Free Republic

Activists from the western Russian city of Smolensk have petitioned the country's parliament, the Duma, to demolish a symbolic memorial site to the Katyn massacre and a cemetery for its victims, Russian daily Kommersant has reported. Images posted online showed heavy machinery, bearing the pro-war 'Z' and 'V' symbols, approaching the Katyn monument in an apparent bid to destroy it. The memorial site and monument commemorate the Katyn Forest Massacre in western Russia, a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet NKVD security agency in April and May 1940. The...

To enforce President Joe Biden’s forthcoming COVID-19 mandate, the U.S. Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Its Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free. What's not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or...

It may not seem like a massive development in terms of dealing with the scope of everything that’s been talked about here today, but it will equip law enforcement to see more things through to charges in this country.” —RCMP Cpl. Anthony Statham.. An Internet censorship bill will be useful in prosecuting bloggers and Facebook subscribers, an RCMP specialist said Monday night. Bill C-36 will “see more things through to charges,” a webinar was told. “Law enforcement has to have the ability to use the law effectively,” said Cpl. Anthony Statham of RCMP’s British Columbia Hate Crimes Team. Statham complained...

A Russian historian whose exposure of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crimes angered state officials is due to begin enforced psychiatric testing this week amid fears he will be falsely declared insane, his lawyer said on Tuesday. Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing "the main elements of" a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor. Some of Russia's leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin's crimes - he found a mass grave with up...

A new documentary on Ernest Hemingway - powered by vast but little-known archives kept at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston - is shedding new light on the acclaimed novelist. Hemingway, by longtime collaborators Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is premiering on PBS on three consecutive nights starting April 5. It takes a more nuanced look at the author and his longstanding reputation as an alcoholic, adventurer, outdoorsman and bullfight-loving misogynist who struggled with internal turmoil that eventually led to his death by suicide at age 61..........

“They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too…Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series. Could there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?” wrote Gal Beckerman in the The New York Times this month.“Subversive?” Ah! At least the term appears in connection with the docuseries. And considering that Ernest Hemingway eagerly joined Stalin’s KGB (technically the NKVD at the time), secretly contributed tens of thousands to the Cuban communist party and (literally) drank, as a spectator, to...

20,762 people were shot here during the Great Terror, from August 1937 to October 1938. This former NKVD shooting range is known as one of the places of mass executions and burials of victims of Soviet-era repression. Relatives of the victims, parishioners of Moscow churches, representatives of public organizations, and the diplomatic corps take part in this “Voice of Memory” campaign every year.On Friday, October 30, 2020, on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, the annual "Voice of Memory" will be held at the Butovo training ground in Moscow, and many will pray for the victims...

This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates. MOSCOW — A deadly shooting erupted near the fortresslike headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in central Moscow on Thursday evening, the security agency said in a statement that also reported several people had been wounded. Russian news reports said up to three people had been killed. “An unknown person opened fire near building #12 on the Bolshaya Lubyanka street,” the security service statement said, according to the Interfax news agency. “Some people were injured.” The statement also said that the assailant had been “neutralized” and was being identified....

Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest ... The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner...

Perhaps the only thing that outrages Russian defenders of Stalin more than the obvious parallels between his regime and Hitler’s is any reference to the alliance the two dictators formed in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one that opened the way to war in Europe and lasted until Hitler turned on his former ally in June 1941. But now there may be something even more offensive to such defenders of Stalin and his system: the discovery of documents which confirm that the NKVD cooperated closely with the Gestapo well before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and that may have paved...

VLADIMIR, Russia -- Anna Galinkina was appalled recently to see portraits of Stalin-era secret-police officers festooning celebratory billboards at local bus stops. Her father, Zinovy Galinkin, was sent to the gulag shortly after World War II on flimsy accusations of "anti-Soviet propaganda," and she resents the rehabilitation of those who persecuted her family under the government of President Vladimir Putin. "Today it is obvious that they've removed their masks...The ruling corporate elite of heirs of the Soviet chekists" -- a reference to the former secret police -- "are openly taking revenge on those who refuse to let society forget about...

Russian officials are reportedly destroying the records of gulag prisoners under a secret order passed in 2014, Russian media have reported. An estimated 3-12 million victims of Soviet repression were imprisoned in the gulag network of prisons and forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Registration records kept by the Museum of the History of the Gulag, now threatened with destruction, include the permanent records of those killed, as well as archival files detailing those who survived the gulag and when they were released. A 2014 inter-agency order labeled “for internal use” instructs files to be destroyed once the...

Stalin's NKVD started to round up the Kalmkys. Their crime, some had served the Germans. Of the 95,000 ethnic Kalmyks, about half died enroute or during their first winter in Siberia. Stalin's order was absolute. Ethnic Kalmky's were pulled out of the front line infantry and tank units and deported. Included were 21 Kalmyk soldiers that had been awarded "Hero of the Soviet Union." for their service in combat to the Soviet Union.

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...

Domestic Spying Revelation Could Be Devastating For The Obama White House Peter Foster, The Telegraph June. 6, 2013, 6:46 AM The Obama administration will be bracing itself for a torrent of hostile questions this morning following the apparent revelation that the National Security Agency has been data-mining the phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. Not to be confused with eaves-dropping, or bugging the phones of those suspected of conspiring to commit a terrorist or criminal offence, the top secret court order published by The Guardian appears to show that the NSA has been trawling the anonymous 'metadata'...

Ramón Mercader from Barcelona killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. On 20th August 1940, the exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded at his home in a suburb of Mexico City when an ice axe was driven into his skull. He cried out to his guards as they burst into his study, ‘Don’t kill him! He must talk.’ Despite struggling fiercely, and even managing to bite the hand of his assassin, Trotsky died the next day, and the man who wielded the murder weapon was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He insisted throughout his trial and his...

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy. Americans remember Pearl Harbor as the work of a Japanese military machine hell-bent on a war of conquest. The truth is more complicated. The imperial regime had faced severe political shocks throughout the 1930s. Two attempts on the life of Emperor Hirohito—one by a Japanese communist whose father was a member...

In 1941 a young priest was condemned to death by the Soviets. He was to become one of the ChurchÂ’s great leaders, says Jonathan LuxmooreIn a stately marble corridor of the Polish bishopsÂ’ conference HQ a diminutive old man stands awkwardly among colleagues in the regalia of episcopal office. Outside, a line of dark Mercedes wait to transport their passengers back to spacious residences, while in the vestibule teams of assistants stand in readiness. Cardinal Kazimierz ÅšwiÄ…tek, who died in July, was an unlikely ecclesiastical elder statesman, surviving imprisonment and exile before being called to lead his countryÂ’s Catholics through...

THE NEW NOBILITY: THE RESTORATION OF RUSSIA'S SECURITY STATE AND THE ENDURING LEGACY OF THE KGB By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan PublicAffairs, $26.95, 299 pages No one familiar with the security system of the old USSR expected the KGB to dry up and blow away when communism collapsed in 1991. Further, many of us doubted whatever government replaced the Soviet state would make any changes of substance in its intelligence agencies. Skepticism is proving well-founded. Indeed, the newly constituted security services are more shadowy and powerful than was the KGB at its prime. The Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba...

Russia prime minister dismisses protests against his regime as 'provocations' as anti-Putin rallies take place in world citiesVladimir Putin today angrily dismissed protests against his regime as "provocations" and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a "whack on the bonce". Using characteristic street language, Putin derided Russia's opposition as a group of publicity-seeking malcontents and said they had only themselves to blame if they were on the receiving end of police brutality during anti-government meetings.