Anatol Lieven reported from Moscow for the Times from 1990 to 1996 and is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. His latest book is Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World.
Three years after E.H. Carr’s death in 1982, Mikhail Gorbachev began the process which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, a development which at first sight renders Carr’s life’s work not only irrelevant but absurd, based as it was on a profound admiration for Soviet achievements. The charge of having grossly misread the nature of the Soviet system is likely to dog him in death, just as in his lifetime he could never wholly shake off that of having advocated the appeasement of Nazi Germany. What’s more, as the Soviet archives are gradually opened, they are likely to make his history of Soviet Russia seem totally obsolete.
Since the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 the Republican Party has set out its values with a starkness not revealed even during the despised regimes of Nixon and Reagan. This has yielded a...
Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a lens through which we can see the character of contemporary Russians close up and grotesquely exaggerated. The Zhirinovsky glass reveals and enlightens like a Francis...
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