Free Republic

The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. ............... ............... But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody...

An Armenian Source:Hovhannes KatchaznouniThe Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) has nothing to do any more. The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic. Translated from the original by Matthew A. Callender, Edited by John Roy Carlson (Arthur A. Derounian). Published by the Armenian Information Service Suite 7D, 471 Park Ave. New York 22 - 1955. This is a summary of an important book, entitled laquo; The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) Has Nothing To Do Any More raquo;.The author is Hovhannes Katchaznouni (1), the first Prime Minister of the independent Armenian Republic. It is actually a manifesto,...

Full service of Vespers and Vigil for the Holy Royal Passion Bearers Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia and the Tsarevitch Alexei who, along with their faithful retainers, were butchered this night 100 years ago by the Communists. (English & Slavonic appx 2.5 hrs)

It is now well over a year since Vladimir Putin's Russia passed 'anti-missionary' laws and more than 180 cases have since been brought. Activities ranging from prayer meetings in homes, posting worship times on a religious website and praying in the presence of other citizens have been interpreted as 'missionary activity' with Christians making up the vast majority of the law's victims. One case is that of Donald Ossewaarde, an American Baptist preacher living in Oryol, who was expelled for hosting a church meeting in his house. Having lost appeals throughout the Russian judiciary system, Ossewaarde's case is now with...

A few blocks from Moscow’s Lubyanka Building, which for decades served as the headquarters of the Soviet Union’s KGB security agency, the Russian Orthodox patriarch recently consecrated a church memorializing those martyred during communism’s reign. “While we were in procession around the church, people were standing with portraits of those martyred and those condemned to death” by the communist regime, said Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, who heads the church’s department for external affairs. President Putin, who was a former KGB agent, as well as government officials and church leaders, were in attendance for the ceremony May 25. Patriarch Kirill’s...

When government officials assume office, we hear a lot about their “great integrity” and “high character.” Maybe the beltway press is working from a different dictionary, but in my 15 years in Washington, I've yet to see it. When was the last time a high-ranking government official resigned in protest or disgust? That's not a rhetorical question. Peter Edelman, a top Health and Human Services bureaucrat, resigned when President Clinton signed welfare reform in the mid-‘90s. But no one in the Clinton administration batted an eye when the president lied to his cabinet officials about his affair with Monica Lewinsky,...

This year is the 96th anniversary of the Russian revolution, one of the most earthshaking events in human history. The terms "history" and "96th anniversary" are apt to cause the eyes of many if not most Americans to glaze over, but American life today is being molded directly by the ideas and events set in motion in Russia in 1917. Distilled down to the most important elements, the Russian revolution had three key ideological elements: first, the state as almighty, a replacement for God; secondly, a political elite to guide the "masses"; thirdly, the use of the state's police power...

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Robert Service chronicles the West’s early failure to take action against Bolshevism. Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution, by Robert Service (PublicAffairs, 480 pp., $32.99) “Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time,” observed Britain’s then-Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill in 1919. In his new book, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution, Oxford historian Robert Service shows that not only Churchill, but also most of the West, were aware of the emerging Soviet presence. For a crucial five years,...

Black radical WEB DuBois, who later joined the Communist Party, was the organization's first director of publicity and research, as well as editor of the group's monthly publication The Osiris. This publication gave DuBois an excellent outlet from which to pour forth all manner of racial invective against whites, supposedly in the name of "promoting equality." .... DuBois was known to have "hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917" and he travelled to the Soviet Union in 1926 and 1936. He especially liked 'the racial attitudes of the Communists'." In 1922 the NAACP started to receive grants from the Garland Fund,...

This is a must see, Patriots! This is the best adaptation of Animal Farm.

The death last year of Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded westerners of the ideological disturbances that wracked the just completed century, the greatest of which Solzhenitsyn himself had documented in The Gulag Archipelago and in his novelistic cycle The Red Wheel. The literature of the Communist tyranny in Russia, of its internal and exported violence, bulks large, even when one considers it only in terms of English translations. In addition to Solzhenitsyn, we have Gulag memoirs by Yevgeniya Ginsburg and Lev Rozgan, biographies of victims by their survivors such as Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two books about the persecution and imprisonment of her husband...

The reburial of empress Maria Fyodorovna, the mother of Russia's last tsar, has taken place in St Petersburg in accordance with her wishes. The Danish-born empress was exiled after the communist revolution and died in the country of her birth in 1928. Her son, Nicholas II, abdicated in 1917 and was executed by the Bolsheviks, along with much of his family. Members of several European royal families attended the reburial ceremony at St Isaac's Cathedral. Among them were Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and the UK's Prince Michael of Kent, a distant relative of Maria Fyodorovna.

The catastrophe, termed the Russian Revolution, through all the degradations, tribulations and disappointments, has to lead to a new and better awareness. Such an experience in the life of a people cannot but enrich and sharpen our perceptiveness. But a crisis of soul will have to precede this perceptiveness with a readiness for repentance and humility. The light will be begotten after an inward cleansing and ascesis. This -- is a law of spiritual life. And it is needful to be aware, that all the whole thinking portion of Russian society, that which has esteemed itself as the bearer knowingly...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...

IN OCTOBER 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, sailors in the port of Kronstadt formed the vanguard of the revolution. They overran the cruiser Aurora, bombarded the Winter Palace, stormed the building and handed it over to the Bolsheviks. Four years later, 900 of those same sailors were executed by firing squad after they rose up against the Communists and the Red Army. Thousands of others were dispatched to the Gulag prison camps. Now their story is to be used by the TV company WarkClements as the narrative spine of a two-part documentary promising to "unpack" the myths...