Free Republic

(CNN)What was once the gleaming pride and joy of the Soviet space program now lies covered in dirt and bird droppings in a disused hangar in Kazakhstan. With their broken windows, missing tiles and ransacked interiors, these shuttles are a haunting -- and fascinating -- piece of space history, rarely seen by the outside world. Indeed, when 36-year-old Russian photographer Ralph Mirebs discovered the derelict shuttles and rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome, he was touched by the sad end for these "wonderful winged machines."

MOSCOW/WARSAW (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday it was outraged by Poland's destruction of a Soviet war monument, warning Warsaw of the "most negative consequences" after what it said was a flagrant violation of an agreement between the two countries on protecting memorial sites. Poland has been one of the most vocal critics of Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia and Poland share a history of conflicts and the disagreement over war memorials is likely to add to tensions. "Warsaw must finally understand that the 'war of monuments' unleashed in Poland may have the most negative consequences,...

President Richard Nixon was drunk during the height of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, according to veteran journalist Tim Weiner writing for Politico magazine. Weiner’s book, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, makes the charge. The former New York Times reporter claims that a call recorded by Henry Kissinger proves Nixon was drunk on the fifth day of the crisis after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel which caught their Intelligence agency by surprise. It became clear in the hours after the 1973 Yom Kippur attack that the Arabs had surprised Israeli forces...

Federal Bureau of Investigation files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government. Jarrett’s dad, … Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals…. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad. Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett,...

Francis laments that world powers did nothing to save Jewish, Christian, gays from Nazi death camps.ROME — Pope Francis on Sunday denounced what he called the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II. He also decried the deaths of Christians in concentration camps in Russia under the Stalin dictatorship, which followed the war....

Night Witch commemorative stamps (Photo: toysworld.od.ua)In the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, German soldiers had a very real fear of witches.Namely the Night Witches, an all-female squadron of bomber pilots who ran thousands of daring bombing raids with little more than wooden planes and the cover of night—and should be as celebrated as their male counterparts.This month marks the 73rd anniversary of the start of their pioneering service. In June of 1941, the Axis powers pushed into the Soviet Union using the largest invading force in the history of warfare. The infamous Operation Barbarossa saw over four million troops wade into Russia from...

'Seventy five years after the sinking of the Lancastria - Britain's worst maritime disaster in history - why is the tragedy largely forgotten? And what do those touched by the catastrophe want now? "The trouble with the story of the Lancastria is it doesn't fit with the grand narrative of that period - the miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain," reflects Mark Hirst. "No amount of spin can turn the story of the Lancastria into something triumphant." Mark - a former broadcast journalist and co-founder of the Lancastria Association of Scotland - has studied the life of...

The Soviet Union was the first to begin developing firearms specifically for their combat divers. The Soviet Navy was worried about divers attacking their ships in their naval anchorages, and in particular those of the Black Sea fleet based in Sevastopol, located on the Crimean Peninsula, and Odessa, Ukraine. These anchorages could be easily threatened by NATO forces operating out of Turkey. It wasn’t an idle worry. The use of divers to attack anchored ships was used extensively by the Italian Navy during World War II, and the British Navy developed their techniques by using captured Italian equipment. The Soviet...

President Putin joined a march on Red Square, holding a picture of his father in uniform As viewers watched Russian state TV coverage of Victory Day on 9 May, their eyes will have been drawn to one face in particular among the crowds carrying photographs of family members who took part in the struggle against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. Among the massed ranks, a portrait of his late father held out in front of him, was President Vladimir Putin. This surprise appearance amid crowds in Moscow honouring ordinary people who served in World War Two seems to be...

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...