Free Republic

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical...

HOOKSETT, N.H. – The New Hampshire Union Leader published a guest op/ed from a teacher who identifies herself as a liberal.  Diane Sekula is a teacher in Hooksett, NH and she was responding to a published article that said Common Core is a conservative flashpoint. Sekula writes:I come from a staunch Democrat family. By most people’s standards, I would be considered liberal. I am also, however, very much against Common Core. Public dissatisfaction with Common Core is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of importance for anyone interested in doing what’s best for the children of New Hampshire.She points...

Moscow (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday defended the infamous pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that agreed to divide up eastern Europe during a visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to carve up eastern Europe between them in a secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on non-aggression. "When the USSR realised that it was left facing Hitler's Germany alone, it took steps so as to not permit a direct collision and this Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed," Putin said at a news conference in response to...

When the F-15 was created, it was created to be a pure air-to-air fighter, with the philosophy of “not a pound for air-to-ground” guiding designers. So how did Israel end up turning their F-15s into deadly long-range multi-role strike aircraft well before the F-15E Strike Eagle became a reality? Here’s how. In Need Of A Game Changing Fighter Israel’s love affair with the F-15 began out of the need to procure a fighter that could trump the increasingly complex fighters that surrounding Arab states were amassing from Russian and French sources. Both the F-14 Tomcat and the F-15 Eagle were...

American Communist Party's involvement in Soviet espionage Despite the wishful caviling of a few die-hard Marxist professors, the controversy over the American Communist Party’s involvement in Soviet espionage was long ago settled beyond even an unreasonable doubt. For example, a June 7, 1999 Time Magazine review of several new books on the subject found that, “The opening of Soviet archives after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., together with the Venona decryptions…, has made it clear that the fear of Soviet espionage was neither neurotic nor hallucinatory…The Venona traffic demonstrates beyond argument that the Soviet penetration into American government, science, and...

Russian scientists have developed experimental embalming methods to maintain the look, feel and flexibility of the Soviet Union's founderÂ’s body, which is 145 years old today. For thousands of years humans have used embalming methods to preserve dead bodies. But nothing compares with Russia's 90-year-old experiment to preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin, communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union. Generations of Russian scientists have spent almost a century fine-tuning preservation techniques that have maintained the look, feel and flexibility of Lenin's body. This year Russian officials closed the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square so that scientists could...

Can it be that students gather annually around the country to construct “Model United Nations” because the real one has failed so miserably? “What good does it do?” Judge Jeanine Pirro asked a packed, admittedly conservative audience at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D. C. last Monday. Judge Pirro was in town to receive the Reed Irvine award for investigative journalism from Accuracy in Media. Judge Pirro suggested a two prong approach to the UN: Get out of it and get it out of New York. She also noted that when she served as DA in Westchester County, there...

Should at any time we feel ourselves to be alone, or for the secular world to be so overwhelming and powerful as to render spiritual life redundant, we can reflect on the difficulties of our predecessors and be inspired by their cheerfulness and joy in the face of tremendous privations. As mentioned before, the mid 1920’s was a period of ferocious attacks upon the Church by the Bolsheviks, both clergy and laity. Many of the faithful were executed or imprisoned in the Gulag for extended periods on nonsensical charges. The Solovetsky Island concentration camp (Solovki for short), formerly a remote...

After a September 1989 tour of Houston's Johnson Space Center, Boris Yeltsin -freshly elected to the new Soviet Politburo- made an impromptu visit to a typical American grocery store -'Randalls'- in Clear Lake, Texas, to have himself a look around... And more than anything he'd seen at the advanced NASA facility, what really blew Yeltsin away was the sheer variety of goods at the supermarket. The fact that such stores where to be found in just about any town in America was said to be beyond comprehension for the Soviet politician- the pictures tell a thousand words- A mesmerized Yeltsin wandered the isles, marveled...

Vladimir Putin has an army of professional trolls running thousand of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to flood social media with pro-Russia propaganda. Hundreds of workers are paid £500 a month to work exhausting 12-hour shifts bombarding the internet with comments placing Putin in a more favourable light. The trolls work under strict condition which see them banned from talking and even forging friendships with one another.

If you believe that the U.S. aggressors were preparing to land in Crimea in the winter of 2014 in order to help the Ukrainians kill all the Orthodox Russians there, and that only the pre-emptive military operation under the command of President Vladimir Putin saved them, then you are "one of us" — that is, a true-blue adherent of the state's cult. However, if you think that the United States was not planning a military operation in Crimea last year, that it did not "have its eye on" the peninsula and that NATO never did and still has no plans...

Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. You can read the full letter here. The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. (snip) If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stirred controversy after paying tribute to a monument complex to Soviet soldiers killed in Hungary during the suppression of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising. Hungary's law states that the present day freedom ‘blossomed' out of that uprising also known as the ‘1956 revolution' and anyone ‘justifying the crimes committed by the communist system is to be punished'. This means that Putin's commemoration of the soldiers violates Hungarian law. Despite government officials denying that Putin laid a wreath at the monument specifically commemorating Soviet invaders, an advance of the itinerary of Putin's visit said that he would...

The first man in outer space 50 years ago believed fervently in the Almighty — even though the atheistic Soviet government put famous words in his mouth that he had looked around at the cosmos and did not see God. Mankind’s first space flight lasted 108 minutes on April 12, 1961. It was the height of the Cold War. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was proclaimed by the Soviet leadership to have announced, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.” However, he never uttered those often-quoted words, says a close friend. And it seems that the Soviet Union lied...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...

For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Obama and politicians in both countries have been trading barbs for months as the countries' relations have plunged ever southward. But what about the countries' citizens? Are they as at odds as their leaders' rhetoric suggests? WorldViews delved into recent opinion polls conducted by the Pew Research Center and Gallup. Together, the data provide interesting insights into what Russians and Americans think about each other and themselves, how they differ in certain ways, and how they are similar when it comes to other aspects. Ways Americans and Russians think differently Less than half of all...

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less. Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution . In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago . Others say that the figure is 45 million,...

Viorel Florescu/staff photographer Retired Washington Township math teacher Miriam Moskowitz, 98, leaving federal court in New York City on Thursday with Caren Ponty, left, and her nephew Ira Moskowitz, after U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled against her petition to reverse her 1950 felony conviction related to atomic espionage. Miriam Moskowitz has been called a lot of things in her 98 years of life — feisty, aggressive and possessing a violent temper, among them. But the one label that bothers her most is spy for the former Soviet Union — a moniker given to her by the government.  That...

A new report out of Europe says that Russian military confrontations and "near misses" with NATO nations have seen a dramatic uptick in 2014. It warns that Russia must reevaluate its military policy and that NATO and Russia must improve communications to avoid potentially catastrophic confrontations. The report, released today by the European Leadership Network (ELN), a British think tank focused on regional security, chronicles some 40 incidents over eight months in which Russian military forces committed "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, and other dangerous actions" across Europe and near North...