Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Let us now consider whether the mass murders in the Katyn’ forest and the other places were a direct consequence of the Soviet-German treaty of 1939 known in the West as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. First, would the camps for Polish…
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think Gorbachev was elected Secretary-General of the Communist Party twenty years ago. Soon the word “perestroika” came into circulation — was it 1986? 1987?
I called it decimation — well, not quite: Romans cast lots to pick the unfortunate, while the Bolshevik Politbureau had a different selection criteria. This is what the Politbureau ordered in March 1940 — a slightly abridged translation of this…
Polit.ru reminds the readers that on March 6, 1940, the Politbureau of the Bolshevik party decided to execute over 25,000 Polish prisoners of war, policemen, and government officials captured during the occupation of Eastern Poland (Western Belarus and Western Ukraine,…
Thanksgiving For all, for all I thank you: For the secret pangs of passions, For the bitterness of tears, for the poison of the kiss, For the revenge of enemies and the calumny of friends; For my soul’s ardor wasted…
If anybody still thinks Pravda is a newspaper of record, it’s your last chance to adjust to reality. Privately owned since the early 1990s, Pravda belongs to a class of Russian newspapers that mix second-rate reporting with second-rate tabloidism, and…
I’ve stumbled upon the ending and dating of this poem. It’s even more radical considering a Russian émigré penned it down in France in 1949. Here’s a rhythmically irregular (deliberately so) translation. I am for war and foreign intervention;I’m for…
Paul Cella discusses Disraeli the Nationalist, quoting David Gelernter. The latter, I have to agree with the former, is a “formidable writer” indeed (I did learn a few things from his Weekly Standard article), and Lord Beaconsfield as subject matter…
The Russo-Japanese war was still in progress a hundred years ago from now. Tsushima, the greatest disaster the Russian fleet has been through, was still a few months ahead. It is remarkable that three musical pieces written during or shortly…
or, To those who have read Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin, and those who have not Baron Jungern’s “protagonist” is, in an uncanny sense, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the White commander who captured the capital of Mongolia in 1921, driving out…
I may not ever get to read this book by Prof. Sevcenko but the brief foreword by Frank E. Sysyn is a better guide to understanding Ukrainian identity than most that I have seen since the outbreak of the Kyiv…
It was 100 years ago yesterday that the first Russian revolution had begun (Jan. 9, 1905, Julian calendar). To be fair, one might as well say it had started with the nationwide strikes in December 1904, but it was on…