It’s just a few months shy of fifty years since I first met Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, better known by the affectionate name of Der Alter Rebbe — the Old Rabbi. By meeting him, I mean reading and studying…
Most people hate to speak ill of the dead. They look for something nice to say about even the not-so-dear departed. People’s natural imperfections usually seem to shrink when they leave this earth. Not so with Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as…
Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt By Alexander Etkind (University of Pittsburgh Press, 264 pages, $30) Just before his death in 1967, the American diplomat William C. Bullitt published a scathing book on Woodrow Wilson that…
George F. Kennan was a diplomat, historian, geopolitician, strategist, writer, public intellectual, professor, farmer, and introspective diarist. He lived a very long life — he died at the age of 101 in 2005. His ideas helped shape the course of…
In some kingdom, in some land, beyond seven mountains, beyond seven rivers, beyond the hills, beyond the valleys, as every good Slavic folktale ought to begin, there lay a country where all the animals of field and forest lived in…
A century ago, on December 30, 1922, Russia signed treaties with Ukraine, Byelorussia (now Belarus), and Transcaucasia (combining Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) to form the Soviet Union. The latter continued to expand, reaching its apogee after swallowing Estonia, Latvia, and…
Russian President Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000. He succeeded Boris Yeltsin in Russia’s first peaceful transition of power from one democratically elected leader to the next — ever. It was a historic moment for Russia. Putin, however, had…
Mikhail Gorbachev, a communist to the end, died at 91 on Tuesday. “The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy,” reads the Washington Post’s obituary. “It brought to an end a seven-decade experiment born…
Biographer Robert Caro described in brilliant detail the life and campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro allows his readers few illusions about the gritty reality of those elections. In 1941, as Caro relates, federal judge Jimmy Allred was listening to…
