Ex-Soviet region feeling more isolated
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The Kvint Distillery with its smooth, wooden casks full of honey-colored brandy is so revered in Trans-Dniester that it graces the 5-ruble bank note.
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A breakdown of which former Soviet republics enjoy generally warm official ties with Russia and which have a chillier relationship:
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MOSCOW -- Maintaining control over the North Caucasus region, where the plains of southern Russia give way to mountain ridges and the predominant faith changes from Orthodox Christianity to Islam, has been Moscow's headache for centuries.
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LODZ, Poland  - Once a byword for poverty and post-communist racketeering, Poland's second largest city of Lodz was a place people wanted to escape. Today some are moving back, drawn by foreign investment and falling unemployment.
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Chechnya is often called a breakaway republic, but the militant separatists who have harried Russian forces for more than a decade and struck with bold attacks within and beyond the mostly Muslim region's borders are a relatively small segment of a population long tired of bloodshed.
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PEREDELKINO, Russia -- The unpaved, unlit roads are clogged with traffic. Getting to and from work in the center of Moscow is a 90-minute crawl each way. The schools are lousy. There are no stores within walking distance. Local health-care facilities are primitive.
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Belarusians' decision whether to scrap presidential term limits in a referendum this weekend could determine if this East European nation will remain an isolated Soviet-style throwback or slowly turn toward the ...
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Primo summit sul territorio dell'ex Unione sovietica
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The southern Russian Republic of Chechnya is surrounded on nearly all sides by Russian territory but also shares with neighbouring Georgia a remote border high in the Caucasus mountains.
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Once a symbol of post-Soviet industrial decay, many are reviving and boosting local economies.
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More than 50 former Soviet dissidents who spent years in prisons and Siberian exile say Russia is in danger of slipping back into a police state under President Vladimir Putin and the former KGB colleagues he has brought to power.
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PIMCHAKH, Russia  - Listening to enigmatic Koryak-language songs and eating traditional salmon soup and cutlets in this village, it is easy to imagine indigenous cultures still thrive on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula.
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MARKHAYANOVA, Russia  - The Kolyma used to be a river of death for prisoners in some of the harshest camps of Josef Stalin's Gulag empire. Now the camps are long gone, but so too is the activity of a once-bustling Soviet Arctic outpost.
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GLASGOW, May 29 (IPS) - Representatives of civic groups from the  post-Soviet region admit that their organisations are sometimes  more closely following the democratisation line set by donors  than the aspirations of their societies.
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born out of a former gulag north of the Arctic Circle - come to be a key player in South Africa&#39;s gold industry? There used to be a lot of talk about foreign companies running off with Russian resources.
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The 17 children of Ruvin Avshalomov tell the story of this Azeri mountain village, where houses have grown more chic and life a lot more quiet in the years since the Soviet break-up.
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MOSCOW (CP) - War clouds are gathering over the former Soviet Caucasus region as Georgia's U.S.-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili moves to re-unite his fractured nation by pressuring two separatist provinces that have close ties to Russia.