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“The Death of Stalin” is a British-French political satire about the controversial Soviet leader, directed by Scottish writer Armando Iannucci and based on a graphic novel of the same name. Two days before its premiere, the Russian Ministry of Culture announced that it was withdrawing the screening license...after prominent cultural figures expressed concern over its ideological content at a public screening. “The Death of Stalin' should not be shown in Russia due to signs of 'ideological animosity,’” TASS cited Yuri Polyakov, a member of the ministry’s public council as saying. "The film insults our historical symbols -- the Soviet anthem,...

Russia's culture ministry on Tuesday withdrew permission for the release of British film The Death of Stalin later this week after officials and top arts figures labelled it offensive and "extremist". Armando Iannucci's comedy, which had a world premiere in September, takes a satirical look at the power scramble after Stalin's 1953 death and includes actors playing historical figures such as World War II commander Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Nikita Kruschev and Vyacheslav Molotov. "The distribution certificate for the film 'The Death of Stalin' has been withdrawn," a spokeswoman for the culture ministry told AFP. The ministry said the film's release...

Born in 1912, Kim Il Sung went to the Soviet Far East in the 1930s to train with Stalin's military during the war against Japan, which had occupied the Korean peninsula since 1910. The North makes much of Kim, the heroic soldier. But whether he actually fought against the Japanese is a matter of debate. What's clear is that Stalin believed Kim was trustworthy, and after the Soviet invasion of the peninsula in 1945, installed him as the Communist leader in the North. A virtual unknown in his country, he seized power with considerable help from the Soviet Union and...

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour. Beria and Stalin, back...

Arizona lawmaker Jeff Flake compared Donald Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on Wednesday, delivering a blistering attack on the president to a nearly empty U.S. Senate chamber. The Republican has become one of Trump's favorite targets, earning a presidential nickname – 'Jeff Flakey' – since his impending retirement has freed him to openly castigate the White House on several fronts. 'It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,' Flake said, citing a Trump tweet in which he branded five news outlets 'the...

Sen. Jeff Flake said Monday that his upcoming speech was “in no way” comparing President Trump and former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “Joseph Stalin was a killer. Our president is not,” Mr. Flake, Arizona Republican, explained in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He emphasized the non-comparison in a subsequent tweet with a link to the article.

Sen. Jeff Flake is planning to slam President Donald Trump's attacks on the press on the Senate floor this week in a speech that will compare the president's use of the term "enemy of the people" to describe the media to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. "When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him 'fake news,' it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press," Flake, R-Ariz., will say, according to excerpts of the speech provided to NBC News. Trump called the media the "enemy of the people" in a February...

Now, let us begin by answering the question which our sermon topic raises: Can a Christian be a communist? I answer that question with an emphatic “no.” These two philosophies are diametrically opposed. The basic philosophy of Christianity is unalterably opposed to the basic philosophy of communism, and all of the dialectics of the logician cannot make them lie down together. They are contrary philosophies. Now, there are at least three reasons why I feel obligated as a Christian minister to talk to you about communism. The first reason grows out of the fact that communism is having widespread influence...

While Stalin is a widely reviled figure in the West, he has a more complicated legacy in Russia, where many remember him as being a strong figure in the country, especially during World War II. In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has pushed for a revised view of Stalin’s legacy that downplays his role in mass purges as simply mistakes made by a great leader. A total of 46 percent of Russians expressed some kind of positive view of Stalin in Levada’s poll, the highest percentage of positive answers since Levada began asking the question in 2001. Thirty-two percent...

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides a deeply reported, bottom-up explanation of Russia's resurgence under Putin. By cleverly exploiting the memory of the Soviet victory over fascism in World War II, Putin's regime has made ordinary Russians feel that their country is great again. Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised...

A Russian historian whose exposure of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crimes angered state officials is due to begin enforced psychiatric testing this week amid fears he will be falsely declared insane, his lawyer said on Tuesday. Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing "the main elements of" a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor. Some of Russia's leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin's crimes - he found a mass grave with up...

