Visitors to the Victims of Communism Museum are learning about systems that are propped up by lies and the brave individuals who have told the truth. Looming large on a gallery wall of the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington,…
The head of the executed man thought, saw, suffered. And I saw what he saw, understood what he thought, and felt what he suffered. How long did it last? Three minutes, they told me. The executed man must have thought:…
It happened on the twenty-ninth day of the month of Sivan, in the year 5701, and it happened in the Slobodka neighborhood of the Lithuanian city of Kovne. To put it another way, it happened on the twenty-fourth of June,…
I “The wicked are estranged from the womb,” so the Psalms tell us, “they go astray from birth.” King David’s aetiology of crime was perhaps the first, and remains the most concise, prefiguring later theories of biological positivism. If criminality…
Maria Katchmar was 7 when the troops came to her farm. The soldiers entered her home in Cherkasy Oblast — a region of Ukraine along the Dnieper River — and immediately began to break everything. Windows and doors. Paintings and…
We are approaching one of the horrible milestones in human history — the birth of the Gulag a century ago. Sometime during the autumn of 1922, Soviet officials decided to establish a system of forced labor camps for both political…
Nations, like people, have psychologies that make their behavior more predictable than they would otherwise be. Russia has since at least the late 17th century been an imperialist state willing to subjugate its neighbors by force of arms or by…
Above the bank of the Dniepr the midnight cross of St Vladimir thrust itself above the sinful, bloodstained, snowbound earth towards the grim, black sky. From far away it looked as if the crosspiece had vanished, had merged with the…
Bucha is a small town 20 miles from Kyiv. Last year, my girlfriend and I took a walk in a cozy park there. Generally, many Kyiv residents went to Bucha on weekends to get a break from the capital’s noise….
It was late in the evening of May 24, 2014, and the Tatar activist Ervin Ibragimov was taking a stroll through the picturesque streets of his central Crimean hometown of Bakhchysarai. Whether he needed some time alone with his thoughts,…