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James Oliver is a contributor to Euromaidan Press. He has an interest in history and covering the parts of notably Eastern European history normally forgotten. Follow James on twitter at @historyboy77
On January 10 this year it was announced by The State Committee for State TV and Radio Broadcasting in Ukraine that a Russian translation of Anthony Beevor’s work “Stalingrad” had been subject to a ban on the basis of what it...
This note is a response to a pervasive myth held by those who want to demonise Jews as a whole by pointing to the apparent role Jews played in the Communist movement. But what they point to is complete nonsense. It might be good to look at...
Between 1932–33, Stalin sought to wipe out the very concept of an independent Ukraine by targeting its peasantry and its leadership. In many senses, Lenin and Stalin carried on the traditions of the Tsarist empire in seeking to deny the...
Read the previous parts: 1) The interwar prelude 2) Hitler’s Anschluss In the West, much sympathy existed with Hitler on the basis that the treaty of Versailles had treated Germany too harshly and the belief that Hitler was simply...
Read the previous part: The interwar prelude If Stalin had an ambition for the conquest of Poland, so also did Adolf Hitler. The advances that Germany made against Imperial Russia prior to 1918 fed into the German nationalist concepts of...
More than we think, Soviet propaganda has influenced the way in which many see World War II. This is perhaps most telling when discussions of its early period (1939—41) are raised. “Protective” invasion? In conventional...
Over the last year the Holodomor has garnered much needed additional publicity, in part due to the current situation in Ukraine but in the West discussion of it is still often met howith the look of confused faces and a great deal of...
On 5 July 1933, a desperate appeal for food aid was sent to Stalin from within the Bashkir ASSR. The Bashkirs are a small Turkic ethnic group that mostly reside in a region just to the north and west of Kazakhstan, and in 1933 Stalin had...
On May 22 Volodymyr Katriuk, a Ukrainian World War II veteran and a suspected participant in the massacre of the 186 inhabitants of the Belarusian village of Khatyn 1 passed away in Canada. For years his name had been at the center of a...
On 19 September 1939, advanced units of the Soviet 6th army reached the outskirts of the city of Lviv. What they found was a city that had already been subject to relentless bombardment from German artillery placed upon nearby hills as...
Free independent media is a necessary condition for democracy to function in any country. Censorship, on the other hand, is rampant in all its forms in dictatorships. These definitions may be relevant in a black and white world; in...
