Free Republic

Symposium: When an Evil Empire Returns By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | June 23, 2006  The Cold War is back. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, is leading his country back into the dark ages of Soviet totalitarianism and instigating a global confrontation between Russia and the United States -- as well as between Russia and the West as a whole. The Russian President has consistently rolled back democratic freedoms. And he is proving that the genie can be placed back into the bottle: he has centralized authority and suffocated dissent in the media and in the nation at large. Reformers making efforts to build...

John Kerry's Fellow TravellersA 5-part series exposing John Kerry's Communist connections.Part 4: Subversion in the Senate: Kerry's Communist ConstituencyBy Fedora *NOTE: The term "fellow traveller" as used in this article series refers to someone who is not a member of the Communist Party (CP) but regularly engages in actions which advance the Party's program. Some apparent fellow travellers may actually be "concealed party members": members of the CP who conceal their membership. Which of these classifications is applicable to the Kerrys is a question this series leaves unresolved. This series does not argue for any direct evidence of Richard or...

One year ago today, Miley Cyrus, won Best International Song for “Flowers”. The first verse paints a chilling picture of the modern world: “We were good, we were gold Kinda dream that can’t be sold We were right ’til we weren’t Built a home and watched it burn.” I told Joe from Niddrie thatthe world needs a restoration of freedom. He told me a list of other problems he thought took precedence. Joe believed that conservatives need to stand up for the battler to alter the perception that conservatives only help business. I observed that American President Franklin Roosevelt described...

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community. "The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign...

Moscow legislators backtracked on claims that they are considering the return of a monument honoring the founder of the Soviet secret police to the center of the city. The city parliament made no plans concerning the return of the statue of Felix "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, legislature speaker Vladimir Platonov said on Ekho Moskvy radio Saturday. City lawmakers have no right to pitch such initiatives anyway and can only rule on their funding, said Platonov, a member of the ruling United Russia party. Fellow city lawmaker Andrei Metelsky said earlier Saturday that the Dzerzhinsky statue was a historical landmark and could...

"The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg incorrectly fact-checked a guest about a famous moment when President Ronald Reagan challenged the Soviet Union. Actress Rosie Perez was comparing former President Trump’s years in office to the Biden-Harris administration, arguing that Trump was a national embarrassment during his tenure in the White House and the crises he faced. "Biden and Harris got us out of a pandemic. Our world was crumbling around us. What did Trump do on the pandemic? He sent COVID tests that we desperately needed over to our adversary, to Russia. What happened?" she asked. "Even if you are a...

On this day on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s call to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down the Berlin Wall" became widely considered a defining moment of the Reagan presidency, according to Stanford University. The line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," also came to be a profound statement of the 1980s. President Reagan’s "tear down this wall" speech was made following the G7 summit meeting in Venice. And as the Reagan spoke, his words were amplified on both sides of the Berlin Wall, reaching both East and West Germans, according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American...

Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media. In a way, it was fitting that as the last leader of the USSR, Gorbachev was probably its only truly humane one. And it’s equally sobering that Gorbachev has passed away at a time when political repression in his native Russia has become stifling once more, and the specter of conflict in Europe which long overshadowed the region during the Cold War has become reality. These were outcomes Gorbachev strived...

Hey, no bias there!This week the world learned of the passing of England’s 96 year old Queen Elizabeth II. A couple weeks ago Russia’s 91 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Communist Soviet Union, passed away. And the difference in coverage in the media was, shall we say, interesting.The New York Times published an essay by one Maya Jasanoff. Jasanoff is described as “a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of three books about the British Empire and its subjects.” The title of her essay:Mourn the Queen, Not Her EmpireAmong other things Professor Jasanoff says...

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler of the USSR, has died at 91. On the one hand, that sounds pretty good. A long life, a long career, world fame, a one-time politician, then a popular public speaker and leader of a think tank. He outlived his wife by over 20 years, and stayed active and vocal until the end. In many ways, it sounds like a life that one would envy, doesn't it? However… What kind of a politician was he? And what kind of think tank did he run? What did he stand for in life? What did he advocate...

What seemed impossible to the rest of the world — the fall of the Soviet Union — only took six years under his leadership, a reminder of how temporary political systems can be. SNIP The relevance of all of this to the U.S. is that over the last seven years, we have seen more political instability, threats of violence, talk of Civil War, political polarization and efforts to undermine key democratic institutions than at any other time in modern American history. While the comparison between the U.S. today and the USSR in the early 1980s should not be overstated, it...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday, citing scheduling conflicts, but he paid tribute to the last Soviet leader Thursday, the Kremlin said. In a call with reporters, Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the president paid his final respects by laying a wreath at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where Gorbachev died on Tuesday at age 91. “Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do this on Sept. 3, so he decided to do it today,” Peskov said. Russian state television showed Putin walking to Gorbachev’s open coffin and placing...

He said the Russian leader had paid his respects at the Moscow hospital where Gorbachev died on Tuesday, aged 91. Gorbachev's reforms helped end the Cold War, but saw the demise of the Soviet Union, which Mr Putin has lamented

Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Louis XVI ended the French monarchy WaPo praises USSR's BidenI don't speak ill of the dead not because they cannot argue back but because they cannot hear me. Why waste my breath? Instead, let me take on David Hoffman's fact-challenged obituary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final thug in charge of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship best known for killing about 50 million people and starving Ukraine into submission in the 1930s. Hoffman wrote, "Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform...

Former Secretary of State James Baker on Tuesday paid tribute to former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at 91 earlier in the day, calling the former world leader a “giant who steered his great nation toward democracy.” In a statement published through his eponymous Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Baker applauded Gorbachev’s role in ending the 40-year Cold War between Russia and the U.S., referring to him as an “honest broker” who stood by his word despite experiencing pressure from Moscow. Baker served as the secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration from 1989...

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. [A classic New York Times eulogy. VERY long, but an excellent political history of the USSR from the 1930s to the late 1990s. No NYT pay wall. MSN.com publishes all of it.]

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 92, Russian news agencies cited hospital officials as saying on Tuesday.

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern...

In the Spring 2010 issue of City Journal, I described an archive of documents from Soviet government agencies smuggled to the West by the Russian researcher Pavel Stroilov and the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. These documents, I noted, were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes. Within weeks of the article’s appearance, I received hundreds of e-mails. Many came from victims of Soviet Communism—there is...

By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom HarrisPresident Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America. He could have made the decision simply because the science is false, but most of the public have been brainwashed into believing it is correct and wouldn’t understand the reason. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, though thankfully not the U.S., support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they did, they wouldn’t be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO2) tax, on...