Free Republic

I visited the Soviet Union twice back in the eighties. Fascinating place. … And, because I was on cultural exchanges, I met brilliant people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and a dozen or so other well known Soviet writers and filmmakers. Funnily enough, most of them would eventually take me aside and ask me if I could help them get out of there. I couldn’t, unfortunately, but I could well understand why they wanted to leave. At the end of both of my trips of about two weeks each, I desperately wanted to get the Hell out myself. I hated the place....

Frontpage InterviewÂ’s guest today is Irina Tsukerman, the coordinator for Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People, a new initiative which focuses on the digital documentation of sites and narratives connected to Soviet persecution of Jews, as well as sites and stories associated with acts of resistance.FP: Irina Tsukerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.I would like to talk to you today about your new initiative, Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People.But letÂ’s begin with you telling us a bit about your background and what inspired you to start this effort.Tsukerman: I was born in Ukraine, when it was still part of the...

A new biography covering Chancellor Angela Merkel’s life in East Germany has caused a stir by suggesting she was closer to the communist apparatus and its ideology than previously thought. Published this week and written by journalists Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuth, the book quotes Gunter Walther, a former colleague of hers at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, as saying she had been secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda” in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization at the institute. Merkel, a trained physicist, worked at the academy from 1978 until 1989. … Merkel has said in the...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

Vladimir Putin is more than a year into his third term as president of Russia, and he is likely to dominate the country's next decade as he dominated the last—just as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev dominated their own times in the Kremlin. Like Putin or loathe him, he embodies an era. But centuries from now, the history books will barely remember the human rights abuses or oil pipelines in today's coverage of Russia. Mr. Putin will be remembered for one thing only: missing the chance to save his nation from a lingering decline. The United Nations predicts that, by...

Must See. Jeanine Pyrro Slams Chechen Jihad Mom Zuby Tsarnaeva.

MOSCOW, April 27 (UPI) -- Russian citizens should not be allowed to freely own guns for purposes of self-defense, says President Vladimir Putin. His comments were made after a gunman with a rifle killed six people in southwest Russia Monday, RIA Novosti reported Saturday. "I do not support the idea of free arms distribution in Russia," Putin told a Russian television station. "It is dangerous to artificially stimulate this process." snip

I have seen the future and ran away. At first the move to America from the former USSR made me feel as though I had made a jump in time, from the stagnant depraved past into a distant dynamic future. There was an abundance of commonly available futuristic contraptions, machines, and appliances that made everyday existence easier and more enjoyable. Less obvious but just as exciting was the media's openness: I no longer needed to read between the lines to know what was happening. Most importantly, there was honesty, dignity, and respect in relations among people. Today I'm feeling like...

... Griffin: I think you’re trying to tell us something… to this country. Bezmenov: Oh yes. I am trying to tell you that it has to be stopped, unless you want to end up in [a] gulag system, and enjoy all the advantages of socialist equality, working for free, catching fleas on your body, sleeping on planks of plywood, in Alaska this time, I guess. That’s where Americans will belong unless they will wake up, of course, and force their government to stop aiding Soviet fascism. ...

At the end of World War II, huge swaths of Europe and Asia had been reduced to ruins. Borders were redrawn and homecomings, expulsions, and burials were under way. But the massive efforts to rebuild had just begun. When the war began in the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the Axis the Allied powers had resulted in 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole world. Allied forces now became occupiers, taking control of Germany, Japan, and much of the territory they had formerly...

Three Numbers In the Soviet Union preparations begin for the fiftieth anniversary of the communist revolution; in particular, a large collective "book epic" is conceived. The idea has been talked about in the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers with Fedin, Twardowski, Tikhonov, Surkov Gribachev, etc., and, of course, the idea will be implemented. Not even one "book epic", probably, will be created. We decided to offer the authors of this undertaking three numbers that will be useful for any "book epic." NUMBER ONE It is a question of human losses in the revolutionary transformation of Russia. Ninety-plus years...

MOSCOW, March 29 (RIA Novosti) – President Vladimir Putin has met with activists who served in his presidential campaign a year ago and promised to revive a Soviet-era award by the end of Friday. “In the Soviet Union, we had the ‘Hero of Socialist Labor’ title, and in my opinion, it was justified,” Putin said on Friday morning in Rostov-on-Don while meeting with the staffers of the All-Russia People’s Front, who successfully campaigned for his re-election for a third term. He said that the necessary orders would be in place by the end of the day to revive the title,...

