Free Republic

MOSCOW — Thought the Soviet Union was anti-American? Try today’s Russia. After a year in which furious rhetoric has been pumped across Russian airwaves, anger toward the United States is at its worst since opinion polls began tracking it. From ordinary street vendors all the way up to the Kremlin, a wave of anti-U.S. bile has swept the country, surpassing any time since the Stalin era, observers say. The indignation peaked after the assassination of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, as conspiracy theories started to swirl — just a few hours after he was killed — that his death was a...

War as a game? Check.Foreign leaders as caricatures? Check.Sightings of Russian invaders? Check that too.Yup, welcome to the new Cold War.The relationship between Russia and the West, fraught by any measure, this week devolved into something looking more like a ridiculous Cold War parody film from the 1960s than any sort of modern diplomatic arrangement.Related: Why Putin May Be the Lesser of All Russian EvilsOn one hand, there was Russian President Vladimir Putin, practically smirking at the news that his proxy fighters in Ukraine had driven government troops out of the contested city of Debaltseve.To the soldiers who were injured...

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence. In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in their barracks. We saw the Elbe as Moscow's red line, and they saw it as ours. While Reagan sent weapons to anti-Communist rebels in Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, to the heroic Poles of Gdansk he sent only mimeograph machines. That Cold War caution and prudence...

Newly released documents show that the U.S. government drew up a plan in April of 1956 for how to deal with an impending nuclear war. What was its strategy? Declaration of martial law, evacuation of top American personnel to secret offices, and the immediate detention of over 12,000 people with ties to "subversive organizations." It was called Plan C. Muckrock has obtained these new Cold War-era documents detailing the doomsday scenario through Freedom of Information Act requests sent to the FBI. Plan C evolved and changed as different people in the chain of command got involved. At one point, Plan...

The first man in outer space 50 years ago believed fervently in the Almighty — even though the atheistic Soviet government put famous words in his mouth that he had looked around at the cosmos and did not see God. Mankind’s first space flight lasted 108 minutes on April 12, 1961. It was the height of the Cold War. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was proclaimed by the Soviet leadership to have announced, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.” However, he never uttered those often-quoted words, says a close friend. And it seems that the Soviet Union lied...

Top Gear Russia magazine accidentally published an image of a secret Russian submarine. The Russian edition of the automobile magazine published a photo of the classified "AC-12 Project," a nuclear deep-water submarine, nicknamed "Losharik" after a children's movie. This was first reported by the unofficial blog of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and picked up by Slon Media, which reached out to an expert for commentary.

New Cold War: A revised Russian military doctrine identifies NATO as Moscow's No. 1 threat, as the Obama administration announced it was returning control of 15 bases in Europe back to the host governments. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave President Obama a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking in the form of a revised strategic doctrine. It re-emphasizes that NATO, notwithstanding President Obama's "flexibility" and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "reset" button, is the No. 1 strategic threat facing Russia. We are reminded of Obama's rebuke of Mitt Romney in the third presidential debate, when the GOP nominee...

Happy Birthday to the Soviet Union! In 1922, in post-revolutionary Russia, a bunch of commies got together and officially established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Federation called a meeting, and created the world’s first union based on Marxist Socialism… It shaped up to be such a rousing success, Joseph Stalin celebrated by killing 50 million fellow countrymen. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks managed to win over the hearts and minds of their fellow commie forces using their message of Hope and Change; which lead to a pretty clear direction for...

Russia appears striving to boost the demand for its language in North Korea, amid signs that the Cold War allies try to build up strong bilateral relations. Russia's Maritime Province of Siberia donated as many as 1,400 Russian books to North Korea, the Russian news agency Interfax said Wednesday. The books vary on the subjects from Russian history, literature, culture, to language. It reported that the state government delegated the donation project to "Russkiy Mir," an orthodox cultural foundation established by Russia's president Vladimir Putin in 2007 as a vehicle for exercising soft power abroad. The foundation delivered the books...

