Free Republic

I grew up among refugees. My parents had fled from Communist Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Union. We had many Hungarian friends, but also knew people from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. All had their stories, the one more dreadful than the other. I remember one story among many, when we visited a couple, let’s call them “Joe” and “Cathy”. When we were leaving, thinking they were out of earshot, I blurted out: “Why does Uncle Joe have funny hands?” My mother hushed me quickly and the whole thing was forgotten. But some years later,...

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened. At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and...

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the "Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler's Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened...

Soviet nostalgia in Russia has now become a major focus of scholarly research with researchers in many disciplines making contributions to its description and meaning. This research began in the West, but has engulfed many in the Russian Federation and the other post-Soviet states. “Societies which experience historical traumas, need anesthesia and psychotherapy,” sociologist Roman Abramov days. Millions of people not surprisingly respond to turning to a past real and often imagined to provide them with reassurance. That often takes the form of nostalgia for “the good old times,” which in the Russian case for many, but far from all,...

Donald Trump Jr. had a scathing critique of the athletic company Nike after it decided to pull a sneaker bearing a flag used during the American Revolution. Instead of using that older version of the American flag, Trump Jr. suggested Nike should unveil a communist-style shoe looking similar to the hammer-and-sickle logo of the former Soviet Union. "If the Betsy Ross Flag, the flag of the American Revolution, is too offensive for Nike to commemorate The 4th of July maybe Nike should go with this... seems to be more in line with their views," Trump Jr. tweeted on Wednesday. His...

Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov chastised Western powers in an article published in Russia's International Affairs magazine on Tuesday, ahead of events in Europe to mark the D-Day landings on the Nazi-occupied Normandy coast. "False interpretations of history are being introduced into the Western education system with mystifications and pseudo-historical theories designed to belittle the feat of our ancestors," Lavrov wrote. "Young people are being told that the main credit in victory over Nazism and liberation of Europe goes not to the Soviet troops, but to the West due to the landing in Normandy, which took place less than a...

“Chernobyl,” the HBO mini-series that ends Monday in the U.S., isn’t easy to watch as someone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1986 and who has since visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone. But, like many of my compatriots, I’m watching it — and thinking it should have been made in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, not by an American entertainment channel. There are two reasons for this. One is authenticity — despite a valiant attempt at it, the series falls short. But the other, more important reason is that this kind of harsh sermon on the importance of listening to...

It seems every major Russian media outlet had to chime in about the “Chernobyl” TV series by HBO. Although the foreign program airs only online to paying viewers, the show has become something of a national sensation in Russia where the pro-Kremlin media have launched a mini-crusade against it. Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP), Russia’s most popular newspaper, raised suspicions that competitors of state-atomic center Rosatom were using the series to tarnish this country’s image as a nuclear power. Argumenty i Fakty...dismissed the show as “a caricature and not the truth.” “The only things missing are the bears and accordions!” quipped Stanislav...

MOSCOW -- Konstantin Vyatkin has never acknowledged the Soviet collapse. "For the past 28 years I've tried to live in this country called Russia," he says. "But in my heart I still live there, in the Soviet Union." The words may sound banal in a country where two-thirds of the population professes nostalgia for the former empire, motivated by economic concerns and the absence of a welfare state. But Vyatkin does not simply miss the Soviet Union -- he actively denies its breakup, and claims to obey only its laws. And now a vibrant cottage industry is helping legitimize his...

This meeting is part of the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall... Kissinger (now 94) reflects on the events, personalities, and thinking that characterized the United States and Soviet Union's leadership.

A record 70 percent of Russians approve of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s role in Russian history, according to a poll published by the independent Levada Center pollster on Tuesday. Stalin’s image has been gradually rehabilitated in the 2000s from that of a bloody autocrat to an “outstanding leader.” President Vladimir Putin has revived the Soviet anthem, Soviet-style military parades and a Soviet-era medal for labor during his presidency. A record low of 19 percent viewed Stalin’s role negatively, down from 32 percent in 2016. “Stalin begins to be perceived as a symbol of justice and an alternative to the current...

