Vladislav Surkov

Lipetsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia. Its administrative center is the city of Lipetsk. As of the 2021 Census, its population was 1,143,224.

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR, previously known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic as well as being unofficially known as Soviet Russia, the Russian Federation or simply Russia, was an independent federal socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous Soviet socialist republic of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian SFSR was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev. It was the first Marxist-Leninist state in the world.

The Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was an autonomous republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in existence from 1936 to 1944 and again from 1957 to 1992. Its capital was Grozny. The 1979 census reported the territory had an area of 19,300 km2 (7,500 sq mi) and a population of 1,155,805 : 611,405 being Chechens, 134,744 Ingush, and the rest being Russians and other ethnic groups.

The Russians are an East Slavic ethnic group indigenous to Eastern Europe, who share a common Russian ancestry, culture, and history. Russian, the most spoken Slavic language, is the shared mother tongue of the Russians; Orthodox Christianity has been their historical religion since 988 AD. They are the largest Slavic nation and the largest European nation.

Lipetsk, also romanized as Lipeck, is a city and the administrative center of Lipetsk Oblast, Russia, located on the banks of the Voronezh River in the Don basin, 438 kilometers (272 mi) southeast of Moscow. Population: 496,403 (2021 Census); 508,887 (2010 Census); 506,114 (2002 Census); 449,635 (1989 Census).

Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner, a British army officer, and Rudolf Augstein, a former Wehrmacht radio operator who was recognized in 2000 by the International Press Institute as one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes. Typically, the magazine has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1.

Grozny, also spelled Groznyy, is the capital city of Chechnya, Russia.

Dzhokhar Musayevich Dudayev was the first President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a breakaway region in the North Caucasus, from 1991 until his assassination in 1996.

Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning 93,030 square kilometres (35,920 sq mi) of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and Slovenia to the southwest, and Austria to the west. Hungary has a population of 9.7 million, mostly ethnic Hungarians and a significant Romani minority. Hungarian, the official language, is the world's most widely spoken Uralic language and among the few non-Indo-European languages widely spoken in Europe. Budapest is the country's capital and largest city; other major urban areas include Debrecen, Szeged, Miskolc, Pécs, and Győr.

A defence minister or minister of defence is a cabinet official position in charge of a ministry of defense, which regulates the armed forces in sovereign states. The role of a defence minister varies considerably from country to country; in some the minister is only in charge of general budget matters and procurement of equipment; while in others the minister is also an integral part of the operational military chain of command. A defence minister could be titled minister for defense, minister of national defense, secretary of defense, secretary of state for defence, minister of war or some similar variation.

The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly the Main Intelligence Directorate, and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU, is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units.

Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, sometimes known by his initials MBK, is an exiled Russian businessman and opposition activist, now residing in London. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion, and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires. He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus, during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s.

Bank "MENATEP", Bank "MENATEP SPb" and "Group Menatep Limited" were financial companies, created by Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. "Group Menatep Limited", the US$29 billion holding company that had indirect controlling interest in Yukos Oil Company, was later renamed, and now still exists as holding company GML with Leonid Nevzlin as principal shareholder holding a stake of around 70 percent. The other four ultimate beneficial owners who own an equal stake each are Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Brudno, Vladimir Dubov and Vasily Shakhnovsky.

Mikhail Maratovich Fridman is a Ukrainian-born, Russian–Israeli businessman, billionaire, and oligarch. He is one of the co-founders of Alfa-Group, a multinational Russian conglomerate. According to Forbes, he was the seventh-richest Russian as of 2017. In May 2017, he was also ranked as Russia's most important businessman by bne IntelliNews. In August 2022, Fridman had a net worth of $11.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

ALFA-BANK JSC (Alfa-Bank), is the largest of the private banks in Russia. It was founded in 1990 by Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman, who is still the controlling owner today. Headquartered in Moscow, it operates in seven countries, providing financial services to 22 million active corporate customers and over 1 million active retail clients as of 2021. Alfa-Bank has been named Russia's best bank on numerous occasions by financial publications, and was placed 270th in the 2009 edition of The Banker magazine's Top 1000 World Banks. The bank is known internationally for its Alfa Fellowship Program, which gives emerging young leaders from around the world the opportunity to gain professional experience in various fields. Alfa-Bank is also well-known in Russia for its social and cultural initiatives, ranging from charity projects to educational programmes, exhibitions, concerts and music festivals. On March 1, 2022, Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven left the bank's board of directors after coming under EU sanctions imposed in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russian is an East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the native language of the Russians and belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is one of four living East Slavic languages, and is also a part of the larger Balto-Slavic languages. Besides Russia itself, Russian is an official language in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is used widely as a lingua franca throughout Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states. It was the de facto language of the former Soviet Union.

Bratsk is a city in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Angara River near the vast Bratsk Reservoir.

Mikhail Yefimovich Fradkov is a Russian politician who served as Prime Minister of Russia from 2004 to 2007. An Independent, he was the longest serving director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service from 2007 to 2016. Since 4 January 2017, Fradkov has been Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.

Channel One is a Russian state-controlled television channel. It is the first television channel to broadcast in the Russian Federation. Its headquarters are located at Ostankino Technical Center near the Ostankino Tower in Moscow.

PJSC Gazprom is a Russian majority state-owned multinational energy corporation headquartered in the Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg. As of 2019, with sales over $120 billion, it was ranked as the largest publicly listed natural gas company in the world and the largest company in Russia by revenue. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Gazprom was ranked as the 32nd largest public company in the world. The Gazprom name is a contraction of the Russian words gazovaya promyshlennost. In January 2022, Gazprom displaced Sberbank from the first place in the list of the largest companies in Russia by market capitalization. At present, the company is delisted from international markets, and continues substantial construction in its operational results.

