Free Republic

When it came to deadly epidemics, the Soviets didn’t do half-measures. Not only doctors, but the police, army, navy, and even the KGB were all brought in to curb the spread.In 1939, microbiologist Abram Berlin brought a dangerous disease back with him to Moscow from Saratov. There in Saratov, during experiments on animals, he used the living causative agent of the plague, and was strictly confined to quarantine. However, an urgent call from Moscow forced him to go immediately to the capital, unleashing the plague. Berlin checked in at the Hotel National, dined there, and visited a hairdresser. Feeling very...

Bernie comes with baggage, and the American public rejected him. Looking at how his campaign is awash in money, however, indicates socialism is not going away. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders likes to say his political ideology never changed. In his case, consistency is not a positive.Over the course of decades in public life, Sanders has made multiple statements praising and apologizing for socialism all over the world. Here are a sampling, as well as explanations for why he’s dangerously wrong.1. Bread Lines Are Great “It’s funny sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are...

Flanked by members of the famed "Miracle on Ice" U.S. Olympic hockey team, President Trump celebrated the team's captivating 1980 performance at a campaign rally on Friday. Forty years removed from defeating the Russian hockey team in the semi-finals of the 1980 Olympic Games, Trump honored the U.S. team's historic victory by bringing captain Mike Eruzione and coach Herb Brooks's daughter onstage during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. The team stood behind Trump as the president ran through his stump speech and lashed out at the fake news media. The players wore red Make America Great Again hats and...

Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders likes to market himself as a wise old man who just happens to have clown hair but is right about everything, such as the War in Iraq. Yet his opposition to the Iraq War was dictated not by cool-headed geopolitical calculations, but the lifelong habit of romancing American enemies — as is typical for communism-lovers.The recently surfaced press conference Sanders gave following his return from his honeymoon in Yaroslavl, USSR, is a great example of leftist naïveté about totalitarian regimes. For Bernie to fawn over Soviet culture the way he did indicates a staggering...

On this day in 1890, the writer Boris Pasternak was born into an affluent and cultured Russian-Jewish family. His father, Leonid, was a renowned artist and professor at the Moscow School of Painting; his mother Rosa, nee Kaufman, was a concert pianist. His parents’ social circle included notable figures of the day such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leo Tolstoy. The influence of this creative community led the young Pasternak to study first music and then philosophy, both in Russia and abroad. In 1912 he abandoned academia to pursue his true calling: poetry and prose. The outbreak of World War I...

The U.S. fast food giant opened its first chain in Moscow on this day 30 years ago, in the final months of the Soviet Union. McDonald’s opened the doors of its first restaurant in Russia 30 years ago, on Jan. 31, 1990. With 900 seats, it was the largest McDonald’s in the world at the time. Muscovites started queuing at 4:30 a.m. for their chance to get a taste of the famous American fast food. McDonald’s sold 34,000 burgers on its first day — smashing the burger chain’s previous first-day record of 9,100. Around 27,000 Russians applied to work at...

The Kremlin reacted with fury on Tuesday after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Soviet collusion with Nazi Germany led to the outbreak of World War II. While visiting Poland on Monday to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp, Zelensky said the Poles “were the first to feel the consequences of the criminal collusion of the totalitarian regimes.” Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and carved up Poland in September 1939 under a secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazi invasion prompted Britain and France to declare war on Germany. “We categorically disagree with...

“The Poet and the Lady” is an exhibition devoted to the unlikely friendship between the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky and American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. The exhibition is at the Voznesensky Center, a relatively new addition to the Moscow museum scene, which has the mission of not just telling the story of Andrei Voznesensky, but the entire “Thaw” era in the 1960s. The Voznesensky Center also promotes contemporary culture and art and highlights its connection to Voznesensky’s generation. “The Poet and the Lady” is displayed in several halls, each devoted to certain aspects of the Voznesensky-Kennedy relationship. The first hall,...

Pundits wrote off Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign back in October after his heart attack evoked the risks of nominating a candidate who would turn 80 during the first year of his presidency. But since then, Sanders has made a remarkable comeback — and not just in terms of his health. Having climbed to second place nationally and raised a whopping $34.5 million in the fourth quarter, he now finds himself leading in New Hampshire and tied for first place in Iowa, according to the latest CBS/YouGov poll. Perhaps Joe Biden, who enjoys much stronger support among black voters, is still...

