Free Republic

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said that he knows who planned the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that the incident bodes ill for America's future. "The storming of the Capitol was clearly designed in advance, and it is clear by whom," Gorbachev last week told an interviewer for Russian media. And, while he didn't identify the plotters, the renowned statesman said that he senses machinations at work. "It will take a little time, and we will figure it out, why it was really done," Gorbachev said....

Great expectations characterised 1989...The Gorbachev era brought about a frenzy of change, and people witnessed incredible events on a weekly basis: they snatched up newspapers, hung on every word broadcast on TV, and with every passing day they felt more alive and free. By the mid-1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet period started to creep in. The greyness of the Brezhnev era, with its endless queues and empty shops, started to be recalled as a peaceful, prosperous time. And gradually something that had seemed impossible during perestroika, became real: Stalin’s shadow loomed large again. Vladimir Putin’s rise to power came accompanied...

Sometimes, a history lesson works better when it’s a little ragged and personal. Clocking in at a little over 90 minutes and consisting primarily of a sit-down interview with the former Soviet leader, Werner Herzog’s Meeting Gorbachev speeds through a vast stretch of the 20th century, explaining the decline of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain through the eyes of the man whose reforms precipitated much of it. But Herzog himself brings a surprising — and, it turns out, necessary — element to their interactions: that of the grateful world citizen, one of billions who felt the first pangs...

To Ronald Reagan and his entourage, the summit meeting in Iceland looked like the perfect photo opportunity. Three weeks before the midterm elections, Reagan would be pictured shaking hands with the smiling Russian in his Fifties fedora. The president would be portrayed in the media as an earnest peacemaker, diligently searching for ways to end the nuclear-arms race. This time, though, the photos turned out badly. When he emerged from his bargaining sessions with Mikhail Gorbachev, the president looked stung, like a small boy who had burned his fingers playing with a light socket. Reagan came home empty-handed from Iceland,...

The dominant narrative of modern Middle East history emphasizes European colonization and accepts as a truism that the former colonial powers prioritized the protection of their material interests—in oil, above all—above the dignity and self-determination of the region’s inhabitants. --Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability...Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region’s meddling overlords...Then came Mikhail Gorbachev—a Westernizing reformer. At last, the Cold War was over. A new world order was at hand. What if this conventional wisdom is nonsense?...

1. Putin like Gorbachev has entered an arms race with a weak economy that can’t support it. 2. Putin has gotten involved in long-running foreign policy “adventures,” Afghanistan in the case of Gorbachev who ultimately got out of that one and Putin in the case of Ukraine. 3. Putin is prepared to fund all the misfits of the world who are prepared to support him just as Soviet leaders including Gorbachev until the money ran out were prepared to back those of “’a socialist orientation.’” 4. Putin is spending enormous sums on “pompous celebrations and ‘projects of the century’ like...

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...

Proof of “Russian Collusion” in American elections generally ignored by the mainstream media up to the present day comes in the words of Vladimir Putin to RT Russia TV in 2012. That’s when Putin said Obama was “an honest person who really wants to change much for the better.” (Reuters, Sept. 6, 2012) Another prominent Russian was also on the public record for urging Americans to vote Obama back in the presidential race of 2012.

Ex-President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev compared the meeting between Russian and US leaders Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg to his meeting with ex-President of the United States Ronald Reagan. The politician made such a statement in an interview with Italian publicist Giulietto Chiesa posted on Globalist portal on Saturday. "I recall when we started the disarmament dialog with Ronald Reagan, I was told in several days after first contacts that US naval vessels entered the Black Sea and approached territorial waters of the Soviet Union. I was asked, "What shall we do?"...

Moscow (AFP) - The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, on Thursday urged Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to restore trust between the United States and Russia a day ahead of their first meeting in Hamburg.

be confused and at a loss. But no problem is more urgent today than the militarization of politics and the new arms race. Stopping and reversing this ruinous race must be our top priority. The current situation is too dangerous. More troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers are being brought to Europe. NATO and Russian forces and weapons that used to be deployed at a distance are now placed closer to each other, as if to shoot point-blank. While state budgets are struggling to fund people’s essential social needs, military spending is growing. Money is easily found for sophisticated weapons...

Newly released British government files show that leaders and top diplomats were taken by surprise and deeply upset by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power in November 1990. One of the first responses to Thatcher’s removal as Conservative Party leader and prime minister came from former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who said in a note to Thatcher it was “worse than a death in the family.” […] Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wrote an affectionate note that for the first time referred to the iron-willed Thatcher as “Margaret.” …

I had never heard about this story before, but a clever and competent reader shared it on our Facebook page, and I thought some of y’all might enjoy it too. Back in 1989, card-carrying Communist and Politburo member in the Soviet Union Boris Yeltsin visited Johnson Space Center, and then took a tour of a grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas. According to a Houston Chronicle reporter, Yelstin was far more affected by the grocery store visit than he was the space center. He apparently was stunned by the aisles and aisles of supermarket products, and told the other Russians...

NEW YORK — Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear. But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have...

In a Spiegel interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses morals and politics in the nuclear age, the crisis in Russian-American relations and his fear that an atomic weapon will some day be used. […] “It was clear to me that relations with America and the West would be a lasting dead end without atomic disarmament, with mutual distrust and growing hostility. That is why nuclear disarmament was the highest priority for Soviet foreign policy.” […] “(C)an we really imagine a world without nuclear weapons if a single country amasses so many conventional weapons that its military budget nearly tops...

Mikhail Gorbachev accuses the United States of drawing Russia into a new Cold War saying he fears hostilities could escalate into armed conflict. The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of drawing Russia into a new Cold War and said he feared hostilities could escalate into armed conflict. The United States "has already drawn us into a new Cold War, trying openly to achieve its main idea of triumphalism," Mr Gorbachev said in an interview with the Interfax news agency. "Where will that lead all of us? A Cold War is already being waged openly. What's...

Reports of a potential “Russian” submarine found near England and Sweden have once again become common, and now the United States is being asked by Great Britain to help in the search for this mysterious underwater object. In a related report by the Inquisitr, Vladimir Putin recently signed and enacted a new military doctrine which proposes that Russian nuclear weapons defense systems near Europe will be expanded based upon joint defense projects with China, India, and other countries. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also warns that the Ukraine crisis may transform into World War 3, claiming that a nuclear war...

"A war of this kind would unavoidably lead to a nuclear war," the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner told Der Spiegel news magazine, according to excerpts released on Friday. "We won't survive the coming years if someone loses their nerve in this overheated situation," added Gorbachev, 83. "This is not something I'm saying thoughtlessly. I am extremely concerned."

Isn’t it extraordinary how something long in existence can be suddenly re-proposed as a brilliant new idea? Politicians and educators, hoping we have memory problems, often do this to fool us into thinking they are working hard to improve a situation. Another audacious example of this strategy was recently provided by the Holy See’s support of a proposal for a “United Religions”. The proposal came from former Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shimon Peres. At a private audience with Pope Francis this September 4th, Peres “proposed the founding of a United Religions organization — modelled after the United Nations...