There is little doubt that Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a talented, original, and influential writer. His debut novel, Journey to the End of the Night, made a sensation in 1932. Its echoes are distinct in Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller, written when the American was living in Paris…

It so happened that my last foreign trip before the full-scale Russian invasion was to Budapest in November 2021. I stayed in the city’s Terézváros district, less than 150 meters from Terror Háza, or the House of Terror — a museum depicting the crimes of Hungary’s past fascist and communist…

Last night I went to bed after 1 AM, only to be awakened an hour later by an air-raid alert. I was too tired and fell asleep again, but with a gnawing premonition that missiles might be coming my way. The first thing I read in the morning was the…

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a lot of controversy about canceling Russian culture, both inside and outside Ukraine. …

When someone claims to be an advocate of freedom, it doesn’t necessarily mean they advocate freedom for everyone. This is the impression one gets from those self-styled libertarians and anarchists who demonstrate unabashed support for authoritarian or straightforward totalitarian regimes. Thus, a meme term has emerged: “Kremlintarians,” referring to self-professed…

Two testimonies were read at the tenth station of the Via Crucis procession at the Colosseum on this year’s Good Friday. One of them was of a Ukrainian youth who described his family’s flight from Mariupol to Italy, where he had felt “stripped of everything, completely naked” — a reference…

Introduction February 2014. Just as Russia was invading and annexing Crimea, the world was watching Putin’s another show-off, also in the Black Sea region: the Winter Olympics in Sochi. …

Lev Gumilev (1912–1992), a Soviet-era historian and philosopher, is rarely mentioned as an influence on modern Russian ideology, if only because he wasn’t much of a political thinker. However, as a self-styled “last Eurasianist”, he constitutes a not-to-be-overlooked link between the original movement from the early 20th century that advocated…

To maximize the efficiency of its global brainwashing campaigns, the Kremlin resorts to diversification, targeting virtually every country in the world and all demographic groups, as well as instrumentalizing various factors that help malicious propaganda broaden its outreach. For clarity, since the term “propaganda” may encompass all kinds of campaigns…