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Category: History/Archeology

Putin’s men, the Israeli smugglers, and the great St. Petersburg drug bust

Putin’s men, the Israeli smugglers, and the great St. Petersburg drug bust

RFERL reports: The man in bulky winter fatigues licked his pinky, dabbed it inside the hand-sized package his underlings had just opened, and brought it, covered in white powder, to his mouth. “Tastes bitter. Numbs the tongue,” he said as laughter filled the room. It was February 1993 in St. Petersburg, and the man in the military uniform was sampling what was billed as the largest cocaine haul in Russian history: just over a metric ton — with an estimated…

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Putin offers Russians little more than selective memories of Soviet-era military triumph

Putin offers Russians little more than selective memories of Soviet-era military triumph

Anne Applebaum writes: In Soviet films, on Soviet posters, in Soviet poetry and songs, the typical Red Army soldier was hale and hearty, simple and straightforward, untroubled by trauma or fear. He cheerfully marched all day, slept on the ground at night, never complained, and never even used swear words. When the British historian Catherine Merridale was collecting the lyrics of Red Army songs for her 2005 book, Ivan’s War, she ran into a wall: Even decades later, ethnographers and…

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Sinn Féin’s victory won’t bring a united Ireland right away – but it’s getting closer

Sinn Féin’s victory won’t bring a united Ireland right away – but it’s getting closer

Fintan O’Toole writes: In 2021, a hundred years after the creation of Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson tweeted: “Let me underline that, now & in the future, Northern Ireland’s place in the UK will be protected and strengthened.” Since the word “not” has to be inserted automatically into every positive statement Johnson makes, unionists ought to have taken this as fair warning: Year 101 of Northern Ireland’s existence would be its equivalent of George Orwell’s Room 101, where you are confronted…

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How Victory Day became central to Putin’s idea of Russian identity

How Victory Day became central to Putin’s idea of Russian identity

Shaun Walker writes: In cities across Russia on Monday morning, tanks and missile trucks will growl their way along the main streets. Soldiers will march across central squares. Fighter jets will roar overhead. Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the 1945 endpoint of what they still call the “great patriotic war”, has gradually become the centrepiece of Vladimir Putin’s concept of Russian identity over his two decades in charge. This year, as the Russian army’s gruesome assault on Ukraine grinds on,…

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The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

Michael E Smith writes: All cities have neighbourhoods. This may not sound like much of an observation, but it is in fact a powerful claim for archaeologists of early cities. We now know that neighbourhoods are the only true urban universal – a feature found in every city that has ever existed, past and present. Other seemingly ‘urban’ traits, from streets and big buildings to markets and specialists, are absent from many cities and urban traditions. But neighbourhoods are playing…

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The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

Timothy Snyder writes: When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it. Empire’s story divides subjects…

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The core of Putin’s weakness

The core of Putin’s weakness

John Sipher writes: In a recent discussion with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin put the recent invasion in historical context. According to Kotkin, “What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a…

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Democrats, you can’t ignore the culture wars any longer

Democrats, you can’t ignore the culture wars any longer

Jamelle Bouie writes: Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.” Likewise, in a much more recent…

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Taking decolonisation beyond Eurocentrism

Taking decolonisation beyond Eurocentrism

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven writes: With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a number of Right-wing critics, most notably perhaps Bernard Lewis. Less well known in the West is Samir Amin, the…

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In Russia’s war on Ukraine, historians and history are on the front lines

In Russia’s war on Ukraine, historians and history are on the front lines

RFE/RL reports: Ukrainian military intelligence reported on March 24 that Russian occupying troops in the country were confiscating books and other materials that the Russian government has deemed “extremist” — primarily books about Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, the war against Russia-backed separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine, and studies of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. “The occupiers have a whole list of names that cannot be mentioned [in the titles of books],” the service wrote, listing such figures as 17th-century Cossack leader…

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History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’

History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’

Samuel McIlhagga writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an exemplary instance of the use of historical ideas to justify invasion. Whereas U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was couched in abstract rhetoric about “the power and appeal of human liberty,” Putin has resorted to esoteric historical arguments to explain his choice to invade. Putin, in his information and propaganda war, has repeatedly used certain imperial tropes that make historical claims about how Russia should be…

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Putin’s 20-year advance to war in Ukraine — and how the West mishandled it

Putin’s 20-year advance to war in Ukraine — and how the West mishandled it

The Wall Street Journal reports: In Ukraine, President Yushchenko was struggling to fulfill the hopes of the Orange Revolution that the country could become a prosperous Western-style democracy. Fractious politics, endemic corruption and economic stagnation sapped his popularity. Mr. Yushchenko sought to anchor Ukraine’s place in the West. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2008, he met with Ms. Rice, by then the U.S. Secretary of State, and implored her for a path to enter NATO. The…

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Putin is making the same mistakes that doomed Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union

Putin is making the same mistakes that doomed Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union

John Blake writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin often evokes the Soviet Union’s epic defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II to justify his country’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet Putin is committing some of the same blunders that doomed Germany’s 1941 invasion of the USSR — while using “Hitler-like tricks and tactics” to justify his brutality, military historians and scholars say. This is the savage irony behind Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine that’s become clear as the war enters its…

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Mystery warriors made the fastest migration in ancient history

Mystery warriors made the fastest migration in ancient history

Science reports: The Avars, mysterious horse-riding warriors who helped hasten the end of the Roman Empire, dominated the plains between Vienna and Belgrade, Serbia, for more than 2 centuries. Then, they vanished without a trace. Scholars have been searching for their origins ever since. Now, archaeological and genetic evidence reveals the Avars were migrants from Mongolia—and their migration was, up to that point, the fastest long-distance movement in human history. The Avars had no written records. Grave goods and historical…

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Autocracy can destroy democracy

Autocracy can destroy democracy

Anne Applebaum writes: In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg….

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