1,582 words
Last week I was having a good early morning over coffee. While reading a blog, I saw a reference to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, a government agency I suspected was invented to employ people with no practical experience and psychopathic tendencies at high salaries. (more…)
Trotsky on his death bed.
Trotsky on his death bed.
3,149 words
But there are in our country semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who help us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us. — Karl Radek at the Moscow show trials, 1937 (more…)
2,428 words
Sarah Cameron
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018
See also: What is the Metaphysics of the Left & Nietzsche and the Psychology of the Left
Strikingly ignorant, malignantly cruel, with no concept of history, with but an elementary knowledge of social production, with little productive capacity, with no constructive ability, [Bolshevism] would be ludicrous were it not for the sentimental, weak-minded followers who, steeped in idealism and fanaticism, really believe in a Bolshevik Utopia, (more…)
3,733 words
Anne Applebaum
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2017
Robert Conquest
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine
New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1986
The [Communist] Party’s . . . rationale for everything done to the kulaks, is summarized with exceptional frankness in a novel published in Moscow in 1934: “Not one of them was guilty of anything, but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” — Robert Conquest (more…)
Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin in better times (at least for Stalin).
Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin in better times (at least for Stalin).
1,233 words
To be men! That is the Stalinist law! . . .
We must learn from Stalin
his sincere intensity
his concrete clarity . . . .
Stalin is the noon,
the maturity of man and the peoples.
Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride . . .
— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Stalin” (more…)
3,203 words
The recent film Oppenheimer brought a renewed interest in the history of atomic espionage. The names certainly echo throughout history: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Harry Gold, and more. Then there are other notables, more obscure but whose activities were considerably more damaging than the above-named. One was known in the Venona decrypts — a batch of intercepted Soviet cable traffic in the 1940s — by the codenames FOGEL and PERS. It still remains a mystery who “Perseus” really was, but this might have been Oppie himself, among other possibilities. (more…)
2,148 words
The following was originally published in Polish in July 2023 in the Do Rzeczy weekly magazine. This translation was published at the English-language Polish conservative site Sovereignty.pl.
In 2002, Vladimir Putin was asked in an interview how the Russia he rules differs from the Soviet Union of Stalin’s time. The questioner’s intention was obviously to show that the times of bloody dictatorship in Russia were past, and that its present and future were times of freedom and democracy. In a conversation with the same reporter in 1991, Putin had warned with a sad face of a possible “return to totalitarianism.” 11 years later, when he had become the country’s President, he again put on a sad face, albeit for a completely different reason. (more…)
2,324 words
Steve Moxon
The Woman Racket
Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008
The woman racket is the McCarthyism of the 1990s. — Norman Mailer
Women. You can’t live with ‘em and you can’t kill ‘em. — Mad Dog and Glory
This millennium we have become used to new myths. Islam is a religion of peace, trans people are facing “genocide,” and blacks invented trains, planes, and automobiles while dodging the bullets of a racist police force. (more…)
1,597 words
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the flamboyant leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, launched a coup against the Russian government on June 23, 2023 which began after he broadcast a video message over social media. (more…)
The author at the Bay of Pigs.
2,962 words
Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022
What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. (more…)
1,867 words
Peter Pomerantsev
Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible
London: Faber & Faber, 2015
Most people probably know the story of the Potemkin villages: When the Russian Empress Catherine toured newly-annexed Ukraine, Grigory Potemkin, her lover and the territory’s Governor, erected false villages and instructed men to act as peasants in order to deceive the Empress and the foreign ambassadors accompanying her about the region’s wealth. Whether the story is historically accurate is a subject of debate. (more…)