KYIV - The choice is stark. Stay the slow and not-quite-steady course with a deeply unpopular but seasoned leader who knows the ropes and has taken Ukraine westward despite foot-dragging on reforms and a failure to tackle entrenched corruption. Go with another veteran, a political survivor with a dodgy past twice imprisoned by opponents who has lost two presidential elections but is banking on public disappointment and populist promises to carry her to victory. Or take a chance on a comedian with no experience in politics and governing but who has managed to tap into an antiestablishment mood similar to...

WASHINGTON/CARACAS (Reuters) - The United States on Monday accused Russia of “reckless escalation” of the situation in Venezuela by deploying military planes and personnel to the crisis-stricken South American nation that Washington has hit with crippling sanctions. The Russian planes and military personnel arrived outside the Venezuelan capital Caracas on Saturday, according to local media reports, two months after the Trump administration disavowed President Nicolas Maduro. Washington has recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s legitimate president and demands that Maduro leave power, which Russia has described as a U.S.-backed coup against the socialist government.

housands of candles will be lit all over Estonia on Monday to commemorate the tens of thousands of victims of the 1949 March Deportation. Between 25-28 March, more than 22,000 people in Estonia alone were forced from their homes and deported east, many to never return. 70 years ago, four days of deportations of local civilians from throughout the Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania began on 25 March in the meticulously organised Operation Priboi ("Coastal Surf").Over the course of the operation, more than 22,000 people from Estonia, and a total of more than 90,000 people across the Baltics, were forcibly...

It is no exaggeration to say that Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1960s adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel “War and Peace” is a singular feat of filmmaking that can never be repeated. If it were, a director would have to match the resources at Bondarchuk’s disposal — a virtually unlimited budget, props from Russia’s great museums, thousands of extras from the Soviet army — and engineer sprawling battle sequences using no computer-generated effects. The extraordinary support behind “War and Peace” is apparent in every lavish frame of its seven-plus hours, and it is staggering to witness — even more so in the...

Er … suuuuure it is. The only way anyone could assert this with a straight face, let alone with the smug dismissal Ocasio-Cortez displays here, is to be entirely ignorant of the post-war history of Berlin, Germany, and the deep desire to flee the communist system in both. A quick search on “Berlin Wall history” for the woefully uneducated would land on this entry in Encylopaedia Britannica: In the years between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans had fled from East to West Germany, including steadily rising numbers of skilled workers, professionals, and intellectuals. Their loss threatened to...

Belarus is ready to merge with Russia, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said on the third and last day of his bilateral talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday. Rumors resurfaced this year that Russia could annex Belarus as Putin’s constitutional term limits bar him from running for the presidency in 2024. “The two of us could unite tomorrow, no problem,” Lukashenko said in a video. “But are you – Russians and Belarussians – ready for it?” Lukashenko said as quoted by Interfax. “We’re ready to unite and consolidate our efforts, states and peoples as far as we’re ready.” Putin, meanwhile,...

Facing a steady decline in available fighter jets, the Indian Air Force is now reportedly in talks to buy 21 unfinished Soviet-era MiG-29 Fulcrums from Russia and have them completed in a modernized configuration. The proposed deal comes as India continues to struggle with a host of other fighter jet procurement efforts, most notably a more than decade long effort to purchase of more than a hundred new fighter jets, which is now effectively in its third incarnation. The Times of India was first to report on the possible acquisition of the MiG-29 hulks, which date to the late 1980s...

When 30-year-old footage of Vermont’s independent senator, Bernie Sanders, singing drunk and shirtless in a sauna complex in the Soviet Union emerged on Twitter Monday, folks had a field day with it. Some found it endearing and amusing, but others were enraged by him palin’ around with Russians.

Anya Fedotova is a 31-year-old Russian photo editor. She works in GUM, a state department store on the Red Square in Moscow. Every day she goes to work in what was once a prime example of democratized enterprise—an attempt to boost Communism through consumerism. On her way to the office, she passes by grandparents pointing out Soviet-era toys, accessories and tableware to their grandchildren, showing them what life was like back in the USSR. “It’s one of the centres of Soviet-era nostalgia,” she tells me. “Entire families come here to enjoy the atmosphere and eat Soviet ice-cream.” In a recent...