Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I’m tempted to subscribe to somebody else’s theory that Russia is on its way to replacing Iran as the largest pariah state of the world. Whether it is a crackpot idea or something obvious, Russia is facing a major decline…
When Stalin was forced to leave the theological seminary in Tiflis in 1899, he received a certificate confirming that he had completed four years of instruction with excellent behavior (!) and was qualified to teach elementary school or work “in…
In his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic nomination, Bill Clinton named his history professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, Carroll Quigley, as a major influence. Quigley was a scholar of wide-spanning, almost Toynbean ambition and indisputably great learning.…
If you have taken a cab from Moscow to Sheremetievo, you must have seen these giant anti-tank “hedgehogs” in Khimki. It is a monument to the defenders of Moscow in 1941. While regular Nazi troops probably did not advance as…
This post has been inspired by this note by Language Hat on a slightly different subject. In modern Russian usage, “the Great Helmsman” is taken by default to be a reference to Mao. The word most likely to denote Stalin…
When Russia defaulted on its public ruble-denominated bonds and the ruble lost two-thirds of its value to the dollar in August 1998, the Kirienko cabinet also fell. Facing a largely hostile Duma, Yeltsin appointed Yevgeny Primakov prime minister. It was…
I would recommend Owen Hatherley’s well-researched piece on Moscow’s residential districts (not quite suburbs) to anyone interested in post-Soviet urban life and urban planning in general. I suggest that readers also browse the photos in the author’s Flickr albums, some linked…
Putin met with Pope Francis last week, but just before that… In a rare newspaper interview ahead of his state visit to Italy, Vladimir Putin has claimed he never makes mistakes because God “built his life so he’d have nothing…
John Schindler has written a number of posts on the less known or commonly misunderstood campaigns of WWI, including Isonzo and Galicia. The Soviet take on Russia’s role in WWI, as taught at schools and colleges, was that the war…
Neither Edward Luttwak, in his 2015 review of They Can Live in the Desert and Nowhere Else by Ronald Grigor Suny, nor Mark Mazower, in his 2001 review of The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16 by James…
The pending closure of Dmitry Zimin’s Dynasty Foundation is the latest episode in the Kremlin’ campaign against independent NGOs. True to the principle of rule by (as opposed to of) law, Putin has badgered them with two recent bills, on foreign agents and on undesirable organizations.…
Oleg Khlevniuk is the foremost Russian specialist in the history of the Soviet ruling circle from the late 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953 and of the mass terror of the same period. In his work, Khlevniuk largely builds on…