Russia

Posted by: John Phoenix Question: Moldova held parliamentary elections on September 28. The Moldovan Central Election Commission says the ruling Party of Action and Solidarity won. How does the Foreign Ministry assess the election outcomes? Maria Zakharova: The election campaign was assessed as unprecedentedly dirty and politicised in Moldova itself. It was marked by massive use by the authorities of administrative and coercive resources, all kinds of extra-legal mechanisms, blackmail, and threats. Political analysts describe it as a “theatre of the absurd,” a “cheap spectacle,” and an “operetta-like show.” To remain in power, the current regime effectively used barbaric medieval methods to intimidate its opponents; it removed competitors, shut down independent media, blo...

Posted by: John Phoenix Roberts calculates that the size of Stalin’s library at some 25,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals. In Stalin’s collection, “Apart from the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, there are few foreign translations in Stalin’s collection.  Notable exceptions include Russian translations of Winston Churchill’s book about the First World War, ‘The World Crisis’; three books by the German revisionist social democrat Eduard Bernstein; two books by Keynes, including ‘The economic consequences of the peace’; Jean Jaurès’s ‘History of the great French revolution’; Tomáš Masaryk’s ‘World revolution’; the German economist Karl Wilhelm Bucher’s ‘Work and rhythm’; an early work by Karl Wittfogel on the ‘awakening’ of China; John Hobson’s ‘Imperialis...

Posted by: John Phoenix The Bolsheviks put a huge premium on education and spreading knowledge among the population.  By 1928, the number of books published in the USSR surpassed the Tsarist peak of 34,000 titles, which was second to Germany’s.  That same year, the Soviet Union printed 270 million copies of books – more than double the rate of Tsarist times. In addition to his own vast collection, Stalin liked to borrow books from other libraries, both personal and institutional – a favourite source being the Lenin Library. Death of Stalin’s wife There is a lot of gossip about Stalin’s family life, but “By all accounts the 1920s were a fairly happy time for the Stalin family”, but the family idyll ended abruptly when Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) Alli-luyeva died i...