Free Republic

As Europe marks 80 years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which carved up eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Russia is trying to defend the agreement again. There is no political benefit to doing this. President Vladimir Putin needs to abandon his Stalinist inheritance of a foreign policy based solely on national interest. If Moscow needed any reminder that many in eastern Europe still hold the treaty against it and still consider it a threat, plenty came on the anniversary. The governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania – the countries directly affected by the pact’s secret...

Video at link: Psychiatrist Allen Frances: “Trump is as destructive of person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were”

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...

I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group That Murdered Americans The allies of a Communist terrorist group are running the country. August 1, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 99 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. There is a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist take on the Manson murders, in which the fictional members of the family blame movies for their crimes. The real answer is less cinematic and more political. The Manson family’s crimes were part...

Why is Communism relevant today? Ignorance! Just ask around. You may be shocked to find that nearly no one under twenty-five has ever heard of Stalin, whose genocide exceeded Hitler's by a factor of five. Communism is being repackaged in this atmosphere of ignorance. Films like “Motorcycle Diaries” and “Young Marx” portray Che and Marx as wise, prophetic figures fighting for mankind's betterment. Idealistic youth is responding enthusiastically in their need for heroes. If you travel abroad, say to India or South America, you can see full-scale marches complete with red banners and portraits of Stalin. How do you get...

The Washington Post on Thursday announced that Stalin has wiped out all memories of his Secret Police chief, Yezhov. Oops! I mean the Democrats have deleted all their recent tweets about the big feud between Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrat leadership with the leftist Squad. This attempt to wipe out the recent past was announced by Mike DeBonis in "House Democrats move to tamp down internal feud, delete tweets that sparked infighting."

Ukraine's Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow. In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the "communist and Nazi regimes" used similar methods of "implementing repressive state policies." The legislation was passed by Ukrainian lawmakers in May 2015. That law paved the way for the removal of all communist monuments not related to World War II and renaming public places and landmarks bearing Soviet names. Since then, dozens of statues, plaques, and other monuments --...

When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid. In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review, Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not...

Great expectations characterised 1989...The Gorbachev era brought about a frenzy of change, and people witnessed incredible events on a weekly basis: they snatched up newspapers, hung on every word broadcast on TV, and with every passing day they felt more alive and free. By the mid-1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet period started to creep in. The greyness of the Brezhnev era, with its endless queues and empty shops, started to be recalled as a peaceful, prosperous time. And gradually something that had seemed impossible during perestroika, became real: Stalin’s shadow loomed large again. Vladimir Putin’s rise to power came accompanied...

The cover story in the May 25, 2019 issue of “WORLD” showed the dangers of socialism -- but “New York Times” columnist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the notion that American socialism could lead to “Soviet-style central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry; ... there is essentially nobody in American political life who advocates such things. . Scaremongering over socialism is both silly and dishonest.”Hmm. When teenager Ioseb Jughashvili (he later changed his name to Stalin) became an atheist after reading Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” I suspect he didn’t set out to murder at least 20 million people. Hugo Chávez wanted to soak the...

Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War II and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated. Moscow's comments might irk war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel. Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of...

Millenials are aged 25 – 39. In Australia four out of five are not even “familiar” with Mao. Half have never heard of him, even though he caused the deaths of twice as many people as Adolf Hitler. Political ideologues control our education system. We teach kids identity politics, and how to control the weather with light globes, but not the most important political lesson of the 20th Century. We won the cold war, then lost the peace. Why Millenials are embracing Socialism Tom Switzer, Sydney Morning Herald The survey evidence is clear. In a YouGov poll commissioned by the...

Russia's online community has been abuzz over the past week with praise for popular YouTuber Yury Dud's documentary about life in the land of the gulag labor camps. His documentary, “Kolyma — Birthplace of Our Fear,” was viewed 9.5 million times in seven days. It’s a departure for the 32-year-old sports editor, whose 5.1 million subscribers tune in to watch him interview personalities from all walks of life about their personal lives. “Why is it that — after rappers, comedians, musicians, actors and directors — we approached this difficult and alarming subject?” Dud asks at the top of the show....

Lionsgate's Hellboy made a sly reference to Baba Yaga's history as a threat to the world when the titular paranormal investigator revealed she had previously tried to raise the spirit of Russian dictator Josef Stalin back from the dead. However, the reference was removed in the Russian version of the film. According to the BBC, the Russian release of Hellboy censored the reference to Stalin. The audio was bleeped out, and the subtitles instead indicated that Baba Yaga had previously tried to raise the spirit of German despot Adolf Hitler instead.

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...

"The reconstruction of the cathedral was a symbol of the resurrection of Russia, a sign of hope for better times for the people who had turned away from God, but are now returning to Him." On December 5, 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. It was built more than half a century after Russia's 1812 victory over the French, and was in use for about the same length of time. Under the Soviets, this cathedral, Russia's largest, was destroyed in just one day. In its place, they planned to build a Palace...

Joseph Stalin visited Novosibirsk only once in 1928. The monument to him was dismantled, along with those in other Soviet cities, in th early 1960s. And now he is to return, though in private. Local Communists have been struggling to rebuild the statue since 2016, and their struggle eventually brings fruit. The city's mayoral office nodded, however reluctantly, to the Stalinists' demand to erect a statue of Stalin by May 9, the Russian V-Day. Unlike the huge original monument at Novosibirsk main square, the replica will be way more modest: only three metres tall, and placed in a private yard...

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...