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We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

Russian troops are indiscriminately murdering civilians and interning them in concentration camps, the embattled Georgian president charged yesterday, as he begged the West not to "appease" Moscow as it did with Nazi Germany. The startling accusations came as Russian troops blatantly violated a cease-fire by sending an armored convoy through the strategic city of Gori. The invaders first poured into Georgia five days ago - ostensibly in defense of a pro-Moscow breakaway region, South Ossetia. "What they are doing is exactly what Stalin did to Finland, what they've done to Afghanistan, what in the Second World War Germany was doing...

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolu tion insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine... wasn't genocide. Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country." Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers. And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide. The United...

Pete Seeger, America's best-known and most influential folksinger, wrote me a letter a few days ago. I did not expect to hear from him. Last June, I wrote in these pages about the new documentary on his life. The article ran under the headline "Time for Pete Seeger To Repent." My complaint was that the film, good as it is, did not give a completely honest account of Mr. Seeger's politics. The filmmaker, Jim Brown, interviewed me on camera, but he did not include any of my critical remarks in the final version. In my interview, I pointed out that...

Now in their 70s and 80s, children of the victims of Josef Stalin's political repressions remembered one of the darkest pages of Russia's history at a ceremony Wednesday in central Moscow. Several hundred people laid flowers and lit candles to honor the victims of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The 70th anniversary comes as the Kremlin, focused on restoring Russians' pride in their Soviet-era history, has been trying to soften public perception of Stalin's rule and hushing up the full horror of his...

A new manual for Russia's history teachers succinctly distills President Vladimir Putin's drive to rekindle patriotism, retelling events of the past six decades according to the Kremlin's preferred storyline: Russia is a great power that shouldn't be ashamed of its past. Backed by support from the president himself, the book, which rails against U.S. hegemony, is raising fears among some historians that the Kremlin is -- quite literally -- trying to rewrite history in a way that risks breeding ultranationalism and whitewashing the darkest chapters of Russia's past. ... The book, aimed at teachers of students who are in their...

The history of the Soviet gulag has been told before, most powerfully in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic, "The Gulag Archipelago," published in the 1970s. Yet so immense is this history, so vast was the whirlwind of terror that swept over the Soviet Union in the 1930s, that much is only now coming to light. The network of prison camps documented by Solzhenitsyn, we are learning, formed only part of the gulag system. There was a second or "hidden" gulag as well that destroyed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.

Drive down Victory Boulevard in Grozny, and you'd never think there had been a war in Chechnya. Five years ago this broad avenue looked like Stalingrad after World War II. Now it's flanked with new apartments and boutiques selling Italian clothes -- snip--- The rest of the world may not have noticed, but Russia's president has won the Chechen war. He did not start it, but he prosecuted it with the full might of Russia's military. The conflict was as brutal as any Europe has known in the last century. Grozny was bombed flat, along with half of Chechnya's towns....

Don't Miss: Springtime for the Dear Leader March 15, 2006 · Okay, you've just escaped North Korea. You were held there for years in the gulag of prison camps. Your only crime? Listening to South Korean radio about the death of Kim Il Sung. But you're out now. You've made it to freedom. What do you do? Why, put on a musical, of course. Director Jung Sung San's musical, Yodok Story just opened in Seoul. It deals with rape, beatings, murder... great family fare, no?

Fifty Years Later, Russians Regard Stalin Positively March 4, 2006 (Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in Russia think the tenure of one of the most notorious Soviet leaders was beneficial, according to a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation. 47 per cent of respondents believe Josef Stalin played a positive role in the country’s history. Stalin was the second leader of the Soviet Union, taking over after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. Stalin was responsible for a series of repressive campaigns—known as the Great Purge—during the 1930s. During his tenure, Stalin eliminated all possible political opposition...

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study.  It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed.  Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from 'mental rigidity,' 'dogmatism,' and 'uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness."  (B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, Oct. 2004, pp. 28-29)   As usual with leftists, the true meaning of their words is couched in deceptive code.  When the deceptions are peeled away we discover that ''dogmatism''...

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement. These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person. "He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a...

If I were a judge, I would sentence Durbin and his fellow travelers and comrades in the Gitmo Flat Earth Society to: Endless hours of sleep-deprived filibustering watching continued reruns of documented terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and their murder of thousands; the beheadings of journalist Daniel Pearl, Nicolas Berg and others; the films of Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein's sons, depicting the systematic torture and murder of hundreds of Iraqis; Hitler's concentration camps in Germany and the starvation, gassing, burning of millions of Jews; the carnage of Pol Pot's systematic fratricide of 2 to 3...

So Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois thinks our Guantanamo soldiers are like the Nazis? As a soldier stationed in Germany, the land where Hitler's Nazis once trod, I found my blood boiling by the words coming from the liberal Democratic senator from Illinois. Senator Durbin, along with the rest of his left wing and terrorist sympathizing party thinks President Bush should close the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, because--in his words--the soldiers at Gitmo are "acting like Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, Pol Pot, or others who had no concern for human beings." Two things here: Where is the outcry...

Last week's long-range confrontation between Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin was much more than a personal tiff involving two formidable Illinois Democrats who obviously are not fond of each other. It contrasted Daley's majority Democratic Party of bygone years with Durbin's minority Democratic Party of today. When Daley in his June 21 press conference referred to Durbin's rancorous comments about the U.S. military as a ''disgrace,'' he was only repeating in public what many old-line Democratic loyalists told me not for quotation. But Durbin's Washington party colleagues defended his comparison of the U.S. detention...

Okay, a quick show of hands. How many of you bought that “apology” from Dick Durbin? Which one, you ask? Well, let’s forget about the one where he blamed America for not being smart enough to understand his “nuance.” That was pretty much an insult to everyone’s intelligence. For that matter, so was the real apology, where he was sorry for potentially being “misunderstood” by the great unwashed. (That’s us, in case you’re curious). Now, I’m quite sure that all of you heard about Durbin’s little snit on the Senate floor, where he compared Gitmo to the worst depredations of...

You know things aren’t going well for the Democrats when their main fighting issue is what the room temperature is at Guantanamo Bay’s Motel 6. Among the brilliant ideas of the “We Support the Troops” party is to close down the island-resort prison center affectionately referred to as Gitmo. The people most upset about the “torture” are mainly a bunch of leftwing, bed-wetting socialists who have never supported the war in any form or at any stage, but who we are now supposed to take as objective, credible persons. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Idiot) breathlessly announced the extent of the torture...

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) says he was misunderstood, when he made his scurrilous comments on the Senate floor, last week. Saying that he would not apologize for his comments on Thursday, he issued this on Friday: “My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this administration, which add to the risk our soldiers face. I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings. Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and...

So now the Democrats are attacking our troops by comparing them to the guards in the Gulag Archipelago and Pol Pot death camps. Once again the Party is supporting the enemy Terrorists that we are fighting as always. The same Party who has supported the IRA, PLO, FLN, KLA, Hezbola and every other terrorist group that attacks America supports today’s terrorists killing Americans. The same Party that hid and supported the Gulag when it was run by the Soviet Union is now condemning those prisons of death. If Dick Durtbag wants to throw around words like Gulag, let’s take a...

Had Che Guevara not been executed by Bolivians in 1967, he may well be celebrating his 77th birthday this week. Or he may have endured a bloody death at the hands of other enemies. Had he lived, Western college students almost certainly would not be walking around campus mindlessly displaying his likeness on flaming red T-shirts. A dead martyr is much easier to lionize than a living dictator. Though he died nearly 40 years ago, Guevara is still sparking controversy. Rolling Stone magazine reported last week that guitar legend Carlos Santana was protested at his June 1 Miami concert. The...

”They gave me a good time in Cuba,” 15-year-old Afghan former-detainee Mohammed Ismail Agha said in a 2004 interview with the London Telegraph. "They treated us well,” elderly farmer Faiz Mohammed added. “We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes." Okay, maybe these are atypical examples, but can you believe even one person who survived the Soviet prison system came out with a favorable recommendation? “Great diet plan,” Ivan Ivanov said, “I lost 130 pounds!” Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan's description of the U.S. detention facility at...

They gave me a good time in Cuba,” 15-year-old Afghan former-detainee Mohammed Ismail Agha said in a 2004 interview with the London Telegraph. "They treated us well,” elderly farmer Faiz Mohammed added. “We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes." Okay, maybe these are atypical examples, but can you believe even one person who survived the Soviet prison system came out with a favorable recommendation? “Great diet plan,” Ivan Ivanov said, “I lost 130 pounds!”    Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan’s description of the U.S. detention facility...

For over 225 years, Americans have valued the rights spoken of in the Declaration of Independence – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans have spilt their blood and spent their treasure to protect these basic rights for themselves and others. Amnesty International’s stated purpose is to prevent human rights violations. Thus, one might expect the United States and Amnesty International to be allies. However, they are not because Amnesty International’s stated purpose and its actual purpose are very different. Whatever its claimed purpose, Amnesty International has become just another extreme Left anti-American organization. Amnesty International’s secretary general, Irene...

