Tag Archives : Soviet Union

The upper house of Russian parliament approved on Monday a bill that expands the powers of the Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB), backed by President Dmitri Medvedev and criticized by human rights defenders. The text, which allows special services warn against anyone suspected of “create conditions” favorable to commit a crime, [...]

In Russia, domestic economic health is not synonymous with national power. The country has always had a dysfunctional economy. ‘By contrast, its military power has always been disproportionately strong.’ The Russian security machinery devoted a bigger chunk of its economy to military power. The Russian government has been able to do this ‘Moscow [...]

According to revelations of Russian intelligence, Polish leaders ‘conspired’ during the 1930s with Nazi Germany against the vital interests of the Soviet Union, ‘instigating separatism’ in the Caucasus, Ukraine and Central Asia to promote the ‘disintegration’ of the USSR, and ‘opposed’ the formation of [...]

Vladimir Putin has been in a leadership office at the Kremlin for 10 years, having a direct hand in transforming Russia ‘from the unstable but semidemocratic days of the 1990s to the statist, authoritarian structure of today.’ In more operational terms, that means carrying the country ‘from tentative democracy to near-police state.’ Putin couldn’t [...]

In theory, this time Russia should remain as the major power in its region. Throughout the year, despite its own economic spasms, Moscow devoted huge amounts of money to their impoverished post-Soviet neighbors, seeking to ensure their loyalty in the long term and restrict the influence of the West in the region. But the neighbors seem to have other [...]

In Reagan’s March 8, 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, he refereed to the U.S.S.R as the ‘evil empire.’ He castigated the nuclear power ambitions of the Soviet Union. He also justified the NATO deployment of nuclear-tipped missiles in Western Europe as response to the Soviet deployment of its [...]

Many Americans believed that the US was fighting a war that the Vietnamese people did not want to be fought for them. To say that the US military participation in Vietnam was not popular in the US is an understatement. Many critics felt that what was going on was a civil war between north and south Vietnam, and that the US was poking its nose into [...]

A famine in 1930s which killed millions of Ukrainians during Stalin era finally has a true memorial at Kiev. The famine was not due to natural reasons. The villagers were brutally starved and killed by hunger by then communist regime in Soviet Union. The memorial is a stark reminder of Stalin’s dark legacy. No amount of pressure, power could bury [...]