Umm.... I would love to hear/read/ learn about Russia's past. For example Stalin, communism, corruption, and how it currently is. May i please recieve some help where i can read or someone who is willing to share their life story or any help at all to a young american who wants to expand hiw knowledge of how the world is was and could be? Please help and thank you!=)

When riding this strange forum, I thought about a printing's mistake. Were you not writing about France and Sarkonaparte 1er (L'erreur est humaine !). Sincerely. Jean-Claude Meslin

This little civic enterprise causes the same revulsion and outrage amongst Stalin's uncountable victims throughout Eastern Europe as Russians might feel if contemporary Germany were to similarly heroize Hitler. I don't think that Russia has any idea of how deeply damaging to its international standing its refusal to make a clean break with Soviet era crimes is.The reason why it has no idea is because has never really embraced the truth about its Soviet infamy.

LB9806 -- You could go to Google video or Utube and view; 'Eustace Mullins' giving a talk on 20th century history. 'Lyndon LaRouche' also offers truthful imformation. If you could follow the money trail for these posters, back to the original scource. You would arrive at 'The City' (financial) in London. In my opinion.

LBD9806 - Do your own research, learn our language and use it as a tool, then come here and meet our people. Don't expect to be able to get a picture from the discussions here, but watching RT is fine. Good luck on your journey of learning, avoid the biased teachers, and make your own mind up. Travel light on preconceptions, travel heavy on analysis and thought! Talk to the ordinary folks, for they have the real stories to tell of the times you ask. They are the ones who waited for their phones for years, who ran to work half naked, who saw the black cars arriving, who had the free appartment given and the holiday on the black sea, some worked on the collective farms, some studied in university, they got their red diplomas and two and three educations, some waited on street corners waiting for the bus to take them to the army for their compulsory service......enjoy! you are embarking on a journey of epic proportions.

LB9806 You might find it interesting to read "Two Hundred Years Together.", the last book published by Solzenytsin only two or three years ago. I do not know whether it is available in the West because it has been banned by those who do not wish to be exposed for what they did - but if you look into The Barnes Review you will find that they brought out an edition of their magazine in November or pernaps October last year which is a synopsis of the book - and it is well worth getting. The truth about the Bolshevick Revolution needs to come out and soon in order for Russia to really heal. There is a lot to learn - Solzenitsyn is a good start. At least one knows that he can be relied on to be not only absolutely truthful but conservative in his use of figures. He is not likely to exagerate. He was a great scholar. There is another man I have heard of, but do not know his writing myself, called Juri Lina. You can find out a lot at the website of Henry Makow. I think the World need to know the truth and urgently.

To LB9806: Russian history is long, fascinating and violent, beginning with the first migrations of Slavic ancestors to the current territory of Russia in about the 7th Century and their merging and melding, sometimes peacefully and sometimes by conquest with people who were already living in the land. It includes the often violent internal warfare with competing Slavic kingdoms, and the even more violent conquest by and resistance to outsiders, from Oriental Mongols to European crusaders to tyrants like Napoleon and Hitler. Having no significant geographic boundaries with its neighbours, borders were determined mostly through violence, and shifted frequently. Through it all, a typically Russian character was formed, some of whose significant qualities include a chronic distrust and suspicion of the outside world, an aversion to taking personal responsibility for civic affairs in favour of fatalistically yielding to one’s own tyrannical government as this was judged better than the often even more tyrannical foreign invaders, a love of huge spaces, big things and extravagant gestures, an inattention to detail and exactness, and an inability to empathise with legitimate concerns of other nations, especially smaller ones. And on a personal level, a characteristic warmth, vivaciousness, a sense of the artistic, a love mysticism, the standing in no great awe of truthfulness, and an absolutely astonishing capacity to absorb suffering and still rebound. All this has come together to produce the kind of Russia with which we are familiar from living memory. Some books which I have found outstanding for filling in the details of this Russia of recent history are: “Stalin and His Hangmen” by Donald Rayfield. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB Colonel who defected to the United Kingdom and became the highest-ranking KGB defector, states of this book, “This is a major contribution to the history of the USSR. It produces probably the most detailed and precise knowledge of Stalin’s thinking and deeds, and that of his most important butchers. Rayfield casts light on the areas which have not been well enough described before: extermination of the intellectuals, destruction of the Church and killing of priests, slaughter of the peasantry, ferocious attacks on the Jews.” Another book of Soviet history is “Gulag – a History” by Anne Applebaum (winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize). The cover describes it this way: “The Gulag is Russia’s forgotten holocaust. The largest network of concentration camps ever created, it murdered millions and haunted all those who came out alive. Here, for the first time, is the full, moving story of its countless victims: how they lived, laboured, suffered – and survived to bear witness to one of history’s most terrible crimes.” For a description of WW2 through the eyes of ordinary Russian soldiers as distinct from official Russian propaganda, I recommend “Ivan’s War – Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale. According to one critic, “Catherine Merridale has done something very unusual. The Soviet war effort has been described many times but her new book tells the searing story from the bottom up…” And from another, “This is an inventively researched and evocatively written study of the Soviet soldier on the blood-ridden eastern front. Using freshly available archival materials, as well as sparkling interviews with a vanishing generation of veterans, Merridale has provided an empathetic and realistic portrait of the men and women who, more than any other combat soldiers, brought down the Third Reich.” Of course the Soviet Union itself eventually fell, too. A book that I found gives excellent insights into that process is “The War That Never Was – the Fall of they Soviet Empire 1985-1991” by David Pryce-Jones. It provides a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the event which Putin called the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century, which most of Eastern Europe called their salvation, and which the world at large calls a comprehensive turning point in history. And for an absorbing and startling look at the Russia that has emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, I recommend “The New Cold War” by Edward Lucas. According to one literary critic, “Edward Lucas’s absorbing book shows the forces that are turning Russia against the West. They include militarism, greed, and a failure to understand that national greatness can be based only on civilized values. It is an invaluable primer for students of the Russian situation and a cautionary tale for those who prefer to treat Russia as it pretends to be rather than as it is.” I also thoroughly agree with Count Cash’s advice to visit Russia and see for yourself.