Free Republic

A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.' It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being...

  Big Guns There's a post-Soviet phrase hailing the inventor of the ak-47: "God merely created man; equality was made possible thanks to General Kalashnikov." I recalled this as I was sitting in the office of deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Nationalist Assembly (UNA). As he spoke, he absentmindedly drew machine guns on a piece of paper. He also sketched some bows and arrows and gave me copies of his organization's publications, which contained manual-like descriptions of various guns and tips on how to clean them. Electoral posters in his office were not unlike Hitlerjugend propaganda. One read: "power,...