None of Moscow’s think-tankers are wired to Putin’s murky conscience… But they channel sentiments, none more pressing than that of injured pride: Should not the Americans be given a little of their own medicine? Weakened by deepening domestic cleavages, shamed by Afghanistan, and preoccupied with China, the United States makes for a good target for […]
Joseph Djugashvili was a student in a theological seminary when he came across the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Bolshevik revolutionary. Thereafter, in addition to blowing things up, robbing banks, and organizing strikes, he became an editor, working at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik […]
President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he may run for a fourth presidential term in 2018, confirming the expectations of most Russians and frustrating those now working to restore free elections in Russia. If Putin runs and wins, it would keep him in power for about a quarter century and make him the nation’s longest-serving leader since […]
For some 45 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in a deadly embrace of the Cold War. Then, communism lost the war of ideologies, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the two superpowers went in different directions. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how the two countries still seem to be joined at the hip, with the U.S. at times imitating and at times almost […]
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill enjoyed an alcohol-fueled all-nighter in Moscow as World War II was in full swing, previously secret files have revealed. Relations between the two leaders were stiff until Churchill arranged a tete-a-tete with Stalin, with the aid of interpreters, which led to a late-night boozy banquet in 1942, according to files released by Britain’s National Archives. Read […]
VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book […]
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the Red Army‘s victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, prompting renewed debate over the legacy of Josef Stalin. Once again, many conservative Russians are hoping that the name Volgograd will one day be permanently changed back to Stalingrad. As a nod to them, local Volgograd deputies agreed to call the city Stalingrad during the six days of the battle’s anniversary every year. […]
Russia’s ruling regime is persisting in its attempts to rehabilitate the name of Joseph Stalin. For Vladimir Putin, this has been a consistent course—from the reinstated melody of Stalin’s national anthem to new school textbooks justifying Stalin’s mass purges as “adequate to the task of modernization.” In 2010, as Russia marked the 65th anniversary of […]
No one in the 20th century was responsible for more deaths than Mao Zedong (1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party; not Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler. The sheer size of China meant that Mao’s vicious, carefully premeditated policies led to more death, starvation, suffering and bloodshed than the work of anyone else in history’s […]
looking beyond borders 