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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
At some point during the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Nikita Khrushchev was asked whether it would be okay to give the prize to the American virtuoso, Van Cliburn. One of the most famous—and unexpected—lulls in the Cold War came when Texan Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. stepped off a plane in Moscow in April 1958. [...]
Dear President Putin: It is no use trying any further to accommodate the United States or cooperate with it. We cannot afford any more concessions. It is clear that the United States only respects force and firmness. Dear Mr. President: The below memorandum regarding Russian-American bilateral relations was drafted by my Ministry’s Department of North [...]
As major players on the global stage, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump could counterbalance the forces of globalism which seek to destroy all sovereign nations… Can we trust Russia? Should we trust Russia? Should we trust Trump on Russia? The buzz word of Barack Obama’s Presidential Election Campaign, oh so many eons ago, was “change.” [...]
There is no escape from historical existence. With all its contingencies, unexpected happenings, and mysteries, historical existence offers opportunities for grasping the great drama of life. Conservative intellectuals have long been suspicious of the pressures that political ideologies place on the writing of history. Most famously, Herbert Butterfield, in his classic work, The Whig Interpretation [...]
There are moves afoot to whip up the old Cold War angst and anger and to resurrect enmity towards Russia. Liberals in the West, outraged at Russia’s resistance to their decadent agenda, are caricaturing Russia as an enemy of Western “values.” In 1998 I had the inestimable pleasure and honour of interviewing Alexander Solzhenitsyn at [...]
How is it that so many Senators on both sides of the aisle, and media outlets ranging from liberal to conservative, seem so fixated on goading the Trump Administration into confrontation with Vladimir Putin and Russia…? It never fails to get a few chuckles and more than a few eye rolls whenever a worn-out comedian [...]
Vladimir Putin is not a saint and none but a fool would seek to canonize him, but nor is he a tyrant and none but fools should seek to demonize him. In these days of acrimonious political mud-slinging, there seems to be almost nothing upon which the radicals on the left and the reactionaries on [...]