As I recovered from a rough bout of jetlag over the weekend, I came across an interesting piece by William Wan over at the Washington Post. The article explores China’s study of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author points out that, “the shadow of the U.S.S.R. still hangs over many parts of Chinese society. What is considered bygone Cold War history by much of the rest of the world, even by many in Russia, lives on in China.” Wan goes on to note “The obsession is fueled by the fear that, with a few wrong steps, China’s Communist...

Full title: Revealed: The banker who shaped the modern financial world after WWII was a Soviet spy who wanted America to become communist Harry Dexter White was the architect of the post-war financial system, which paved the way for the West to dominate the 20th century and win the Cold War. But it has now emerged that the brilliant economist was in fact a staunch anti-capitalist who privately praised the Soviet Union's communism. Documents unearthed at Princeton University prove that, although White devoted his life to strengthening western capitalism, he secretly despised the system he had created and believed it...

Nazism and Communism They Endured the Communist Terror by Horst Schüler    Place of horror. A Soviet prison camp in the Vorkuta region. Our author Horst student had there for four years, forced to work - PHOTO:. PICTURE-ALLIANCE / AKG-IMAGES / A contribution to the controversy over the memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism: Horst Schüler responds to the historian Wolfgang Benz. The former director of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism Wolfgang Benz has recently published in Tagesspiegel about the dispute over the right of interpretation of the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and communist regimes....

As most of you have read or seen by now, a journalist and NBC/MSNBC media consultant named William “Bill” Arkin has created quite a stir by viciously insulting American soldiers in Iraq. He wrote at his Washington Post blog, “Early Warning: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security” column (1/30/07), that “… this NBC (Nightly News) report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer force that thinks it is doing the dirty work” re Iraq. The “report,” according to Arkin, featured “a number of soldiers (who) expressed frustration with...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience� of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Vladimir Lenin is not considered funny in Poland. A Polish mobile phone operator that used a cartoon image of the Russian communist revolutionary found itself barraged by angry feedback and responded this week by stopping its advertising campaign. Older Poles remember the late Soviet leader for shaping a communist regime that killed millions and imposed mass terror in the Soviet Union. A communist regime was later imposed on Poles against their will by the Soviets after World War II. The company, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa S.A., counted on younger Poles having shaken such associations, and recently started using a drawing of...

Top Swedish politicians and Raoul Wallenberg's own sister on Thursday introduced an official memorial day for the "great Swede", who saved 100,000 people from the Holocaust in Budapest during World War 2, citing the need to fight today's anti-Semitism and its modern "anti-Islam kin". 'Give Wallenberg an annual day': minister (4 Aug 12) Wallenberg death still 'shrouded in mystery' (3 Aug 12) Obama honours Raoul Wallenberg's legacy (20 Apr 12) In an opinion article published on Friday in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper, Wallenberg's sister Nina Lagergren, Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, and United Nation's Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson lead...

Putin has called for Communist leader Vladimir Lenin's body to be preserved in its mausoleum on Red Square, comparing the embalmed body of the founder of the Soviet state to the relics of saints. "Many are saying that having Lenin's Mausoleum runs counter to the tradition. But what runs counter to tradition?" Putin told a meeting with celebrities who campaigned for him in the March 2012 presidential election, according to the Kremlin website. "Just go to Kiev Pechersk Lavra or check out Pskov Monastery or Mount Athos. You'll see the relics of saints there." Putin cited almost word-for-word the present-day...

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy. Americans remember Pearl Harbor as the work of a Japanese military machine hell-bent on a war of conquest. The truth is more complicated. The imperial regime had faced severe political shocks throughout the 1930s. Two attempts on the life of Emperor Hirohito—one by a Japanese communist whose father was a member...

The carton below is from Soviet Communist Russian times. You can see how the capitalist system is depicted as slavery - the opposite of how communism works, IE., free money, multiplied and returned to the worker - in the right frame. Tell me Obama does not think differently. And, as many Americans kill off Christmas as the celebration of the birth of Jesus, so the Soviets replaced Saint Nick with "Father Frost" - a man who gives out presents because he is a generous communist. From Wikipedia Ded Moroz "Following the Russian Revolution, Christmas traditions were actively discouraged because they...

East Germany's secret police sold citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials • Tens of thousands tested with experimental drugs not approved in the West • One study of a drug for heart conditions saw six out of 17 patients die • Sinister practice exposed in disturbing new Germany documentary Former Communist East Germany secretly sold its citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials. Tens of thousands of sick people in the former German Democratic Republic were treated with medicines not approved in the West to...

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has declared war on the Internet, and not just within his country’s own borders. Putin’s war may be coming soon to a laptop or smart phone near you. For years we’ve been told by Putin’s apologists that his moves against traditional media didn’t matter because it was impossible to strangle Russia’s feisty Internet. But for a KGB dictator, “impossible” is a meaningless term. Putin’s campaign consists of a three-part pincer movement, and now that he has essentially been made “president for life”, he is pursuing it with greatly renewed vigor. … Throughout Putin’s first twelve years in...

