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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...

March 1981, and inside 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is confronting the most terrible dilemma any British Prime Minister has ever faced. The news could hardly be worse. Across Britain, tens of thousands of terrified people are streaming out of the major cities. Looting is widespread, while every day brings bomb attacks at railway stations and RAF bases. Abroad, the Red Army has sliced through the West’s defences, using chemical weapons to punch through Nato’s front lines. Yugoslavia has fallen, and West Germany and Norway are on the verge of succumbing. After four days of Russian air raids, killing hundreds...

BERLIN (AP) -- A German court decided Friday to release a former Red Army Faction terrorist that was involved in a murder of a U.S. soldier in 1985 and a deadly bombing at a U.S. military base. Birgit Hogefeld's parole request was granted after serving 18 years in prison because of her "positive development," Frankfurt state court said, noting she finished a college degree through distance learning and started to work on a Ph.D.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Prosecutors said on Tuesday they will charge a Dutch chemicals dealer as an accomplice to genocide for supplying Saddam Hussein with lethal chemicals used in the 1988 chemical attack on a Kurdish town that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians. Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office said the suspect, who was arrested in Amsterdam on Monday, will face charges ''for violating the laws of war and involvement in genocide.'' Prosecutors said Frans van Anraat, a 62-year-old chemicals dealer, had been a suspect since 1989, when he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced the appointment of a joint Israeli- Russian panel to consider proposals from international designers for a memorial in Netanya commemorating the Red Army’s victory over Germany in World War II. Netanyahu announced plans to build such a memorial during a February meeting in Moscow with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. During that meeting, Netanyahu said the gesture was in honor of the 65th anniversary this year of the victory over the Third Reich. His announcement was made amid a growing concern in Russia that its role and enormous sacrifice in the victory over Nazism have...

US servicemen will participate in the Victory Day Parade on Red Square in Moscow on May 9, Alexander Vershbow, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs said. The Americans will celebrate the 65th anniversary of Victory in WWII, the official said. Vladimir Kozhin, an official spokesman for the administration of the Russian president, confirmed that Moscow had invited France, Britain and the United States for the parade. The French were the first to agree. They now decide soldiers of which troops will march in the heart of Moscow on May 9. If all is arranged as planned, it will be...

USSR red army tanks graveyard— few km east of Kabul, Afghanistan When Russia left Afghanistan after the war, a lot of their equipment was left behind.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has often described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest tragedy” of the 20th century, has now said that the “reunification” of Georgia has “already been decided,” a suggestion some of his listeners believe was a call for restoring Moscow’s control over Georgia and even the former USSR as a whole. In an intriguing commentary published in yesterday’s “Gazeta,” Bozhena Rynska describes both the celebration of the 80th birthday of longtime Soviet and Russian official Yevgeny Primakov and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s two very different toasts on that occasion (www.gazeta.ru/column/rynska/3287611.shtml). The celebration took...

Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland. The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," voiced our...

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

WASHINGTON — A pair of nuclear-powered Russian attack submarines has been patrolling off the eastern seaboard of the United States over recent days, a rare mission that has raised concerns inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies about a more assertive stance by the Russian military. The episode has echoes of the cold war era, when the United States and the Soviet Union regularly parked submarines off each other’s coasts to steal military secrets, track the movements of their underwater fleets — and be poised for war. But the collapse of the Soviet Union all but eliminated the ability of the...

Barack Obama's great uncle criticises him over Buchenwald visit The first time they discussed his participation in the war was when Mr Obama wrongly said during the campaign that Mr Payne had "liberated" Auschwitz. Opponents swiftly pointed out that had been done by the Red Army.

Westernism is giving way to Orientalism in Moscow's outlook, if the past week's happenings are any guide. As Russia's ties with the West deteriorate, an upswing in its strategic partnership with China becomes almost inevitable. The resumption of Russia-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) dialogue has gone awry. And the nascent hopes regarding a "reset of the button" of the Russian-American relationship are belied. With Moscow under multiple pressures from the West, two top Chinese officials have arrived in the Russian capital to offer support - Defense Minister Liang Guanglie and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Moscow angrily reacted to NATO's expulsion...

TOMSK, Russia: For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving up clues: a scrap of clothing, a fragment of bone, a skull with a bullet hole. And so a historian named Boris Trenin made a plea to officials. Would they let him examine secret archives to confirm that there was a mass grave here from Stalin's purges? Would they help him tell the story of the thousands of innocent people who were said to have been carted from a prison to a ravine, shot in the head and tossed over? The answer was no, and Trenin understood...

The Russian army draft starts on the first day of October. According to the presidential decree of September 28 more than 200,000 young Russian men are eligible for military service this year. Compared to previous draft, held in the spring, the number of young men eligible for army service has almost doubled. This is due to a change in legislation, before which 26 categories of young men were eligible for deferment of service. Now this number has been reduced to 21.

Russia put the West on alert for a new Cold War that the Kremlin is ready to fight, its President said yesterday. President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said. Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The move brought instant condemnation from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries. President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this...

Russian troops are indiscriminately murdering civilians and interning them in concentration camps, the embattled Georgian president charged yesterday, as he begged the West not to "appease" Moscow as it did with Nazi Germany. The startling accusations came as Russian troops blatantly violated a cease-fire by sending an armored convoy through the strategic city of Gori. The invaders first poured into Georgia five days ago - ostensibly in defense of a pro-Moscow breakaway region, South Ossetia. "What they are doing is exactly what Stalin did to Finland, what they've done to Afghanistan, what in the Second World War Germany was doing...

Barack Obama reminisces about his uncle that helped to liberate prisoners in Auschwitz. The only problem is the Red Army liberated Auschwitz not the Americans. (Video Included)

Ideology matters again. The big development of recent years is the rise not only of great powers but also of the great-power autocracies of Russia and China. True realism about the international scene begins with understanding how this unanticipated shift will shape our world. Many believe that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But Chinese and Russian rulers, like past rulers of autocracies, do have a set of beliefs that guide their domestic and foreign policies. They believe in the virtues...

"Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank”( Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member Communist Party USA) only a few days before he left Hawaii for college. He said that Davis called college an “advanced degree in compromise,” warned Obama not to forget his “people,” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.” This pro-Communist view appears to have been the mindset of Frank Marshall Davis, who spent many hours advising and reading poetry to a young Barack Obama. Barack Obama’s childhood...