Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
…with nearly no comment, for want of time. Richard Pipes published an important piece (preview only, subscription required) on Russian society in Foreign Affairs. Some of his ideas are very close to what I’ve been saying all along (lack of…
60 years ago yesterday, the Allies landed in Normandy. This year, Russia’s president was at last invited to join the festivities. Let’s hope this will bring all the former Allies one step closer to recognizing the true significance of the…
Gabriel Syme writes in Poor man’s Stalin: Saddam Hussain is of the same breed as the monstrous Josef Dzhugashvili – a powerful, resilient, personally courageous, charismatic, megalomaniac and psychopathic dictator. While comparing Bush to Hitler is plain stupid, comparing Hussein…
Robert Lane Greene of the Economist reminds that transition from totalitarianism to modern democracy can take a long, long time, depending on the initial and current conditions. It’s good to read an article so full of common sense, but why…
Rock ‘n’ Roll by Diana West has a quote from the ambassador of Hungary to the US: When we were listening to the radio, we were part of the Free World, if only for a few moments, whether the system…
I must admit I had known the word defenestration for a few weeks before Lynn mentioned it, having learnt the Russian version of it (defenestratsiya) completely by chance. There is only one expression where I had encountered this word before…
Suppose you’re a member of a racial, ethnic or religious group, and this fact is obvious to a stranger. You could put a high priority on your membership and make it a factor in your decision-making. Or you could view…
According to Alex Tapinsh, Latvia will have to pay EUR20,000 within three months to two Russian nationals for violation of their human rights, European Union court on human rights declared Thursday. The court held that the two women, a former…
Gary Brecher’s latest piece, The French, vindicates some of my own scribbles, in a way. A short memory is a sin. This eXile article is full of deliberate, wild and profane exaggerations — and therefore effective; this is postmodern (and…
Could the Holocaust have happened in the US? What a silly question! History is what happened, not what could have happened. OK, OK, silly and all, but do I have an answer to it? Well, how can this happen in…
So what if there were no political prisoners there? So what if the revolution devoured its enemies, its children, and onlookers alike? “The world did not know disappointment before the Great French Revolution; the disappointment came with the 1792 republic,”…
If I were the President of the Russian Federation, and happened to be fixated on helping Russians in Latvia, I would amply finance a network of private Russian schools in that Baltic country. They would be equally open to students…