While many causal factors shaped what we know as the Revolution of 1989, the indispensable factor determining when the revolution happened, and how it happened, was John Paul II. Continue Reading »
The Victims of Communism Museum opened only last year after decades of thoughtful planning, and the care that went into the project shows. Visiting the museum is a powerful experience. Continue Reading »
In this unexpectedly timely collection of essays, the journalist David Satter recalls an adventure that informed all his subsequent writing about Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1977, having met some Lithuanian dissidents, Satter set off to visit their Estonian counterparts. Eluding the police . . . . Continue Reading »
The fight for freedom can be intoxicating. Defining it has proved more difficult.
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Until surprisingly recently, most left-wing and liberal people were hesitant and equivocal about acknowledging the wickedness of the Soviet regime. The mere collapse of the Soviet Empire did not immediately change their minds. Robert Conquest, who told the truth about Stalin’s Great Terror in . . . . Continue Reading »
Recent research raises questions about the Kremlin's involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Continue Reading »
Two artists give new life to a symbol of death. Continue Reading »
Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 by aleksandr solzhenitsyn notre dame, 480 pages, $35 The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of exile, Between Two Millstones, begins with the author’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and closes with him viewing the landscape . . . . Continue Reading »
What Hitchens fails to spot is that the Soviet Union was not just about Communism, or about Russia. It was an empire. One hundred twenty million-plus of the Soviet Union’s two hundred eighty-six-million population were non-Russians. Almost none of them were Soviet by choice, any more than the one hundred million people in the other Warsaw Pact countries wanted to be under Soviet tutelage. To view the collapse of the evil empire solely from a Russian point of view is therefore misleading. Continue Reading »
The misreading of Russia’s geopolitical situation is especially sad because for the first time in many decades there is much to hope for in Moscow. Out of utopian misery has come the prospect of rebirth. It is as yet incipient. But I see great possibilities in it, in the many once-blighted . . . . Continue Reading »
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