Free Republic

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

Jim Jordan wants to know what the White House knew about the IRS targeting scandal, and when they knew it-- as if we didn’t know. The conservative Representative from Ohio has penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the activities of the IRS and, more specifically Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who is at the center of the controversy. Jordan essentially is saying where there is smoke there is fire, and oh yeah, where there’s fire, there is fire too. “Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her...

Groups Siberian russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago. Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago. First visited Alaska August 21, 1732, members of the team boat "St. Gabriel »under the surveyor Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fedorov during the expedition Shestakov and DI Pavlutski 1729-1735 years Vote for secession of Alaska from the United States and joining Russia

MOSCOW, March 19. /ITAR-TASS/. The Communist Party of Russia suggests renaming one of the streets or squares in the Russian capital to celebrate the reunification of Crimea with Russia. Andrei Klychkov, the leader of the Communist Party faction in the Moscow State Duma, said on Wednesday that the party was going to submit its proposal to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin soon. They believe that Europe Square in front of the Kievsky railway station could be a perfect place to perpetuate the historical event. Klychkov said several new names for the square had been suggested. “The list of names includes Square...

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea — American and Ukrainian officials warned Sunday that Russia may be poised to expand its territorial conquest into eastern Ukraine and beyond, with a senior NATO official saying that Moscow might even order its troops to cross Ukraine to reach Moldova. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya, appearing on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” said the prospect of war with Russia is growing. “We don’t know what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has in his mind and what will be his decision,” Deshchytsya said. “That’s why this situation is becoming even more explosive than it used to be a...

There’s not a lot to like about Vladimir Putin: he’s autocratic, vain and runs a corrupt government. And he doesn’t give a fig for human rights. The repression in Chechnya, the jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot protestors, the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy – all this happened on Putin’s watch. Who would not be on the side of the 100,000 people who turned out on Moscow’s streets last winter to protest against Putin’s election to a third term as president and to demand fair elections and an honest...

(CNSNews.com) – In an interview Wednesday with a local Washington, D.C., affiliate, Secretary of State John Kerry said he doesn’t know anyone who wants the U.S. to go to war with Russia over Crimea, an autonomous republic in the southern region of Ukraine before Russia’s military intervention. “I don’t know anybody in America who has suggested to go to war over Crimea. Do you want to go to war over Crimea? I don’t know anybody who says you ought to go to war over Crimea, so therefore, your options are economic and diplomatic and isolation,” Kerry said. As CNSNews.com previously...

MOSCOW, March 17, /ITAR-TASS/. President Vladimir Putin on Monday, March 17, signed a degree recognising the Republic of Crimea as a sovereign and independent state. “1. Considering the will of the peoples of Crimea expressed at the all-Crimea referendum on March 16, 2014, I hereby decree that the Republic of Crimea, where the City Of Sevastopol has a special status, be recognised as a sovereign and independent state,” the decree said. The decree entered into force upon signature, the presidential press service said.

Ukraine's Crimean parliament voted Monday to nationalize energy companies Ukrtransgaz and Chornomornaftohaz, according to a statement on the Parliament's website. A Crimean official said last week that the local authorities may sell the oil and gas company Chornomornaftohaz to a Russian firm "such as Gazprom" once the region assumes control of it. On Sunday, a Russia-backed referendum in Crimea demonstrated overwhelming support for joining the Russian federation. The US and its European allies are expected to announced sanctions against Russia on Monday after Crimea announced that just under 97% of voters in the region supported leaving Ukraine and becoming a...

In the wake of a March 16 referendum in which Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation, Ukrainian leaders refused to cede any part of the peninsula, calling on their troops to prepare for war. "Crimea was, is, and will be our territory," said Defense Minister Ihor Tenyukh in a statement delivered at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center on March 17. Former heavyweight boxing champion and leader of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform Vitali Klitschko announced that Ukrainian troops would remain at their bases, even after March 21, the end of a peace treaty signed by the interior ministries...

Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine smashed their way into public buildings and burned Ukrainian-language books on Sunday in further protests following two deadly clashes in the region last week. Protests, some several thousand strong, spread to Russian-speaking southern districts as Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, under the control of the Russian military for two weeks, voted in a referendum on joining Russia. [...] In Kharkiv, Reuters Television footage showed pro-Russian activists scaling an iron gate, smashing a van and breaking into the offices of a Ukrainian cultural center. Two policemen stood nearby, examining the van. The footage then showed young men seizing...

In 1898, British writer H. G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds," a science-fiction novel in which Martians invade the Earth and nearly decimate humanity. A decade later, in what was then the Russian Empire, writer and Marxist revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov wrote his novel "Red Star," also about Martians landing on Earth. But in Bogdanov's novel, the Martians are not violent or monstrous. Instead, they invite the main character, a young Russian student named Leonid, back to the Red Planet to see the Martians' civilization: a thriving, peaceful — and communist — utopia. The optimism of "Red Star" was...

If you want to know the back story of the Ukrainian revolution, The Soviet Story tells exactly what happened to Ukraine during the Soviet era - and a lot more.It's the best educational film on the nature of communism, which should be shown to all high school students in America to immunize them against the lure of the “great” utopia. However, I doubt most teachers will do so in today's political climate. This 2008 documentary tells the story of the anti-human ideology the way I see it myself. That was rather surprising, because in today's “progressive” media climate, such...

Putin Adviser Publishes Plan for Domination of Europe By Robert Zubrin March 10, 2014 10:38 PM On March 9, a very influential geostrategic and ideological adviser of the Putin regime, Aleksandr Dugin, published his game plan for domination of Europe. The plan, which Dugin calls “the Russian Spring,” is presented as one of three scenarios for resolution of the current Ukrainian crisis. The other two, in which the Kremlin blinks in the face of Western pressure, result in thermonuclear war or complete global chaos.Following is Dugin’s plan for the Russian Spring. (The translation is mine. The original, published in Russian,...

What is Vladimir Putin up to? The crisis in Ukraine, brought to a boil when Russia’s president sent troops into the Crimean peninsula, has created almost a cottage industry of guessing at the autocratic leader’s intentions from one day to the next. When it comes to Putin’s long-term strategy, however, there is at least one concrete plan that offers some insight, and one specific date that Russia observers are looking ahead to. That date, Jan. 1, 2015, is expected to mark the birth of an important new organization linking Russia with an as-yet-undetermined constellation of its neighboring countries—an alliance Putin...

On a presidential visit to Russia, Ronald Reagan had an unlikely encounter with a KGB agent posing as a tourist: future Russian president Vladimir Putin (pictured above with a camera around his neck). Iconic Photos (via Tabitha Hale of Rare) has the backstory for the photo:

Sarah Palin’s prescient assertion in 2008 that electing Barack Obama would embolden Russia to take on sovereign countries like Ukraine certainly seems to have been on the mark. Ironically, Tina Fey’s parody on "Saturday Night Live", taken for the truth about Palin exclaiming that she can see Russia from her house may also come true. I just hope we don't all wind up seeing Russia from our window. After the events in Ukraine this past week followed by President Obama’s lackadaisical response at a press conference Saturday and Palin’s original remark that Russia can be seen from “land here in...

Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed. The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of...

On February 22nd, former world chess champion and political activist Garry Kasparov intimated that if Barack Obama had been president instead of Ronald Reagan, the Soviet Union would still exist. Kasparov was born in the Soviet Union in 1963. He is a renowned chess player, a human rights defender, and an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Lenin. On February 22nd he tweeted: "I've said it before, but if Barack Obama had been president instead of Ronald Reagan, I'd still be a Soviet Citizen."

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...