The Cost of Communism
by Colin DueckThe Victims of Communism Museum opened only last year after decades of thoughtful planning, and the care that went into the project shows. Visiting the museum is a powerful experience. Continue Reading »
Hall of Mirrors
by Gary Saul MorsonIn 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 »
Freedom After Communism
by Ben SixsmithThe fight for freedom can be intoxicating. Defining it has proved more difficult.
Continue Reading »
Bookings to Utopia
by Peter HitchensUntil surprisingly recently, most left-wing and liberal people were hesitant and equivocal about acknowledging the wickedness of the Soviet regime. The mere collapse of the Soviet Empire did not immediately change their minds. Robert Conquest, who told the truth about Stalin’s Great Terror in . . . . Continue Reading »
The Quiet Hours of Leonid Brezhnev
by George WeigelRecent research raises questions about the Kremlin's involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Continue Reading »
Icons on Ammo Boxes
by George WeigelTwo artists give new life to a symbol of death. Continue Reading »
Russian Jeremiah
by Ryszard LegutkoBetween Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 by aleksandr solzhenitsyn notre dame, 480 pages, $35 The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of exile, Between Two Millstones, begins with the author’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and closes with him viewing the landscape . . . . Continue Reading »
The Realism We Need
by Edward LucasWhat Hitchens fails to spot is that the Soviet Union was not just about Communism, or about Russia. It was an empire. One hundred twenty million-plus of the Soviet Union’s two hundred eighty-six-million population were non-Russians. Almost none of them were Soviet by choice, any more than the one hundred million people in the other Warsaw Pact countries wanted to be under Soviet tutelage. To view the collapse of the evil empire solely from a Russian point of view is therefore misleading. Continue Reading »
The Cold War Is Over
by Peter HitchensThe misreading of Russia’s geopolitical situation is especially sad because for the first time in many decades there is much to hope for in Moscow. Out of utopian misery has come the prospect of rebirth. It is as yet incipient. But I see great possibilities in it, in the many once-blighted . . . . Continue Reading »
A Cinematic Lesson in Hope
by George WeigelAt a moment like this when there doesn’t seem to be a lot going right—ascendant authoritarianisms throughout the world; lethal violence by ideological fanatics; feckless responses to both from the democracies—it’s good to be reminded that things can be different, and in fact were different, . . . . Continue Reading »
America's most
influential
journal of
religion and
public life
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
influential
journal of
religion and
public life
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
Filter Tag Articles
Subscribe Today!
