Free Republic

One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin's execution squads and concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national monument or place of mourning. Worse, 15 years after glasnost, 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate. This was not always the case. During the 1980s, when glasnost was just beginning in Russia, Gulag survivors' memoirs sold millions of copies,...

The Red Army's defeat of Nazi German forces on Polish soil in 1944-1945 remains a thorny issue in Russian-Polish relations. Many Poles viewed the Red Army as an occupation force, not as liberators, as the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had carved up Poland between two dictatorships. Poland updated its "de-communisation" legislation, banning "totalitarian" symbols, which would include Soviet propaganda monuments. The Russian foreign ministry condemned the new Polish "de-communisation" law as "an outrageous provocation", and warned of unspecified "consequences". "The USSR paid the highest price to liberate Poland - on that country's soil, in battles with the enemy, more than 600,000...

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...

Beijing and Moscow have criticised the US military’s move to put countering China and Russia at the centre of its latest national defence strategy, with China again hitting back at America’s “cold war and zero-sum game mindset”. Presenting the new strategy – which will set priorities for the Pentagon for years to come – Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Friday called China and Russia “revisionist powers” that “seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models”. It marks a shift in US defence priorities after its focus for more than a decade-and-a-half on the fight against Islamist militants. The...

"Heroes are not to be criticized..." The official Soviet narrative of the Second World War used the concept of heroism to imbue war commemoration with an obligation towards the State. Such a concept was designed to make subsequent generations feel inferior to their predecessors and obliged to give of their best. Today, the victory serves as the strongest connection between Soviet and modern Russian patriotism. The paper argues that the memory of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) as treated in museums in St Petersburg today is an appropriation by present-day Russian propaganda of the Soviet narrative. Soviet memorial sites are...

Russia's going crazy for the Olympics. The 1972 Olympics. Even as the Russian team faces up to being barred from next month's Winter Games for doping offenses, audiences are flocking to see a movie about Soviet glory on the Olympic basketball court 46 years ago. "Going Vertical" tells the story of the Soviet Union team which won gold in 1972, becoming the first basketball team in history ever to beat the United States at the Olympics. It's a tale of Cold War rivalry, inspiring speeches and something very familiar to Russian sports fans after recent scandals — a gold medal...

"For Russians disillusioned with their initial experience of capitalism and democracy, alternative history offered a therapy in which the problems of today gave way to new images of past glory." In 2009, we wrote a book entitled Nationalist Imaginings of the Russian Past. Anatolii Fomenko and the Rise of Alternative History. Its focus was the explosion of 'alternative' history, a publishing phenomenon that emerged in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The leading light in this movement was, and remains, Anatolii Fomenko, a Sovietera mathematician who claimed that the standard historical chronology was hopelessly inaccurate and...

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...

In the coming period when travel to the Soviet Union is more usual, I believe the American people will expect committed leaders to get information by serious personal inquiry rather than to rely upon secondary sources. Among some of the more specific lines of inquiry I wish to pursue are those which would illuminate the reasons for the continued existence of religious conviction among millions of Soviet citizens, all of whom have been subjected to varying degrees of oppression and discouragement by powerful agencies of propaganda and anti-religious education. This tenacity to spiritual commitment is worthy of careful study for...

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...

Today, operations in space are more routine and the competition between states is more diffuse. While generally still important in international politics, prestige plays only a small role in the current international dynamic. To be clear: There is still competition between the U.S. and rising powers. However, unlike the Cold War, which was a battle of opposing political philosophies, here we see competition primarily over economic and strategic opportunity. Another significant difference between the Cold War space race and the current one is that the playing field isn’t level as it was during the Cold War. The U.S. today has...

During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1988, President Ronald Reagan, a lifelong anti-communist, met with students at Moscow State University and delivered a stirring plea for democracy and individual rights...As he addressed the students, the president stood underneath a bust of Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, and in front of a mural filled with revolutionary flags of revolution. Document: Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message - perhaps, but also some of the most important business of this summit - it is a message...

Christmas Eve, 1968. As one of the most turbulent, tragic years in American history drew to a close, millions around the world were watching and listening as the Apollo 8 astronauts - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders - became the first humans to orbit another world.

We remember the 54th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination this week.  There is something about President Kennedy's legacy, as Alan Brinkley wrote a few years ago: President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House. His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience. Most of his legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill. Yet he was also responsible...

The U.S. government considered manufacturing or obtaining Soviet aircraft in order to launch an attack on American or friendly bases that could then provide an excuse for war, according to newly released documents.The documents are part of an October release of thousands of formerly classified files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It describes a March 22, 1962 meeting that discussed “the question raised by the attorney general on the possibility of U.S. manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft.”The meeting was held by the “Special Group (Augmented),” which according to an encyclopedia on the Central Intelligence Agency, included Attorney...

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...

Last week marked the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. On the night of November 7, 1917, the Winter Palace in Petrograd was occupied by the Bolsheviks. Seventy-two years later, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened. In the intervening period, according to the estimates in The Black Book of Communism, the grand total of victims of communism was between 85m and 100m. Mao Tse-tung alone accounted for tens of millions: 2m between 1949 and 1951, another 3m in the course of the 1950s, a staggering 45m in the man-made famine known as the “Great Leap Forward”,...

Thousands of Hungarians erupt in protest against the Soviet presence in their nation and are met with armed resistance. Organized demonstrations by Hungarian citizens had been ongoing since June 1956, when signs of political reform in Poland raised the possibility for such changes taking place in their own nation. On October 23, however, the protests erupted into violence as students, workers, and even some soldiers demanded more democracy and freedom from what they viewed as an oppressive Soviet presence in Hungary. Hungarian leader Erno Gero, an avowed Stalinist, only succeeded in inflaming the crowds with praise for the Soviet Union’s...

US Air Force is prepping nuclear-armed bombers to be on 24-hour alert Armed B-52s will be parked at Barksdale Air Force for the first time since 1991Weapons will be ready to take off at a moment's notice if they get the command  The United States Air Force will put its ageing fleet of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers on 24-hour alert for the first time since the end of the Cold War, according to its chief of staff.  Amid rising tensions with North Korea and a resurgent Putin-led Russia, General David Goldfein told Defense One that the strategic bomber force will be...

Watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick PBS series on the Vietnam War put me in mind of a memorable essay that Jim Webb—Vietnam war hero, novelist, secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, and most recently Democratic senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia—penned for the American Enterprise Institute seventeen years ago. In this remarkable piece, he called into question the popular idea of a “Vietnam generation.” Webb noted that those who came of age during that war are more properly regarded not as a generation but as an age group, permanently divided by different reactions to a whole range of counter-cultural...