SEOUL, May 9 (Yonhap) -- U.S. President George W. Bush is reading a North Korean defector's book revealing gruesome human rights abuses in the Stalinist country, according to a White House source contacted in Seoul over the weekend. "I am in the middle of reading 'the Aquariums of Pyongyang,'" the White House source quoted Bush as saying in a recent meeting with aides. The White House source, whose name is being withheld by the Yonhap News Agency for privacy, told a friend in Seoul that Bush "appeared to be very concerned" about the plight of the 23 million North...

Just out of university Lev Mishchenko was sent to the Soviet front where he was captured and clung to life at a series of brutal camps including Buchenwald, little knowing 10 years hard labor in a gulag awaited him on his return home. ``As the war began the authorities announced the formation of volunteer militias. We organised in the universities and factories and around 100,000 of us Moscovites signed up,'' said Mr Mishchenko, who was 24 when the Soviet Union entered World War Two in June 1941. ``We thought we'd be trained and then led by career soldiers but they...

Budapest, Hungary, October 1997. It was a gorgeous fall day, the sun sparkling off the Danube, the domed Royal Palace glinting on Buda Hill, smartly dressed shoppers strolling along the Vaci. Just a few years ago this place had been a fear-ridden Russian colony. Now everyone on the street was chattering away on a cell phone. Back in the Soviet days, only the Nomenklatura – the Communist elite – could get a telephone, and even they were terrified of talking freely. I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news...

North Korea's hardline communist regime is using deadly nerve gas on its own citizens and possibly is operating experimental gas chambers, according to a Jewish human rights group. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told WorldNetDaily he went to Asia to talk with North Korean defectors who said they witnessed gruesome experimentations. Cooper began the investigation after learning of a BBC documentary in February 2004 based on interviews with a former North Korean official who had defected. The rabbi interviewed that man and two others, who confirmed the claims. The Rabbi interviewed a 55-year-old chemist who...

Two survivors of the North Korean prison camps spoke at the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and at the EU, a UK-based a Christian human rights charity reported Monday. The two survivors, both Christians, were imprisoned at the Yodok Political Prison Camp and suffered “appalling abuses,” according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. “In a political prison camp in North Korea, one must forget that he or she is a human being,” said 49-year-old Tae Jin Kim, initially defected to China in 1986 to escape North Korea. “I had to do many things to survive. I...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26, 2005 U.S. Airforce pilot Troy "Gordie" Cope is seen with his F-86 Sabre fighter sometime before he was shot down by a Russian flying a MiG-15 on Feb. 26, 2005. (Photo: AP (file)) (AP) Closing a curious chapter of Korean War history, the Pentagon announced Friday it had identified the remains of an Air Force pilot whose jet crashed on Chinese territory after being shot down during a dogfight with a Russian flying for North Korea. The case puts a spotlight on a Russian role in the 1950-53 Korean War that was kept quiet for decades and helped feed...

<p>A document from Russian archives lists American servicemen in Soviet custody in May 1945.</p> <p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. military service members may have been imprisoned and died in Soviet forced-labor camps during the 20th century, according to a Pentagon report to be released Friday.</p>

Poland marks 65 years since Stalin's deportation of Poles to Siberia AP Friday, February 11, 2005 WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Survivors marked 65 years yesterday since Soviet occupiers began sending Poles to Siberian labour camps after signing a pact with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland. Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, at least 320,000 Poles from what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania were deported between February 1940 and June 1941. Historians estimate that some 20 to 30 per cent perished from forced labour in subfreezing temperatures, disease and starvation. A wreath-laying ceremony at a monument to the deportees marked...

WASHINGTON -- The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army as it pursued the retreating Nazis is upon us. It is perhaps a good occasion for me to recall what has been one of the strongest formative influences on my political point of view, the Holocaust. I learned about it in early grammar school under peculiar circumstances In the seventh and eighth grades in the mid-1950s I was an unruly student. Particularly when the teacher would demand of her class "silence," I became oddly loquacious. Thus I was forever being banished to the back of the...

Prosecuting the Gulag The gulag destroyed most of its faithful before they could be confronted with their crimes. By Peter Rollberg Published: January 21, 2005 There was a time in the West when it took courage to mention the gulag in some liberal circles. Intellectuals and politicians who brought up the system of concentration camps that stretched from corner to corner of the Soviet Union could easily be labeled "anti-communists," "anti-Soviets" or simply "cold warriors." Turning a blind eye to the millions of victims of communism is among the Western left's gravest original sins, and one it still has to...

