Free Republic

On this day on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s call to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down the Berlin Wall" became widely considered a defining moment of the Reagan presidency, according to Stanford University. The line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," also came to be a profound statement of the 1980s. President Reagan’s "tear down this wall" speech was made following the G7 summit meeting in Venice. And as the Reagan spoke, his words were amplified on both sides of the Berlin Wall, reaching both East and West Germans, according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American...

Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media. In a way, it was fitting that as the last leader of the USSR, Gorbachev was probably its only truly humane one. And it’s equally sobering that Gorbachev has passed away at a time when political repression in his native Russia has become stifling once more, and the specter of conflict in Europe which long overshadowed the region during the Cold War has become reality. These were outcomes Gorbachev strived...

Hey, no bias there!This week the world learned of the passing of England’s 96 year old Queen Elizabeth II. A couple weeks ago Russia’s 91 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Communist Soviet Union, passed away. And the difference in coverage in the media was, shall we say, interesting.The New York Times published an essay by one Maya Jasanoff. Jasanoff is described as “a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of three books about the British Empire and its subjects.” The title of her essay:Mourn the Queen, Not Her EmpireAmong other things Professor Jasanoff says...

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler of the USSR, has died at 91. On the one hand, that sounds pretty good. A long life, a long career, world fame, a one-time politician, then a popular public speaker and leader of a think tank. He outlived his wife by over 20 years, and stayed active and vocal until the end. In many ways, it sounds like a life that one would envy, doesn't it? However… What kind of a politician was he? And what kind of think tank did he run? What did he stand for in life? What did he advocate...

What seemed impossible to the rest of the world — the fall of the Soviet Union — only took six years under his leadership, a reminder of how temporary political systems can be. SNIP The relevance of all of this to the U.S. is that over the last seven years, we have seen more political instability, threats of violence, talk of Civil War, political polarization and efforts to undermine key democratic institutions than at any other time in modern American history. While the comparison between the U.S. today and the USSR in the early 1980s should not be overstated, it...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday, citing scheduling conflicts, but he paid tribute to the last Soviet leader Thursday, the Kremlin said. In a call with reporters, Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the president paid his final respects by laying a wreath at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where Gorbachev died on Tuesday at age 91. “Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do this on Sept. 3, so he decided to do it today,” Peskov said. Russian state television showed Putin walking to Gorbachev’s open coffin and placing...

He said the Russian leader had paid his respects at the Moscow hospital where Gorbachev died on Tuesday, aged 91. Gorbachev's reforms helped end the Cold War, but saw the demise of the Soviet Union, which Mr Putin has lamented

Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Louis XVI ended the French monarchy WaPo praises USSR's BidenI don't speak ill of the dead not because they cannot argue back but because they cannot hear me. Why waste my breath? Instead, let me take on David Hoffman's fact-challenged obituary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final thug in charge of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship best known for killing about 50 million people and starving Ukraine into submission in the 1930s. Hoffman wrote, "Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform...

Former Secretary of State James Baker on Tuesday paid tribute to former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at 91 earlier in the day, calling the former world leader a “giant who steered his great nation toward democracy.” In a statement published through his eponymous Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Baker applauded Gorbachev’s role in ending the 40-year Cold War between Russia and the U.S., referring to him as an “honest broker” who stood by his word despite experiencing pressure from Moscow. Baker served as the secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration from 1989...

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. [A classic New York Times eulogy. VERY long, but an excellent political history of the USSR from the 1930s to the late 1990s. No NYT pay wall. MSN.com publishes all of it.]

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 92, Russian news agencies cited hospital officials as saying on Tuesday.

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern...

In the Spring 2010 issue of City Journal, I described an archive of documents from Soviet government agencies smuggled to the West by the Russian researcher Pavel Stroilov and the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. These documents, I noted, were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes. Within weeks of the article’s appearance, I received hundreds of e-mails. Many came from victims of Soviet Communism—there is...

By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom HarrisPresident Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America. He could have made the decision simply because the science is false, but most of the public have been brainwashed into believing it is correct and wouldn’t understand the reason. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, though thankfully not the U.S., support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they did, they wouldn’t be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO2) tax, on...

EXCLUSIVE: The head of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) has called on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to launch an investigation into whether Russia secretly funded U.S. green groups that advocate against domestic oil and gas production. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., led a letter to Yellen Friday that cites a 2015 Washington Free Beacon report that suggested the California-based Sea Change Foundation may allegedly be a conduit for Russian oil interests in funneling money to groups like the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress.

MOSCOW – The escalating tension between Russia and Ukraine begs the question of what went wrong. The Cold War ended with such fanfare three decades ago that many people assumed the world would become a better place, at least in terms of geostrategic stability, and many diplomats have been deeply disappointed by the latest developments.

<p>In recent years, President Vladimir Putin has grown increasingly insistent that NATO is encroaching close to Russia's borders, and Moscow last week demanded "legal guarantees" that the U.S.-led alliance will halt its eastward expansion.</p><p>"How can one count on equal relations with the United States and the West in such a position?" Gorbachev told state news agency RIA Novosti on the eve of the anniversary of his resignation as the leader of the USSR.</p>

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Tuesday said that he believes that NATO and the United States had no chance of garnering success from entering Afghanistan. Gorbachev, who previously oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, said that while he now regards Soviet presence in Afghanistan as a mistake, Americans and NATO have mishandled their campaign in the country as well. "They should have admitted failure earlier," Gorbachev, 90, told RIA. "The important thing now is to draw the lessons from what happened and make sure that similar mistakes are not repeated."

Perhaps President’s Ronald Reagan’s most famous and influential speeches was his “Berlin Wall speech” at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany 34 years ago today on June 12, 1987. It was in this speech (at about 12:00 in the video above) that Reagan made his famous and history-changing demand “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” That statement and speech helped changed the course of history, and there’s even an entire Wikipedia entry for “Tear down this wall” (in addition to an extensive page for Berlin Wall). According to the Wikipedia entry, “The speech was also a source of considerable controversy...

MOSCOW (AP) — Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev turned 90 on Tuesday, receiving greetings from the Kremlin and global leaders while Russians remained divided over his legacy. Gorbachev, who has stayed in a hospital as a precaution amid the coronavirus pandemic, was scheduled to have a video call Tuesday with his aides and associates who gathered at his foundation to congratulate him. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Gorbachev in a letter published by the Kremlin, hailing him as “one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the...