There have never been such massive crowds of anti-government protestors in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union as there are this week. In Minsk, the capital of Belarus and in other major cities they stretch as far as the television cameras can see. Not even the protestors in Ukraine seven years ago had numbers like these.

Moreover, they have a legit...

75 years ago the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th and on Nagasaki on the 9th was premeditated mass murder.

President Harry Truman had a workable alternative to using the atom bomb- to cooperate with Stalin, as Roosevelt and Churchill had done on the Western front, in the Soviet advance on Japan, rather than making it a race for control. Ind...

Almost forgotten in the story about the Coronavirus is the story of AIDS. The drive to deal with it, the search to find medicine to cure it, and the self-discipline by homosexuals only began in 1981, when the disease was discovered and its causes understood.

It was a stroke of luck that AIDS was discovered so quickly. Another five or ten years could...

Bruce Blair died a few days ago at the age of 72- one of the great unsung heroes of the nuclear bomb age. In his twenties he had been an intercontinental nuclear rocket launch officer, spending his days or nights deep down in a below ground bunker waiting for the signal to fire and obliterate the cities and their people, the workers of all classses,...

There is “Magic Money” around in case you didn’t know. Not quite made out of thin air, but getting on that way. This is a phrase invented by the economic writer, Sebastian Mallaby, in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, America’s leading foreign policy bi-monthly journal. It is an usually important and well researched article. All policy makers should...

Change is absolutely necessary in Russia, but how to bring it about? One doesn’t have to be a prejudiced Western ideologue to point this out. As the weekend’s demonstrations in the far eastern city of  Khabarovsk underline there are a good number of people, mainly young, who feel the political system, as is presently organized, doesn’t give them the...

One of the founders of Russia’s Pussy Riot rock band, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, was interviewed at length on the BBC this past weekend. She has no time for President Vladimir Putin. When the group played inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour she was sent to jail for two years for “religious hatred”. She doesn’t seem bitter but she seems damning....

It is a common trait in mankind to apply to ourselves a generosity of interpretation which we do not extend to others. We find proofs of wickedness, using evidence that we would not use against our own. We play down the sins of ourselves, our own country and our leaders, past and present.

In the days of the Nazi government in Germany there was an inb...

Tomorrow the tanks will roll across Moscow’s Red Square. It is the day of the great parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. In the West it’s not that well-known a fact that the Soviet Union lost many more soldiers and civilians in the war than all the rest of the allies put together. Without the alliance of the Wes...

Perspective and proportion are everything in this Pandemic of Fear that now consumes our attention and our daily lives.

With very rare exceptions the media ignores this. As I write there have been world-wide 436,005 deaths from coronavirus. But a remarkable, barely noticed, 4,137,712 have recovered.

In comparison the number who died last year from AID...