16 mins read
Patrick Lawrence: John Durham & Burying History
Witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in U.S. history. To be deprived in this way of the past — of the facts of our time — is a kind of condemnation.
16 mins read
Witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in U.S. history. To be deprived in this way of the past — of the facts of our time — is a kind of condemnation.
5 mins read
If the crime is promoting distrust in institutions, the evidence is strongest against the FBI and media.
7 mins read
A closer look at what war does to a country and internationally, what needs to be done to fix it.
8 mins read
The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.
1 min read
Excerpt from ACURA founder Stephen F. Cohen’s talk on his book “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War” at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Policy.
5 mins read
Russia turned Bakhmut into the graveyard of Ukrainian military power. What comes next?
4 mins read
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is reported to have supplied Western weapons to Russian neo-Nazis who attacked a village inside Russia on May 22.
2 mins read
Financial Times reports that the Russian Volunteer Corps includes self-avowed neo-Nazis
8 mins read
By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.
4 mins read
Introduction by Committee for the Republic Chairman John B. Henry:
4 mins read
The meeting of the G7 countries in Hiroshima, Japan, on May 19 to 21 laid out clearly what their policy will be for the world, namely, guns not butter.
11 mins read
The latest investigation into the charges that Donald Trump’s campaign worked in concert with the Russian government exposes a cynical collaboration between Trump opponents and the FBI.
4 mins read
Crises, crises everywhere, as far as the eye can see. There’s a border crisis, a fentanyl crisis and a crime crisis. Massive deficit spending is leading to a fiscal crisis. President Biden’s 39% approval rating as he seeks a second term would suggest a leadership crisis.
6 mins read
A mantra endlessly repeated by US officials and military leaders, especially in their testimony before Congress, is that America’s vast network of minor state allies in NATO and around the world provide it with resources and power that Russia and China cannot match. However, this is simply not true. It is a fantasy, unsupported by the factual historical record.
9 mins read
As world tensions heighten over Ukraine, some fear this crisis might grow into a great geopolitical catastrophe. Certainly it could. But few recognize there is an even greater matter of conflict brewing between the US and Russia. It could quickly outpace the already-dangerous Ukraine war.
5 mins read
At this moment, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock now stands at only 90 seconds before midnight. Thus, as we move closer and closer to a nuclear World War 3, why not identify the major steps that took us to this dangerously slippery road? Who knows, perhaps this exercise could help to bring some perspective to those who are pushing us into oblivion. They have families and children too. Sometimes even the greatest villains have the moment of repentance.
16 mins read
Witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in U.S. history. To be deprived in this way of the past — of the facts of our time — is a kind of condemnation.
5 mins read
If the crime is promoting distrust in institutions, the evidence is strongest against the FBI and media.
1 min read
Excerpt from ACURA founder Stephen F. Cohen’s talk on his book “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War” at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Policy.
4 mins read
The meeting of the G7 countries in Hiroshima, Japan, on May 19 to 21 laid out clearly what their policy will be for the world, namely, guns not butter.
11 mins read
The latest investigation into the charges that Donald Trump’s campaign worked in concert with the Russian government exposes a cynical collaboration between Trump opponents and the FBI.
10 mins read
The 69th Bilderberg Meeting, a secretive conclave of global power brokers, has kicked off in Lisbon, Portugal, with issues on the agenda including transnational threats, artificial intelligence, and America’s leadership in world affairs.
5 mins read
The War in Ukraine is a two-act tragedy, with a third quite possibly looming. Act one took place in late 2021 through February 2022, with the rejection of a Russian draft agreement, along with Ukraine’s refusal to implement the key provisions of the Minsk I and II agreements of 2014-15, which would [a] have brought about a cease fire of hostilities against Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lukansk regions, and [b] paved the way for referendums in those eastern regions on limited autonomy, under which they would remain within the borders of Ukraine.
7 mins read
A closer look at what war does to a country and internationally, what needs to be done to fix it.
8 mins read
The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.
5 mins read
Russia turned Bakhmut into the graveyard of Ukrainian military power. What comes next?
4 mins read
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is reported to have supplied Western weapons to Russian neo-Nazis who attacked a village inside Russia on May 22.
2 mins read
Financial Times reports that the Russian Volunteer Corps includes self-avowed neo-Nazis
7 mins read
Russia and China fully understand they must stick together to fend off Washington, because if one falls the other is on its own
7 mins read
Germany defies US by maintaining constructive engagement with China, which Berlin sees as uniquely placed as peacemaker in Ukraine
8 mins read
Zelensky came to Washington to receive a $45 billion Christmas present, stuffed in a sack of $1.7 trillion in U.S. government spending.
7 mins read
Biden Regime Secretary of State Blinken has blocked negotiations between Russia and Ukraine by declaring it is US policy to drive Russia out of the reincorporated territories, including Crimea.
4 mins read
Ukraine continues to shrilly double-down on its claim that the S-300 missile that killed two Polish citizens earlier this week was a Russian missile fired from Russia. Russian-made it may have been since Ukrainian arsenals have long held Russian-made weaponry from Soviet times.