Revealed: How the U.S. planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union - Scientists were hoping for giant flash on the moon that would intimidate the Soviet Union - Aim of mission was to launch the nuke by 1959 - Plan was later scrapped due to possible danger to people on Earth It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s. At the height of the space...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

A woman throws icons away in a propaganda poster which states, "The Bright Light of Science Has Proven That There Is No God." Denver, Colo., Oct 19, 2012 / 05:43 pm (CNA).- Some 40 Soviet propaganda posters against Christianity will soon be displayed at Denver’s Catholic cathedral as part of an exhibit dedicated to religious liberty. “These posters remind us that societies can turn very deadly when you have a kind of radical secularism which manifests in an anti-Christian attitude … you see it in all its ugliness through the lens of these posters,� Father Doug Grandon told CNA...

AFP - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was expected in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian leaders on his first major foreign visit since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will host Zardari for talks on Thursday at the Kremlin where officials from the two countries were also expected to sign agreements on cooperation in agriculture, aviation and energy, a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Moscow told AFP. "Economics will be the focus of the visit," said the spokesman, Raja Abdul Qayyum. The three-day visit to Russia will be Zardari's first...

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Seventy-five years ago, on August 5, 1937, one of the most horrific — and most ignored — episodes in human history began. “Operation Kulak” ("kulak" meaning rich peasants) was the Soviet Union’s effort to repress those farmers who had a little more than other farmers (according, at least, to the definitions of the Communist Party), and who resisted collectivization. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (pictured) had begun the development of “Operation Kulak” the previous month, when he contacted all the regional Party leaders as well as the NKVD (roughly the Soviet equivalent of the Gestapo and SS in Nazi Germany), asking...

Russia has long held the inglorious title of abortion capital of the world, with consistently the most terminations per woman of child-bearing-age of any nation. This grisly habit was established back in Soviet times, when the shimmering workers' paradise found simply snuffing-out the unborn less expensive than supplying birth-control in sufficient quantities. Alas, even if families would liked to have had a larger brood, the creaking state-run economy never could produce sufficient plenty for anything north of about 1.1 children/couple, with most families crammed-into a two-room, cement-panel rabbit hut... ah, the glorious efficiencies of central-planning! And while any red-blooded male can...

In the 1980s, it was Afghanistan to which international Islamic fighters came, helping the mujahedeen successfully take on the Soviet army and its puppet regime in Kabul. Then came Bosnia in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s, in both of which veteran jihadists fought a sectarian war on behalf of outgunned Sunni minorities.In 2012, they’re flocking to Syria With funding from private organizations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, they are making their way across the frontiers from Iraq and Jordan, hooking up with opposition elements in Syria and taking the battle to Damascus and the heart of the...

Communism has continued to swallow countries because resistance to Communism fell away after 1991.The adoption of a private property system in Russia did not signify the triumph of capitalism. It signified a new kind of danger which involves the subversion of capitalism through capitalism itself argues sovietologist J.R. Nyquist.

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

Often the most wondrous things come in the smallest of packages. Today, the hope of an Arab Spring is fast becoming the despair of a nuclear winter. We’re turning our backs to the only true ally we have in the Middle East, only to make alliances with tenuously formed governments. The United Nations is more concerned with wealth redistribution and political correctness than it is for its chief priority -- peacekeeping. In the void, it’s important to remember a time when a child stepped in to do the job the UN couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Her target? Yuri Andropov, the general...

In the Russian Arctic lies buried an unfinished railway built by prisoners of Stalin's gulags. For decades, no-one talked about it. But one woman is now telling the story of the thousands who suffered there—and there is talk of bringing back to life the abandoned railway itself. … Lyudmila (Lipatova) and I had uncovered a tiny section of one of Joseph Stalin's cruelest and most ambitious projects—the Trans-Polar Main Line. It was (Stalin's) attempt to conquer the Arctic—part of what he called his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The scheme was supposed to link the eastern and western...

Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamor and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo'ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see apocalypse right here, right now. The Soviet era sign still welcomes people to the city. Yet there are few visitors who stay more than a few hours. They all leave after they have done looking at what...

The Pechersky district court in Kyiv on April 12 sentenced Valery Ivashchenko, who was acting Minister of Defense from June 2009 until April 2010, to five years in jail. This is despite the European Union’s warnings that more persecution of ministers from the former government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (2007-2010) would put into question Ukraine’s European integration. Ivashchenko has been the fourth imprisoned former top official from Tymoshenko’s government. Like Tymoshenko, former Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko and former Environment Minister Georgy Filipchuk before him, Ivashchenko was indicted under the same Article 365 of the Criminal Code “for excess of...

