Malaysia Flight 370 has been missing for 41 days. Best deductions from all data indicates that Flight 370’s Boeing 777 aircraft is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean about 1,200 nautical miles west of Perth, Down Under. It’s black-box is dead—no longer transmitting locating pings. Experts in the field speculate that it may years […]
Category Archives: 20th Century Topics
Putin, Chamberlain, and Hitler
On 2 March 2014, President of Russia, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian motorized infantry to invade the Ukraine’s CrimeanPeninsula. Such a military incursion violates international treaties and specifically the Soviet Union’s/Ukraine’s treaty of 1954. The Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, deeded the Crimea to the Ukraine as a gesture […]
Amelia, 2009 Film Review
Fox Sunlight Pictures. Mira Nair, director. Hilary Swank and Richard Gere lead actors. Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan screen-play writers. 111 minutes. 2009. So I’m tardy with this review. Not so. I published it in In Sync magazine in its January 2010 issue—shortly after I viewed this film. Now that my new social media […]
International Brigades in Spain 1936-39 by Ken Bradley: A Book Review
The clue to the authors political bent is in his Dedication: “To the volunteers of the international brigades who gave all they had to oppose international fascism and to preserve a free Spain.” (My emphasis on “free.”) Republican Spain (again another euphemism) was anything but free or a republic. In 1936, when the Spanish Revolution […]
Book Review: Engineers of Victory: The Problelm Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War Paul Kennedy, Random House, New York, 2013, 438 pp., with maps and Tables, photographs, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Kenny posits that there were five key tactics to the Allied victory in World War II. How to […]
Russian Julian Calendar
Imperial Russia used the “old style” Julian calendar that was seriously out of kilter with the solar seasons and religious holidays—in particular Christmas and Easter. The Russian Orthodox Church had political and religious issues with the Pope in Rome that dated back centuries, and refused to change to Pope Gregory XIII’s Gregorian reform calendar introduced […]
Romanov Jewelry
Fabulous hardly describes the vast treasure of the Romanov jewelry cache. Below are a few samples of this vast collection. For those who have a keener interest I recommend the book titled Jewels of the Romanovs, Stefano Papi, Thames&Hudson, New York, 2010. Join the Czar’s1916 Christmas Ball in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg—formal […]
Trans-Siberian Railroad
The Trans-Siberian Railroad is the longest railway line in the world connecting Moscow to Vladivostok at 5,753 miles, and has branch lines to Ulan-Bator, Mongolia; Beijing, China, 4,888 miles; and Pyongyang, North Korea, 6,380 miles. This railroad spans seven times zones and takes eight days to complete the Moscow to Vladivostok trip. By the mid […]
What compelled me to pen this historical novel, St. Catherine’s Crown, about the Russian Revolution?
I chose to write about the Russian Revolution—the overthrow of the monarchy and installation of an atheistic Communist regime—to refresh our minds of its monumental impact on world events for seventy years. The Bolshevik’s leaders—Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky head of the Soviet secret police, for examples—exercised their unmitigated evil and bilious […]
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Llich Lenin (1870-1924) Lenin was born into a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Russia—a town on the Volga river about 850 miles east of Moscow. He became a leftist revolutionary after the OHKRANA (the Czar’s secret police) arrested and executed his brother in 1887. He attending the Kazan State University, but he was suspended […]