Free Republic

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

An astronomer at the University of Western Ontario has found a Soviet moon rover in recently released images from a NASA satellite. Phil Stooke combed through data and images of the moon's surface from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that NASA released Monday. Stooke compared the images to his own recently published reference book on moon geography, The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration, and pinpointed the location of the Soviet rover Lunokhod 2. "The tracks were visible at once," said Stooke, in a statement. The location of the rover was already known through laser ranging experiments, but there's no telescope on...

Powered by 228,800 Lb-Ft of thrust, this Lun-class Ekranoplan was designed to carry two-million pounds of Europe-invading soldiers and vehicles and six nuclear missiles at speeds up to 340 MPH. Thank God Reagan defeated the Soviet Union.

Achievement: The nation that put the first man on the moon may have put its last as budget cuts slash NASA's plans to return. Men will return to the moon, but they will likely speak Chinese. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced in front of a joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of that decade. It was a clarion call to the American spirit and technology to rise up and prove that America's best days were still ahead. Forty-one years after Neil Armstrong set foot on...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia invited Ukrainian president-elect Viktor Yanukovich on Monday to visit Moscow, aiming to consolidate improved relations with Kiev after years of acrimony under the outgoing president. President Dmitry Medvedev made the invitation in a letter to Yanukovich released by the Kremlin press service. Ukraine's electoral commission confirmed on Sunday Yanukovich's win over his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in a runoff on February 7, paving the way for his inauguration. Tymoshenko says she intends challenging the result in court. If Yanukovich accepts the invitation, it could be his first foreign trip as president, reinforcing expectations that he will steer...

When I grew up, the Soviet Union was considered a super power. Today it doesn't even exist. Isn't it amazing how rapidly the images of national power can shift? I'm Swedish and know a little about fighting Russia. My family and our ancestors have done so for centuries. We have been shot at, raided, ambushed etc. But never intimidated from defending Nordic freedom. I'm no hero. Several of my ancestors were though and the least I can do in order to honor them is to stand up for what eternally is true and right, help build my own country and...

Closure of Soviet Concentration Camps Where ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ First Appeared Recalled 23 December 2009 By Paul Goble VIENNA – The theft of the sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which hung over the entrance to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz has not only sparked international outrage but also called attention to the place where those words first hung at a place of detention of the innocent in the 20th century – the Solovetsky Camps of Special Assignment in the USSR. Seventy years ago this month, Yury Brodsky writes in today’s Novaya Gazeta, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria shut down...

Hopeless Change Malcolm A. Kline, December 8, 2009 Always check the vintage of ideas that academic, political and media-elites label “new.” “In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal ‘cradle-to-grave’ healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine,” Yuri N. Maltsev writes in the Free Market newsletter published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. “The ‘right to health’ became a ‘constitutional right’ of Soviet citizens.” “The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would ‘reduce costs’ and eliminate the ‘waste’ that stemmed from ‘unnecessary duplication and parallelism’—i.e. competition.” Perhaps you could argue...

The future of the war in Afghanistan was on the line as Gen. Stanley McChrystal met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a secret rendezvous at a Belgian airbase in August. Gen. McChrystal, the top Western commander in Afghanistan, pushed for more U.S. troops to roll back the spreading Taliban-led insurgency. Mr. Gates, officials say, was skeptical. A quarter-century ago, he was a top Central Intelligence Agency officer aiding the anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, and he remembered how a 1985 decision by the Soviet Union to widen that earlier war had failed to turn the tide. In a speech to...

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vitaly Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin's purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness. He was 93. Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel physics prize for developing the theory behind superconductors, materials which allow electricity to pass without resistance at very low temperatures. He shared the prize with British-American Anthony Leggett and Russian-born U.S. scientist Alexei Abrikosov. But Ginzburg's career as a Soviet scientist almost ended when he took as his second wife a woman arrested in...

Once the butt of jokes the world over, communist-era East European goods from sweets, to rustic washing machines and clunky cars are all the rage again. As the world prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, souvenirs such as portraits of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu are now avidly sought at markets. In Belgrade, cafes are named after Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito or even the Soviet KGB secret police.

The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from "voting with their feet" and leaving a society they rejected...While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans -- hostile or sympathetic -- actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media's fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of...

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Even his best friend betrayed him. Stelian Tanase found out when he asked to see the thick file that Romania's communist-era secret police had kept on him. The revelation nearly knocked the wind out of him: His closest pal was an informer who regularly told agents what Tanase was up to. "In a way, I haven't even recovered today," said Tanase, a novelist who was placed under surveillance and had his home bugged during the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's regime. "He was the one person on Earth I had the most faith in," he said. "And...

By far, the best movie I have ever seen about the savagery and ruthlessness of Communism, an ideology which indeed puts Nazism and Fascism to shame.

Polish Resolution Names Soviet Invasion as Tyrannical Sets record straight in the face of Russian denials By Tom Ozimek Epoch Times Staff Sep 23, 2009 Poland's parliament passed a resolution on Wednesday intended to officially set the record straight on events surrounding the outbreak of the Second World War. "On 17th September, 1939, the army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) commenced hostilities within the territory of the Republic of Poland, without formal declaration of war, violating Poland's sovereignty and breaking international law. The basis for the Red Army's invasion was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, signed on 23rd August,...

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin praised President Obama Friday for canceling a plan for an antiballistic missile system in Eastern Europe that Russia had deemed a threat, suggesting that the move would lead to improved relations between their countries. “I very much hope that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others,” Mr. Putin said. The Obama decision on Thursday replaced the Bush administration antimissile plan with a reconfigured system focused on short- and medium-range missiles. Mr. Putin and other Russian officials who spoke to reporters on Friday did not say whether Russia would respond with...

Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security. "We do not want a united Germany," Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev at a lunch meeting in the Kremlin in September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the whole international situation and could endanger our security." Among the 1,000 transcripts of Politburo and other high-level papers smuggled out of Russia by...

Seven men convicted of killing the Grenadian prime minister in the 1983 coup that spurred a US military invasion of the Caribbean island state (pictured: US soldiers arrest Marxist militiamen) have been released from jail. AFP - Seven men convicted of the murder of Grenadan prime minister Maurice Bishop during a 1983 coup were set free Saturday, 26 years after the killing that spurred a US military invasion. Former deputy prime minister Bernard Coard was released, along with former ministers and senior officers from the People's Revolutionary Army, after Governor General Carlyle Glean reviewed their sentences. Scores of relatives, former...

Some would go farther and say that the memorandum from Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB that was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR, outlining a secret proposal made by Senator Ted Kennedy to the Soviets to help them "understand Reagan" in return for their help in making him president, constitutes treason. It's not a word to throw around lightly and the reason I refrain from using it is because I am unsure Kennedy's actions meet the definition. Kennedy was not in direct contact with Andropov, using his good friend John Tunney, former...

"In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a "nonpaying" patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually "not available" for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats." "Slavery certainly 'reduced costs' of labor, 'eliminated the waste' of bargaining for wages, and avoided 'unnecessary duplication and parallelism'." "To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the...