Free Republic

The documentary film was released and posted on August 20 on the YouTube channel of Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation in connection with the celebration of 75 years of nuclear industry. The film, edited in classic Soviet-style propaganda, shows all preparation procedures. First the transportation of the giant bomb by rail to the Olenya airbase near Olenegorsk on the Kola Peninsula. The Tu-95 aircraft take-off and flight across the Barents Sea to the detonation site near the Matochkin Strait at Novaya Zemlya. Then the release of the bomb attached to a parachute to slow the fall so the plane could...

Boris Berezovsky and other Kremlin critics took out a full-page advertisement in major U.S. newspapers on Tuesday warning the United States not to trust President Vladimir Putin. The advertisement in The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal was clearly designed to embarrass Putin as he headed for the United States to attend the UN General Assembly and a summit with U.S. President George W. Bush. Titled "Seven questions to President George Bush about his friend President Vladimir Putin," it accused Putin of undermining democracy, stamping his control on parliament, courts and media, and overseeing genocide in Chechnya....

The artistic genius behind the highly acclaimed conservative satirical site The People's Cube has been arrested and released on $8,000 bail for putting up pro-Israel posters to combat a pro-Islamist conference at George Mason University. He now faces the prospect of five years in prison for allegedly committing a "class 6 felony."Beloved satirist Oleg Atbashian (who has contributed to PJ Media) has gotten in trouble for defying authorities before: "Back in my Soviet dissident days, when I was collecting signatures in defense of Andrei Sakharov, I was screamed at, threatened, and lectured by the KGB and Communist functionaries," Oleg says. "What I never imagined was...

[Andrey] Sakharov [a Soviet dissident and one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb] gave a bitter description of this habitual psychological attitude in his Memoires, when he tried to find a military application for the Tsar Bomb: After testing the "big" device I was worried that it didn't have a good carrier (bombers didn't count because they're easy to shoot down), in other words, in the military sense we were working in vain. I decided that an effective carrier could be a big torpedo fired from a submarine. I imagined that a nuclear jet engine that converted water...

There was a time when moral giants walked the earth. One of them, Soviet dissident Elena Bonner -- widow of the great physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov -- left us on Sunday at the age of 88. A model of courage and principle, Bonner was one of my heroes from the days when I was a teenager in the Soviet Union and my parents listened to news of Sakharov and Bonner on banned foreign radio broadcasts. She was also a personal hero I had the privilege to meet: Four years ago, we had a long talk at...

Had Che Guevara not been executed by Bolivians in 1967, he may well be celebrating his 77th birthday this week. Or he may have endured a bloody death at the hands of other enemies. Had he lived, Western college students almost certainly would not be walking around campus mindlessly displaying his likeness on flaming red T-shirts. A dead martyr is much easier to lionize than a living dictator. Though he died nearly 40 years ago, Guevara is still sparking controversy. Rolling Stone magazine reported last week that guitar legend Carlos Santana was protested at his June 1 Miami concert. The...