My intention is not to make anyone panic. But we all have to realize that the election this November, is, in my opinion, the most important of the post World War Two era. The election will determine whether you will live in the America you were born in, or whether America will be transformed into a totally new country (one similar to France, Cuba, Netherlands, etc.) In 1972, George McGovern run as an anti-war liberal. But he never revealed any intention to radically transform American culture. In 1976, Jimmy Carter run as a moderate, who was to the right of...

Kwon Hyok is one of about 4,000 North Korean defectors living in Seoul, South Korea. Most escaped because of hunger, fear, torture, imprisonment or a simple hatred of the regime. But Kwon Hyok is not one of those. In 1999 he was a North Korean intelligence agent stationed in Beijing when he was persuaded by the South Koreans to defect. Six years before, in 1993, Kwon Hyok says he was Head of Security at prison camp 22 in Haengyong, an isolated area near the border with Russia. Camp 22 is one of a network of prisons in North Korea modelled...

Nearly 60 years ago last week, Auschwitz was liberated. On Jan. 27, 1945, four Russian soldiers rode into the camp. They seemed "wonderfully concrete and real," remembered Primo Levi, one of the prisoners, "perched on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky." But they did not smile, nor did they greet the starving men and women. Levi thought he knew why: They felt "the shame that a just man experiences at another man's crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist." Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so...

NORILSK, Russia, Jan. 22 — Stalin imprisoned people here, exploiting their labor to build an industry in icy isolation. His Soviet successors enticed them here with higher salaries and ideological cant to conquer the forbidding Arctic. Now Russia wants people to leave Norilsk — only to find that most would rather stay, despite poverty, corrosive pollution from ever-billowing smokestacks and insufferable weather that plunges temperatures below freezing for most of the year. Advertisement Burdened by the costs of sustaining 10 million people in a vast, frozen region that stretches from the Kola Peninsula in the west to Chukotka in the...

In Bangkok this week, President Bush used long words -- multiparty talks, security guarantees, long-range missiles -- to discuss the problem of North Korea with North Korea's neighbors. Here in Washington, on the other side of the globe, a small organization called the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will today use pictures to discuss the problem of North Korea with anyone who wants to listen. The pictures that the committee has procured -- and now published, together with a report called "The Hidden Gulag" -- are satellite photographs of North Korean concentration camps. With remarkable clarity they...

North Korea detains up to 200,000 people in "slave" camps where torture and executions are routine and starvation is widespread, a report released yesterday said. The study by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea told how pregnant women among thousands of North Koreans repatriated from China are forced to abort their infants or watch their babies killed after birth, in case the fathers are foreign. The Hidden Gulag - Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps was compiled by David Hawk, a former United Nations human rights investigator, who has in the past reported on the Khmer Rouge genocide...

EOUL, South Korea, Oct. 21 — A new report on human rights in North Korea says hundreds of thousands of prisoners work in often life-threatening conditions in at least 36 camps hidden in isolated valleys and mountains of the closed Stalinist country.Torture, meager rations and the imprisonment of entire families are routine, according to the report, which draws on the accounts of 30 former prisoners and prison guards, including several North Koreans who were later among the tens of thousands who have fled to China to escape famine and repression.In a new step, satellite photographs are matched with information from...

On April 18, 2002, Yang Jianli, a U.S.-based Chinese activist who openly calls for democracy in China, went to China for a short visit after 13 years in exile. A week later, after visiting some cities rocked by protests of unemployed workers, he disappeared. He was secretly arrested by the Chinese government and has been jailed incommunicado for more than a year. Recently the Chinese government announced that it is charging Yang with illegally entering China and espionage, charges which carry sentences ranging from ten years' imprisonment up to the death penalty. Yang's ordeal is, sadly, not an anomaly. In...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. CHEYENNE -- A prison industries mushroom farm at Shoshoni is a significant economic development opportunity for the region, a policy analyst for Gov. Dave Freudenthal says. In a letter to John Faunce, former executive secretary for the Wyoming State AFL-CIO, Michael Howe wrote that the farm also is a chance to provide prisoners with much needed vocational training during the construction phase of the project and valuable employment once the farm is up and running. "It is true that during the construction phase prisoners will be paid less than minimum wage...

The horror story of the Soviet gulags was a book long overdue, its author tells Tina Faulk. What started you off on your book [Gulag: A History of the Soviet Concentration Camps]? I have lived in Eastern Europe, on and off, for many years. I wanted to read a book like this, and I found it strange that I was unable to find one. I also wondered why the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler. Ken Livingstone, a former British MP, now Mayor of London, once struggled to explain the...