Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Vladimir Putin has been preparing for this moment ever since the Berlin Wall, like Humpty Dumpty, came tumbling down. The eight oil pipe lines that run across Ukraine from Russia to Europe traverse sacred ground, for it was Ukraine that bore the brunt of Josef Stalin’s man made famine in 1932-33. Germany – which, unlike Ukraine, is a part of NATO – may have forgotten its Berlin Wall. It’s been twenty seven years since former President Ronald Reagan visited Germany and shouted to free Western Germans within sight of the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”

Putin In 1932-33, Joseph Stalin’s withering hand touched Ukraine. In what has come to be called the Holodomor , upwards of 5 million people died of famine. Labeled genocidal by the United Nations, the Stalin produced famine, was the first time in history that famine on this scale was used as a totalitarian instrument of oppression. Two courageous reporters who defied Moscow’s ban on travel, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, took trains out into the countryside and reported on the famine, Muggeridge by concealing in diplomatic pouches his dispatches to a London newspaper. The truth about the famine, as it happened, was a very slender reed. The news was overcome by stories written by Walter Duranty for the New York Times. Duranty, whom Muggeridge later would say was the greatest liar he had met in all his years in journalism, reported that there was no famine in Ukraine, later admitting that 10 million people had died in the non-existent famine. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize f...

It is easy to think that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” the book that helped to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, was a contemporary of yet another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky. They both lived in cursed “interesting times,” Dostoevsky at the end time of the Czars, and Solzhenitsyn at a time when Soviet communism began to stink in men’s nostrils. Dostoevsky, the author of “Poor Folk”, imprisoned by the Czar for subversive activity, was sent packing to Siberia, where he spent several years in the harsh Russian winters concocting “The House of the Dead,” his fictional novel that drew on his prison years. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for subversive activity by modernity’s version of the Czars, the Politburo, and he spent his time concocting “A Day in the Life of Ivan Desenovich,” which drew on his prison years. A faithful biographer of Dostoevsky, tells us that the Czar had arranged a tormenting send off for those early socialists, writers...

Bill Buckley, whose conservativism no one will question, once successfully persuaded the Yale Union to rescind an invitation to speak that it had extended to American Communist Party Leader Gus Hall. In an address before the Yale Union in 2006, about a half dozen years after Buckley had decided to give up public speaking, he recalled the moment to mind: “David Boren, the president of the PU, invited me to appear before you, and I accepted. A week later I saw in the Yale Daily News an article listing the speakers the PU had lined up for that fall. It included the General Secretary of the Communist party of the United States, Gus Hall. I sent a note to Mr. Boren and told him to drop my own name from the fall list, as I declined to appear on any roster of speakers that included an official of the Communist party. This was about the time Solzhenitsyn published his first book about life in the Gulag Archipelago, and I and a few others thought to seek an appropriate response to the condition...

A few questions: 1) What are those things on Evo Morales’ head? 2) Will Fidel Castro ever die? 3) What’s up with democracy these days? Both Morales, the president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, were democratically elected, as was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who some rightists have compared to Adolph Hitler – who, by the way, also was democratically elected. Is this the sort of thing that President Bush, democratically elected twice, wants to spread about the world like dragon’s teeth? Some short answers: 1) The decorative headpiece is made, in part, of bagels. 2) Like most tyrants, Castro probably will die in his bed of advanced old age. Some blame his longevity on the CIA, an organization that seems incapable of making a lethal exploding cigar. 3) Can’t answer that one. Part of it is stupidity. Part of it is traceable to the allure of socialism, a doctrine that holds that everything needful may be appropriated from the hated upper classes. Tha...