Robert Coalson worked as a correspondent for RFE/RL from 2002 to 2024.
A schoolteacher in Bashkortostan is opening eyes by trying to live for six months without spending more than the $158 a month that the Russian government defines as the subsistence minimum.
Eighty years ago this month, investigators of dictator Josef Stalin's secret police claimed to have uncovered a "fascist terrorist gang" of deaf people in Leningrad. By the time they finished extracting confessions and denunciations, 35 people had been executed and 20 more sent to Stalin's labor camps.
Russian leftist activist Sergei Udaltsov has returned to Moscow after spending 4 1/2 years in prison. He confronts a fractured political environment that is much changed from the one he helped shape in 2012.
If the Russian government doesn't quickly start doing more to combat the spread of HIV infections and to treat those already infected, activists say, the country can expect 20,000 AIDS deaths this year and more in the following years.
The mayor of the Far Eastern port of Magadan has found himself in a Twitter spat with local bloggers over his claims to have beautified the city.
Several times each year, the huge and troubled AvtoVAZ car factory in Tolyatti closes down and sends its 37,000 workers on forced vacation. Workers say their vacation allowances are so small that they must scramble to make ends meet during the idle time.
Tightening its grip over the illegally annexed Ukrainian region of Crimea, Moscow is pushing ahead with the construction of a $2 billion highway across the peninsula. But hundreds of residents say their property rights are being trampled in the rush to get the project under way.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has joined the growing campaign calling for a ban on a forthcoming film about a love affair between the future Tsar Nicholas II and a ballerina.
As he approaches his 85th birthday next month, legendary Russian satirist Vladimir Voinovich is still looking ahead -- and he is calling on Russia to do likewise.
The 80th anniversary of the formal beginning of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's 1937 Great Terror passed without any official notice from the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But people whose families were torn apart by the government's assault on its own people are trying to be heard.
A growing campaign in Russia and abroad has emerged to support Novaya Gazeta journalist Ali Feruz, who has been ordered deported to Uzbekistan. Friends and activists are convinced it is very likely Feruz would be tortured, imprisoned, or even killed in the authoritarian Central Asian country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the United States to reduce the staff of its diplomatic missions by 755 people in the latest twist in souring relations between the two countries. The situation brings to mind late 1986, when the Soviet authorities suddenly barred Washington from hiring Soviet citizens to work at its missions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to famed rights activist Lyudmila Alekseyeva to mark her 90th birthday. The move drew criticism that the strongman was cynically using the revered figure to soften his own lamentable record on human rights.
The U.S. and Russian presidents are set to meet for the first time on July 7 at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. But U.S. allegations that Moscow interfered in last year’s election have strained efforts to get relations back on track.
In the six years that Russian state tenders have been made public, a prison in Novosibirsk has signed millions of dollars' worth of suspicious noncompetitive contracts with companies controlled by one regional legislator.
One of Russia's most prominent lawyers has quit his post on the faculty of the Moscow State Law Academy in protest after officials there installed a plaque commemorating a speech given at the school by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1924.
Former Kursk Oblast lawmaker Olga Li has been convicted of defamation in a case that she sees as revenge for her opposition positions in the legislature and her work editing a critical local newspaper.
In April, two Moscow courts rejected lawsuits filed by female Aeroflot flight attendants against company rules that allegedly discriminate on the basis of age and appearance. But the plaintiffs are undaunted and plan to take their case as far as they need to.
After the World Health Organization warned participants in European gay-pride festivals to take precautions against hepatitis-A, the Russian government went one step further – recommending that all Russians traveling to Europe get vaccinated.
The head of an embattled Moscow theater has appealed to theatergoers to prove that a production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was not, after all, just a dream.
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