Imre Nagy was a Hungarian leader, but he was hanged in Budapest on 16 June 1958 on the orders of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, as “a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries.“ Nagy had not always been afoul of the Soviet government. At birth a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nagy was wounded …
At the same time of the turn of the nineteenth century that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek of Austria-Hungary were attempting to convince Emperor Franz Josef that their marriage would not lead to the end of the Empire, another culturally inappropriate marriage was taking place between Alexander I of Serbia and Draga Lunjevica Mašin. Draga, …
Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow; and I won’t have to send a second. — message from Tito to Stalin found on Stalin’s desk after his death. In the …
Salami tactics refers to a divide and conquer approach, which aims to split up the opposition. The expression evokes the idea of slicing up one’s opposition in the same way as one might slice up a salami. — politicaldictionary.com The entire face of the world changed when Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy agreed to resign …
They entered the Embassy of Yugoslavia in Stockholm at 09:45 on 7 April 1971. By 10:35 it was all over. The 1971 attack on the Yugoslav Embassy was the second such incident on a foreign delegation in 1971’s Sweden. The first incident also targeted the Yugoslavs, and took place on 10 February in Gothenburg at …
I was arrested in 1974 because the state security service found my university diaries and their contents were judged to contain agitation and propaganda against the regime. But those diaries had never been published and no one other than myself had even read them. Nevertheless, I purposefully hid them because I knew that I might …
Groups like uMkhonto we Sizwe and others struggling against colonialism and post-colonialism needed weapons for their struggles and, more importantly, training. While a lot of this came from the Soviet bloc, many liberation movements were less-than-eager to jettison one colonial overlord in the west for one in the east. It was into this gap …
The tiny African island of Mauritius is only slightly bigger than the City of London, and much less densely packed – slightly more than 1.2 million people versus London’s nearly 9 million. The island punched above its weight in providing heroic agents for the Allied Cause in World War II, however. One of those …
Historical fiction can be the a fantastic way to ingrain history events as long as it doesn’t deviate too far from the dry and dusty demands of factual “truthiness”, and in the vein The Second Seal by Dennis Wheatley is an excellent primer for the dabbler who wants to get started in the area World …
Aminatta Forna tackles trauma, although not in the way that most western readers are used to dealing with trauma’s effects. Her previous book, Happiness, brings a different explanation to how different cultures deal with trauma. The problem, rather than the trauma itself, is societal expectations of trauma. Those who expect a trauma-free life as …
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