Soviet Union

Bob

18th September 2023 Novak and Goode 0

The screaming started shortly after daybreak; the women and children had spent the night in the schoolhouse for the children of the Pilsudski Settlers. Throughout the night the women had taken it in turns to [more…]

Role Reversal

28th March 2023 Patrick Barron 0

Starting around 1989 the Soviet empire started to crumble. The time period between the forming of NATO in the late 1940’s and the retreat of Russia from Eastern Europe and the eventual collapse of communism [more…]

Somalia – Western Economic Colonialism

7th February 2023 Going Postal 2

Somalia’s recent history is also a tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. Knowing nomads happily demonstrated their supremacy and disdain for outsiders, the so-called fruits of civilization were not [more…]

The Land Beyond the Khyber

18th August 2021 Going Postal 0

My uncle was, from the end of the war until his death in 1973, Special Correspondent for the Manchester Evening News. I recently came across an article which the paper published in June 1971 in [more…]

Postcard From Berlin, 1979

10th December 2020 Going Postal 0

Back in the late 1970s, when we were both rising stars in IT in the Ministry of Defence, my friend was posted to Berlin to run the Army’s computer centre there. Being a good mate, [more…]

A Barren Shore, Part Two

23rd October 2020 Going Postal 0

An even greater slab of armour plate than the one we had stumbled across decades before, stood upright blankly showing its wounds, punched through and scored by shot, rusty red, the memorial to those Finns [more…]

A Barren Shore, Part One

16th October 2020 Going Postal 0

This is a personal memoir of several visits to the far north and going realisation of what had always been before my eyes, unseen and recognised. I am not an historian and certainly not of [more…]

Hungary 1956; ‘Normalization’ in Budapest

23rd June 2020 Going Postal 0

The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising led to repercussions far beyond the borders of the country itself. In its wake communist fellow travellers were forced to confront the grim realities of Soviet realpolitik, the [more…]

Communist Flip Flops

22nd January 2020 well_chuffed 0

The aspiration for this article is to enlighten some Puffins about the several about-turns the Communists were forced into before, during and after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were enemies, [more…]