Russian History

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of examining together two analytic concepts – memory and periphery. These concepts receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining memory and periphery and the epistemic insights they provide for various disciplins are presented in the different contributions to this issue.

Türkiye ve Rusya arasındaki ilişkilerin geniş bir tarihî arka planı vardır. Osmanlı Devleti ve Çarlık Rusya’sı döneminde her iki taraf, Balkanlar ve Kafkasya’nın egemenliği uğruna mücadele etmişlerdir. Millî mücadele döneminde, iki milletin
de hem eski yönetimlere, hem de ortak işgalci devletlere karşı bir mücadele verdiğini görüyoruz. İkinci Dünya Savaşından sonra Sovyetlerin Türkiye üzerinde devam eden siyasal niyetleri Türkiye için tehdit oluşturmaktaydı. Türkiye; dış politika alanında, savaş sonrası Avrupa dengesinde meydana gelen boşluklardan yararlanarak Sovyet emperyalizmine karşı beklediği güvenliğe NATO’ya girmekle kavuştu. Putin dönemiyle birlikte Rusya ile Türkiye arasındaki siyasi, ticari ve ekonomik ilişkiler canlandı. Rusya’nın Suriye konusundaki tavrı ilişkilerin seyrini değiştirdi ve bir Rus uçağının Türkiye tarafından vurulmasıyla yeni bir sürece girildi. Bu çalışmada Türk-Rus İlişkileri tarihi gerçekler ışığında dönemlere göre incelenmiştir.
Anahtar kelimeler: Osmanlı Devleti, Çarlık Rusya, Soğuk Savaş, Suriye, Putin dönemi, Rus jeti.

The Trump administration continues to be an administration in transition. It has taken the new President and his entourage a prolonged period of time to settle in. The new administration has not yet managed to formulate something approximating a comprehensive U.S. foreign policy and a " grand strategy " for establishing a new global order. However, preceding administrations have also found this difficult and almost impossible to achieve. The Trump White House is divided between an ideological wing and a more pragmatic faction with the President unable to decide which faction to side with. Secretary of State Tillerson has made clear that Trump's " America First " foreign policy is all about U.S. national security and prosperity. The Trump administration, it seems, has very little inclination to base U.S. foreign policy on the country's traditional democratic and humanitarian values. This article also considers U.S. foreign policy toward Europe, Russia/the Middle East and China. It concludes that compared to the shrill rhetoric of the election campaign, the administration has begun to pursue a more moderate foreign policy. The White House has come out in support of NATO, there is even talk about a revival of the TTIP negotiations, there has been a new relatively harmonious relationship with China and the administration attempts to pursue a constructive policy of re-engagement with Russia regarding Syria and Ukraine. The notion of a " normalization " of the Trump administration's foreign policy should not be taken too far, however. A predilection for constant change, turmoil and self-promotion is the one enduring and reliable factor that characterizes the administration and the President himself. .

This article examines the openly adversarial neoconservative foundation under George Bush to the supposedly more ‘engaged’ diplomatic interaction under Barack Obama. What will be exposed is a fairly uninspired and non-innovative American policy that not only fails to consider Russian initiatives from Russia’s own national security perspectives, but aims to contain it within a continued Cold War box that not only sours opportunities for collaboration but guarantees the absence of partnership in areas of global security. This piece examines the consequences of imagining Russia only as nemesis.

, as a field of scientific research, is a set of stories, mythos in Greek meaning ‗story' or ‗legend' and logos ‗word'. Usually, the myths are works of literature. The term mythology may include all the myths of religion or culture. Throughout history, these stories have circulated as works of literature, folk tales (ballads, odes, songs, songs of bravery) or based on historical sources written at different ruler's courts or monasteries. In this paper I will present a number of similarities between Greek and Roman deities and the slavic ones, basing my research as much as possible on the information provided by an etymological analisys, a description of the deity as well as rituals, offerings, sacrifices and celebrations dedicated to the deities. As a main source for Slavic deities, I used a compilation of medieval and religious texts written in the Kievan Rus' by monk Nestor, called the Russian Primary Chronicle or Nestor's Chronicle. This script presents Russian history and Kievan Rus between 850-1110 years, written in Kiev during Iziaslav Sviatopolk the second's (Grand Prince of Kiev 1093-1113) reign. The Chronicle is German-Scandinavian inspired, since the Prince Sviatopolk's (the principality's ruler) policy was pro-Scandinavian. Also, I could list following volumes: Dictionary of Slavic mythology by Ilie Danilov and Slavic mythology by Sorin Paliga. In addition to these works, information about Slavic mythology can be found in the following books:

ATTENTION READERS: Kindly remember to cite this paper when you use it in your own research. There are two (slightly) different versions of this paper. The one you see here is the one I wrote as an undergraduate student. The one that I had published by the journal Vestnik is very slightly different - you can find that one in the link below.

