Post Tagged 'soviet union'

March 14, 2022

Who’s writing Vladimir Putin’s Animal Farm?

It’s 1934 and Gareth Jones (James Norton), journalist and foreign adviser to British prime minister Lloyd George, is trying to convince a room full of stuffed shirts with fancy government titles that Adolf Hitler is looking to wage war in Europe, to build a thousand-year Reich. Continue Reading...

January 21, 2022

Lenin’s ugly legacy of identity politics

“I broke sharply with all questions of religion,” said Vladimir Lenin, with typical vituperation. “I took off my cross and threw it in the rubbish bin.” Such was a metaphor for the dark turn made by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who came to be known by an alias, “Lenin.” Continue Reading...

December 08, 2021

Christmas 1991: The birth of freedom in the death of the evil empire

“You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,” wished Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to American President George H. W. Bush. “I am saying good-bye and shaking your hand.” It was a long-distance handshake, done via telephone. Continue Reading...

November 08, 2021

How China’s communist regime will outlast the USSR’s

The collapse of the Soviet Union 74 years after the Bolshevik revolution was supposed to herald the end of communism. Yet the People’s Republic of China lives on, 72 years after Mao Zedong famously proclaimed the founding of the PRC in Beijing. Continue Reading...

December 13, 2019

Think like Lenin

Gary Saul Morson has excellent and enlightening piece at the New Criterion on Vladimir Lenin and what he calls Leninthink. “Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. Continue Reading...

December 12, 2019

Chernobyl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn on a culture of deceit

Yesterday, December 11 was the birthday of the great Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918. The Imaginative Conservative published an essay I wrote on Solzhenitsyn and the HBO series Chernobyl. Continue Reading...

December 11, 2018

An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn centenary

On this day in 1918, Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, parents of peasant stock who had received a university education. Continue Reading...

February 21, 2017

Religion & Liberty: Fighting for totalitarianism’s victims

The unofficial theme for Religion & Liberty’s first issue in 2017 is despotism. In this issue, you’ll find stories from the Soviet Union, a close look into the North Korea regime and a reexamination of Hitler’s rise to power. Continue Reading...

July 19, 2016

Standing with the oppressed during Captive Nations Week

On July 17, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a proclamation declaring the third week of July “Captive Nations Week” for that year and every year “until such time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.” Continue Reading...

October 12, 2015

How Hockey Helps Us Understand Russia

To celebrate his 63rd birthday last week, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin participated in an exhibition hockey game. This was no ordinary pond hockey, however. It featured a cast of former NHL and professional stars. Continue Reading...

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