Russia’s occupation cum annexation of Crimea is a tragedy no matter how you slice the salami tactics. One just wants to protest, boycott, DO something. But what? Well, like President Obama and the EU, we’re coming up a bit short on the list of feasible and effective sanctions. But here are a few things we recommend NOT doing.

Russia's occupation of Crimea, part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, is wrong. It is wrong under international law, it is in violation of several treaties Russia has with Ukraine and the West, and it is even wrong according to Russia's own foreign policy "principles." So why did it happen?

As the United States struggled with the trauma of seeing a fellow state succumb to Communism, a pattern of familiar stages started to emerge in - of all places - its agricultural exports.

You think planting a flag on a piece of land makes you own it? Think again! With Sakhalin, it was just one step in the long back-and-forth between Russia and Japan.

Remember the days when a superpower could shoot down a plane full of civilians just for wandering into its airspace? We called those days the Cold War – and the plane was KAL Flight 007, shot down by a Soviet fighter pilot on September 1st, 1983.

It would be an understatement to say US-Russian relations have hit a low point. Not a Cuban Missile Crisis or even a 1980 Olympic Boycott sort of low point. More like a US bombing of Belgrade or Russian sleeper spies discovered in America sort of low point.

The Americans, on FX, is a brilliant episodic drama that recreates the 1980s with only minimal anachronisms but plenty of tension, plot twists, double-dealing and moral relativism.

Ambassador Jack Matlock had a front row seat for the final days of the US-Soviet Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. While working on his article, 1983: The Scariest Year (Mar/Apr 2013), Russian Life Publisher Paul Richardson conducted an email interview with Matlock, which is produced here in its entirety.

By launching the flabby Cold War trope that Russia is our "geopolitical adversary," Mitt Romney has exhibited yet another symptom of foot-in-mouth disease on foreign policy...

Reviews of some recent books on Tolstoy, Spying and the end of the USSR. And a new translation of an often overlooked work by Dostoyevsky. As published in the November/December 2011 issue of Russian Life.

Today, Herbert Hoover – the 31st president of the United States (1929-1933) – is probably most associated with the onset and deepening of the Great Depression. Few know that prior to his presidency he was a successful international mining engineer (and had some lucrative investments in Russia before the Revolution), and later headed up the ARA (American Relief Administration), designed to deliver needed foreign aid to Belgium in the aftermath of World War I. 

Life is always stranger than fiction, or, in this case, it may have been imitating [bad] fiction. Or at least so it seems from the transcripts of the case against Anna Chapman.