The scars left on the soul and minds of so many surviving victims of communism are hard to heal On Christmas 1989, twenty-five years ago, the brutal communist dictatorship of Romania ended with the execution of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena in front of a firing squad at Tirgoviste, following a brief trial. His reign of terror lasted 24 years (1965-1989). The first communist despot, Gheorghe Georghiu-Dej (1945-1964) was so ruthless, the citizens felt like “hunted” animals during his regime. Almost forty-four years of brutal communism left a deep and festering wound that would be hard to...

Ten percent of the population, have fled Cuba, many of whom found a new home in America. When that many people wanted to leave, it tells you something is terribly wrong with life in Cuba When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Cold War that had existed between it and the U.S. since the end of World War Two came to an end, but there was ditritus, loose ends like Cuba and it has taken until now for an end to the diplomatic obstacles whose roots reach back to the Eisenhower administration. In 1960 it had approved a CIA...

"On Wednesday, Obama administration officials confirmed to The Post that Cuba has freed American citizen Alan Gross. Gross, who was detained in December 2009 while working as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been accused of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison by Cuba. His imprisonment was a major problem in relations between Washington and Havana. Gross was not freed by accident. According to ABC News, his release is the culmination of more than a year of "secret back-channel talks at the highest levels of both governments." And, importantly, his release comes at the...

Following the return of Alan Gross to the U.S., Sen. Ted Cruz slammed the “Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy,” saying the Castro brothers are “state sponsors of terrorism” and that President Barack Obama “does not understand the difference between our friends and our enemies.”Cruz, one of three Cuban American members of the upper chamber in Congress, also called the normalization of relations between the two nations “a tragic mistake” made the comments to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto Wednesday afternoon. TED CRUZ: “This is yet another manifestation of the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy. For six years we followed...

Last week the US House voted overwhelmingly in favor of an anti-Russia resolution so full of war propaganda that it rivals the rhetoric from chilliest era of the Cold War. Ironically, much of the bill condemns Russia for doing exactly what the US government has been doing for years in Syria and Ukraine. For example, one of the reasons to condemn Russia in the resolution is the claim that Russia is imposing economic sanctions on Ukraine. But how many rounds of sanctions has US government imposed on Russia for much of the past year? I guess sanctions are only bad...

Mac Slavo November 16th, 2014 There are few events that could lead to a truly cataclysmic upheaval of the global order. Right now, half a world away and out of the view of most Americans, exactly such developments have been set into motion. These events are so significant that they promise to shape the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. And, should the trend continue unabated it is only a matter of time before the American way of life as we have come to know it is no more. So says Casey Research Chief Global Strategist Marin Katusa in his...

Prince David Chavchavadze was a CIA agent during the cold war who was descended from Tsar Nicholas I of Imperial Russia and became friendly with Stalin's daughter Prince David Chavchavadze, who has died aged 90, was descended from the royal families of both Russia and Georgia, and served as a cold war case officer with the CIA for 25 years; he later made his mark as a writer and historian... Prince David Chavchavadze, born May 20 1924, died October 5 2014

A new report out of Europe says that Russian military confrontations and "near misses" with NATO nations have seen a dramatic uptick in 2014. It warns that Russia must reevaluate its military policy and that NATO and Russia must improve communications to avoid potentially catastrophic confrontations. The report, released today by the European Leadership Network (ELN), a British think tank focused on regional security, chronicles some 40 incidents over eight months in which Russian military forces committed "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, and other dangerous actions" across Europe and near North...

Winston Churchill urged the United States to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War, a newly released document reveals. The previously unseen memorandum from the FBI archives details how Britain’s wartime leader made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947. Churchill believed a pre-emptive strike on Stalin’s Russia might be the only way to stop Communism conquering the West. The note, written by an FBI agent, reports that Churchill urged Right-wing Republican Senator Styles Bridges to persuade President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack which would ‘wipe out’ the Kremlin...

Tensions between the major powers have pushed the world closer to a new Cold War, former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Saturday. The 83-year-old accused the West, particularly the United States, of giving in to “triumphalism” after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the communist bloc a quarter century ago. The result, he said, could partly be seen in the inability of global powers to prevent or resolve conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine. “The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some are even saying that it’s...

In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed...