Free Republic

Sunday’s centenary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century, will largely go uncelebrated in his home country of Russia this weekend, where the revolutionary leader stands accused of laying a “timebomb” underneath Russia and Ukraine that has exploded in the past decade. There will be no parades or stirring speeches in Red Square. The obvious reason is that one of Lenin’s most strident critics is Vladimir Putin, who appears far more enamoured with the empire that Lenin’s revolutionaries overthrew. Often portrayed in official Soviet culture as a grandfatherly, nurturing figure who...

Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged Saturday to defend the country and its people from an armed rebellion declared by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, describing the call to action as a treasonous decision that puts the country’s survival in peril. In a televised address Saturday morning, Putin said the mutiny amounted to "a deadly threat to our statehood," vowing there will be "tough actions" in response. "All those who prepared the rebellion will suffer inevitable punishment," Putin stated. "The armed forces and other government agencies have received the necessary orders." While he did not call Prigozhin out by name, he...

The government of the southern Russian Voronezh region urged residents to avoid the M-4 north-south motorway connecting Moscow to southern regions because a military convoy was on the move there, after the leader of the Wagner private militia suggested that he planned to oust Russia's military leadership. The government said on its Telegram channel that the situation was under control and that measures were being taken to ensure public safety.

The owner of the Wagner private military contractor made his most direct challenge to the Kremlin yet on Friday, calling for an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister. The security services reacted immediately by opening a criminal investigation into Yevgeny Prigozhin and calling for his arrest. In a sign of how seriously the Kremlin was taking the threat, security was heightened in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don, which is home to the Russian military headquarters for the southern region and also oversees the fighting in Ukraine. Prigozhin claimed Saturday that his forces had reached Rostov, saying they faced no...

Tonight, footage taken on the streets of Moscow showed armoured vehicles racing to secure the Duma building, Russia’s parliament. Tanks and armoured vehicles were seen on the streets of Rostov, an important military outpost in Russia, from where Prigozhin reportedly believes the missile attack was personally directed by Shoigu. Roadblocks manned by special forces were set up around Moscow, as footage showed an armoured motorcade whisking Putin to the Kremlin for an emergency meeting. It is understood the shady Wagner thugs have already passed the first checkpoint on their way to Novocherkassk, where the army headquarters are. In a videotaped...

Russia’s FSB security service has opened a criminal case for armed mutiny against Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin after the mercenary chief accused the Russian military of targeting his forces and vowed to “destroy” his rivals, in an unprecedented escalation of infighting among Russia’s elite. The FSB said that Prigozhin’s statements “had no basis” adding that it had launched a criminal inquiry. The FSB later added that Prigozhin’s statements and actions constituted “calls for the start of an armed civil conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation.” The security service urged Wagner fighters “not to make irreparable mistakes, to stop any...

The Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has said Russia’s defence ministry concocted false pretences to trick Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine and said Moscow could have avoided the war entirely. In a half-hour tirade Prigozhin, founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, claimed Russia had faced no immediate threat from Ukraine when Putin began his full-scale invasion last year and accused the army’s top brass of deceiving the Russian president for their own personal gain. The extraordinary rant, posted on social media on Friday, was the former caterer’s latest salvo in a long-running spat with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin...

A document used in the Proud Boy trial was not theirs, it was written by a government stooge. Another chunk of evidence that the government set up and executed toward Americans was not written by the Proud Boys but By the US Government itself. The document best known as “1776 Returns” was not a Proud Boy document. The document was given to a woman by the name of Erika Flores, a love interest of the Proud Boy leader, Enrique Tarrio. This FBI and CIA member or associate asked her to share it with Tarrio! According to the Motion by attorney...

After the revolt of Bar Kokhba against the Roman Empire (132-135 C.E.), the Judea province was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to detach the Judean province from Jewish identity. In recent history, the area called Palestine includes the territories of the present-day Israel and Jordan (see the map). From 1517 to 1917 most of this area remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, in 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration for "the establishment in Palestine of a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPvwzeOY0uM

Six men sat down for a business meeting on the morning of October 18 last year, amid the hubbub and marble-columned opulence of Moscow’s iconic Metropol Hotel, to discuss plans for a “great alliance.” A century earlier, the grand institution was the scene of events that helped change the face of Europe and the world: Czarist forces fought from inside the hotel as they tried and failed to hold the Bolsheviks back from the Kremlin in 1917, and it was here, in suite 217, that the first Soviet Constitution was drafted after the revolution succeeded. The six men — three...

RUSSIA’S CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION of World War One was an army without a country. The 60,000-man unit, raised between 1915 and 1917, was made up of Czech and Slovak patriots keen to free their ancestral homeland from Austrian rule. By taking up arms in the name of the Russian Tsar, the men of the unit hoped that after the war the great powers would reward them with statehood. But when in 1917, the Bolsheviks rose to power following the collapse of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and then made a separate peace with the Central Powers, the Czechoslovak Legion suddenly found itself trapped...

Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from Putin’s speech as recorded by Twitter user @RWApodcast:“Ukraine was completely built and created by Lenin. He was its architect, including his orders on including Donbass in the Ukrainian Soviet republic by force.”“Now the ukrainians destroy lenin monuments and want decommunization. you want decommunization? We can show you what REAL DECOMMUNIZATION means in Ukraine.”“The destructive fantasies ofLeninist nation-building were never removed from the judicial basis of Soviet and post-Soviet statehood.”“Historically, the inhabitants of the south-western regions have called themselves ‘Russian’ and ‘Orthodox’. we think this is self-evident.”“Modern Ukraine was completely and utterly created by the...

Not since the 1970s has there been such an important discovery from the Great War in France. In woods on a ridge not far from the city of Reims, the bodies of more than 270 German soldiers have lain for more than a century - after they died the most agonising deaths imaginable.On 4 May 1917 the French launched an artillery bombardment targeting the two ends of the tunnel, sending up an observation balloon to get a sight on the north-facing slope. For once their accuracy was formidable. A shell fired from a naval gun hit the entrance, triggering more...

Is "1917" a wartime shoo-in for best picture, or might "Parasite" make some Oscar history Sunday night? The 92nd annual Academy Awards brings to a close yet another awards season, one in which the main acting categories are led by performers who've run roughshod over their competition. But the race for best picture is somewhat more up in the air. Sam Mendes' World War I thriller "1917" is the closest to a favorite, having won important Golden Globe, Producers Guild and Directors Guild awards. But Bong Joon-ho's South Korean black comedy "Parasite," which took the best ensemble award at the...

...I have long maintained – and the film 1917 brought it vividly back to mind – that one of the causes of the collapse of religion in Europe, and increasingly in the West generally, was the moral disaster of the First World War, which was essentially a crisis of Christian identity. Something broke in the Christian culture, and we’ve never recovered from it. ...For five awful years, an orgy of violence broke out among baptised people – English, French, Canadian, American, Russian and Belgian Christians slaughtering German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian Christians. And this butchery took place on a scale...

Here is my impression of the much anticipated movie, 1917.

The bleakly beautiful and intensely nerve-rattling “1917” (opening Friday) ostensibly is a war film set amid the brutal realities of trench warfare between England and Germany on the fields of rural France in World War I. And it is that, so much so that you can almost feel the mud and viscera ooze between your fingers when a soldier, who has landed in a pool of muck, mistakes a fallen fighter’s corpse for something sturdy and his hand plunges deep into a body cavity. But “1917,” the latest film from director Sam Mendes (who made the James Bond films “Skyfall”...

This week, Universal Pictures released a behind-the-scenes look at "1917," a story about two young soldiers — played by George MacKay ("Captain Fantastic") and Dean-Charles Chapman ("Game of Thrones") — who embark in a race against time through the apocalyptic hellscapes of the Western Front to deliver a message that could save 1,600 lives. To make the Great War as immersive and viewer-relatable as possible, Mendes and the Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins opted to shoot the entire film as a continuous shot that never departs from the two main characters. "From the very beginning I felt this movie should be...

“Unless President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder (or his successor) want to be seen as flaming hypocrites, Petraeus must now be prosecuted.”.....”What Petraeus is accused of is leaking classified documents to a journalist. That’s a very specific crime, falling under the Espionage Act of 1917. ”