Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, banned in the Soviet Union until 1989, has been published in a new shorter, Russian-language edition aimed at schools. The book was included in the list of compulsory books in Russian schools only last year, according to a report in RIA Novosti.
Read more on Russian students get a new, shorter Gulag Archipelago. What about Americans?…
A Polish friend recommended this NYT piece by Roger Cohen reflecting on the most recent tragedy visited upon the Polish people. Cohen’s friend, Adam Michnik in Warsaw, “an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers,” had said to him in the past that:
Our series on the year in review continues with the third fourth of 2006:
July
“Isn’t the Cold War Over?” David Michael Phelps
I’ve got an idea for a new sitcom. Titled, Hugo and Vladi, it details the zany adventures of two world leaders, one of whom (played by David Hyde Pierce) struggles to upkeep his image of a friendly, modern European diplomat while his goofball brother-in-law (played by George Lopez) keeps screwing it up for him by spouting off vitriolic Soviet rhetoric and threatening all of Western civilization with his agressive (but loveable) arms sales and seizures of private oil companies….
