The NYTimes has an excellent series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was only seven years old when this happened, but can still remember watching the news reports showing Berliners attacking the wall with sledgehammers as they were sprayed with firehoses. What an amazing moment [...]

This is for all the illiterate idiots (hello, Glenn Beck) who invoke the names Stalin, Hitler, Kim, and Mao when discussing Obama. Pick up a goddamn history book for once and realize what you are actually saying. From “A Trip to Chon Tash”:
The crimes of the old regime were on exhibition to those swearing an [...]

What the EFF?!

I wish they would play this on WashFM (Christmas music 24/7)

Russian bears, of course. And some of them skate better than I do. Moscow Circus, 1970s.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (2L) vehemently arguing w. VP Richard Nixon (2R) who is furiously objecting as an excited interpreter (C) translates their firey words re US ideas on home construction during “kitchen debate” at American Natl. Exhibit at Moscow Fair
The entire transcript is worth reading, but this is the best line:
Khrushchev: You’re a lawyer [...]

American astronauts Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton holding tubes of vodka given to them by Russian cosmonauts during historic rendezvous and linkup of Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft.
Who cares what space food tastes like when your meal comes with a tube of vodka?
(The tubes of vodka didn’t actually contain vodka, as that is probably the last [...]

This music video by Russian metal band ANJ leaves me almost speechless. In it, a buff Mikhail Gorbachev slays Stalin-like zombies and frees the Soviets to party on the beach and consume Coca-Cola and Twinkies. No need to study the fall of the Soviet Union, as this video says it all.
GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC [...]

Jesus Christ, how effin’ dense is John Derbyshire? Linking to the “America Serves” page on Obama’s change.gov site, he then goes on to say:
Arbeit Macht Frei [John Derbyshire]
Corvée labor, a/k/a “community service.”
Those of us over 55 are not excluded, I see. Shall we have to build our own camps, I wonder, like [...]

I got the coolest doll off eBay for a buck.  It’s a Mikhail Gorbachev doll produced around 1990.  He’s about 10 inches tall and when you squeeze him he squeaks.  I’m trying to figure out how I can rig a voicebox so he says “glasnost” and “perestroika.”  That would be sweet.Anyway, here is Gorby:

Gorby is wearing [...]

“Fifty years ago today Russia was delivered from the long nightmare of Joseph Stalin. The man who murdered his compatriots by the millions, who for three decades immersed his country in bloody terror, was finally gone.It was the end of a reign under which every man and woman knew that he or she could at [...]