Yohansen was an active member of Hart, an association of proletarian writers founded in Kharkiv in January 1923 by Vasyl Blakytny. Its purpose was “to fight against bourgeois art” and “to attract the proletarian masses...
The archive contains some 1300 folders with the first reports being from the 1920s and the last from the final days of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost the entire period is covered except for the first half of the 1950s where for one...
It is extremely difficult to pinpoint the exact number of deaths in Ukraine within these two days. Estimates of the death toll vary between locations; nearly 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSSR, 20,000-30,000 in Western Ukraine,with the total...
A Russian lawyer who posed as a Stalinist and sought the rehabilitation of Stalin criminals, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, in order to conduct what he calls “a secret Nuremberg trial” against the Soviet system has...
Perhaps the only thing that outrages Russian defenders of Stalin more than the obvious parallels between his regime and Hitler’s is any reference to the alliance the two dictators formed in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one...
Specialists on religion in the Soviet Union have known for decades that many of the most senior hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church were KGB officers, but few Russians know much about this because the Kremlin hasn’t wanted to...
The Trust, as a Chekist operation directed at and designed to disorder the anti-Bolshevik White emigration at the dawn of Soviet power, is today the model and prototype for Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Russian Orthodox Church...
Seventy years after Stalin expelled 200,000 Crimean Tatars from their homeland, Vladimir Putin is doing it again, albeit in a “new” and “hybrid” format, something that reflects the recrudescence of Stalinism...
Seventy-four years ago, Joseph Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars from their historical homeland, an action that cost nearly 200,000 lives at the time, set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of the Ukrainian peninsula, and...
Sometimes the driest of statistics throw a harsher light on reality than any longer discussion. According to official statistics, during World War II, Soviet tribunals convicted more than 2.5 million Soviet citizens, condemned 472,000 for...
In 2014, after the first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, soldiers who had lost limbs in battle were seen for the first time in public as they returned home. Since the full-on invasion by Russia in February 2022, the...