***You probably want to read/cite the one that is published because it is generally accepted that published academic literature has gone through a process of editing for a more academic audience. Read both if you wish!

You can cite the unpublished paper as:

Hosseini, D. (2005). The Effects of the Mongol Empire on Russia. Unpublished paper. University of Texas at Arlington. Arlington, Texas.

Or for the published paper:

Hosseini, D. (2005). The Effects of the Mongol Empire on Russia. Vestnik, Winter 2005(3). Available at https://geohistory.today/mongol-empire-effects-russia/

I wrote the original paper for a course on the history of the Mongol Empire while I was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington.  I later was asked to edit and publish the paper in The School of Russian and Asian Studies Newsletter, 2005.

This paper looks at the Mongol Empire's impacts on Russia in terms of religion, art, language, government, and the ultimate rise of Moscow. 

Any comments, critiques, and questions are welcomed.

There have been few comparative analyses of non-Western intelligence communities. Those that exist have tended to always involve the United States as a comparative baseline. Most of the non-American investigations on intelligence, whether comparative or single case studies, tend to be anecdotal and historical. Almost nothing exists that tries to examine the operational/philosophical ‘cultures’ of foreign intelligence communities from their own perspectives and priorities. This article will examine China, India, and Russia utilizing the latter approach and calls into question whether the term ‘culture’ should be the exclusively dominant explanatory framework for analysis. The dominance of Western, more specifically Anglo-American, concepts of intelligence will be argued a hindrance to properly understanding the motivations, positions, and prospects of non-Western states. A new formula for understanding intelligence ‘conditions’ will be proposed and elaborated using the Indian, Chinese, and Russian cases. As a result, an argument is created that seeks to break some of the current definitional rigidity and perceptional inflexibility that dominates contemporary intelligence analysis, especially when considering states not necessarily beholden to Western concepts of power and influence, and hopefully producing a more lively debate on how intelligence communities around the world are examined.

Abstract
There is an extensive historical background between Turkey and Russia relations. In the period of the Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia, both sides struggled for territories of Balkan and Caucasus. In other words, there was an Ottoman-
Russian power struggle in the Caucasus and Balkan in the long time. In the period of national struggle, these states fought against for not only old regime but also common occupying states and with this striving they started to recognize internationally. These two features and common similarities led to become an ally between two states. However, after World War II ongoing political intentions
of Soviets over Turkey posed a serious threat for Turkey. The balance of power shifted in Europe after the war and Turkey took advantage from this instability.In this period Turkey became member of an international alliance called the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), therefore Turkey constituted a security against Russian threats. During Putin’s reign, social, economical and political relations between Turkey and Russia have been revived but what Russia
really think about Syria or another words, attitudes towards of Russia in terms of military engagement in Syria have changed relations them in a negative way.
Shooting down of a Russian warplane by Turkey on its border paves the way to a new period. In this work, relations of Turks and Russian will be analysed in the light of historical facts according to period.
Keywords; Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia, Cold War, Syria, Putin’s Reign, Russian jet.

This article draws on a rare extant manuscript of the Melissino Rite, preserved in the archives of the Prince Fredrik Masonic Centre in The Hague, as well as on other primary material, in order to examine the pivotal role played by Pyotr Ivanovich Melissino (1726-1797) in forming an Illuminist-Masonic milieu in St. Petersburg from the mid-1760s. Melissino and his high-grade Masonic Rite have hitherto been largely overlooked by scholars, yet this article aims to emphasize the formative influence he played in Russia in creating an “invisible chapter” in which select initiates could embrace currents of Illuminist thought (alchemy, theosophy and Christian Kabbalah in particular). Scholars have principally examined the development of Illuminism in the second half of the eighteenth century within the restricted space of the Chapters of high-degree Freemasonry in France (and to a lesser extent in Germany and other European countries). Little attention has been paid to Illuminism in Russia prior to rise of the Rosicrucian Circle associated with Nikolai Novikov and Johan Schwarz in Moscow in the 1780s. Thus, this article seeks to re-examine the Melissino Rite as part of a pan-European phenomenon, whilst also highlighting its importance within the sizeable aristocratic Masonic milieu in Russia.

