The KGB - whatever its current name – says that the remains of Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Goebbels’s family were secretly buried in 1946 at a Soviet military base in East Germany, and that in 1970 they were dug up, burnt on a bonfire, ground into ashes and thrown into a river. The Russians also claim they kept some fragments of Hitler’s body, which they still have.
In his happier days before the colostomy bag, the Cuban tyrant sired at least ten children by a half-dozen women, but nobody knows how many exactly, or who are the mothers of some of the known ones. In 1956 alone, three different women had his babies.
Apparently, he never cared to groom one of his sons to succeed him as dictator, and now his little brother is reportedly arranging for his own son to carry on the communist dynasty.
The people in the streets of Pyongyang and Kaesong were often downright skinny. In Pyongyang, I had my picture taken with two elementary-school boys in Kim Il-Sung Square, and I could clearly feel their ribs when I put my hands on their backs. . . .
Our guides repeatedly reassured us that the people had enough food and that each Pyongyang resident receives a ration of vegetables and rice every day. They didn’t mention meat or fruit. When a member of the tour group spat out the tasteless meat that was a rare treat at one of our meals, the waitress standing behind him visibly stiffened. On one occasion, I drew a banana on a piece of paper and showed it to a waitress; she had never seen one. She knew about apples, but she had never eaten one.
Members of the ruling class are fat, though. All North Koreans are equal, but some North Koreans are more equal than the other.
Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother) believes that Britain is worse off as a result of the Soviet empire’s collapse. I doubt that Britain’s Left would have been defeated for good if the wall had stood, but I don’t know British politics half as well as Hitchens does.
The first rapes in East Prussia were an eruption of pure rage, bloody revenge for Wehrmacht atrocities on Soviet soil in the march to Stalingrad; soldiers destroyed homes, raped women — some as young as 12 — and killed children. But revenge could not have been the sole motive, for even Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish survivors were not safe; some, as young as 16, were raped by the soldiers who set them free. By the time the first libidinous Soviet wandered into the diarist’s cellar a few months later — pointing menacingly to a teenage girl and asking “How many year?” — German women appeared to the Red Army simply as rightful spoils of war.
Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than “concede” — as some women put it — to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.
It’s easy to imagine what the women of Tbilisi felt last August when the drunken Russian horde was only 20 miles away.
Cuba purposely has made life difficult for U.S. diplomats serving in the U.S. Interest Section in Havana and has even poisoned family pets to hurt American morale, according to a State Department report released Friday.
There will still be plenty of useful idiots to go to Cuba and make out with the Castros, like that all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus delegation that did it this week.
Buying a car is like one of those Indiana Jones adventures: you can end up with a heart attack, or a ten-year wait. For a long time it was only possible to get a car as a part of the distribution based on merit. An outstanding worker, with thousands of volunteer hours or a mission as a soldier to Angola or Ethiopia, might consider himself lucky if he was allowed to acquire a Moskovich or a Lada. Professionals of the highest rank would compete in the universities and study centers for the small allocations of automobiles. Meanwhile, government officials could aspire to more modern models, which would be repaired in the State’s own workshops.
When the pipe that carried the subsidy from the Kremlin to here collapsed, the distribution of appliances and cars based on merit ended. It began to work in another way, with money as the medium of exchange to get a vehicle. However, a selective filter was maintained to get the right to buy one of the newcomers, such as a Citroen, Peugeot or Mitsubishi. The old cars acquired before 1959 can be sold, but transferring ownership of the cars obtained for labor or ideological qualities is prohibited. The regulations ended up stipulating that what was acquired in those years of “Real Socialism” is only half owned, non-transferable and easily confiscated.
To this day, although some shops display modern all-terrain air-conditioned minibuses, no Cuban can order and buy a car simply by having the money; they must have a letter of authorization in advance, which takes years of paperwork. The process includes an exhaustive investigation into the origins of the funds, along with verification of the ideological purity of the buyer. For almost a decade, the signature on this safe-conduct was that of Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of Ministers, who was thrown out of office a few weeks ago. So, in the midst of the astonishment caused by his removal people are asking, “Now who’s going to sign the letters to get a car?”
Of course a commie regime will be suspicious of anyone who has enough money to buy a car. And I can only imagine what it takes to buy a motor boat on the Freedom Island.
The author, Yoani Sanchez, blogs from Cuba, and since blogging in Cuba is much like car-buying in Cuba, she has to publish her posts by e-mailing them to friends outside the country, who then put them online.
Leonid Brezhnev drinks with (R to L): Chief Rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue Yakov Fishman, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Pimen, and future Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, a KGB agent, who died today. Reception marking an anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Moscow, 1970s.
I stumbled upon this post and remembered a story I had read in a Soviet car magazine 15 or so years ago. There was then (and maybe still is) a “motorcycle wall of death” show somewhere in Moscow, or maybe Leningrad. I seem to recall it was in Moscow’s biggest amusement park called Gorky Park (which was a pretty boring, Soviet-style place when I was there in 2000), but don’t take me at my word.
The magazine’s reporter watched the show and was surprised to see that the motorcycles used by the performers (in the 1990s) were a couple of 1928 Indians – hard tail, leaf-spring fork and all.
It turned out that the bikes, along with the walls themselves, had been brought to Soviet Russia in the 1930s by two terribly misguided Americans who thought it would be a great business idea to bring their show to the working people’s paradise. They were promptly executed as spies, their bikes and all other equipment were confiscated, and the Russians ran the show for at least 55-60 years after that, using the original bikes all that time.
A KGB officer who appreciates America and the West more than American and Western elites do. Can’t say I’m surprised.
He says members of these elites made work easy for his comrades – they didn’t even have to be recruited because they were already working for the Kremlin, whether they realized it or not. Saved the KGB a lot of money and effort, too.
