Science Hub). From the cliodynamic point of view, four decades is not a lot of time.

Ironically, it used to be the crazy fringe on the Right that were the breeding grounds for conspiracy theories (“birthers”, “Clinton death list”). Now mass hysteria and conspirology are sweeping the crazy … Liberal mainstream? Earlier this month Glenn Greenwald wrote a very important

Prompted by the great discussion that followed my post, Does America Have a Long-Term Strategic Plan?, a reader sent me the link to a very interesting article by Michael Kofman, A Comparative Guide to Russia’s Use of Force: Measure Twice, Invade Once. Kofman presents a very interestin

(originally published here) A political scientist friend sent me this opinion piece in New York Times: Why China Will Reclaim Siberia. The author, unfortunately, shows little knowledge of the subject he writes about. For example, he writes: The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the le

  In the previous post, Russia: Geography and Empire, I summarized my thoughts on how geography shaped Russian history, which came out in my popular book War and Peace and War. That book ranges quite widely—from Russia to America, by way of Rome, Arabia, and medieval England and

  A friend of mine sent me the article by Stratfor, The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle. I remember Stratfor in its early days, before George Friedman monetized it by making most of its content available only to subscribers (this article is free to non-subscribers, by t

The confrontation in eastern Ukraine (or Novorossia, as southern and eastern Ukraine were called during the days of the Russian Empire) between pro-Russia activists and the central government in Kiev has escalated dramatically over the weekend. The hottest point is the Donbass region.

The news are dominated by the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine. Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of nonsense repeated in the American newspapers over and over again. It’s just another reminder about the care we, social scientists, must take when we use media a