USSR
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Some of you may know that I’m a rock fan, and one of my favourite bands is Queensrÿche(with Geoff Tate). One song in particular has always stayed with me: “Home Again.” The song explores the emotional toll of war from two perspectives — a father on the battlefield and his daughter waiting for him at…
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When I say “the Jews who fought alongside the Nazis,” it really was a case of the enemy of my enemy—is my friend, or rather they had a common enemy. The photograph above is of Finnish Jewish soldiers on leave during Rosh Hashanah in front of the synagogue in Turku, Finland, in 1943. Finland’s involvement…
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The Holodomor comes from the term moryty holodom which translates as “death inflicted by starvation.” A man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet Republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. Millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims…
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On November 17, 1917—just weeks after the Bolsheviks seized power—Vladimir Lenin delivered one of his most explicit defenses of suppressing opposition newspapers. In the document “Draft Decree on Freedom of the Press” and accompanying statements, Lenin justified what he called a temporary abolition of press freedom, framing it as a revolutionary necessity rather than a…
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The massacre that took place in Slonim on November 14, 1941, stands as one of the many tragic and brutal episodes in the systematic annihilation of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Located in what is now western Belarus, Slonim was home to a vibrant and historically significant Jewish population before the German…
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The role of Finland during World War 2 is a strange one. They were part of the axis powers, not so much because they were great fans of the Nazi regime, but because they saw a powerful ally in Germany to fight the soviets. There were about 2000 Jews in Finland during World War 2,…
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Last year, when I visited Dachau, we had an Irish guide. He was knowledgeable about Dachau, but I disagreed with him on one thing he said. To my own surprise, I didn’t give him a history lesson. I decided to let it go because my primary purpose there was to gain some understanding of Dachau.…
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One might be forgiven for thinking the photograph above is of a Nazi train deporting victims to the East. However, that is not the case—it is an image of deported Polish families to Siberia as part of the Soviet Union’s relocation plan in 1941. I believe that the USSR, particularly Russia) received too much credit…
