Radio 4 - Today (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has made an unusually outspoken condemnation of attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Joseph Stalin. In a message posted on his blog President Medvedev called on people to remember the "millions who died because of Stalin's terror". Last year, in a nation wide television poll to name the greatest Russian ever, Joseph Stalin...
USA Today (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Would we hit the 'reset' button with Stalin? By Lionel Beehner Vladimir Lenin may have gotten his own tomb, but it is Joseph Stalin's ghost that hovers most over Russian politics today. Last week, President Dmitry Medvedev said on his...
Philadelphia Inquirer (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
That's a striking departure from the general drift of the country, which takes a complicated view of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Last month, a Moscow court heard a libel suit filed by Stalin's grandson. The descendant contended that a lawyer had besmirched Stalin's "honor and dignity" in newspaper columns that referred to him as a "bloodthirsty cannibal."
E - Editors Weblog (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Russian Information Agency Novosti, a state-owned news agency based in Moscow, has denied allegations of cooperating with a Western PR company in an attempt "to justify Russia's great power ambitions" and improve the reputation of former Soviet Union dictator, Joseph...
Repman (Free subscription) | 16 hours ago
How'd you like the task of rehabilitating Joseph Stalin's image and reputation? Well, according to O’Dwyer’s, Russian Information Agency Novosti is searching for an international PR firm to do just that. According to the report, the goal is to re-position the Soviet despot who, some historians say, may be responsible for more than 30 million deaths and, instead, highlight his role in...
Hecklerspray (Free subscription) | 14 hours ago
... Russia! There are only two pieces of news that ever come out of Russia. The first is that Joseph Stalin ’s nipples used to bleed every Easter. Some say it was a heavenly reminder of his parents’ religion that he so casually cast aside. This news re-breaks every two years or so. Wait for it – you’ll see. The second news story that always breaks from the formerly red country is that...
kitchen table math, the sequel (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
... have suffered the most, in the 1930s. Second, math proved too obscure for the sort of meddling Joseph Stalin most liked to exercise: It was simply too difficult to ignite a passionate debate about something as inaccessible as the objective nature of natural numbers (although just such a campaign was attempted). And third, at a critical moment math proved immensely useful to the state....
France24 (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
An exhibition on Leon Trotsky, one of the architects of the 1917 Russian Revolution, opened in Saint Petersburg on Friday -- the eve of the uprising's 92nd anniversary. Trotsky was the founder of the Red Army, and along with Vladimir Lenin, one of the prime movers in the Bolshevik revolt that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. After falling out with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1920s,...
West Virginia Record (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Joseph Stalin's infamous KGB chief, Lavrenti Beria, had a unique approach to justice. Instead of investigating a crime to find the culprit, he would arrest the "culprit" first and create a crime to pin on him. "Show me the man," he boasted, "and I will find the crime." Sad to say, things aren't much different in the "People's Republic of West Virginia."...
At Home With Books (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
... using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death. First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including...
Room 611 (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Today's schedule is A-B-Lunch-C-D Hau'oli lā hānau to my son Noah who turns 14 today! A - Social Studies 11 - Today with Mr. Jones you will be looking at the rise of dictators in Europe from the 1920's through the late 30's. You'll focus on Joseph Stalin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. You'll need...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
... Rochers . The traditional brutal brand of statecraft, epitomised in stories of Churchill and Stalin staying up late to exchange domination of Poland for control of Greece on scribbled scraps of paper, nowadays comes alongside the soft-power strain, taken to new heights this week by Fu Ying, Beijing's woman in London. Faced with damaging reports that she was grumpy about the noise next door...
Start Thinking Right (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
The two Josephs of socialism – Joseph Stalin and Joseph Goebbels - would be so proud of their closest ideological counterparts today: Democrats admit paying for pro-Daggett call; Obama records robocall for Corzine By Matt Friedman, PolitickerNJ.com Reporter The Democratic State Committee now admits paying for a robocall to Somerset County voters that slams Republican...
A Boat Against the Current (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
... W.H. Auden’s “low, dishonest decade.” Only two months before, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had contrived to carve up Poland between them, precipitating WWII. The setting for this delightful confection—Paris—would, in mid-June the following year, fall to the Nazis. All the more poignant, then, to hear these words from the eponymous Soviet envoy: “Comrades....
Who Is IOZ? (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
Championship Insane Person, Masha Lipman, warns us that . . . well, something! Look, it turns out that the figure of Joseph Stalin occupies an ambiguous place in the Russian psyche. On the one hand, he was one of history's great monsters. On the other hand, he preserved the Russian nation and destroyed Hitler. History is in fact full of such figures, both monstrous and grand. Augustus...
