Sublime

of two Russian figures—Vladimir Lenin and the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theater director who’s been described as “Putin’s Rasputin” and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master—informs many of the troubling political and social dynamics at work in the post-truth era.

Stalin was planning an assault on the Soviet Union’s Jewish population right before his death in 1953—years after the Holocaust was public knowledge.

Although his own employment in the State Security force was frequently unpleasant he understood its necessity, the necessity of guarding their revolution from enemies both foreign and domestic, from those who sought to undermine it and those determined to see it fail. To this end Leo would lay down his life. To this end he’d lay down the lives of o

but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they – or their Afghan satellites – killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.

When the house of one of the conspirators was found stuffed with weapons, the man protested his innocence by claiming that his hobby was weapon collecting.

Un officier de rang plus élevé, qui avait commencé sa carrière dans le renseignement à Dresde, en Allemagne de l’Est, une fois rapatrié en catastrophe puisqu’il n’y avait plus d’Allemagne de l’Est se retrouvait sans emploi, sans logement de fonction, réduit à faire le taxi sauvage dans sa ville natale, Leningrad, en maudissant les « nouveaux Russes