Hitler invaded the Soviet Union at 0400 hours on June 22, 1941. By June 23, the Wehrmacht had destroyed the entire Soviet air force. By June 26, the Soviet commander of the Western front had lost radio contact with Moscow. By June 28, German troops had entered Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus. And on the …
Tallinn, Estonia — From outside, the offices of Skype — the company best known for its free Internet phone service — don’t look very different from the other Soviet and post-Soviet buildings that make up the nondescript suburbs of the Estonian capital.
And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West.
It’s a dangerous business, oral history, at least when you try it in Russia. Without oral history a complete history of the Soviet Union is almost impossible to write. Archival documents are dry, containing only the official point of view; memoirs, often written years later, are unreliable and frequently slide over important details.
“Why do they hate us?” Much ink has been spilled over the past six years in attempts to answer that question. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to what is, in some ways, a more perplexing conundrum: Why don’t they like us as much as they used to?
The novelty of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance yesterday at Columbia University did not, as many critics would have it, lie in the fact that an august Ivy League institution had invited the Iranian president — a Holocaust-denier, authoritarian leader and sponsor of terrorism — to speak on its campus. The protests, the fury, the screaming New …
Russian President Vladimir Putin sacked his prime minister last week and replaced him with one Viktor Zubkov, an obscure official never before mentioned as a potential leader. Wondering why?
Es war ein sonniger Tag im Juni und George W. Bush hielt an der Universität von Warschau eine Rede. Drinnen lauschten die Politiker interessiert und wisperten zustimmend miteinander. Draußen hatte sich eine jubelnde Menschenmenge versammelt, die Plakate mit Sympathiebekundungen für Amerika hochhielt.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, time for a quiz. Three guesses as to who said this: “And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in …
“She was the people’s princess. And that’s how she will . . . remain.” I marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the Princess of Wales by watching Tony Blair’s sob-choked 1997 tribute to Lady Diana on YouTube.
