By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 October 2025
Nazis, Augusto Pinochet, and Soviet Propaganda
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Tag Archives: Mikhail Gorbachev
Did 27 Million Soviet Citizens Die Fighting the Nazis?
A Note on Viktor Zemskov’s Estimate of Soviet Fatalities in the Second World War
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 April 2025
Russian historian Viktor Zemskov estimated in 2012 that total Soviet losses in the “Great Fatherland War” were sixteen million (11.5 million military casualties and 4.5 million civilian deaths), a far lower total than the official Soviet claim since 1990, inherited by the Russian Federation, of twenty-seven million.
The CIA: In Theory and In Practice
Did Russia Ever Start a Democratic Transition? Can It?
“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
The Role of the “Fraternal Parties” in the Soviet Union’s Global Mission
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 August 2021
After the post looking at the relationship of Reuben Falber and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to the Soviet Union—namely the total subservience of the former to the latter—a follow-up was intended on the broader issue of the how the KGB and its predecessors interacted with the “fraternal” Parties around the world. Eighteen months later, this is that post. Let’s blame COVID.
The accusation that the Communist Parties around the world were fronts for the KGB was often derided as “McCarthyism” while the Cold War was going on. Arguments about that term in general to one side,[1] it certainly did not apply in this case. The accusations as stated were entirely factual. Continue reading
Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 9, 2014
Released on December 21, 2007, twenty-eight years to the month after the Soviet Union launched Operation STORM 333, decapitating the Afghan government and plunging the country into a decade-long war, Charlie Wilson’s War tells a story centred on Representative Charles Wilson of Texas (Tom Hanks), a conservative Democrat, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Right-wing Christian socialite in Houston who has taken the Afghans to her bosom because of her hatred for communism, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a blue-collar case officer at the CIA who is the epitome of the adage that one can get anything done in Washington so long as one does not care who gets the credit. Between them they cajole Congress into moving its appropriations from $5 million to $500 million, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Saudis, to help the Afghan resistance combat the Red Army’s occupation of their country. Continue reading
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