Xibalba

A Battle Miss-Remembered Poltava 1709 Battle of Poltava In a previous post I mentioned and reviewed a rather unpleasant exa...

“Freedom” Under a Tyranny Isaiah Berlin One of the most important attributes of tyranny and living under a tyranny is that intell...

Lenin A Note on his Politics Young Lenin Probably the most influential politician of the 20th century both directly and indire...

Knowing Better Gulag Camp In 1956 Khrushchev gave his secret speech outlining and denouncing the crimes of Joseph Stalin and the St...

Cruel Hindsight Map of Afghanistan In a previous posting I briefly reviewed a book published in the Marxist Regimes series that ga...

Nomenklatura Some Notes on the Soviet elite Part I Soviet Politburo In 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power practically nobody...

Another Napoleonic Fiasco Napoleon and Russia A Brief Note on Supply and Size The French Invasion of and Retreat from Russia in 18...

Sometimes Lessing is less: Doris Lessing and the Afghans  Doris Lessing  One of more annoying features of modern life is the ...

Moral Cretinism Part VII The CPUSA, Stalin and Espionage A Book Review Book Cover Ideological struggles and Academic one upma...

Michael Parenti and Stalin’s Fingers* Moral Cretinism Part VI Stalin aka "Koba the Dread" The writer and “progressive”...

Palace Shadows   Recently I rediscovered a book I originally read more than 30 years ago. The book The Shadow of the Winter Palace ,1 was...

Moral Cretinism Part III Longing for Big Brother  Maurice Merleau-Ponty In two previous postings I looked at two other examples of ...

Frederick the Overrated I Frederick II and the Outbreak of the Seven Years War. Frederick the “Great” One of the joys of historic...

Fomenko’s Fiction Anatoly Fomenko Anatoly Fomenko is a Russian Mathematician who over the last 20 years or so has been putting forwa...

“Development”? One of the problems of the historiography of modern Europe is the “westernization” and “modernization” of Russia and why this...