The Disturbing Campaign Against Poland’s Judges
Anek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Last summer, a very unusual scandal unfolded in Poland—or rather, a very ordinary scandal, but with some unusual protagonists. A journalist at a Polish news website, Onet.pl, exposed the existence of an organized online trolling campaign designed to discredit public figures. An everyday occurrence, of course. Except that this …
Putin’s Big Lie
In the opening scene of the most famous Polish movie of the past two decades, a crowd of anxious, desperate people—on foot, riding bikes, leading horses, carrying bundles—walks onto a bridge. To their immense surprise, they see another group of anxious, desperate people heading toward them, walking from the opposite direction. “People, what are you …
The False Romance of Russia
JERRY COOKE / CORBIS VIA GETTY Sherwood Eddy was a prominent American missionary as well as that now rare thing, a Christian socialist. In the 1920s and ’30s, he made more than a dozen trips to the Soviet Union. He was not blind to the problems of the U.S.S.R., but he also found much to …
A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come
Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well. Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying? On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one …
How Stalin Hid Ukraine’s Famine From the World
In 1932 and 1933, millions died across the Soviet Union—and the foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe. In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. …
Understanding Stalin
Russian archives reveal that he was no madman, but a very smart and implacably rational ideologue. Stalin: Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 BY PENGUIN STEPHEN KOTKIN How did Stalin become Stalin? Or, to put it more precisely: How did Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili—the grandson of serfs, the son of a washerwoman and a semiliterate cobbler—become Generalissimo Stalin, …
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