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...
View ArticleBurying 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...
View ArticleTake 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...
View ArticleIn 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...
View ArticleEntropa: 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...
View ArticleSpain’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...
View ArticleReenacting 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...
View ArticleUpdates: 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...
View ArticleRussia’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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleUkraine: 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...
View ArticlePhoto 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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