Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‚So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency — one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.‘

—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 140.

Hanging above the counter was a black tee shirt with a portrait of Che Guevara and the inscription: ‚Rage Against the Machine‘. On the piece of cardboard under the tee shirt it said: ‚Bestseller of the month!‘ There was nothing surprising about that — Tatarsky knew very well (he had even written about it in one of his concepts) that in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 72.

Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been populated by entirely different individuals.

…

Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 5-7.

Spyros Kontomaris, Diomedes Komnenos, Sokratis Michail, Toril Margrethe Engeland, Vasilis Famellos, Yiorgos Samouris, Dimitris Kyriakopoulos, Spyros Marinos, Nikos Markoulis, Katerina Argyropoulou, Stelios Karayiorgis, Markos Karamanis, Alexandros Spartidis, Dimitris Papaioannou, Yiorgos Yeritsidis, Vasiliki Bekiari, Dimitris Theodoras, Basri (Alexandros Vasilis) Karakas, Alexandros Papathanasiou, Andreas Koumbos, Michailis Myroyiannis, Kyriakos Panteleakis, Stathis Koliniatis, Yiannis Mikronis, ¡presente!

What makes a democracy strong, and how can we engage with the past and present in a video game? 🤔

Last Friday, I’d got as far as Indira Gandhi, Moshe Dayan, and Dubček. I mean, there’s nowhere left to go.

–Venedikt Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997), 87.

Guardian:

In a public statement on Thursday, the state department said it would designate Antifa Ost in Germany, the Italy-based International Revolutionary Front, and two organisations in Greece – Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense – as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists … conspiring to undermine the foundations of Western Civilization through their brutal attacks”.

…

“Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in a statement.

Current reading. When the US government says people who ascribe to Marxist ideologies are conspiring to undermine the foundations of Western Civilization, they neglect to recognize the foundations of today’s western European societies solidly rest on the work of 19th and early 20th Century Marxist theorists.