"There was a time when the isolated, firmly knit family, based on a church wedding, was equally necessary to all its members. If there had been no family, who would have fed, clothed and brought up the children? "The customs and moral principles of family life are changing as the general conditions of life change. ... How can one talk of parents when the mother and father are out working all day and cannot find the time to spend even a few minutes with their children? "It is not surprising, therefore, that family ties should loosen and the family begin...

Birmingham's Southern Museum of Flight gets Soviet helicopter (slideshow, video) BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The hull of one of the most feared helicopters in history arrived at the Southern Museum of Flight Tuesday, riding on the back of a trailer 186 miles from the Fort Rucker U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence. It was a camouflage-painted, Mi-24 Hind. The Hind was a flying gunship that became the iconic image of the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was also a metaphor for the unequal struggle between an advanced technology super-power and a lightly armed guerrilla force on the...

The Obama Record: When Vladimir I. Lenin sought to remake Russian society into a "proletariats' paradise," he targeted three sectors for control: health care, banking and education. Sound familiar? Of these three, however, Lenin viewed socialized medicine as the "keystone" to building his socialist utopia. The Bolshevik leader told the Russian people everybody would be able to afford going to the doctor, not just the "greedy rich." He also claimed centralized control of the medical industry would "reduce costs" and end the "waste" from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" in a competitive market. In 1918, the USSR became the first nation...

An Extremely Creepy Tour of an Abandoned Soviet Monument in Bulgaria Remember those derelict Bulgarian war memorials that resemble space fortresses? Well, it turns out they're just as otherworldly inside. Here's one intrepid urban explorer's journey into the shadowy corridors of the shuttered Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship memorial in Varna, Bulgaria. It's also a case study on why you never tour old Soviet monuments alone. In its Communist heyday, the "Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship" contained an eternal flame, a bomb shelter, and a tourism center. Loudspeakers would also blast Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on constant loop. The center opened in...

Climate-change scepticism must be 'treated', says enviro-sociologist Dubious on warmo peril? You're the kind who'd own slaves Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be "treated", according to an Oregon-based professor of "sociology and environmental studies". Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master's and PhD in sociology. "Over the past ten years I have published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology,...

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be "treated", according to an Oregon-based professor of "sociology and environmental studies". Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master's and PhD in sociology.

Gallery: Familiar-yet-alien Soviet arcade games While playing Centipede (don't judge) at my local mall in the '80s, it never occurred to me that somewhere behind the soon-to-fall Iron Curtain there would be some punk playing the Soviet version of arcade games as well. Hell yeah they were! Now, thanks to two nostalgic Muscovites who remembered their days of playing "Sea Battle," there is an entire museum full of these Soviet-era games. The story of the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is so cool we couldn't make this up if we tried. Let's talk about the games first. Soviet classics Sea...

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s current prime minister and future president, has shown a strong interest in Asian affairs. In his second term, Putin would undoubtedly like to maintain good ties with China, consolidate Moscow’s first-among-equals status in Central Asia, manage the regional repercussions of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, prevent a war or major crisis in the Koreas, and deepen Russia’s integration into East Asia’s more dynamic and prosperous economic networks. At the same time, Putin is eager to strengthen Russia’s position in Europe. It’s a big to-do list, but Russia has already succeeded in raising its profile in Asia...

Vladimir Putin has declared victory in Russia's presidential elections, returning for a third term after spending the last four years as the country's PM. Exit polls and preliminary results gave him about 60% of the vote. Mr Putin told supporters at a rally in central Moscow they had won in an open and honest battle. But opposition groups have reported widespread fraud, with many people said to have voted more than once. ............. "I promised you we would win, and we won," he said, with tears in his eyes. "Glory to Russia!" "We have won in an open and honest...

One of the most haunting impressions of my Soviet childhood was stories my grandparents told about the Black Raven. As a small boy, I was terrified of this polished and poised creature of the night, usually sighted as it crouched to swoop upon an unsuspecting victim and carry him away, never to be seen again. The Black Raven, however, was no avian figment of the human mind. Rather, this secret-police sedan — named for the Russian symbol of death — was a very real fixture of life in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Those who saw the Raven stop...

Sudan is a kind of diabolical Groundhog Day. In the film by that name, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) re-lives the same day over and over again until he learns the lessons needed to change his life and save the lives of others. In Sudan today, people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State are re-living the horrific nightmare from which they thought they had finally awakened after the signing of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But in this case, it is the United States government that has failed to learn the lessons needed to change conditions and save the...