It’s a pity when a 760-page history of the Russian leadership’s thinking during the Cold War period, 1945 to 2022, earns consignment to the waste bin within the first nineteen pages, and in just three sentences. This ratio of toxicity to prolixity – 1 to 40 — is exceptional, although the price asked for it... Read More

Hitler’s violation of the Munich settlement in March 1939 proved his perfidy and his intention to conquer. But why was Britain party to that settlement? The German invasion of Poland triggered the declarations of war by Britain and France. But why were those countries allied with Poland? The two statements are familiar. The two questions... Read More

As we rightly remember the Auschwitz death camp and the rest of the Jewish Holocaust, let’s take a moment to recall the greatest mass killer of prisoners during World War II, the by now forgotten Soviet Major General Vasily Blokhin. Blokhin claimed to have personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag.... Read More

I’ve been deeply immersed in an excellent history book, Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin, 2021. It is at least partially revisionist, and not overtly anti-Hitler and does not often engage in reduction ad Hitlerium (reducing everything to the evil of Hitler, including Hitler himself). It does still believe in the holocaust, a glaring error that... Read More

There is the old adage: A picture is worth a thousand words. Well, grit your teeth, comrade, and click on this link. Behold a snapshot of infamy that’s worth enough words to fill a multi-volume encyclopedia with the title: The 3 C’s of our Ruling Class: Collusion, Corruption, Coercion. The photo captures Eleanor Roosevelt mugging... Read More

Daffodils! Suddenly they are everywhere. My back yard is full of them. One of my neighbors has a front yard in the same condition. Passing by as I walked my dog, I saw the lady of the house doing gardening work among the blooms. I greeted her with: "A host, of golden daffodils!" She called... Read More

In the United States the feel good explanation is that the war was about making freedom and democracy safe. In actual fact there were many agendas at play, and they had next to nothing to do with freedom and democracy. World War II Has many origins. For Germany the war originated in the Versailles Treaty... Read More

There is a very real attempt to rewrite history as we speak. A history that is at the root of what organises our world today, for it is understood that who controls the past, will have control over our present and our future. This attempt to rewrite history is of the most paramount significance because... Read More

Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.) In November 1961, at the end of a Community Party Congress that publicly condemned Stalin’s crimes, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev unexpectedly called for the building of... Read More

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.) Cohen and Batchelor have a spirited discussion of Cohen’s thesis that the political legacies of American slavery and of Stalin’s Great Terror, which engulfed the Soviet... Read More

Editor’s Note: A version of this will be published in the Moscow opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. One of the last and irrepressible truth-tellers about the Stalin era, who themselves experienced the horror of those years, has died. Having lost both his mother and father in the 1930s, in the tyrant’s prisons of torture and execution,... Read More

Editor's Note: This article has been updated with an exchange (see end) between Orlando Figes and Stephen Cohen and Peter Reddaway on June 13, 2012. Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers:... Read More

This essay is adapted from a much longer version in a volume in honor of Robert Conquest, Political Violence, edited by Paul Hollander and to be published in November by Palgrave Macmillan. The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past. –William Faulkner Faulkner was right, and not only about America. Russia’s new... Read More