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Soviet Union Tag

Posted by Katya Rapoport Sedgwick on April 18, 2021 97 Comments
There are features of American wokeness that make me gasp that socialism in the U.S. is going to be worse than the USSR where I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. The ongoing effort to transform mathematics education into a crypto-Marxist indoctrination vehicle seems like the sign of things to come.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 29, 2019 34 Comments
The surest sign that Beto is running is that a leader of "Draft Beto 2020" just shared a video of Bernie Sanders on his honeymoon in the Soviet Unino 1988:
"Recently discovered footage from 1988 reveals a shirtless Bernie Sanders with his wife, Jane, on their honeymoon in the USSR, drunkenly signing “This Land Is Your Land” with a group of presumed Soviets."

Posted by Katya Rapoport Sedgwick on December 01, 2018 24 Comments

The New York Times recently published an Op-Ed with an eye-popping claim: for all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.

This was not the first piece published by the New York Times exploring the Alleged glories of socialism as they relate to women. In August, anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee attempted to answer the greatest question of the 20th century, in Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism (oh — you weren’t wondering that?).

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 07, 2018 4 Comments
Natan Sharansky is winding down his leadership of The Jewish Agency for Israel, a post he has held since 2009.  The Jewish Agency serves to strengthen ties of Jews around the world with Israel. You can read their most recent annual report on their activities here (pdf.) To honor Sharansky's service and life, the Jewish Agency is encouraging people to share memories about Sharansky, including using the hashtag #CelebrateWithNatan. So I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to recollect Legal Insurrection's prior coverage of Sharansky, plus a new story I just learned about him.

Posted by Mary Grabar on November 26, 2017 22 Comments
Hamilton College is acknowledging the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with displays of crimson banners, books from International Publishers (a Communist organization), and visages of Lenin in the library. What should be added is a rendering of a hand-less and toothless frozen corpse with the death certificate from 1939:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 25, 2016 7 Comments
On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachov resigned as President of the Soviet Union. The red flag was lowered at the Kremlin, and the next day, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The BBC reported:
Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union for almost seven years and executive president for nearly two, has stepped down from office. He announced his resignation in a 10 minute speech, broadcast live on television, as the Soviet Union passed into history.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 20, 2016 12 Comments
I never pass up an opportunity to play Boney M music. I first wrote a separate post about Boney M was when lead singer Bobby Farrell died in December 2010:

Boney M

That is a name I had not heard in decades. When I studied in the Soviet Union many of the East European students loved the group Boney M and were surprised that none of the Americans in our group had heard of it.  To them, Boney M was supposed to be one of the leading bands in the U.S.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 08, 2016 3 Comments
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a KGB spy in the 1980s, recently surfaced Soviet documents reveal. Abbas, who was a long-time aide to Yasser Arafat -- the notoriuos Godfather of Arab terrorism -- was appropriately code-named the “mole” (krotov) by his Russian handlers. Abbas was most likely recruited by the Soviet spy agency back in the early 80s when he was a Ph.D. student at a Moscow university where he was polishing his credentials as an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, needed to rise through the ranks of Arafat’s Palestinian terrorist group PLO. Abbas, leader of PLO's main faction 'Fatah', took office in 2005 and appointed himself as the 'President for Life' of the Palestinian Authority -- refusing to call for any further elections -- very much in keeping with the democratic best-practices of fellow Arab despots.

Posted by edgeofthesandbox on September 03, 2016 1 Comment
The announcement of passing of Uzbekistan's veteran dictator Islam Karimov came as surprise to no one in the Russian-speaking world.  The rumors of his death, following a stroke that his younger daughter announced on her Instagram account, had been circulating for days when, in a situation similar to a true Soviet leader's demise:
The Uzbek government did not confirm the reports at first but played funeral music on state channels. [Put yourself in their shoes: How does one break the news like that to the population?] Later on Friday the government eventually released a statement saying the 78-year-old president had died.
Soviet leaders' state of health was never discussed in press, death announcements -- delayed. Western Kremlinologists and ordinary Russians alike had to crack their heads to figure out what was going on. The lack of transparency gives an edge to the strongmen: Recall the Vladimir Putin's pointed disappearance last March prompting speculations of the Russian president's death.  If Putin was only playing with our heads, Karimov was for real.

Posted by Gabriella Hoffman on June 24, 2016 13 Comments
All this alarmism surrounding firearms in America lately is getting out of control. I figure it’s time to offer a unique take on the issue–one that puts American gun rights and their continued need into perspective. From the amateurish House sit-in to the full-on assault on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, your assumptions about Democrats pursuing full disarmanent under the guise of “gun control” are correct. They mean it. As a Virginia gun owner and concealed handgun permit (CHP) holder myself, I hope my perspective get can you to think differently about firearms if you have doubts.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on April 06, 2016 9 Comments
The BBC aired footage of notorious MI6 traitor Kim Philby briefing agents of East Germany's Stasi secret police on Monday. Philby and his "Cambridge five" cohort of British double-agents working for Soviet bloc organizations eviscerated Britain's intelligence organs and stunned Britain between his recruitment in the 1930s and his flight to Moscow in the early 1960s. Recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s, Philby was nevertheless a decorated British intelligence officer and reputedly in line to be the next head of MI6 (Britain's CIA) by the late 1940s. Over the course of his career on behalf of the Soviets, he betrayed untold Western assets and intelligence missions in the East. Finally under suspicion in the early 1950s, Philby "exposed" two Soviet agents who had already been blown or would be imminently to clear his own name.  Despite that measure, Philby was forced to leave British intelligence in 1951.  Tasked with identifying the third member of the spy ring Philby had exposed, British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons in 1955, "I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'Third Man', if indeed there was one."

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 13, 2016 20 Comments
Apparently, Bernie Sanders' supporters can't stop themselves from expressing their thoughts about how great socialism is. The former former Soviet chess champion has taken to Facebook to express his thoughts about being lectured by the uninformed about something he knows all too well. Garry Kasparov writes:
I'm enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 23, 2016 10 Comments
Because yesterday was mostly a travel day for me, I missed the 36th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, the 1980 U.S. defeat of the Soviet Union in Olympic ice hockey. Most people think it was the finals, but it actually was the semi-finals. The U.S. went on to defeat Finland for the gold. For me it holds a very special memory, even though I didn't watch the game live. I was a student in Moscow at the time, living in a large dorm just inside the city limits, on the last Metro stop before the ring road. I studied at the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, which trained foreigners to become Russian language teachers, the theory being that the adoption of English as the international language was harmful to Soviet interests. I had no intention of becoming a Russian language teacher, but the experience was unique.
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