Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1911): General view of the Church of St. John Chrysostom in Korovniki (from the mill) from the west. It is a curious thing that one of the most important stories of the Russian Civil War doesn't even have an English language entry in Wikipedia. Google results either lead to fleeting mentions in obscure... Read More

Although my main academic focus was theoretical physics, I always had a very strong interest in history as well, especially that of the Classical Era. Trying to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory was a challenging intellectual exercise, testing my analytical ability.... Read More

Vladislav Pravdin - GREAT STALIN (1949). It is our joy that during the hard years of the war the Red Army and the Soviet people were led by the wise and experienced leader of the Soviet Union - the GREAT STALIN. And now for something completely different. Instead of snippets from larger works, here’s Egor... Read More

Almost by necessity, all previous Kholmogorov translations have been those of his older texts, with a “lag” between the original and the translation varying between several days and several months. What you see now is a much rarer treat. Kholmogorov has just finished a long and engrossing article on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, clocking in at 16,000... Read More

The latest in our series of translations of Russian national-conservative intellectual Egor Kholmogorov. For the first part, see: Russians in the 2oth Century. Part I: Origins to WWII. Incidentally, while counter-mainstream commenters in the West are hardly well compensated, this is unfortunately doubly true in Russia. If you have enjoyed our translations of him, a... Read More

I have recently had the pleasure of watching a short presentation by Professor Stephen F. Cohen entitled “Rethinking Putin” which he delivered on the annual Nation cruise on December 2, 2017 (see here for the original Nation Article and original YouTube video). In his short presentation, Professor Cohen does a superb job explaining what Putin... Read More

There is a general consensus that Stalin was a sadistic tyrant. But the ghost of his predecessor remains "handshakeworthy" on the left hand side of the political spectrum. The SWPLy bobos of Seattle, who would not have been long for the Communist world, erected a statue to him in the city center. The New York... Read More

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the longest experiment in Communism in recent history. Many saw this event as the proof that Communism (or Marxism-Leninism, I use these interchangeably here) was not a viable ideology. After all, if in Russia Communism was formally ended in 1991, the Chinese quietly... Read More

The latest in our series of translations of Russian national-conservative thinker Egor Kholmogorov. Translated by: Fluctuarius Argenteus; slightly edited by AK. Original: *** It may seem strange that, at the turn of the 21st century, the word “Socialism” is back in the popular political idiom. The final decade of the preceding century seemed to have... Read More

Grigoriev, Andrey & Lynn 2009 Studies of Socioeconomic and Ethnic Differences in Intelligence in the Former Soviet Union in the Early Twentieth Century Abstract: This is essentially a short history of psychometrics in the USSR/Russia. (1) The first measurement of Russian IQ was performed in 1909 by A.M. Schubert, who used the French Binet test... Read More

About two thirds of the USSR's 27 million casualties were civilians - that is, almost 10% of its prewar population. Had those percentages been applied to Nazi Germany, it would lost 8 million people - an order of magnitude than the 400,000 civilians it lost due to Allied strategic bombing, and the 600,000 who died... Read More

The “crooked mile” from the Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile etc) is Fleet Street, which is well known to London journalists. So I was told when I joined the BBC at Bush House, at the very end of Fleet Street. Not only is the street... Read More

It's hard to view Stalin as any sort of Russian national hero considering the demonstrable idiocy of his apologists' arguments. Trying to portray him as such involves descending into a fantasy world in which no country had ever managed to industrialize itself without killing off millions of its most intelligent and productive people or have... Read More

When introducing Jimmie Moglia’s video series about Stalin I promised to share with you my own take on this most controversial personality. Let me immediately say that what I will write below is most definitely not some seminal analysis of the life and personality of Stalin, but rather few more or less disjointed thoughts on... Read More

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was collapsing. The Berlin Wall had been breached. The Communist East German government was literally swept away by the storm tide of history. It was also the most dangerous moment the world had faced since the 1963 Cuban missile crisis. What would the Soviet... Read More

I went to Moscow as a correspondent in 1984, just as the Brezhnev generation of leaders was beginning to die off or be replaced. There was nothing to suggest that Soviet control of Eastern Europe had only another five years to run and that the Soviet Union itself would disintegrate a few years later. In... Read More

In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city... Read More