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Obama’s victory confronts France with its own troubled status quo

Could there be a European Obama? No way, at least not in France, said France's only black minister, Rama Yade. Azouz Begag agreed. Not in Britain either, added Trevor Phillips. There are only 15...

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Burying Perestroika

Rossiya TV launched a show to elect the greatest Russian of history, and in the course of a year, millions of votes were cast. Now the final tally is in, and Stalin's in third place, mere thousands of...

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Take my country. No, really – take it.

A Latvian posted a petition pleading Roman Abramovich to buy the country, and over a thousand people signed. Then again, it's not a first; earlier this year 2000 Latvians petitioned for Swedish...

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In which the great Vladimir Putin solves yet another nettlesome international...

Dilemma: if a Russian flag were to accidentally flip while the Serbs were burning it, wouldn’t they, in fact, be burning their own flag? The men and women honored on the annual top 10 list of Vladimir...

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Entropa: Derailing Europe

To celebrate their shot at the EU Presidency, the Czechs thought an art exhibit would be the best way to celebrate the EU's cultural diversity. If you only caught part of the story so far, listen to...

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Spain’s orphaned children of the revolution

A heartbreaking story about the Spanish children who were taken away from their Republican or leftist parents by Franco's dictatorship underlines the unprecedentedly ideological cruelty of the 20th...

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Reenacting their parents’ revolutions as farce?

In Mediterranean Europe there are still significant constituencies for revolutionary communism or anarchism. Maybe stories like those of Spain's lost children are part of the explanation: the political...

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Updates: Follow the links

Links to go with previous posts: photos from Franco's Spain; what exactly the Russian police all confiscated, when it raided archives on the Stalinist past; the difference between Obama's and GWB's...

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Russia’s gradual embrace of Stalinism

openDemocracy published a must-read contribution to the debate on Russia's creeping rehabilitation of Stalin last month, by "Memorial" founder Arseny Roginsky. It's particularly topical in light of...

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The shooting party

The Tagesspiegel reports that Hell’s Angels and militant neo-Nazis are fighting out a bloody feud in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein. It all apparently started in 2007, when a Nazi...

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Ukraine: Did the protest movement transcend historical borders?

“Even in the president’s heartlands, in Eastern Ukraine, protesters have come out in strong support of ‘Euromaidan’,” two British academics argued last week on the Washington Post’s political science...

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Photo fragments from communist Hungary

This post was originally published in April 2009 on a blog that’s now dead, where it’s no longer online. Turns out I still had a draft saved here, so I thought I might as well republish it. Or: a...

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