NTV is a Russian free-to-air television channel that was launched as a subsidiary of Vladimir Gusinsky's company Media-Most. Since 14 April 2001 Gazprom Media controls the network. NTV has no official meaning according to Igor Malashenko, the author of the name and co-founder of the company, but in the 1990s unofficial transcripts of the acronym include "New" (Novoje), "Independent" (Nezavisimoje), "Non-governmental" (Negosudarstvennoje), "Our" (Nashe).

The Committee for State Security, commonly known as the KGB, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret-police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.

Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed "Iron Felix", was a Bolshevik revolutionary and official, born into Polish nobility. From 1917 until his death in 1926, Dzerzhinsky led the first two Soviet state-security organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU, establishing a secret police for the post-revolutionary Soviet regime. He was one of the architects of the Red Terror and decossackization.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union (USSR) which resulted in the end of the country's and its federal government's existence as a sovereign state, thereby resulting in its constituent republics gaining full independence on 26 December 1991. It brought an end to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide. The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned in December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to end itself.

Legislative election were held in Russia on 7 December 2003. At stake were the 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly.

M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University is a public research university in Moscow, Russia, and the most prestigious university in the country.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. He previously served as the 44th governor of New York from 1929 to 1933, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and a member of the New York State Senate from 1911 to 1913.

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth, and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky was a Russian political scientist who also described himself as a "political technologist". During the Soviet era, he was prosecuted as a dissident. From 1996 to 2011 he was a political adviser to Vladimir Putin. From then, he was a critic of the Russian government.

In justice and law, house arrest is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to their residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all. House arrest is an alternative to being in a prison while awaiting trial or after sentencing.

The Donbas or Donbass is a historical, cultural, and economic region in eastern Ukraine. Parts of the Donbas are occupied by Russia as a result of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Florida is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico; Alabama to the northwest; Georgia to the north; the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean to the east; and the Straits of Florida and Cuba to the south. It is the only state that borders both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. With a population exceeding 21 million, it is the third-most populous state in the nation as of 2020. It spans 65,758 square miles (170,310 km2), ranking 22nd in area among the 50 states. The Miami metropolitan area, anchored by the cities of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, is the state's largest metropolitan area with a population of 6.138 million, and the state's most-populous city is Jacksonville with a population of 949,611. Florida's other major population centers include Tampa Bay, Orlando, Cape Coral, and the state capital of Tallahassee.

Florida's 27th congressional district is an electoral district for the U.S. Congress and was first created in South Florida during 2012, effective January 2013, as a result of the 2010 Census. The first candidates ran in the 2012 House elections, and the winner was seated for the 113th Congress on January 3, 2013.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a politician and lobbyist from Miami, Florida, who represented Florida's 27th congressional district from 1989 to 2019. By the end of her tenure, she was the most senior U.S. Representative from Florida. She was Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2011–2013. In 1989, Ros-Lehtinen won a special election and became the first Cuban American elected to Congress. She was also the first Republican woman elected to the House from Florida. Ros-Lehtinen gave the first Republican response to the State of the Union address in Spanish in 2011, and gave the third in 2014.

Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. A Democrat from Illinois, Obama took office following a decisive victory over Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Four years later, in the 2012 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney to win re-election. Obama is the first African American president, the first multiracial president, the first non-white president, and the first president born in Hawaii.

Russia has concerned both the ability of directors of mass-media outlets to carry out independent policies and the ability of journalists to access sources of information and to work without outside pressure. Media of Russia include television and radio channels, periodicals, and Internet media, which according to the laws of the Russian Federation may be either state or private property.

This article discusses political parties in Russia.

Lyudmila Mikhaylovna Alexeyeva was a Russian historian and human-rights activist who was a founding member in 1976 of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and one of the last Soviet dissidents active in post-Soviet Russia.

Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is a Russian politician who has been serving as the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia since 2020. Medvedev also served as the president of Russia between 2008 and 2012 and as the prime minister of Russia between 2012 and 2020.

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was a Russian physicist, liberal politician, and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, whose life and activist career ended with his assassination in Moscow. In an earlier chapter of his political career, he was involved in the introduction of reforms into the Russian post-Soviet economy. In the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, he was the first governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (1991–1997). Later he worked in the government of Russia as Minister of Fuel and Energy (1997), Vice Premier of Russia and Security Council member from 1997 to 1998. In 1998, he founded the Young Russia movement. In 1998, he co-founded the coalition group Right Cause and in 1999, he co-formed Union of Right Forces, an electoral bloc and subsequently a political party. Nemtsov was also a member of the Congress of People's Deputies (1990), Federation Council (1993–97) and State Duma (1999–2003).

The Democratic Choice of Russia, before 1994 Choice of Russia Bloc was a Russian centre-right conservative-liberal political party. Later the party was self-disbanded and most members would merge into the Union of Right Forces.

Bank "MENATEP", Bank "MENATEP SPb" and "Group Menatep Limited" were financial companies, created by Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. "Group Menatep Limited", the US$29 billion holding company that had indirect controlling interest in Yukos Oil Company, was later renamed, and now still exists as holding company GML with Leonid Nevzlin as principal shareholder holding a stake of around 70 percent. The other four ultimate beneficial owners who own an equal stake each are Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Brudno, Vladimir Dubov and Vasily Shakhnovsky.

Russian is an East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the native language of the Russians and belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is one of four living East Slavic languages, and is also a part of the larger Balto-Slavic languages. Besides Russia itself, Russian is an official language in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is used widely as a lingua franca throughout Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states. It was the de facto language of the former Soviet Union.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.