Robert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukraine famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, has died at 98, having outlived the Soviet Union—which came into being in the year of his birth, 1917—and which he helped to bring [...]
Britannia & the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars 1917-1929, by Victor Madeira (The Boydell Press, UK) Another cache of secret documents may not make forgotten history timelier than this. Modern asymmetrical confrontation truly began after 1914-1918, chiefly between Great Britain and what soon became the Soviet Union. While American troops tipped the balance and sailed [...]
The Russian philosopher S.L. Frank is not someone whose name comes up often among conservative cultural commentators anymore–if it ever enjoyed such currency. Indeed, I suspect that even when his works were more current, he was overshadowed in the Anglophone world by other more prominent contemporaries, such as Nicholas Berdyaev. That’s a shame. In [...]
Wordsworth sang* to Milton, “thou shouldst be living at this hour,” and the same goes for G. K. Chesterton, the connoisseur of paradox. Weighing nearly four-hundred pounds at the end, today he would float like a dirigible over modern foreign affairs; plucking choice paradoxes at every hand and drawing as many lessons from our globalised [...]
I was brought up to believe in exceptionalism. To be precise, I was brought up to believe that there are only three types of people in the world: there are Englishmen, those who would like to be Englishmen, and those who don’t know any better. Such a formulation, no doubt shocking to the sensibilities [...]
The conservative, by definition, is an opponent of utopia and utopianism. His bedrock is tradition. His thought, though certainly abstract by the practical standards of capitalist democracy, is rooted in history and recognizes that even if it were desirable to lift one foot forward, in order to do it, our second foot must first [...]
In the music of Shostakovich, the two sides of the twentieth century are revealed—the absurd and the tragic. It is impossible to tell in his works whether the absurd is the tragic or the tragic is the absurd, just as the events of The Century made it impossible to distinguish between the two. Whatever [...]
Like Russell Kirk, Andrzej Walicki ought to occupy a prominent place in the history of conservative thought for his unmatched “In the Circles of Conservative Utopia.” It could be called the Russian “Conservative Mind.” Russell Kirk did more than any American in the twentieth century to revive and refine British conservative thought and make [...]
“If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” said Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the Reagan White House. Among the dispositions shared by Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge was a determination to stay [...]
Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government. Last month, the House passed such a resolution 411-10. As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House Resolution 758 is so “full of war propaganda that [...]
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 [...]
In a large part of the Western mindset, Russian culture only really existed in the nineteenth century. Before Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy and before the horrific purges of the Soviets, Russia was, we are led to believe, a somewhat backwards land that nevertheless managed to produce great works of art. Undoubtably, Russia in the nineteenth [...]
It was once observed, long ago, that “opinion governs the world.” And while that may be overstating things, it is true that the West’s opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin has wholly governed its policy throughout the ongoing Ukrainian crisis by allowing personal animus and a distaste for his brand of atavistic nationalist politics [...]
What is most striking about the Ukraine crisis is how much the Washington debate lacks any sense of how the issue might look to other interested parties, particularly Russia. Putin is analysed of course—is he, as Hillary Clinton suggested, following Hitler’s playbook? Consider an analogy to get a sense of how Russia might perceive [...]