Free Republic

As hundreds of supporters queued in Red Square to lay flowers at the grave of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, on the 66th anniversary of his death this week, two young activists mingled with the crowd beneath the Kremlin’s walls. “Burn in hell, executioner of the people and murderer of women and children!” shouted Yevgeny Suchkov, before snapping a red carnation and hurling it at a granite bust of Stalin. Police and Kremlin security officers reacted instantly, seizing him in a neck lock and dragging him away. While all the attention was on Suchkov, his fellow activist, Olga Savchenko, stepped...

The Soviet Union even went so far as to include the Katyn Massacre among the list of Nazi war crimes presented at the Nuremberg trials. Wikimedia CommonsOfficials examine the exhumed remains of the Katyn massacre. 1943. In 1940, Poland was caught between the military aggression of both Germany and the Soviet Union. The conflict climaxed that spring in Russia’s Katyn Forest when the Soviets murdered 22,000 of the best and brightest Poles of their generation en masse — then tried to blame the whole thing on the Nazis. The Katyn massacre and its ensuing cover-up shaped Russo-Polish relations for the...

Stalin Kicked The Bucket: Ray Anderson [1953] Old Joe kicked the bucket, he's long gone. He won't worry us from now on. He lived in a place they call Moscow. His number came up and he had to go Yes, old Joe's dead and gone. He stayed around too long. And nobody now can save his hide, 'Cause old Joe lay right down and died. Old Joe won't worry us no more. He killed the helpless by the score. Now I hope he's satisfied, Since old Joe's taken his last ride Yes, old Joe's dead and gone. He stayed around...

HELL—In a statement offered to reporters during a 15-minute recess from hell, dictator and mass murderer Joseph Stalin announced he now identifies as a strong woman of color in order to deflect criticism away from his socialist policies that killed millions. "I now identify as a strong woman of color, and a lot of men simply can't handle that," Stalin said, sassily snapping his fingers in a "Z" formation. "It drives them crazy to know that a strong woman of color such as myself can wield so much power." Stalin stated that white men simply feel threatened by his accomplishments...

The millions of people the Stalin system killed did not disappear into thin air: they were buried typically in mass graves that Russia today has inherited but whose people and officials do not know what to do with them. As a result, they remain a continuing wound on the body of the country, Anastasiya Platonova of Takiye dela says. The Soviet system has left behind “cemeteries of the victims of political repressions: mass burials of those shot as well as small cemeteries of the camps and special settlements,” she continues. Some have been studied, but most have not, despite the...

Tlaib thinks she's here in our House to represent Ramallah, Omar thinks we brought her over from Somalia to introduce their customs of piracy, intolerance, anti-Semitism and female genital mutilation.

A Swedish court in Gothenburg has refused a Polish request for the extradition of a Stalinist-era judge suspected of issuing unlawful death sentences to underground fighters in the 1950s. Judge Mats Hagelin justified the decision by declaring that the crimes that the former judge, Stefan Michnik, allegedly committed in Poland decades ago were covered by a statute of limitations under Swedish law. In October, a Polish court issued an European arrest warrant for Michnik, who is suspected of committing 30 crimes “bearing the hallmarks of crimes against humanity” in Warsaw in 1952 and 1953. The ninety-year-old, who has Swedish citizenship,...

Ocasio-Cortez: Latinos Can’t Be Illegals Because They’re ‘Descendants of Native People’ BY: Cameron Cawthorne Follow @@Cam_Cawthorne February 7, 2019 4:31 pm Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) on Thursday criticized U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and argued in support of undocumented Latinos in the United States, saying the latter cannot be "criminalized" on "Native" U.S. land because they are "descendants of Native people." The self-described Democratic socialist spoke on Thursday alongside several liberal groups, including MoveOn and United We Dream, a pro-immigration group that calls for ICE to be abolished. She repeatedly slammed ICE, claiming it "repeatedly and systematically violates human...

Democratic state lawmakers in New Jersey aren’t done seeking President Donald Trump’s tax returns. Some members of the state Legislature have revived legislation that would require candidates for president and vice president to disclose their tax returns from the previous five years to appear on the ballot in the Garden State. The bill would also ban New Jersey’s voters in the electoral college from voting for a candidate that did not do so. That would affect Trump, a Republican who in 2016 became the first presidential candidate in four decades not to release his returns, if he runs for re-election...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at an event in Claremont, N.H., January 18, 2019. (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she’s proposing asset forfeiture.History is very short, if you look at it the right way. The American Revolution seems like it was a very long time ago, but looked at with the right kind of eyes, it was the day before yesterday: The revolution of Washington and Jefferson inspired the French Revolution, which unhappily perverted the classical-liberal principles of the American Founders and created instead an ersatz religion purporting to be a cult of pure reason —...

