Latest news with #JosephStalin
Toronto Star
7 days ago
- Politics
- Toronto Star
Stalin makes a comeback in Putin's wartime crackdown on dissent
At Moscow's central Taganskaya metro station, commuters stream past a newly restored monument to a former ruler whose reputation is undergoing a dramatic revision in Russia: Joseph Stalin. With President Vladimir Putin tightening the screws of repression as his invasion of Ukraine drags on, the Soviet dictator is making a comeback as a victorious Second World War leader rather than the man responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens. Russia's Communist Party, still the second-largest in the parliament, voted this month to press for full political rehabilitation of Stalin, who's shown flanked by children offering flowers and gratitude in the metro station sculpture unveiled in May.
AU Financial Review
16-07-2025
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
Chalmers' reform summit will be 3 days of nothingness
Summits have gone downhill since the Tehran Summit of 1943 committed the Allies to two military fronts in the Second World War, paving the way for eventual victory over Nazi Germany. Its successor, the Yalta Conference of 1945, kicked off the Cold War and the takeover of half of Europe by the totalitarian Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. Grown men put away their philosophical differences and Joseph Stalin walked away with, well, everything. Winston Churchill, the great warrior of democracy, together with Franklin Roosevelt, traded off peace for communism and what would be decades of misery for half of Europe.
Winnipeg Free Press
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Why Ukraine's fight is ours, too
Opinion In the heart of Moscow, Stalin's shadow grows longer. A replica of a 1950s relief sculpture — The People's Gratitude to the Leader and Commander — now overlooks a major metro station. The scene: Joseph Stalin in military garb, surrounded by adoring citizens. To many in the West, it may resemble nostalgia. It isn't. As journalist Cathy Young writes in The Bulwark, 'The desecration of the memory of Stalinism's victims… is the obverse of the persecution of today's dissenters.' Efrem Lukatsky / The Associated Press Firefighters put out the fire after a Russian missile hit a residential building during Russia's combined missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 17. Vladimir Putin is reviving Stalin's legacy not as history but prophecy — recasting a brutal past to justify brutal acts today. The attack on Ukraine is more than a land grab; it's an ideological assault on truth, memory, and democracy itself. Across Russia, Stalin's image reappears in sculptures, textbooks, and state celebrations. Institutions that preserved memory — like the Gulag History Museum — are shuttered. Remembrance projects such as The Last Address are vandalized. Propaganda saturates the airwaves. According to the Levada Centre — Russia's most prominent independent polling organization, though operating under increasing state pressure — public 'respect' for Stalin has risen to 63 per cent. Yet the message is clearest not in monuments, but in missiles. Since 2022, Ukraine has endured Bucha's massacres, deportations of children, and relentless bombardment. And still, they fight — not just for survival, but for the future of open societies. Canada understands this. Across the political spectrum, every major party has backed Ukraine's right to self-determination. That unity reflects more than geopolitics — it reflects our national conscience. In June 2025, Canada extended its tariff-free import policy for Ukrainian goods, reinforcing economic solidarity alongside its military and humanitarian aid. The EU has provided over €30 billion (approximately C$47.9 billion) in support to Ukraine this year alone, while NATO has trained 75,000 Ukrainian soldiers and coordinated extensive military aid. On February 24, 2025 — the third anniversary of Russia's invasion — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: 'You can count on us … we stand by Ukraine from the very first day on and you can count on us also for the future.' Meanwhile, dissidents like Garry Kasparov warn that 'dictators test boundaries. When they see weakness, they push further.' And Masha Gessen has chronicled the rise of a regime fuelled by historical amnesia and 'state-sanctioned cruelty.' Dmitry Muratov, Nobel laureate and one of the last independent Russian journalists, describes a reintroduction of Stalinist punishments: sleep deprivation, freezing cells, electric shocks. With bitter irony, he predicts a new Russian holiday: Punisher Day. In May, Muratov — still active despite being branded a 'foreign agent'— called for the war's largest civilian prisoner exchange. Alongside this, the Tribunal for Putin initiative has documented more than 100,000 war crimes committed by Russian forces since 2022. The scale is staggering. And still, Ukraine resists. Russia's ideological collapse is also documented in Our Dear Friends in Moscow by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two acclaimed journalists now in exile in London. Their book traces how a liberal generation was slowly co-opted by the state. As they write, 'What we've experienced since 2011 is a series of actions and manoeuvres intended to detach Russia from the West.' The Kremlin's war isn't only external — it targets its own people. As former Navalny campaigner Denis Mikhailov notes in Byline Times, Russia has 'digitized and legalized the machinery of exile.' Opposition isn't just silenced — it's erased through surveillance, laws, and psychological pressure. Exile is no accident. It's state policy. Here in North America, such horrors may seem distant. But history doesn't need an accent to repeat itself. In the U.S., democratic norms are fraying, from book bans to political violence to mass deportations of undocumented migrants. Disinformation spreads, cynicism deepens, and polarization corrodes civic trust. Conspiracies no longer lurk — they mobilize. Complacency isn't passive — it's an accelerant. And self-righteousness? It doesn't protect democracies; it weakens them. As George Orwell warned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 'Who controls the past controls the future.' If we fail to defend truth and memory — whether in Kyiv, Winnipeg, or Washington — we undermine democracy itself. Tuesdays A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world. The war in Ukraine isn't just about borders. It's about how democracies remember, reckon, and resist. If we fail Ukraine, we don't just fail a nation — we fail an idea. Ukraine reminds us that democracy is not inherited. It is defended — sometimes in trenches, sometimes in archives, and always in truth. Let us not forget. Let us not falter. Martin Zeilig is a Winnipeg writer and journalist.
