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Part 1 of 2

Mark Mazower
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
New York: Penguin Press, 2008

I like to think I am not an uncritical person. Before reading a “heretical” book, I almost always read a mainstream book on the topic first, so I know how to situate the possibly more outlandish claims (more…)

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Standard narratives of the Third Reich have long emphasized the concept of “subhumans” (Untermenschen) as central to National Socialist thought and policy on race. Here is a typical example from Wikipedia (as of 23 March 2016):

Untermensch . . . underman, sub-man, subhuman; plural: Untermenschen) is a term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe “inferior people” (more…)

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Part 4 of 4

Prison of the Nation does not cover Vladimir Putin’s era, but Shiropayev has criticized it in depth in his other writings. He considers Putin’s regime “Orthodox neo-Stalinism”: a mix of the worst elements of the Byzantine and the Bolshevik phases of the Project. It is a rule of commissars blessed by Orthodox clergy who are expanding the Empire at the cost of the white population of Russia, while promoting civic patriotism, race-mixing, alcoholism, and mysticism, (more…)

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Part 3 of 4

The Red Terror: Lenin and the October Revolution

Prison of the Nation presents an original view of the Communist Revolution in Russia in 1917. (more…)

Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan the Terrible, detail, 1897

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Part 2 of 4

The Archetype of the Tyrant: Ivan the Terrible

While Ivan III laid the foundations of an independent Russian kingdom (or rather a Muscovite Orthodox khanate) it was his grandson Ivan IV Vasilyevich, better known as Ivan the Terrible who created tsarist Russia and began the real Muscovite expansions of the 16th century.

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Part 1 of 4

Алексей Широпаев
Тюрьма Народа. Русский взгляд на Россию
Москва 2001

[Alexiey Shiropayev, Prison of the Nation: The Russian Perspective on Russia (Moscow, 2001).]

There are different approaches to telling the history of Russia and the Russian people. (more…)