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By Bill Boyarsky
$12.15
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Edited by Peter Davison
$39.95
$17
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AP
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Chechen scholar Thomas Goltz gives a historical primer on the centuries old culture and struggle that shaped the Tsarnaev brothers, suspects in the bombings of the Boston Marathon.
Posted on May 17, 2013
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AP/Richard Drew
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By William Pfaff — A Gallup poll issued this month says that 99 percent of the American public now has become convinced that Iran’s civilian nuclear program will threaten “the vital interests of the United States in the next ten years.” Eighty-three percent say this will be “a critical threat.” Why?
Posted on Feb 28, 2013
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jurvetson (CC BY 2.0)
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By Steven Starr, David Krieger and Daniel Ellsberg —
Fifty years after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russian nuclear confrontation continues. Each nation still keeps a total of about 800 ICBMs at launch-ready status, ready to be fired on a few minutes’ warning.
Posted on Oct 16, 2012
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U.S. Embassy New Delhi (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
In 1962, nuclear war with the Soviet Union was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right and may deploy massive offensive force against those who even think of deterring the benign global hegemon. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever.
Posted on Oct 16, 2012
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michael baird (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Nick Turse, TomDispatch —
From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.
Posted on Aug 10, 2012
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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When American politicians have flashbacks to a Cold War mentality, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is ready with a comeback and a friendly reminder to quit it with the ’70s nostalgia, as he did Tuesday in response to a comment Mitt Romney made the day before about Russia being America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”
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mobyhill (CC-BY)
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By Ann Jones, TomDispatch —
Since May 2007, 76 NATO soldiers have been killed and an undisclosed number wounded in 46 recorded “deliberate attacks” by members of the Afghan National Security Force. These figures suggest more than a recent “trend of Afghan treachery.”
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streetartutopia.com
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Did you see the one about the Bulgarian street artists who used a little color to repurpose a public monument commemorating the Soviet takeover of their country in 1944 into a cartoonish visual joke?
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Today, Ukraine holds the unwanted title of being one of the world leaders in global prostitution—a reality fueled by the country’s harsh economic climate since emerging from the former Soviet Union. Despite the fervent efforts of anti-sex-tourism groups such as FEMEN, the illegal industry, which exploits children as well as women, is booming.
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AP / The Yomiuri Shimbun, Daisuke Tomita
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By Robert Scheer — An important lesson that should be reinforced by the ongoing disaster in Japan is to worry more about the elimination of those nuclear weapons designed to explode, and another is to be concerned about the prospect of sabotage of nuclear power plants.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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He knows a thing or two about the nuances of U.S.-Russian relations, not to mention nuclear disarmament, and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev flexed his knowledge in a New York Times op-ed piece about the New START treaty this week ...
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National Archives / White House
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In light of Henry Kissinger’s comment, captured in the Nixon White House and released this month, that “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” Think Progress has compiled a brief history of the former secretary of state’s complicity in human rights abuses.
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By William Pfaff — To adapt to secular use a phrase from medieval mysticism, “the cloud of unknowing” deepens as the war-waging countries of North America and Western Europe approach their NATO “summit.”
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Wikimedia Commons
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Are you in the market for some highly enriched uranium? If so, then look no further than the exquisite black markets of Georgia, where evidence in a secret trial has shed light on smuggled uranium that is allegedly for sale in the former Soviet satellite state.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev knows a thing or two about warfare in Afghanistan, having ordered Soviet troops out of the country two decades ago, and Wednesday he passed on a little advice to the NATO troops and allied forces fighting there now ... (continued)
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AP
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By Robert Scheer — Peace has descended on the most contentious point of conflict between East and West for the past six decades—but don’t expect the folks at the Pentagon or their military contractors to celebrate.
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AP / Mikhail Metzel
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By Ivo Mijnssen and Philipp Casula —
Russia has come a long way, but geopolitics in Eastern Europe are still overshadowed by a mutual distrust rooted in World War II.
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By William Pfaff — Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed.
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Matti Paavonen (CC-BY-SA)
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Score one for President Barack Obama’s nuclear summit. The White House announced Monday that Ukraine will give up its entire stockpile of highly enriched uranium by 2012 and convert its research reactors to stop producing the stuff.
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AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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Former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, whose name became familiar outside political circles because of George Crile’s 2003 book, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” as well as director Mike Nichols’ big-screen adaptation, died Wednesday at age 76 in Lufkin, Texas.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By James Fergusson —
No invading army has ever “won” in Afghanistan, and nothing unites the people more than infidel soldiers on their holy soil: What Obama could learn from Gorbachev.
