Russia, it is sometime said, is a country with an unpredictable past; but Russian governments have worked hard to try to control not only the future but also the past. Now, however, Sergey Shelin says, the Kremlin “no longer controls...
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...
After meeting with the leaders of Britain and France, Adolf Hitler concluded that he was dealing with non-entities and that he couldn’t possibly lose a war against them, forgetting not only that these countries could and would change...
The photographs of Vladimir Putin sitting on what many falsely supposed was the throne of Byzantine emperors have prompted many to laugh but others to note that “Russia even today in many ways remains an heir of the Byzantine empire,”...
At a time when many commentators are seeking to explain what is going on in Ukraine by searching for analogies with other places and events, it is useful to be reminded of the limits of at least some of these comparisons as Bohdan...
Moscow’s actions in Ukraine now “strikingly recall the behavior of the Soviet Union” during the Cold War which “put down with blood any manifestations of independent thinking and freedom in the countries of Eastern Europe,” most...
Whenever people are confronted by changes that call into question existing paradigms, their first reaction typically is to deny that anything has happened or that it is significant, but their second is to seek analogies and parallels in...
What OSCE spotted The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) reported that on 7 August in the border area of the “non-government-controlled” territory, its long-range drone spotted two convoys of canvas-covered six-wheeled cargo...
