Free Republic

Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is not so much an oral history as a lament. The work is multi-vocal, like a chorus, pierced in places by the solo of an anguished voice. Readers are swept on by a cadence that can ebb and swell with tidal force. The tone induces something close to a trance, demanding a complete surrender to its message of despair. This is no dry account of politics, no tasteful essay on the ending of the Soviet dream. Like any true lament, it comes from a primeval...

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded --and would soon destroy -- a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany's best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942-43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II. Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war. During the horrific Battle of...

The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization. The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition...

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the worst mistakes ever made: the Communist revolution in Russia. Communist regimes went on to kill about 100 million people. Most died in famines after socialist tyrants forced people to practice inefficient collective farming. Millions of others were executed in political purges. Yet when the Russian Revolution happened, people both inside and outside Russia were excited. Crowds cheered Lenin. No longer would nobles rule; no longer would capitalists exploit workers. Now the people would prosper together. British journalist Theodore Rothstein wrote, "The undivided sway of the Imperialist nightmare is at an...

Those who think “Fake News” started with Trump and the media’s “slobbering love affair” with a U.S. president started with Obama should have seen John F. Kennedy’s term. Imagine Obama's term with no Fox News, internet or talk radio. That’s about what JFK enjoyed. And tragically, the fairy tales Kennedy’s court scribes concocted about JFK’s Pattonesque handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis prevail in media/academic circles even today. In fact, you’d never guess this from the “think pieces” from today’s “Best and Brightest” in the Fake News media, but that Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile...

On November 7 the world will mark a grim anniversary: One hundred years since the small but devout faction of Marxists called the Bolsheviks lost a popular election. It was the last one Russia would see for 70 years. Instead of accepting the peopleÂ’s will, the Bolsheviks overthrew that countryÂ’s fledgling provisional government. That revolution unleashed a nightmare: a vicious civil war, the mass killing of clergy and religious believers, the slaughter of businessmen and landlords, and the building of concentration camps, 20 years before Hitler. In a single day, the Bolsheviks were known to boast, they killed more dissidents...

Nearly half of Russian citizens approve of 1939's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a Levada Center poll released on Wednesday has found. Thirteen percent of Levada’s respondents said they “definitely approve” of the pact, while 32 percent they “somewhat approve” of it. A combined 17 percent said they “definitely” or “somewhat” disapprove of the treaty that the USSR and Nazi Germany signed on Aug. 23, 1939. Two-fifths of the 1,600 people polled said they had “heard of” the pact and “think that it happened in real life,” the survey revealed. One-third said they’ve never heard of...

The Austin based Anti-fascists group, Red Guards Austin, has been gaining prominence in the Texas Antifa movement. As we have previously reported, they are a self described autonomous Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective and their website contains multiple reports on their confrontational and often armed demonstrations. They also openly advocate for violent revolution against capitalism. “we must seriously take up the task not only of self-defense on the personal and community level, but we must also struggle to unite all genuine antifascists behind the necessity of revolution. Revolution means the long fight for communism and nothing less.” In a recent blog titled...

This is the Soviet soldier found alive 30 years after dying in Afghanistan By Blake Stilwell Aug. 03, 11:08 AM Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Russian 101st Motorized Rifles were caught in a firefight with the Mujahideen near the city of Herat. A young soldier, 20-year-old Bakhretdin Khakimov, was wounded in the fighting, lost on the battlefield, and presumed dead. Until now. Bakhretdin Khakimov in 1980 and now. Khakimov was a draftee from Samarkand who had only been in the Red Army a short time when he was injured in Herat Province, near Shindand. Some 30 years...

While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, such as coordinating Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party computers.Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information. Mr. Steele was paid by the Democrat-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS with money from a Hillary Clinton backer. Fusion...

Give Joe Scarborough credit. Just when we were getting bored with all the Trump/Nazi analogies, Joe has come up with a new one. On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough compared Trump press secretary Sean Spicer to an old Soviet spokesman and propagandist. Scarborough’s beef was that Spicer had supposedly said that the meeting of Trump campaign people including Donald, Jr. and the Russians was “just about adoptions.” Joe called that a “lie.” But have a look at the screenshot below, showing what Spicer actually said. View the video here.

Never-before-seen information reveals Reagan's “supersecret investigation” into the shooting and wounding of the pope.Contrary to what “pragmatists” in U.S. government agencies concluded, top officials with the Soviet Union were behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, a biographer of Ronald Reagan told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview. Paul Kengor, a Grove City College political science professor and author, has acquired what he calls never-before-seen information about the Reagan administration’s “supersecret investigation” into the shooting and wounding of the pope. The information details the role of the Soviet GRU, the Russians’ brutal foreign military intelligence unit,...

ST Petersburg underground has reportedly been rocked by an “explosion” leaving several people injured. A shocking picture has emerged appearing to show a train door blown off – with catastrophic damage inside.

Orthodox Church pilgrimages with prayers and wreath-placing ceremonies take place every year “in memoriam” of those who sought freedom at all costs and did not wish to live under the Soviet boot across the border from their national roots Political elites have used social engineering to control masses of people and territories over the millennia. They have redrawn borders and moved tribes and herded people into harsher environments, not ideally suitable for human habitation and agriculture; they have sent humans to occupy already heavily populated areas through invasion, conquering them, destroying the local inhabitants’ religion in the process, and forcing...

Acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and denounced anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84... Yevtushenko gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s, with poetry denouncing Josef Stalin. He gained international acclaim as a young revolutionary with "Babi Yar," the unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union... Until "Babi Yar" was published, the history of the massacre was shrouded in the fog of the Cold War...

The Russian military is building a replica of Berlin's Reichstag building as a playground for teenagers to attack at a patriotic theme park. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who made the announcement Wednesday, said the replica at the Patriot Park just outside Moscow will be smaller than life size. The images of Soviet Army soldiers hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag in May 1945 have been iconic in Russia, and speaking at parliament, he added to lawmakers' applause that the idea is for Yunarmia members 'to storm a specific location, not something abstract'.

As we look back tomorrow at the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, an important question should be raised: could the USSR actually have won the Cold War? Or maybe a better question: at least survived? That was something we asked Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard University back in 2014.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to remind people, we were the first, this program was the first to actually make big news out of this. When the Soviet Union imploded, when the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet communism came to a screeching halt -- communism did not. Soviet communism did. But communism didn't lose anything. Communism just kept right on going. They found a new home in the environmental movement and they've been off to the races. Many people are laboring under a misconception that with the fall of Soviet communism, we also saw the defeat of communism in...

Russia is developing a secret nuke train, which can travel 1,500 miles in a day towards Putin's enemies before launching rockets. The trains, packed with ballistic missiles, will be disguised as ordinary passenger or freight trains, making them virtually impossible to identify. Chilling test footage shows the trains can be stopped in their tracks at a moment's notice to deploy the huge rocket launchers. It sounds like something from a James Bond film, but the trains are one step closer to being put into use, following a successful test launch on missiles for the Barguzin 'railway-based combat rocket system', carried...

Our ancestors made America great, and so shall we, again In the Soviet Union, a.k.a. the Evil Empire, over 90 percent of eligible citizens voted in national elections, of which over 90 percent voted for the members of their ruling clique. All the candidates were government-approved, and national propaganda (all Soviet main-stream media) were 100 percent in favor of those whom the ruling clique wanted to get elected. Although formally a democracy (“People’s Democracy” was sometimes used to describe it), the above insidious arrangement was the main instrument in the hands of the Soviet ruling clique with which to decide...