4,718 words
James Howard-Johnston
The Last Great War of Antiquity
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021
The First World War is a curious conflict. The belligerents prayed to the same God, their royal families were closely related, and their nations were free and prosperous. They ruled most of the Earth through their empires. They only needed to cooperate, and the golden world in which they lived could have lasted for a long time — but they failed to do so. (more…)
1,471 words
According to Anatoly Karlin at the Unz Review, the photo below is evidence of how “kneeling before Anglo ambassadors seems to be becoming something of a Ukrainian military tradition”: (more…)
4,351 words
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…)
4,795 words
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…)
1,919 words
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…)
2,072 words
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
2,888 words
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.
4,747 words
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…)
