Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Adam Gopnik links the recent derailing disaster in Pennsylvania to the Americans’ unwillingness to authorize public investment in infrastructure. It’s too early for any blame assignment, but the questIon of tax money spent on trains and such is evergreen. In…
John Schindler argues that Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on breaking up Austria-Hungary led to multiple disasters, including the subjugation of Central Europe by Hitler and Stalin. There’s enough to be said in defense of the old Habsburg empire but I can’t…
Two images from Moscow. “We Remember 1915” written in red under an image painted in black on the wall of an underground walkway. The side panel of a bus stop. In the upper right corner: “100 years 1915-2015 // April…
Elif Batuman, the Turkish-American author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (reviews 1, 2, 3, 4), discusses “reading racist literature” in New Yorker: There I’d be, reading along, imaginatively projecting myself into the character…
Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the fine story writer and poet who was also the first Russian author to win the Nobel prize, wrote in his diary known as The Accursed Days, referring to the folly of the Bolsheviks and their followers: Besides, much is…
When I discussed Walter Reich’s theory on the Soviet pathologization of idealistic behavior with a colleague, he mentioned a curious episode from the memoirs of a distinguished dissident. He said it was Andrei Amalrik; I’m not sure but here’s the story, anyway.…
Paul Goble has translated large excerpts from Semyon F. Gluzman’s interview with Focus, a Kyiv-based journal. Gluzman served seven years in Soviet prisons and labor camps and three years in Siberian exile for his effort to prove that the dissident General Grigorenko had…
From the judgment of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg [pdf], p. 194: It was contended before the Tribunal that the annexation of Austria was justified by the strong desire expressed in many quarters for the union of Austria and…
Last weekend, on the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russian TV aired a propaganda “documentary” called Krym: vozvraschenie na rodinu, which can be translated as Crimea: Homecoming or literally Crimea: The Return to Motherland. Let’s do a simple…
Earlier this year, I finished reading Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État, the dazzling 1968 “practical handbook” that outlined the soon-to-happen 1974 Portuguese revolution and has been recently invoked to explain the 2013 military coup in Egypt. However, Luttwak took care to distinguish between a coup d’état…
30 years ago today, the last of the old guard of Soviet secretary-generals, Konstantin Chernenko, passed away. The youngest of the Politburo members, the 53-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was named chairman of the Burial Commission, an early sign that he might be…
Language Hat discusses The Broken Cubit-Ruler: An Annotated Treatise by the St. Petersburg literary scholar Samuil Lurie: …I’m rather at a loss as to what to say. It’s a brilliant and brilliantly written book… and ordinarily I’d urge you to read…