The intent of this chapter is to re-imagine and apply the term " civil disobedience " to the cyber domain. The full extent of how it can apply will be analyzed in a framework of the evolutionary rights of protest. Traditional civil disobedience is a " performance " via visual and physical mediums, while cyber disobedience is essentially a digital performance with difficulty in attributing true ownership of the act. This is an interesting antithesis to the physical protestor, who uses strategic visibility, threat of arrest, and popular backlash against state behavior as vital aspects of the disobedience. These variables are noticeably absent in cyber disobedience.

This dissertation will analyse the grand strategy of the Russian empire against its southern rivals, namely the Ottoman empire and Iran, in the Caucasus, between 1821 and 1833. This research is interested in explaining how the Russian imperial machine devised and executed successful strategies to use its relative superiority over the Ottomans and the Qājārs and secure domination of the region. Russian success needs, however, to be understood within a broader context that also takes in Ottoman and Iranian policy-making and perspectives, and is informed by a comparative sense of the strengths and weaknesses of all three imperial regimes. In this thesis, the question of why Russia was more successful than the Ottoman state and Iran in the Caucasus between 1821 and 1833 is explained in three main ways: the first and most important factor in this process was the well-functioning fiscal-military machine of the Russian empire; the second factor was the diplomatic and military skill of the Russian leadership which helped to avert any effective political and military alliance between the Ottoman empire and Iran and defeated its rivals in two separate and successive wars; the last main factor in Russian success was its geopolitically superior position.

This essay focuses on a paradoxical transformation that happened within Soviet ideological discourse at the very end of perestroika, around 1990-91. The Party's attempts to revitalize Soviet ideology by returning to the original word of Lenin unexpectedly produced the opposite result. The unquestionable external Truth from which Soviet ideological discourse drew its legitimacy-and that had always been identical with Lenin's wordsuddenly could no longer be known. This shift launched a rapid unraveling of the Soviet communist project. At the center of this unexpected transformation was the search for the true Lenin-a kind of Lenin that Soviet party theorists, bureaucrats, historians, and scientists hoped was still hidden in the midst of his unpublished texts and unknown facts of his biology, life, and death.

Tartaria (originally pronounced “Tataria” without the first “r”) is the name of the pre Mongolian empire that originated in northern Asia before spanning the entire northern hemisphere. Great Tartaria was the largest empire during its time and would have still been the largest empire today. The Tartarian empire flourished due in part of the civilization being a leader in advanced technology, free energy, and grand architecture.
Tartaria is also where the Greek word “Tartarus” originated from.
The denotation of lost souls spending eternity in Tartarus the underworld is due to the Tartarian Empire having been buried and wiped out during the mud flood. The world of the Tartarians is literally the world under our world. The underworld. Tartarus wasn’t the underworld and will never be the underworld. Tartaria is the underworld. The religionists used the Mud Flood deluge and how it wiped out the Tartarian Empire to confuse the populous into thinking they would join those in the “underworld” if they challenged the religious authority.
Who were the Tartarians?
The Tartarians (or Tartars) were the indigenous people (quite possibly founded by Noah’s sons) making up the world renowned Tartarian empire. The Tartarians were a tall people, averaging some eight to twelve feet in height. They would have been considered giants to our current average height of only around six feet; however, back then the height of ten feet was the average. Like the civilizations before them whose heights averaged twelve feet, fifty feet, two+ miles, etc…each preceding civilization had an average taller height than the civilizations coming after them and each succeeding civilization had an average shorter height than the civilizations predating them. Statures are diminishing after each deluge and with each new astrological age we enter.
Civilizations in the current astrological age (the Age of Pisces) are shorter in height than civilizations that existed in the previous astrological age (the Age of Aries) and will be taller in height than civilizations that will exist in the next astrological age (the Age of Aquarius).
The Tartarians are thought to have been “Breatherians,” a being who does not rely on the digestion and burning of calories from food/water, but instead rather receives energy straight from the aether. The aether is thought to be the very fabric of the space time continuum that some would associate with electrons, the wind, the holy spirit, the atmosphere, and the gasses in the atmosphere such as oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Since the The Tartarians quite possibly had a completely altered digestion system than the one we now have, they had no need for toilets in their bathrooms. Which could hint at one of the reasons why bathrooms in the recent past have been used quite extensively as social gathering powder rooms to not only freshen oneself up but to hear and spread local gossip.
The Tartarians were masters of masonry, brickwork, steam punk style technology, universally free energy, and grand architecture. Their Roman/Gothic esque style architecture can still be found in the current guise as water ducts, city halls, banks, water stations, cathedrals, churches, hospitals and similar public and city works type buildings.

