Eastern European History

The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 (Béla Zombory-Moldován)

For more than 150 years, Americans have been mostly spared the cost of war. Yes, at times, some have felt the cost in the lives of their sons, though today our ruling classes <a...

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Stephen Kotkin)

All of history is littered with dead empires. Since the so-called Enlightenment, history is also littered with dead regimes—governments built around an ideology, which in time collapsed, entirely killing the ideology which birthed them...

The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands (Alexander Watson)

I suspect not one in a thousand Americans could locate Galicia, a historically-important area spanning what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, on a map. To be fair, Galicia is today not on...

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (Ananyo Bhattacharya)

This is a disappointing book. Not awful, but not good. The Man from the Future manages to take the life of the polymath John von Neumann and to make it dull, never giving us...

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Stephen Kotkin)

How will our current regime fall? That’s what we all want to know. For those who have eyes to see, it is obvious the American regime is extremely fragile. It awaits only the inevitable...

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (Sean McMeekin)

We are not a serious society. Our ruling class are men of no substance, lacking all knowledge and incapable of competent action on any front. The masses, while they sense a great deal is...

Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel (Pyotr Wrangel)

I recently wrote of the Finnish Civil War, where the Whites defeated the Reds. In the twentieth century, that pattern was unfortunately the exception, with the more common result being seen in the Russian...

On the Finnish Civil War

You have likely never heard of the Finnish Civil War. A brief war, in some ways a simple war, it lasted only three months, from late January to late April, 1918, but killed around...

A Concise History of Finland (David Kirby)

Who thinks much about Finland? During the Cold War, because of its buffer position, it was occasionally in the news. More recently, Nokia was prominent for a while. But I doubt if most Americans...

The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz)

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes. We watch movies, and we instinctively put ourselves in the place of the hero, not in the place of the villain. We read the histories of...