ReForum
Dr. Twigg is a professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University who specialized in public health reform in post-socialist states. Yana Gorokhovskaia talked to Prof. Twigg about the success of Russia’s healthcare reform, the reliability of Russia’s recorded COVID-19 deaths, and how political conservatism has impacted the health of vulnerable populations.
Medical research and development are in the center of everyone’s attention nowadays, and that includes politicians. This inevitably means that science becomes a subject of dangerous compromises.
To understand how Russia’s political path resembles its Central Asian neighbors, Yana Gorokhovkaya, Ph.D. in political science, spoke to Professor Edward Lemon a DMGS-Kennan Institute Fellow at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School and expert on authoritarian governance and security in Eurasia.
Anna Shadrina, sociologist and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London spoke with ReForum about the particular role of women in Russian society.
When we are discussing the contours of some concrete reforms in future democratic Russia, most often we are talking about the restructuring of the autocratic institutions, the strengthening of the role of the parliament, local self-government, ensuring actual independence of the courts, and measures to fight against corruption.
I would like to call the second decade of the 21st century “the time lost” for Russia, the period in which the opportunities gained in the previous years were lost. More importantly, many of the achievements in political and social modernization, that were reached in the nineties and the zero years, either rolled back into oblivion on their own or were canceled out leveled by the policies of Vladimir Putin.
While the Kremlin bosses are telling the people how the sovereign power state is rising from its knees, and their opponents are painting pictures of the “beautiful Russia of the future,” the country is falling deeper into the gap of economic decay both socially and organizationally.