Ce volume rassemble 16 études autour d’un même thème : l’autorité et le rayonnement de l’Église grecque en Orient entre le XIIIe et le XVIe siècle, au-delà des étroites frontières de l’Empire byzantin d’abord, puis, après 1453, dans un Empire devenu ottoman. Ces recherches originales ont été présentées lors d’une table ronde du 22e Congrès International des Études byzantines de Sofia (2011) et s’organisent dans l’ouvrage selon quatre axes thématiques. Dans une première partie, les auteurs s’intéressent aux transformations internes de la représentation que le patriarcat œcuménique se faisait de son autorité spirituelle et politique durant la dernière période byzantine. Une deuxième partie s’attache ensuite à la matérialité de l’exercice du pouvoir, soit dans la pratique de la chancellerie patriarcale (notamment durant la crise palamite) soit dans le fonctionnement du synode permanent, relais essentiel à travers lequel le patriarche exerce son pouvoir en tant que chef de l’Église byzantine. Une troisième partie se penche au plus près sur les difficiles emboîtements de juridiction entre le patriarcat œcuménique, d’un côté, et certaines métropoles éloignées comme celle de Kiev, les nouveaux patriarcats balkaniques, l’archevêché d’Ohrid et enfin les autres patriarcats orientaux. Enfin, dans une quatrième partie, les auteurs s’intéressent aux diverses formes de résilience mises en œuvre au sein du patriarcat œcuménique à l’époque ottomane pour assurer la perpétuation idéologique, institutionnelle et patrimoniale de l’Église orthodoxe dans les conditions difficiles de la domination d’un pouvoir musulman.

A book written in 2009, one year after Russian troops invading Georgia and brutally violating International Humanitarian Law when usurping two of its regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The mot Western reaction to this invasion and annexation.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Ward-Jackson, who read parts of my manuscript; and to Mr. Donald Tyerman, who read the whole. Mr. Bernard Singer helped me with his intimate knowledge of Russian life. To Mr. D. M. Davin and members of the Editorial Staff of the Oxford University Press I am grateful for many suggestions for improvements in style. Mr. Hugo Dewar and Mr. Jon Kimche kindly assisted me with materials and books, some of which are now bibliographical rarities. My thanks are given to Professor Wm. A. Jackson and his assistants at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, who helped my wife and me to find our way through the dossiers of the Trotsky Archives. I am similarly obliged to the Staffs of the Hoover Library, the London Library, the British Museum, and the National Central Library. The generosity of the Oxford University Press and the Humanities Department of the Rockefeller Foundation enabled my wife and me to spend many months in the United States and to carry out that part of our research programme which depended entirely on our access to the above-mentioned American libraries. My debt to other authors is acknowledged in footnotes. The quotation from Machiavelli's The Prince on page xii is taken by permission of J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., from the translation by W. K. Marriott in the Everyman's Library. I. D. ' ... there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well tinder the new .... 'It is necessary, therefore, if we desire to discuss this matter thoroughly, to inquire whether these innovators can rely on themselves or have to depend on others: that is to say, whether, to consummate their enterprise, have they to use prayers or can they use force? In the first instance they always succeed badly, and never compass anything; but when they can rely on themselves and use force, then they are rarely endangered. Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Besides the reasons mentioned, the nature of the people is variable, and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion. And thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force. 'If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long-as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe.' MACHIAVELLI, The Prince, CHAPTER VI CHAPTER I Home and School THE reign of Tsar Alexander II (1855-81) was drawing to its gloomy end. The ruler whose accession and early reforms had stirred the most sanguine hopes in Russian society, and even among cmigre revolutionaries, the ruler who had, in fact, freed the Russian peasant from serfdom and had earned the title of the Emancipator was spending his last years in u cave of despair-hunted like an animal by the revolutionaries, and hiding in his imperial palaces from their bombs and pistols. The Tsar was paying the penalty for the frustration of the hopes he had stirred: he had deceived the expectations of almost every class in society. In the eyes of many landlords he was still subversion itself, crowned and dressed in imperial robes. They had never forgiven him the reform of 1861, which had deprived them of their feudal mastery over the peasants. From the peasants he had lifted the burden of serfdom only to let them be crushed by poverty and debts: the ex-serfs had, on their emancipation, to yield to the gentry much of the land they had tilled, and for the land they retained they had over the years to pay a heavy ransom. They still looked up to the Tsar as to their wellwisher and friend and believed that it was against his intentions that the gentry cheated them of the benefits of the emancipation. But already there had been aroused in the peasantry the hunger for land, that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind. . The gentry and the peasantry were still the main classes of Russian society. Only very slowly was the urban middle class growing. Unlike the European bourgeoisie, it had no social ancestry, no tradition, no mind of its own, no self-confidence, and no influence. A tiny portion of the peasantry was detaching itself from the countryside and beginning to form an industrial working class. But, although the last decade in the reign of Alexander brought the first significant industrial strikes, the urban working class was still looked upon as a mere displaced branch of the peasantry.

