RUSSIAN INFLUENCE IN THE UKRAINE

Yahoo News.  Russians are pushing Ukrainians out of leadership roles in Eastern Ukraine uprising.  And the Russian taking over, Vladimir Anttufeyev, sounds like a person left over from Stalinist times.

He earned a fearsome reputation when he served in Transdniestria, which split from Moldova in 1990, as the head of security operations for 20 years.

Dismissed in 2012 when his ally was replaced as leader of the tiny sliver of land, he barricaded himself for three days in his study and refused to leave.

The EU first blacklisted Antyufeyev over his role in Transdniestria in 2004. Though it later suspended that decision, it has now blacklisted him again over Ukraine, imposing assets freezes and a travel ban on him.

One person who had been questioned by Antyufeyev in Transdniestria on suspicion of spying for Moldova said he was a tenacious interrogator. Speaking on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisal, the person said Antyufeyev was "a professional", capable of being sociable and polite, always rigidly following the chosen line. With a smile on his face, Antyufeyev would exert moral pressure, the person said.

And Slate has published an interesting article calling an ageing liberal Soviet specialist, Stephen Cohen, a pal of Putin for defending Russian actions in the Ukraine.  Cohen has published an article in the leftist Nation supporting Putin.  Cohen seems to ignore Russian atrocities.

In a downright surreal passage, Cohen argues that Putin has shown “remarkable restraint” so far but faces mounting public pressure due to “vivid accounts” in the Russian state-run media of Kiev’s barbarities against ethnic Russians. Can he really be unaware that the hysteria is being whipped up by lurid fictions, such as therecent TV1 story about a 3-year-old boy crucified in Slovyansk’s main square in front of a large crowd and his own mother? Does Cohen not know that Russian disinformation and fakery, including old footage from Dagestan or Syria passed off as evidence of horrors in Ukraine, has been extensively documented? Is he unaware that top Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself, have publicly repeated allegations of war crimes that were quickly exposed as false, such as white phosphorus use by Ukrainian troops or a slaughter of the wounded in a hospital? But Cohen manages to take the surrealism a notch higher, earnestly citing the unnamed “dean of Moscow State University’s School of Television” (that’s Vitaly Tretyakov, inter alia a 9/11 “truther”) who thinks the Kremlin may be colluding with the West to hush up the extent of carnage in Ukraine.

MORALITY AND SOCIALISM

From the Economist.  The more people are exposed to socialism the more unethical they become!  The case of East Germans vs. West Germans.

HISTORY OF THE SOVIET UNION

Anyone remember the old computer game, tetris? The complete history of the Soviet Union!

NADA URBANKOVA

I was looking for some good "communist" era pop music and discovered my favorite Czech singer of the 1970s, Nada Urbankova! What memories!

Vilem pece housky.

Blondak s cervenou bougatkou.

Zavidim.

1968 SOVIET INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

A superb photo documentary. More photos.

JEWS IN POSTWAR COMMUNIST EAST GERMANY

Communism was not above anti-semitism.

Jewish Communists returning from exile to the Soviet occupied part of Germany were confronted with prejudice and suspicion and sometimes even had to fear for their lives.

THE COLD WAR, KENNEDY & OBAMA

I haven't been following the Obama campaign recently, but now see that he is involved in a bit of debate involving cold war interpretations. I guess I am not with Obama on this debate. I with the historians who feel JFK's foreign policy was marked more by failure than success.

EAST GERMAN SECRET POLICE

The activities of the East German secret police don't get much coverage. Wired has a good summary.

The pages amounted to a minute-by-minute account of Poppe's life, seen from an unimaginable array of angles. Video cameras were installed in the apartment across the street. Her friends' bedrooms were bugged and their conversations about her added to the file. Agents investigated the political leanings of her classmates from middle school and opened all of her mail. "They really tried to capture everything," she says. "Most of it was just junk."

There's no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.

The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years — even taking into account the varying textures and durability of paper, the different sizes and shapes of the fragments, the assortment of printing (from handwriting to dot matrix) and the range of edges (from razor sharp to ragged and handmade.) "The numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle at home, you have maybe 1,000 pieces and a picture of what it should look like at the end," project manager Jan Schneider says. "We have many millions of pieces and no idea what they should look like when we're done."