This gentleman evidently belonged to the category of those people who wish the Government to interfere in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives. —”The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol Braving the blust’ring blizzarding snow, lo, I am the poet Zhivago buffeted by this fierce maelstrom sent by grim Russian wintry discontent. […]
Even if we cannot fully grasp the shape of the near-future international order, either because it has yet to crystalize fully or because we lack the historical distance to see it clearly, we can know some things about it: While Russia and China have settled into their roles, the U.S. remains an actor in search [...]
A journal is claiming that the Russian government was using the Covid-19 outbreak to strengthen anti-EU feelings, make propaganda gains, and gather intelligence at the heart of NATO. Although this report has gained traction, what is this statement really saying and who is saying it? According to a recent news report, Russia is using the [...]
Though they should be on the same side in their opposition to globalism, Russia and Poland have recently entered into an unholy spat over the history of World War II. The Russian Ambassador to Poland stated recently in an interview with the Russian news site rbc.ru that relations between Russia and Poland are “the worst [...]
Russia’s nineteenth-century literary luminaries all found themselves wrestling with a particularly Romantic archetype: the Superfluous Man. Bored, confused, dissolute, yet noble and aristocratic, the Superfluous Man experiences tragedy in his reckless pursuit of passion. And I can’t help but wonder whether there is any hope for these characters—both the Russians in the novels, and the [...]
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
Somehow Joseph Stalin cannot be reduced merely to just another Russian autocrat or just another communist dictator. Not for him the “banality of evil.”… Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 By Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Press, 2014) Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator By Oleg Khlevniuk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Yale University Press, 2015) The Last [...]
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is about a man who leads others, however obliquely, and despite obstacles, both external and internal, to faith. Faith is faith. Without it, man is deprived of any spiritual roots. He is like a blind man. Just more than thirty years ago, on 26 April 1986, a nuclear disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear [...]
We should not confuse or conflate Russian President Vladimir Putin with Soviet leaders, such as Josef Stalin. They are as different as the proverbial chalk and cheese. Nowhere is this more evident than the way in which Mr. Putin has shown himself to be a great admirer of the anti-Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Special [...]
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the greatest classic of anti-communist literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," is now compulsory reading in all high schools. We don’t need to like Vladimir Putin. We don’t need to admire him. But we do need to acknowledge that Russia has moved on from the evils of socialism, even as we [...]
Russia is resurrected from the dead, rising from the tomb in which communism had placed it. It is emerging as a Christian country at a time when other erstwhile Christian countries seem intent on abandoning their faith in order to embrace the suicidal culture of death... Patrick Buchanan’s succinct and penetrating essay on President Trump’s [...]
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump has signaled a historic shift in [...]
The year 1989 may well be seen by future historians as one of those rare pivotal years of this past millennium—like 1066, 1492, 1793, and 1914—that profoundly altered the direction of Western Civilization. It is, of course, still too early to say for certain that we as a society set ourselves on a dangerous collision [...]
The tragedy is not that the Russian Revolution is being forgotten; it’s that it is being remembered in the wrong way. It is being seen through rose-coloured spectacles, its grim reality being smothered in layers of romantic myth… This month is the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most important moments in modern [...]