Free Republic

(Yegor Zhukov, Age 21) The change of power in Russia will be very similar to my arrest. On the night of Aug. 2, when the longest day of my life finally ended and I laid down on a hard bunk bed in an isolation cell of a detention center, the similarity of these two events suddenly became clear to me. And while my cellmates slept — one young and one middle-aged man who were facing prison terms for armed robbery — my tired and screaming brain continued to draw parallels…. However repressive the ruling regime is, however widespread lawlessness becomes,...

Yegor Zhukov was tired of giving interviews. So instead of using the main entrance to an event in his honor, where a television crew was waiting for him, he slipped past a security guard and headed for a side door. He didn’t go unnoticed. “Please, young man, follow the rules,” the guard ordered, running after him. Zhukov, a 21-year-old politics student and popular libertarian YouTube blogger, doesn’t particularly like rules. Or rather, he explains, he doesn’t mind rules in principle, it’s just that he grew up in a country with a big government that uses them to infringe on the...

On December 4, Moscow’s Kuntsevsky District Court continued hearing the case against 21-year-old Higher School of Economics (HSE) student and libertarian YouTube personality Egor Zhukov. Zhukov stands accused of issuing public calls for extremism: Prosecutors have argued that his videos on nonviolent resistance were motivated by “political hatred and enmity to the constitutional structure extant in the Russian Federation” as well as a desire to destabilize the country’s social and political order. Zhukov’s case, one of many that were brought forward during this summer’s wave of election protests in Moscow, has attracted widespread attention throughout the Russian opposition. Many of...

MOSCOW – Protesters have torn down a towering bust of Soviet military hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov in Ukraine's second-largest city. Destruction of the monument in Kharkiv on Sunday came amid protests by an array of far-right and nationalist groups against an organizing session for a new political party. The party is led by the mayors of Kharkiv and Odesa, both of whom were members of the party of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russia president ousted amid bloody protests in 2014. The protesters said the bust violated Ukraine's law banning Communist symbols. A crowd of hundreds cheered as protesters tugged on a...

"Willful. Decisive. Has initiative and knows how to apply it to his work. Disciplined. Persistently demanding. Personally a little cold and insufficiently tactful. Has a significant streak of obstinacy. Painfully proud. In military matters well prepared. . . . Loves military affairs and is constantly striving for perfection." This assessment of the talents and traits of Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, the future World War II hero of the Soviet Union, was made by a superior officer not long after the 34-year-old cavalry officer assumed command of his first brigade in 1930. In 1946, still basking in the public's adulation after the...

Soviet commander admits USSR came close to defeat by Nazis An interview in which a Soviet commander admitted how close Moscow came to defeat by Germany during the Second World War has been broadcast in Russia for the first time. Published: 11:58AM BST 05 May 2010 The Soviet Union nearly lost the war in 1941 and suffered from poor planning, according to Marshal Georgy Zhukov in the frank television interview that has been banned since it was recorded in 1966. Zhukov, the most decorated general in the history of both Russia and the Soviet Union, admitted that Soviet generals were...

Sixty years ago, the US Ninth Army had two bridgeheads across the Elbe River. One was crushed and the other secured. The sixty year old question remains: Should and could we have beaten the Soviets into Berlin?