Free Republic

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Citing history—or, as shall be seen, pseudohistory—is one of the main ways Islam’s apologists try to ennoble Muhammad’s creed and its adherents. As a sort of counterbalance to purportedly noble Muslims, medieval Christians are regularly presented as the epitome of intolerance and violence. Commonly leading the pack are Vlad the Impaler and Ivan “the Terrible” (both featured in the 2002 book, The Most Evil Men and Women in History). In reality, however, these men—and the culture they lived in—were significantly influenced by Islam; they were surrounded by and...

On December 29, 1543, Ivan the Terrible arrived — with the summary execution of hated boyar Andrei Shuisky (Shuysky). Call it Ivan’s rite of passage. The 13-year-old Ivan IV had technically “ruled” Russia since toddlerhood, when his father died suddenly in the prime of life. But in reality, the “ruler” was not the master of his domain. The powerful boyar nobles ran roughshod during his minority, scrapping for power, poisoning off his mother,* and behind the Kremlin’s closed doors overtly treating the kiddo’s regal person like a redheaded stepchild. “What evil did I suffer at [the boyars’] hands!” Ivan later...

The newly revealed exploits of spies who operated in underground tunnels The CIA dug a tunnel under the Kremlin and installed a hi-tech bugging system to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's most senior figures, according to the former US intelligence officer who executed the plan. The device was put in by a US agent who had to wear a protective suit and was guided by satellite and sonar images of Moscow's underground. The bugging formed part of audacious operations to rescue a key defector, a KGB officer with responsibility for eavesdropping, and to alert Boris Yeltsin to the attempted coup...

The memory of Stalin’s Terror is now receiving more attention in Russia than at any time since the 1980s. The Stalin epoch’s influence on Russia is undeniable. Present-day Russians mainly live in a country inherited from the Stalin-era Soviet Union, not least in terms of infrastructure, architecture and social institutions. However, scholars, intellectuals and journalists agree that Russian society has yet to thoroughly work through the totalitarian legacy of Stalin’s era. According to a recent Levada-Center poll, Stalin’s popularity is actually rising. Around 40 percent of respondents expressed positive attitudes towards Stalin, while around one third agreed that Russia now...

Intrigue over how German-made 12th century blade, adorned in Sweden, reached Siberia... An exciting new theory has now emerged that it could have belonged to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and came from the royal armoury as a gift at the time of the conquest of Siberia. The hypothesis, twinning an infamous Russian ruler and a revered battle hero, could turn it into one of the most interesting archaeological finds in Siberian history, though for now much remains uncertain. What Siberian experts are sure about is that the beautifully engraved weapon was originally made in central Europe, and most likely in...

http://www.chosun.com/international/news/200506/200506170015.html/begin my tanslationThe 'Disappeared Lake' of Russia Found 100m UndergroundChung Byong-sun 06/17/05  In a bizarre twist of nature, a lake disappeared overnight in Russia. A lake turned into a mud pit overnight in Nizhni Novogorod, 250km to the east of Moscow. The picture shows the shore of what used to be lake, and its bottom. (Moscow) The mystery surrounding a lake which disappeared one night in Russia last May has been finally solved. On May 19th, a lake holding one million cubic meter of water disappeared without a trace in the village of Bolotnikovo in Nizhni Novgorod, 250km to the east...

BERLIN (AP) — John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker who was convicted of being a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp despite steadfastly maintaining over three decades of legal battles that he had been mistaken for someone else, died Saturday, his son told The Associated Press. He was 91. Demjanjuk, convicted in May of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison, died a free man in his own room in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach. He had been released pending his appeal. John Demjanjuk Jr....

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz,...

Ivan the terribly rude By John Vincent (Filed: 02/01/2004) In a barely literate rant that would have landed him in the Tower had he been an Englishman, the Russian ruler railed against the Queen's "boorish" advisers and likened her to an old maid. The letter, discovered at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, was especially inadvisable since at the time it was written, on Oct 28, 1570, the tsar was involved in a courtship of England and in particular English trade. But, historians will speculate, perhaps it was the failure of a courtship of a different kind that prompted...

Ivan the Terrible Stalin admired him. The rest of Europe believed he was mad. What is certain is that he was one of the most ruthless tyrants in history. The name 'Ivan the Terrible' conjours up images of senseless cruelty and paranoia. Yet, for many in Russia, he is a national hero. Ivan appears to be a man of huge contradictions - a man of God who personally tortured his victims and beat his own son to death; a hardened despot who often behaved like a coward, asking his ally, Elizabeth I of England, for political asylum; a man who...