The Nazi-Soviet Pact as Second Munich

This about History, tagged , , , , , , , was written by for on August 24, 2009 .64 Comments

On the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, signed on August 23, 1939 (also my birthday!), historians, ideologues and everyone in between inevitably fall into a game of recriminations, revisionism and relativism. The anti-Soviet side maintains that the Pact gave Germany a free hand in the […]

Manipulating Russia’s Manipulation of History

This about History, tagged , , , , was written by for on June 23, 2009 .19 Comments

Stalin was the “most successful Soviet leader”. Thus proclaims Filippov’s controversial textbook A New History of Russia 1945-2006 – a symbol of the Putin-inspired drive to rehabilitate Stalinism and steep the next generation of Russian schoolchildren in the glories of sovereign democracy. Right? Unfortunately, there’s just a few problems with this kitschy narrative of neo-Soviet […]

Translation: The Case of the “Stalinist” Textbook

This , about History, tagged , , , was written by for on May 28, 2009 .47 Comments

Ever since the publication of Filippov’s (in)famous textbook A History of Russia 1945-2006 in 2007, the state of Russian history teaching drew a fair degree of negative commentary in the West, some of it reasonably lucid, most of it superficial or hysterical. What the latter have in common is that they almost invariably haven’t read […]

Victory Day Special: The Poisonous Myths of the Eastern Front

This about History, tagged , , , , , , , , was written by for on May 9, 2009 .52 Comments

За нас за вас и за десант и за спецназ! The Red Army was the single greatest contributor to the defeat of Nazi Germany sixty-four years ago, a truly evil empire based on slavery and oppression, and responsible for the genocide of millions of Slav civilians, Jews, Soviet POW’s and Roma by gas, bullets and […]

Was the French Revolution primarily a Class Struggle?

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for on April 4, 2009 .3 Comments

The classic Marxist argument holds than an emerging bourgeois class, its wealth based on commerce, industry and capital accumulation, was constrained and frustrated in its political ambitions by the nobility. France was divided into Three Estates, the Third Estate which bore the taille (the main direct tax), the nobility (subject only to the capitation poll […]