NAZIS & FASCISTS

The official story is Russia hacked into U.S. “government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments,” as David Sanger of The New York Times reported. But plenty of things are uncertain. First, Sanger wrote last Sunday that “hackers have had free rein for much of the year, though it is not clear how many email and other systems they chose to enter.”

The motive of the hack is uncertain, as well what damage may have been done.

“The motive for the attack on the agency and the Treasury Department remains elusive, two people familiar with the matter said,” Sanger reported. “One government official said it was too soon to tell how damaging the attacks were and how much material was lost.”

ANDRE VLTCHEK—One of the vilest fabrications has been those which were unleashed against the young Soviet Union, a country that emerged from the ruins of the civil war fueled by the European, North American, and Japanese imperialist interests. Foreign armies and local violent gangs were destroying countless cities and villages, robbing, raping, and murdering local people. But determined acts to restore order and elevate the Soviet Union from its knees, dramatically improving lives of tens of millions, was termed in a derogatory way as “Stalinism”. The label of brutality was soon skillfully attached to it.

V. PUTIN—Today, European politicians, and Polish leaders in particular, wish to sweep the Munich Betrayal under the carpet. Why? The fact that their countries once broke their commitments and supported the Munich Betrayal, with some of them even participating in divvying up the take, is not the only reason. Another is that it is kind of embarrassing to recall that during those dramatic days of 1938, the Soviet Union was the only one to stand up for Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union, in accordance with its international obligations, including agreements with France and Czechoslovakia, tried to prevent the tragedy from happening. Meanwhile, Poland, in pursuit of its interests, was doing its utmost to hamper the establishment of a collective security system in Europe.

MICHAEL J CARLEY—The Great Patriotic War began at 3:30am on 22 June 1941, when the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas with 3.2 million German soldiers, organised in 150 divisions, supported by 3,350 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 2,000 warplanes. Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Slovakian forces, amongst others, eventually joined the attack. The German high command reckoned that Operation Barbarossa would take 4 to 6 weeks to finish off the Soviet Union. In the west, U.S and British military intelligence agreed. Besides, what force had ever beaten the Wehrmacht?

An excerpt form the popular Russian talk show “An evening with Vladimir Solovyov”. Translated and subtitled by Eugenia. A well-known Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov discusses the meaning of the WWII memory for the Russian society and the Russian people. The context of the discussion was the proposed constitutional amendments. Translator’s notes: (1) The Soviet division consisted of 10,000 soldiers. (2) The British light cruiser Edinburgh carrying 5.5 tons of the Russian gold as payment for Western supplies was sunk by a German submarine on its way home from the Soviet port Murmansk in April of 1942. Shakhnazarov mistakenly said that it happened in 1941.