As if the 2016 U.S. presidential election wasn’t contentious enough, Mexico stands to be no less divisive and ridden by controversy. Current front runner for the July 1st presidential contest, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (often simply known by the acronym AMLO), is a longtime fixture of the outsider political left, […]
To what extent will the festering matter of Crimea inflame east-west tensions and further contribute to a “new Cold War”? Late last year, I was invited to the Yalta European Strategy meeting (or YES), an annual Kyiv gathering of policymakers, experts and others. Ever since Russia militarily occupied Crimea in […]
One can scarcely read the news these days without coming across references to the threat of an imminent “new Cold War.” Gravely, experts warn of escalating tensions being ratcheted up as a result of western sanctions against the Kremlin, ongoing friction in Ukraine in addition to any number of other […]
From stained glass to sculpture, riding the Moscow metro evokes ties to the old Soviet Union.
Even as war rages in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Kyiv, commuters may take in the sight of supposedly bucolic Ukrainian life at Kievskaya, a Soviet-era metro stop in Moscow.
Traveling in the Moscow metro provides a keen reminder of old Soviet days. Take, for example, the Byelorusskaya metro station, where visitors may taken in vintage mosaics depicting Belorussians who are happy and content within the old Soviet state.
In Moscow, some of the vestiges of the old Soviet Union are still apparent. Far beneath the surface, people may visit an old Soviet nuclear bunker.
Walking around Moscow, one can occasionally spot the old Soviet past peeping out from behind the landscape. Take, for example, the Marx memorial which has now become a tourist destination. At the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, visitors take in old anti-capitalist posters from the revolutionary period.
Walking around Moscow’s Krymskaya statue garden is an eerie experience, as the visitor is greeted to a seemingly vanished Communist world with age-old dinosaurs.
Walking around the All-Russian Exhibition Center, visitors are greeted to the sight of hyper-stylized statues which idealize Soviet industrial and military workers, women and even astronauts.
