By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 October 2022
The Shah’s Perspective on the Islamic Revolution That Toppled Him
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Category Archives: History
“Socialism With A Human Face” Was Always Impossible
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 August 2022
It was on this day in 1968, fifty-four years ago, that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, one of its colonies in the “Warsaw Pact”, which had embarked on a program of liberalising reforms. The Czech leadership did not intend to depart from the socialist path, merely to soften its edges—and ran into the brute fact that this was not possible. Continue reading
Reviewing the Mystery of Jihadi Ideologue Abdullah Azzam’s Assassination Three Decades Later
Britain Won the Spy War with the Irish Republican Army
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 July 2022
An IRA parade in Belfast || Image source
Bloody Sunday and the Irish Republican Army
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 June 2022
Intelligence and the English Civil Wars
The Trial of an English King
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 January 2022
“Judgement of Charles I,” by Ladislaus Bakalowicz, 1650
The Bolshevik Assassination Campaign Against the Russian Royal Family
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 January 2022
The Russian Imperial Family: Olga, Maria, Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, Anastasia, Tsesarevich Alexei, and Tatiana. Taken in Crimea, 1913.
The Last Tsar and the Duty of Monarchy
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 December 2021
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich in exile in France, February 1929
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich (1866-1933), the brother-in-law of Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), gives an interesting anecdote in the second volume of his memoirs, Always a Grand Duke, published in the year he died, 1933, showing how the last Russian Emperor conceived of the duties of his office. Continue reading
The February Revolution: The End of the Russian Monarchy
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 19 December 2021
Skobelev Square during the February Revolution, painting by Aleksandr Gerasimov, 1917
The “February Revolution” is so-called because Russia at the time was on the Julian (Old Style (O.S.)) calendar. By the Gregorian (New Style (N.S.)) calendar, which Russia adopted in February 1918, these events take place in March 1917. And momentous events they were, leading to the abdication of the last Tsar, the end of a monarchy and an entire system of power and authority that dated back more than 350 years. For eight months in 1917, Russia struggled to extend the constitutionalist reforms that had begun under the Tsardom within a more liberal framework. The liberals never did gain the upper hand over the radicals, not even after the September 1917 de facto return to autocracy. In November 1917, a coup by the most extreme Leftist faction, the Bolsheviks, terminated the experiment, burying for seven decades even the aspirations in Russia for liberalism and democracy. Continue reading