The former Navy SEAL who sent Osama Bin Laden to the grave weighed in on a star witness in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, and it wasn’t pretty. Robert O’Neill slammed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman Tuesday for his allegedly partisan motives in the Democrats’ attempt to oust the president. ... O’Neill wrote. “I wish the left wouldn’t use his uniform to make him a saint. He’s an operative with an agenda.” ... The lieutenant colonel even went outside his chain of command, a move that lends weight to the theory he is simply an anti-Trump operative taking the...

ANDREI VYSHINSKY QUOTES THE LEGAL PHILOSOPHY OF TERROR IN STALIN'S RUSSIA Although Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky is best known as Joseph Stalin's chief prosecutor during the trials of "state enemies" in the 1930s, Vyshinsky was also something of a theorist of the relationship between law, Marxism-Leninism, and the Socialist state. The quotations below are drawn from three of Vyshinsky's publications. They illustrate the basic direction of Vyshinsky's thought and political philosophy throughout his life as a leading member of the Soviet state apparatus. What is here is a scientific justification for the use of terror by the state.

To understand communism, it’s important to look at the man who was the first to institute a government dedicated to Karl Marx’s ideals: Vladimir Lenin. When I was in college, I recall a conversation with several classmates who joked about throwing a get-together and naming it “The Communist Party.” They mocked the idea that anyone would fear this supposedly well-meaning ideology. I wonder if they would have been laughing if they were in the presence of gulag survivors. This Nov. 7 marks the 102nd anniversary of Lenin’s rise to power in Russia, and Nov. 9 will mark the 30th anniversary...

Who could have guessed that the words of Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria to Joseph Stalin, "Show me the man, and I will show you the crime," would be strangely embodied in American politics and jurisprudence in the 21st century? Moreover, according to Dr. Strangesсhiff — congressman, chairman, and commissar — these wonderful words have recently found their way into the U.S. Constitution. Secret impeachment would seem to be a new idea, but the curious Dr. Strangesсhiff borrowed it from the closed Soviet trials of dissidents, "enemies of the people," and other "undesirable elements." Bravo, comrade Strangesсhiff! Please, continue...

Dear Mr. Brin: Fifty years ago this week, when I was a 21-year-old college senior, I was in the Soviet Union, sent by the government of Israel to smuggle in Jewish religious items and smuggle out names of Jews who wanted to escape the Soviet Union and could then be issued a formal invitation to Israel. I was chosen because I was a committed Jew and because I knew Hebrew and Russian. I was no hero, but the trip did entail risk. The Soviets did not appreciate people smuggling out names of Soviet citizens who sought to emigrate, information the...

... Mrs. Pelosi took the impeachment reins away from Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and handed them to Mr. Schiff, who has been running secret hearings as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Witnesses testify behind closed doors, and Democrats selectively leak the testimony or evidence to the pro-impeachment press in ways that are often distorted or incomplete. Republicans then offer a competing narrative, and the public is left to wonder what’s true. All of this is supposedly in service to the serious purpose of removing a President elected by 63 million Americans. Mr. Schiff was challenged on his secrecy on Sunday...

In October 1917, Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power and inaugurated the first communist workers' state, founded on the principles of Karl Marx's “Das Kapital.” Almost immediately, the race was on to turn antiquated, almost feudal imperial Russia into a communist utopia. It was a tall order in Russia: the vast majority of the population of the nascent Soviet state were illiterate peasants, for whom the traditions and tenants of Orthodox Christianity were the sole cultural and spiritual bedrock. Replacing it with the more complicated economic and social principles of Marxism took ingenuity, dedication and ruthlessness. The state embarked on a...

I grew up among refugees. My parents had fled from Communist Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Union. We had many Hungarian friends, but also knew people from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. All had their stories, the one more dreadful than the other. I remember one story among many, when we visited a couple, let’s call them “Joe” and “Cathy”. When we were leaving, thinking they were out of earshot, I blurted out: “Why does Uncle Joe have funny hands?” My mother hushed me quickly and the whole thing was forgotten. But some years later,...

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened. At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and...

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the "Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler's Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened...

Soviet nostalgia in Russia has now become a major focus of scholarly research with researchers in many disciplines making contributions to its description and meaning. This research began in the West, but has engulfed many in the Russian Federation and the other post-Soviet states. “Societies which experience historical traumas, need anesthesia and psychotherapy,” sociologist Roman Abramov days. Millions of people not surprisingly respond to turning to a past real and often imagined to provide them with reassurance. That often takes the form of nostalgia for “the good old times,” which in the Russian case for many, but far from all,...