Let other mayors fret about potholes, taxes and sewers. This is an Olympic city, and here is the jeans-clad mayor striding into his office on a recent afternoon, fresh from a landslide, and not the electoral kind. When Sochi won the 2014 Games, life ...

First, Vladimir Putin accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of inciting protests against him at the end of 2011. The next fall, the Russian president threw the U.S. Agency for International Development out of his country. Then he decided civic groups that get U.S. financing must ...

In the Soviet era, female political prisoners who were sent to labor in Russia’s Mordovia region described their privations in tiny words written on cigarette papers, which took months to reach the world. Today, an inmate can hand a real letter to a husband, ...

Every year, around 25 million passengers enter Sheremetyevo airport — and usually they come out again. Not Edward Snowden. The guy who was made famous by spilling the beans about U.S. surveillance programs has managed to keep his own whereabouts strictly hush-hush. Somehow he ...

A country doctor, a tiny, dilapidated village hospital, an indifferent health bureaucracy — and now, coming to the rescue, volunteers from distant Moscow, bringing furniture, equipment, money and, maybe most important, good cheer. In the background, though, is the Parliament — weighing a law ...