In this unexpectedly timely collection of essays, the journalist David Satter recalls an adventure that informed all his subsequent writing about Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1977, having met some Lithuanian dissidents, Satter set off to visit their Estonian counterparts. Eluding the police . . . . Continue Reading »
About a decade ago, I would go to a party, get drunk off the kind of alcohol that’s sold in plastic bottles, snort up some dubious research chemicals, and then discover to my horror that I’d just spent the last hour talking to a complete stranger at a high clip about the labor theory of value. I . . . . Continue Reading »
The fight for freedom can be intoxicating. Defining it has proved more difficult.
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The ongoing Roman celebration of the Casaroli Ostpolitik as a triumph for Vatican diplomacy and a model for the future is sheer mythmaking—and damaging mythmaking at that. Continue Reading »
Colonel Ryszard Kukliński took a courageous stand against communism’s culture of death, knowing that freedom is never cost-free. Continue Reading »
Thousands of Cubans have taken to the streets from one end of the island to the other, chanting “liberty,” “down with the dictatorship,” and “down with communism.” Continue Reading »
Looking back on his time as a Cuban-trained communist revolutionary, the French writer Régis Debray recalled that Chile’s Marxist president used to display on his desk a photo of guerrilla leader Che Guevara, inscribed: “To Salvador Allende, who is headed to the same place by a different . . . . Continue Reading »
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, raised from the dead and led by such a powerful witness, is a living testament to the power of faith. Continue Reading »
Last December, while most of us were watching the presidential election lumber toward its disastrous conclusion, two aged representatives of a very different political era died. One of the deceased was David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, the pen name he used while writing novels set in . . . . Continue Reading »
Attempts to defend the Vatican’s shameful reluctance to support beleaguered Chinese Catholics remain unpersuasive, even ludicrous. Continue Reading »
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