4 mins read
CNN — More than two dozen liberal House members are calling on President Joe Biden to shift course in his Ukraine strategy and pursue direct diplomacy with Russia to bring the months-long conflict to an end.
4 mins read
The Ukrainian leader was angry about information revealed by a leaked document, saying sharing such info in Ukraine was a ‘felony’
12 mins read
Patrick Lawrence celebrates Jacob Seigel’s essay in Tablet magazine on the “hoax of the century.”
7 mins read
Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell admits that the Biden campaign triggered the false claim that the Hunter laptop story was “Russian disinformation.”
5 mins read
As the Russians just reminded us, the science lab in the sky run by them, the Americans and others is the alternative to nationalism and war.
10 mins read
We cannot even begin to fathom the non-stop ripple effects deriving from the 2023 geopolitical earthquake that shook the world: Putin and Xi, in Moscow, de facto signaling the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.
6 mins read
It has become fashionable in the US media in recent months to compare the ongoing war in Ukraine, Europe’s biggest and bloodiest conflict since World War II, with the long drawn-out trench stalemate in World War I. This is all too true: But in precisely the opposite way than the hundreds of ignorant American pundits and politicians parroting this line imagine.
Vladimir Emelyanovich Maximov (Russian: Владимир Емельянович Максимов, born Lev Alexeyevich Samsonov, Лев Алексеевич Самсонов; 27 November 1930, — 26 March 1995) was a Soviet and Russian writer, publicist, essayist and editor, one of the leading figures of the Soviet and post-Soviet dissident movement abroad.
Born in Moscow into a working class family, Lev Samsonov spent an unhappy childhood in and out of orphanages and colonies after his father was prosecuted in 1937 during the anti-Trotskyism purge. He went to Siberia to travel there under an assumed name, Vladimir Maximov (to become later his pen name), spent time in jails and labour camps, then worked as a bricklayer and construction worker. In 1951 he settled in one of the Kuban stanitsas and started to write short stories and poems for local newspapers. His debut book Pokolenye na chasakh (Generation on the Look-out) came out in Cherkessk in 1956.
In 1956 Maximov returned to Moscow and published, among other pieces, the short novel My obzhivayem zemlyu (We Harness the Land, 1961) telling the story of Siberian hobos, courageous, but deeply troubled men, trying to find each their own way of settling down into the unfriendly Soviet reality. It was followed by Zhiv chelovek (Man is Alive). The former caught the attention of Konstantin Paustovsky who included it into his almanac Pages from Tarusa. The latter found its champion in Vsevolod Kochetov who in 1962 published it in Oktyabr, which he was then in charge of. It was met with both public and critical acclaim and was produced in 1965 by the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre. In 1963 Maximov became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and in the mid-1960s joined the Oktyabr magazine's staff. All the while, though, his literary output was getting harsher, darker and more pessimistic.
Two of Maximov's early 1970s novels, Sem dnei tvorenya (Seven Days of Creation, 1971) and The Quarantin (1973) proved to be the turning point of his career. On the one hand, in retrospect they marked the high point of his creativity. On the other, steeped with the longing for Christian ideals and skeptical as to the viability of the Communist morality, both went against the grain of the norms and the criteria of Socialist realism. They were rejected by all Soviet publishers, came out in Samizdat, were officially banned and got their author into serious trouble. In June 1973 he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and spent several months in a psychiatric ward. In 1974 Maximov left the country to settle in Paris, and in October 1975 was stripped of the Soviet citizenship.
In 1974 Maximov launched the literary, political and religious magazine Kontinent to take up what many saw as the Hertzen-founded tradition of supporting the Russian literature in exile. It became the center point of Russian intellectual life in Western Europe, attracting such diverse authors as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Galich, Viktor Nekrasov, Joseph Brodsky and Andrey Sakharov, the latter describing Maximov as "the man of unwavering honesty." Maximov remained the magazine's editor-in-chief up until 1992, when, during one of his visits to Moscow, he transferred it to Russia and granted all rights to his colleagues in Moscow. He was also the head of the executive committee of the international anti-communist organization Resistance International.
Among Maximov's best-known works written in France were the novels Kovcheg dlya nezvanykh (The Arc for the Uninvited, 1976), telling the story of the Soviet development of the Kuril Islands after the World War II, an autobiographical dilogy Proshchanye iz niotkuda (Farewell from Nowhere, 1974—1982), and Zaglyanut v bezdnu (To Look Into the Abyss, 1986), the latter having as its theme Alexander Kolchak's romantic life. All three, based upon historical documents, portrayed Bolshevism as a doctrine of ruthlessness, amorality and political voluntarism. He authored several plays on the life of Russians in emigration, among them Who's Afraid of Ray Bradbury? (Кто боится Рэя Брэдбери?, 1988), Berlin at the Night's End (Берлин на исходе ночи,1991) and There, Over the River... (Там, за рекой, 1991).
The drastic change in political situation in his homeland and the fall of the Soviet Union left Maximov unimpressed. He switched to criticizing the new Russia's regime and, while still a staunch anti-Communist, started to published his diatribes aimed at Egor Gaidar-led liberal reforms regularly in the Communist Pravda, to great disdain of some of his friends.