Free Republic

A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world's only country with an unpredictable past. That jibe has come winging back in recent days, after the Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of "historical revisionism" that harm Russia's image. The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev's administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also...

ANOTHER RUSSIAN fighting for human rights and the rule of law has been murdered in Vladimir Putin's Moscow. Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who defended Chechens brutalized by Russian troops and journalists who wrote about the abuses, was shot in the head yesterday by a masked man carrying a silencer-equipped pistol. An opposition journalist who tried to intervene, Anastasia Baburova, was also fatally shot in the head. This occurred in broad daylight, on a busy street in central Moscow less than half a mile from the Kremlin. It was another demonstration that assassinations are a dominating feature of political life under...

MOSCOW -- No matter how powerful the Russian government may appear nowadays, it hasn't been able to quell nostalgia for some of the country's most brutal leaders. Dictator Josef Stalin made the final cut Wednesday in a Kremlin-backed contest to identify Russia's most significant historical figure, though he was stripped of almost one million votes organizers called "illegal." The "Name of Russia" contest is part of a broad effort by the Kremlin and state media to strengthen national pride, drawing on Russia's Soviet and Czarist past. But the campaign has turned into a political minefield.

I remember back a few years seeing Free Tibet bumper stickers on progressive Saabs and hippie VWs. Tibet is still in China's clutches, Russia is busy slapping around it's former vassal states, but the world is focused on the supposed crimes of George Bush. I can understand the argument that we never should have invaded Iraq, although I think that point is now moot. I can also understand those who think war is wrong and who insist that might doesn't make right. What I can't understand is those on the left who criminalize the Iraq invasion but see nothing wrong...

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev today called on U.S. presidential candidates to develop alternatives to the use of military power, decrying what he called "increasingly visible signs of the militarization of politics and thinking in the modern world ... even though the military route again and again leads to a dead-end." Writing in the the Russian government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Gorbachev said the Bush administration has shown a tendency to "seek to address these problems primarily through threats and pressure. Will the candidates develop an alternative approach to these most crucial problems? This is now the main question." RIA Novosti,...

MOSCOW - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has created an inner cabinet of key ministers that will meet weekly, further strengthening his grip over Russia's levers of power. The new forum mimics a format used by Putin as president before he handed over the Kremlin to his close ally Dmitry Medvedev last week. "The full government is a rather big body," Putin's chief spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. "That is why it was decided to set up a managerial staff that can handle certain issues without the need to summon the full cabinet." Medvedev could in theory choose to attend...

Each year a group of KGB Commissars would get together for a weekend of bear hunting.  A helicopter would fly them to a clearing deep in the forest, leave them with their guns and camping gear, then pick them up two days later. Now the hunting weekend has ended, and the Commissars are waiting in the clearing with their equipment and with the carcasses of three bears. The helicopter swoops in and lands, the pilot steps out and takes one look at the waiting cargo. "Comrade Commissars," the pilot says.  "I'm sorry, but I cannot take all three bears on...

...Vaclav Havel, one of the very few truly great men of our time,... [a] lifelong advocate of nonviolent resistance, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, is a very old 71, a frail survivor of cancer and years in Communist cells. But he's as passionate as ever about freedom. The climax of his speech to NATO's military and civilian leaders was a stark warning about Russia: "A dictatorship of a fairly new type is coming into existence to the east of the area under NATO protection. All basic human and civic freedoms are gradually...

Russians deserve better than the parody of an election in which they will be asked to choose President Vladimir Putin’s successor. The Kremlin has done everything to ensure that Dmitry Medvedev, Mr Putin’s nominee, will be elected by an overwhelming margin on Sunday. The ex-KGB men who dominate the administration have squeezed effective opposition from the political scene. Parliament, the courts, business and the media have all been bent to the president’s will. Only three candidates are allowed to run against Mr Medvedev: Gennady Zyuganov, the veteran Communist party chief, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultra-nationalist leader, and an unknown former public...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he saw no need to hang his successor's portrait in his office once he steps down as Russia's president. It is accepted etiquette in Russia for all officials to hang up a portrait of the head of state. But Putin's protege Dmitry Medvedev is expected to win next month's election while he stays on as a very influential prime minister. "In order to establish my relationship with Dmitry Anatolyevich (Medvedev) I won't need to hang his portrait on my wall if he is elected president," Putin said. "As for my relations with...

Nothing but an announcement on Fox at this time.