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

Abbas Amanat combines chronological and thematic approaches, exploring events with lasting implications for modern Iran and the world. Drawing on diverse historical scholarship and emphasizing the twentieth century, he addresses debates about Iran’s culture and politics. Political history is the driving narrative force, given impetus by Amanat’s decades of research and study. He layers the book with discussions of literature, music, and the arts; ideology and religion; economy and society; and cultural identity and heritage.



For further details about this book, including the Table of Contents and selections from chapters, please visit: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300112542/iran. For ebook (including Kindle) and audio version (both Audiobook and audio CDs) please see: https://www.amazon.com/Iran-Modern-History-Abbas-Amanat/dp/0300112548/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=amanat+Iran&qid=1557691542&s=gateway&sr=8-1. The audio version can be listened  concurrent with highlighted ebook through Audible. A paperback edition by Yale University Press appeared in August 2019.  For audio sample (4 hours) go to: https://play.google.com/books/listen?id=AQAAAECMBkxG0M.

For reviews please search online: New York Review of Books, Economist, Times (of London), Sunday Times, Wall Street Journal, and International Journal of Middle East Studies.

The Caspian Project is a weekly digital magazine organized by the online analytical resource, Modern Diplomacy. Dr. Matthew Crosston is the Senior Editor of the project, which aims to acquaint people with this critically undervalued region of the world. The analyses go far beyond the standard issue of energy and encapsulates economics, politics, culture, religion, global affairs, conflict and peace.

This edition of the Caspian Project testifies to the enormous wealth of analytical opportunity seen all across the region. While in the past we have enjoyed producing single-issue specializations (which we did over the past two weeks with The Russian Debate and The Persian Gambit, to great fanfare and applause), the true essence of the Project is to have great diversity for the readers every issue. No. 11 as it turns out is something of a hybrid of these two aspects: readers with this issue get quite a bit of diversity while also getting to enjoy a mini-specialization, as a number of the articles inside deal with different aspects of the Russian intelligence community, namely, the Federal Security Service or FSB.

So, on top of some very thought-provoking and hard-hitting articles dealing with the ethics, surveillance, and transnational activities of Russian intelligence, readers ALSO get to learn more in this issue about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Turkmenistan’s human rights record, and Kazakhstan’s entrance into the WTO. It is an issue, therefore, that cuts across domestic politics, global affairs, security, economics, and international organizations. This is something we at Modern Diplomacy hold dearly when it comes to the Caspian Project: so much that is happening in the world today, affecting so many countries, transects in one way or another the greater Caspian sea region. It shall always be a hub of activity and importance, far beyond the standard call about energy and natural resources.

Resumen: el estudio presente trata de dilucidar si la política exterior de Rusia responde a un modelo de neorrealismo ofensivo o defensivo. Con tal objeto se ha establecido un marco teórico comparativo entre ambas escuelas de las Relaciones Internacionales, incluyendo parámetros cualitativos diferenciadores. Así mismo, el análisis de datos se desarrolla de acuerdo con una metodología basada en un estudio de caso focalizado en la historia reciente de Rusia y en la guerra de Ucrania, y en tres variables: ideología, geopolítica y cultura. La actitud competitiva en el espacio exsoviético y la ruptura del statu quo y el uso de la fuerza en Ucrania mostrarían una tendencia ofensiva

Abstract: the present research tries to determine if Russia's foreign policy responds to a model of offensive or defensive realism. To this end, a theoretical framework has been established between the two schools of International Relations, including qualitative and parameters to differentiate. Likewise, the data analysis is developed according to a methodology based on a case study focused on the recent history of Russia and the war in Ukraine, and on three variables: ideology, geopolitics and culture. The competitive attitude in the ex-Soviet space and the rupture of the status quo and the use of the force in the Ukraine would show an offensive tendency.

The Caspian Project is a weekly digital magazine organized by the online analytical resource, Modern Diplomacy. Dr. Matthew Crosston is the Senior Editor of the project, which aims to acquaint people with this critically undervalued region of the world. The analyses go far beyond the standard issue of energy and encapsulates economics, politics, culture, religion, global affairs, conflict and peace.

In this number the senior editor discusses the subtle nuances behind the Iran deal that involves Saudi-Israeli counter-balancing, how DAESH factors into the region with great power politics, BRICS strategizing, and a unique perspective on the impact of Russian sanctions.