Summary Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship -- it can only be democratic. Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics...

On Jan. 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy will announce the five short documentary films up for the Oscar. Among the shortlisted films is the documentary “Women of the Gulag” by Russian-American director, Marianna Yarovskaya. It is the first time in the 91 years of the Oscar’s history that a woman director from Russia is so close to getting such prestigious award. Yarovskaya´s documentary film centers on the memories of six remarkable women survivors of the Gulag. Now in their eighties and nineties, they were sentenced to Soviet forced labor camps during the Stalin era. But...

Perhaps the only thing that outrages Russian defenders of Stalin more than the obvious parallels between his regime and Hitler’s is any reference to the alliance the two dictators formed in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one that opened the way to war in Europe and lasted until Hitler turned on his former ally in June 1941. But now there may be something even more offensive to such defenders of Stalin and his system: the discovery of documents which confirm that the NKVD cooperated closely with the Gestapo well before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and that may have paved...

“Since the year 2000 is that history has been gradually re-politicized. And the Russians started treating history that way. They’ve become more sensitive again about discussing this sort of crimes of their past. For the Russians, understanding the history of the gulag is absolutely crucial. It is also crucial for the West" ...Under President Putin, the Stalin period has come to be viewed with ambiguity by politicians, writers, film makers, and regrettably the public. The stories of the victims of the gulag, told by simple people who had little or no understanding of why this was happening to them, make...

MOSCOW - The number of Russians who regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has risen to its highest since 2005, amid rising economic concerns and nostalgia for the Soviet welfare system, the Levada pollster said on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin famously dubbed the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century and he and many Russians have long lamented the blow its demise dealt to Moscow’s great power status. In the survey, 66 percent of Russians said they regretted the Soviet break-up, a level not seen since 2005 when Levada recorded 65 percent and...

Whether you like it or not, Joseph Stalin was one of the greatest anti-fascists in the history of the anti-fascist movement. Under Stalin's command, the Red Army defeated the nazis and saved several ethnic groups from nazi extermination. This is a legacy we cannot forget.

The Gulag forced-labor camps in the USSR were “a good thing” as prisoners worked there to the benefit of the state, a 23-year-old local MP in Yekaterinburg said, and was slammed online as a “monster” in need of a history lesson. “Gulag is, actually, a good thing. Previously, the people were sent to work under supervision – at least, there was some benefit from them. But now, the inmates – rapists and murderers – just drink builder’s tea and do nothing, while we waste our money on them,” Andrey Pirozhkov, a recently-elected Communist Party MP in the Yekaterinburg’s local parliament,...

Gulag hunter is an unusual CV entry, admits Stepan Cernousek. "We are not like professional archaeologists from the university — it is a kind of passion which is a little strange, because the topic is very dark." Stepan is the leader of a small team of archaeologists, amateur historians, and adventurers, trekking thousands of kilometres across Siberian taiga forest and facing bears, freezing temperatures and raging rivers to preserve an increasingly forgotten part of Russia's dark past — the more than 30,000 prison camps that embodied forced labour: the gulags. "Today's Russia and its relationship with its history is awkward,"...

The U.S. power grid is continuing to be targeted and probed by Russian cyber actors, according to a notable cybersecurity firm, as well as other aspects of critical infrastructure (CI). Researched from the threat intelligence firm FireEye said at the CyberwarCon forum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that even though the American power grid is relatively well-defended and tough to strike with a full-scale cyber attack, that hasn’t deterred Russian state actors from continuing to probe for weaknesses...

Stalin’s popularity among society in today’s Russia is rather superficial—Russians know little about the dictator and his life; they are rather nostalgic about the period of his rule and the achievements of his era. The image of the Soviet dictator as an outstanding leader is blended with Russians’ individual memories of repression and terror which affected almost every Russian family. These reminiscences however do not penetrate the public sphere at the mass level, which makes it possible for the state’s narrative to dominate it. The Kremlin has exploited the ambivalent and superficial attitude which Russians have to Stalin. Even though...