In the stable and prosperous bi-polar world of 2030 in which we live today, it is hard to recall how close the multi-polar world of 2020 came to limited nuclear war and even to wholesale Armageddon. Still harder to grasp is how remote from the 2020 conflicts were their cause — and how beneficial that cause seemed when it occurred in 2015. But the discovery of a vast oil field in northern Canada that year set in motion a series of events that eventually led to . . . well, let’s trace its extraordinary impact. Canada was already an energy...

FROM the day Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer, died of polonium poisoning in London last November, officials in Russia treated the investigation of his death as if it were simply a matter of bad public relations. They dismissed accusations of Russian involvement as nonsense fabricated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s enemies. Britain last week punctured Russia’s strategy. A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to accuse another former K.G.B. officer of the murder and demand his extradition pushed Russia out of the international court of public opinion and into the international court of law. If recent history is...

Mr Putin and Mr Gates are both former spies So will the 43rd Munich Security Conference be remembered as the start of a new Cold War? That is probably the single most important question to emerge from this long weekend of speeches and private chats among the world's most powerful. Certainly Russian President Vladimir Putin's strident speech stands out from the crowd. In it, to recap, he strongly criticised the US and its European allies, with his harshest criticism reserved for Washington. The US had, he said, overstepped its borders in every way, seeking to impose its will on...

London (dpa) - Former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar, who was hospitalized after falling ill at a conference in Ireland, was poisoned, his daughter claimed Thursday. ``It was a political poisoning,'' Maria Gaidar told the BBC's News 24 channel. Doctors see ``no other grounds'' for the mystery illness, she said. The 50-year-old was initially hospitalized in Ireland and has since returned to Moscow where he remains in hospital but is said to be improving. Gaidar was acting prime minister in 1992, though Russia's legislature ultimately vetoed his candidacy. In the 1990s, he served as economics and finance minister and as...

SEOUL — Contrary to the reaction from Washington and Tokyo, experts in Seoul and Moscow believe that North Korea’s launch of Scud, Rodong and Taepodong-2 missiles was a major success both technically and politically. Meanwhile, Russia has revealed its eagerness to sell information and technology to North Korea for use in Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Alexei Grigoriev, deputy director of Russia’s Federal Information Technologies Agency, told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass that Moscow was interested in “establishing contacts with the Korean side and discussing future cooperation." Grigoriev cited as an example the sale of sophisticated gear to store and transport...

National PR-ity // Moscow drafts a plan to influence the United States The Kremlin has taken up the promotion of Russian interests in the United States head-on. The key role will be given to the Russian-U.S. Council for Business Cooperation (RUCBC) whose supervisory board will include high-ranking officials from the Russian president’s administration, ministers and prominent public figures. The Russian government asked the Finance Ministry to find sources to finance the NGO. However, it has already been suggested that big business contribute for the council’s activities. The first donation is expected to amount to $50 million. Work has in progress...

Ignore the broad smiles, firm handshakes, cheerful backslapping and toasts raised to "everlasting friendship" between well-dressed, smiling Russians, intense Germans, glib Americans and deceptive Brits. The Second Cold War has already begun. If forced to be perfectly frank, every diplomat, spy or banker from Boston to Baku would acknowledge this. Anyone who reads the press or watches television must have noticed by now that the most dynamic, aggressive and self-assured force in the world today is Russia. Daily reports in the media announce that Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom is buying a pipeline network here or a European gas company...

A fatal desire for order Nina L. Khrushcheva International Herald Tribune FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2006 NEW YORK The 50th anniversary of the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, at which Nikita Khrushchev delivered his so-called "secret speech" against Joseph Stalin, is being ignored in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Only last year, there were many phone calls to my family asking for their participation in commemorative events. But those plans were drawn up before May 2005, when Russia celebrated the 60th anniversary of World War II with the sort of Stalinist "brutalist" pomposity reminiscent of Cold War days. Indeed, portraits of Stalin...

Against the backdrop of rapidly deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations - prompted by revelations of Moscow’s missiles sale to Iran and the State Duma’s passage of dubious legislation restricting nongovernmental Organizations - (NGO) activities - Aleksandr Voloshin’s surprise trip to Washington last week seemed more than mere coincidence. Aleksandr Voloshin, former head of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations, spent almost three days on a private visit in Washington and New York. In the U.S. capital, he clarified the Kremlin’s grievances vis-à-vis the White House to a small group of nonplussed Russia experts, who sought to understand the country’s latest erratic behavior. He...