What’s Missing
During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…
Category: Power and Ideology
What’s Been Going on
Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to…
On “Useful Idiots”
The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…
Dostoevsky Saw It Coming
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
The Communist and the Buddhist
[Nikolay] Valentinov … recorded his shock at Lenin’s certainty not only that Marx and Engels were absolutely correct, but that no fundamental principle they enunciated, about anything, could ever be changed. “Nothing in Marxism is…
Twenty-two Years Ago
The following is from Israeli novelist David Grossman’s Seven Days: A Diary, October 2001, in Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo MONDAYI keep reading hostile remarks about Israel in the…
Elimination
“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red…
Regarding the Dreyfus Affair
“It is my duty to speak up; I will not be an accessory to the fact. If I were, my nights would be haunted by the spectre of that innocent man so far away, suffering…
One Way or Another
[Emperor] Alexander II said he did not fear the Liberals because he knew they could all be bought, if not with money, then with honors. –Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence