Staunton, December 5, 2015 In response to Vladimir Putin’s address and the arrest of Karelian regionalist writer Vadim Shtepa, Karelian head Aleksandr Khudilaynen says that the West is seeking to use Islamic fundamentalism against Russia just as it tried to use Nazism against the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Khudilaynen said that it was “not […]
As the readers of this blog know perfectly well, the Kremlin is actively cooperating — sometimes financially — with European far right parties. However, Moscow may also be engaged in even more sinister activities, namely whipping up racial hatred in the West in order to discredit democratic societies that have taken a strong position on […]
Staunton, March 12 — It is an article of faith for Vladimir Putin and many Russians as well that, despite what he and they are sometimes willing to concede were Joseph Stalin’s excesses, the Soviet dictator was absolutely necessary in building up a strong Soviet Union that was then capable of defeating Nazi Germany. But […]
Staunton, February 14 – Most in Russia and many in the West are so used to thinking of fascism and especially Nazism as a phenomenon of the extreme right that they do not remember that Nazism was National Socialism and that until the Rohm Purge it was as much a movement of the left as […]
Staunton, January 5 – Following Vladimir Putin, who suggested Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by a clutch of “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites,” commentators in Russia and sometimes in the West suggested that anti-Semitism was widespread in Ukraine. Indeed, they have made it a major theme in their presentations. But Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko deputy in […]
Staunton, November 10 – The fighting in the Donbass is a clash between two types of nationalism, civic Ukrainian nationalism of a Western type and “a unique crusade” against that kind of nationalism that is powered by a Russian “flight from freedom” Erich Fromm described in his classic 1941 book on the rise of fascism […]
Staunton, September 26 – The pro-Moscow militants in Ukraine’s Donbas backed by Russian forces represent a threat not only to the territorial integrity of Ukraine but to the future of Russia because the leaders of “Novorossiya” combine nationalism and socialism in a way that recalls some of the greatest evils of the 20th century. In […]
Staunton, July 5 – “Putin’s Russia has already long been a Reich” much like Hitler’s Germany, but ordinary Russians now, like ordinary Germans 75 years ago, have not taken note of the fact because so far the state’s repressive attentions have not been directed primarily at them, according to Vitaly Portnikov. Portnikov, a Ukrainian commentator […]
Staunton, June 8 – There are few place names more disturbing to those who live between Europe and Moscow and to those who care about human freedom more generally than Yalta, the site where near the end of World War II, Western leaders agreed with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on the division of post-war division […]
Staunton, May 18 – Vladimir Putin’s conception of a “Russian world,” of “the idea of the uniqueness of the Russian man,” is “much more dangerous for the world than is Putin himself,” according to Andrey Piontkovsky. And the West must fight “this nightmare” by discrediting its author and showing that it “doesn’t work” Speaking to […]
