In my mind’s eye, what I see on East 33rd Street is the old brick horseshoe where I learned baseball from my grandfather Weigel in the late 1950s—and where, a half-century ago, I had a foretaste of the joy of the Kingdom. Continue Reading »
What 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 »