As America begins preparations for Sunday’s New Year’s Eve festivities, some might be celebrating another holiday — that of the formation of the Soviet Union. The USSR, established Dec. 30, 1922, by Vladimir Lenin, was born out of the same needless bloodshed that would later define it. Five years prior in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution began, sparking a civil war that would leave millions dead, many by sheer acts of murder committed by competing factions.

How should comtemporary Russians remember Soviet-era political repressions?OrthoChristian.com continues its endeavor to publish material on the theme of the 1917 revolution towards the end this centennial year. In this article, Vasiliy Shchipkov, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Moscow State Institute of International Relations, discusses the Christian approach to remembering the terrible time of Soviet repressions vs. a mentality of retribution.Great Consecration of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ and the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church in Sretensky Monastery. Photo: G.Balayants / Pravoslavie.ru My family knows about repressions, about political and religious persecutions, not from...

Stalin's NKVD started to round up the Kalmkys. Their crime, some had served the Germans. Of the 95,000 ethnic Kalmyks, about half died enroute or during their first winter in Siberia. Stalin's order was absolute. Ethnic Kalmky's were pulled out of the front line infantry and tank units and deported. Included were 21 Kalmyk soldiers that had been awarded "Hero of the Soviet Union." for their service in combat to the Soviet Union.

Trudging through mud in sub-zero temperatures, digging the earth with their bare hands and heaving huge rocks with the most primitive of tools, these horrifying photos have revealed life inside Joseph Stalin's gulag prisons, where people were worked to death in Soviet labour camps through the mid-1900s. This year marks 100 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution, which led to Vladimir Lenin taking control of the Soviet Union. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rose to power and became the state's authoritarian leader. Between 1929 and the year of Stalin's death in 1953, 18million men and women were transported to...

A group of Russian scientists have sounded the alarm over what they said were attempts by the head of the security service to openly justify Stalin’s mass purges, the first such attempt in decades. In an open letter published by Kommersant broadsheet, more than 30 academics slammed Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB security service – the successor to the feared KGB – for seeking to legitimise the mass purges known as the Great Terror. Historians estimate about one million people perished in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s out of around 20 million who died under his three-decade rule...

Sometimes a state’s official view of the past can serve as the basis for an unwritten social contract between a government and its citizens. This is what is happening in Russia today. President Vladimir Putin has introduced the idea of what he terms a “thousand-year history” that Russians must take pride in, a history that incorporates many victorious pages from the country’s past, including Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. This glorious history is offered to citizens in exchange for their political loyalty, and it is presented as being more important than economic progress. Putin’s personal role has been critical...

"Political experts have consistently rejected the idea that Putin has reproduced the mechanism of Stalin’s power. They ridicule out of hand the very thought of it, arguing that Putin is not Stalin on the basis that there are no repressions today comparable with those in Stalin’s time and that there cannot be..." "Why? I argue that this is primarily due to a superficial understanding of Stalinism and Stalin’s mechanism of power. The core of Stalinism was not mass repressions but a clandestine model of power, in which the worst traditions of Russian authoritarianism going back to the time of Ivan...

"Anyone who grew up with the Eastern Orthodox Church (in my case, the Greek Orthodox Church in New York) will get a good laugh at Vladimir Putin pretending to be a Christian during his first Easter as Russian ruler..." "The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been, since its reconstitution during WWII, an instrument of the state. The best illustration of this is probably the 1949 “Greetings from the clergy and laity of the Russian Orthodox Church to the leader of the nations of the USSR, the Generalissimus Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday.” It states, in part: "Witnessing at every...

On Sunday, a high school student from the Siberian city of Novy Urengoy made a conciliatory speech to Germany's parliament... "I was extremely upset,"Nikolay Desyatnichenko said, "because I saw the graves of people who died innocently, and many of whom wanted to live peacefully and didn't want to fight." He ended his short speech by saying he hoped "the world would never see war again." Not long after a Bavaria-based Russian posted the speech on Facebook with his outraged comments, thousands of posts ripped apart the high schooler, his school and his family. Thousands of people recalled the atrocities their...