NZ Herald
05-07-2025
- Sport
- NZ Herald
All Blacks vs France player ratings: How the French rated in Dunedin test match
How the French players rated in the first test at Forsyth Barr Stadium. 1. Giorgi Beria – 6 Debutant was born in Georgia, meaning there's a chance he's related to Joseph Stalin's hatchet man, Lavrentiy Beria. Certainly had a suitably menacing look. Flattened Newell in first scrum, and worked industriously
Daily Mirror
26-06-2025
- Daily Mirror
'I'm a dark tourist - I ran off screaming after my visit to an abandoned hotel'
My trip to Georgia took an unexpected turn after I participated in the emerging dark tourism trend - only to discover I had actually invaded someone else's living space What's the worst thing you've ever done on holiday? Once I broke into someone else's home. It was September 2024 and my boyfriend and I were chasing the tail of an adventure. It was one we thought we might find in Georgia, a nation in the Caucasus with a tremulous Russian border. A series of gushing blog posts pointed us to the country's most compelling dark tourist hotspot: Tskaltubo, former bathhouse of the Soviets. If you've never heard the term before, dark tourism has been an emerging niche among thrill-seekers for several years now. Defined by as tourism that involves travelling to sites that include death and disaster, it's been widely expanded to include locations linked with dictators, serial killers and incarceration. And it's only growing in popularity. According to research published by the Digital Journal, the industry is projected to reach over £32 billion in value by 2031, while a 2022 Travel News survey found that an overwhelming 91% of Gen Z (13-28 year olds) had engaged in the activity in some form. Tskaltubo, a spa town where the late Joseph Stalin and his comrades used to kick back and unwind, certainly fit the bill of morbid allure. Besides, the photos made it look like something straight out of the Last of Us. It's been abandoned since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and what remains are half-crumbled buildings, floating stairs, and premonitions of societal collapse. It looks like another world entirely. We took a bus to Tskaltubo, a dusty town that appeared half-empty, and in my search for a creepy building to explore, I saw the hotel. It was several stories tall. Grass poked through the steps on the walk up to it. There felt like there was something drawing me in. There is something particularly unsettling about an abandoned hotel. Corridors upon corridors of rooms lay empty. Furnishings were torn crudely from walls, leaving chunks of scrabbled plaster. Damp spread through the white ceilings like bleeding tendrils. And yet signs of life were there. I saw a half-open Bible by the window sill. Old documents thrashed over the floors. A half-drunk coffee mug by a boarded-up door. I climbed up the half-dilapidated staircase to the topmost floor. There, I could sense an unnatural stillness. Stretched along the hallway was a string laid out like a tripwire. I stepped over it, heart racing. I sensed some kind of presence but I told myself I was making it up. Then I came across a room with a doll tied to it. Room 125. I stopped and stared at the doll. Its eyes were red and they were boring into me. A door slammed. I screamed and I ran. I found out later that it was not my imagination. Tskaltubo is in fact home to tens, perhaps hundreds of IDPs. IDPs are internally displaced persons and there are over 280,000 in Georgia, based on a UN report. Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you! The majority of them fled the region of Abkhazia in the 1990s on the back of the Georgia-Abkhaz war. With few alternatives, many chose to settle in Tskaltubo, where they lived in abandoned bathhouses and hotels on the verge of collapse. In 2022, 12 of the sanatoriums were sold to investors, while the Georgian government has created a housing scheme to rehome refugees. But, according to a BBC report, as of 2024 inhabitants say many families are still living there. I thought about my pounding footsteps, the shrieking. The ominous boobie traps left, not by a ghost, or a horror villain, but by people with no other home – I assumed to ward people like me off. But I'm just part of a wider problem.