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AP / Herbert Knosowski
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By Robert Scheer — Mikhail Gorbachev is not honored enough for the example he set. His past practices and recent cautions about Afghanistan should be heeded by Barack Obama.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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You’d think that Mikhail Gorbachev, having stood at several key historical junctions in the not-so-distant past, might have a few thoughts about his time in office and the turns of events that happened since—and Soviet Russia’s last leader does.
Posted on Sep 20, 2009
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Flickr / agitprop
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Is Vladimir Putin’s dictator chic to blame for Josef Stalin’s makeover? The Soviet tyrant who presided over the suffering of millions and helped launch World War II has been rebranded as a “competent manager” and, if Moscow’s deserted Gulag Museum is any indication, Russians appear to be lapping it up.
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AP / Joseph Kaczmarek
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By Daniel Ellsberg — The document in his hand was almost unthinkable: It projected roughly 600 million deaths in a U.S.-Soviet war. Here’s the first installment of a memoir of the nuclear era by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who revealed the Pentagon Papers.
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kremlin.ru
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has attempted to improve relations between his country and Poland by addressing some wrongs committed by the Soviet Union—and later Russia—against its Baltic neighbor in recent decades. He offered an apology in an article he penned for the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza that ran Tuesday.
Posted on Sep 1, 2009
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Julien Bryan
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The Germans invaded Poland on this day 70 years ago, and so began what many consider the greatest conflict in human history. An estimated 60 million people would die, including 27 million Soviets and 12 million Jews, Gypsies, gays and other victims of the Nazi holocaust. Most of the dead were civilians.
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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It’s been a year since last summer’s military showdown between Russia and neighboring Georgia, but even though the Georgian president (and many Western media outlets) pointed to “Russian aggression” as the cause of the conflict, an international investigation team looking to get to the bottom of the matter is still working away at finding the answers.
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enjoyfrance.com
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By William Pfaff — There is an important current in conservative U.S. opinion that believes Western Europe to be under something like a siege, or a potential siege, by its large Muslim immigrant population. I should actually say that it’s not just American conservatives, although they write alarmed books about the impending Muslim domination of Europe, and the collapse of European Christianity and identity. They fear the Decline of the West.
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The debate over our 40th president’s role in ending the Cold War continues with the publication of James Mann’s “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.”
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It’s always a little spooky and a little funny to listen to a person from the past predict a future that may have already come to pass. In this clip from 50 years ago, Mike Wallace interviews “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley, and while some of what Huxley says sounds goofy, some sounds uncomfortably familiar.
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AP photo / Xinhua, Xie Xiudong
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By Anand Gopal —
Who exactly are the Afghan insurgents? Every suicide attack and kidnapping is usually attributed to “the Taliban.” In reality, however, the insurgency is far from monolithic.
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AP photo / Shakh Aivazov
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By Robert Scheer — So, Vladimir Putin was right: It was Georgia that started the war with Russia, and once again it was President Bush who got caught in a lie. No surprise, but it is a reminder of just how eager some are for a new Cold War and how indifferent they are to the truth of the matter. Updated
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people.com.cn
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With Georgia on the U.S. mainstream media’s map after its recent war with Russia, a new interest in Georgian history and politics seems to have come to life, especially concerning the cult of personality that Stalin still leads in his native land.
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Russian officials beg to differ with Western critics who claim that Russia’s ongoing presence in the Georgian port town of Poti violates the terms of the cease-fire agreement between the neighboring nations, insisting that the remaining Russian forces are of the peacekeeping, not the combative, variety.
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By William Pfaff — Why has the U.S. maintained an aggressive stance toward Russia long after the demise of the Soviet Union? And how on earth does that strike anyone in Washington as a productive strategy for America, not to mention the rest of the West?
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has weighed in again about the recent bloody battles between Russia and Georgia, this time insisting in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that Russia was “dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili” and “did not need a little victorious war.”
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Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on “Larry King Live” Thursday to give his read on the Georgia-Russia conflict, asserting that Georgia was definitively the first to attack, in “a barbaric assault” on Tskhinvali, and that “there was support and protection” for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from ... elsewhere in the world. Updated
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guardian.co.uk
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Georgia bombed separatists in the country’s South Ossetia region Tuesday evening, killing 25; Russia rolled an estimated 150 tanks into Georgia in retaliation, ostensibly to defend the region’s high Russian immigrant population. Georgia pleads its case as a “freedom-loving” nation to garner U.S. support; any semblance of logic retreats.
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AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichencko
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The Kremlin released word on Monday of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s death, apparently of heart failure. Yeltsin leaves behind a complex legacy. He was instrumental in Russia’s transformation from Soviet state to democracy, but, as Mikhail Gorbachev noted, Yeltsin also made some “serious errors.”
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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