http://russian-front.com Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:23:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Kommersant is usually a quite good newspaper, but published an article on Russian military purchases abroad that makes a serious historical mistake (partial English version here). Ivan Safronov is the reporter, but may not be responsible for the error. The article as a whole is an excellent survey of the ... http://russian-front.com/2012/01/19/kommersant-on-russian-arms-imports/ In keeping with the Soviet tradition of marking the birthdays of important historical figures, the Voice of Russia (Russian text here) marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of General Nikolai Fedorovich Vatutin. While the profile is in general terms a good one, several things about it struck me ... http://russian-front.com/2011/12/21/nikolai-vatutin-an-inconvenient-general/ One of the things that this year's ASEEES meeting brought home to me is the way in which all of our judgements as historians are inherently and unavoidably provisional. In particular, I heard quite a few things from new research on World War II that made me think about The ... http://russian-front.com/2011/12/12/if-i-had-it-to-do-all-over-again-new-research-on-the-great-fatherland-war/ Evidently, 1200 words taken without proper attribution aren't enough to lose you a Ph.D. As previously posted here and here, I found that much in Saif Gaddafi's dissertation in a hour or so with google. The Saif Gaddafi plagiarism wiki has more. So we now know a lower bound for ... http://russian-front.com/2011/12/01/so-what-does-it-take-to-lose-a-university-of-london-ph-d/ I heard about a lot of interesting new work at the ASEEES conference this year, and one of the exciting things ASEEES was the way in which research at one panel complemented and extended research presented in an entirely different context. The way in which the Russian Empire handled the ... http://russian-front.com/2011/11/27/caring-for-imperial-russias-sick-and-wounded-soldiers/ At the annual meeting of the ASEEES (the organization-formerly-known-as-the-AAASS), I presented some preliminary research on the Great Purges in the Red Army, looking at the specific figure of Iona Yakir, then commander of the Kiev Military District. That made him one of the two men intended to bear the brunt ... http://russian-front.com/2011/11/21/voroshilov-gamarnik-and-yakir-the-troika/ The following video surfaced this past week on Youtube in the context of President Dmitrii Medvedev's recent efforts to reform and professionalize the country's police force. Its subject is Col. Aleksei Nikolaevich Isakov the (now former) deputy director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Lomonosov district (raion) of Lomonosov ... http://russian-front.com/2011/07/21/youre-in-trouble/ I seem to post a disproportionate number of pieces complaining about falsification of the problem of falsification of history, but I can't help myself when I keep being fed new material. The latest evidence: an ITAR-TASS story (hat tip to Johnson's Russia List) claiming in its headline that "Russian historians ... http://russian-front.com/2011/06/21/shattering-myths/ Not particularly Russian, but this does have some military history relevance . . . In summer travels, I found myself stuck without a wide selection of reading material, but came across an old Modern Library edition of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Since that's a book far more often referenced ... http://russian-front.com/2011/06/19/oswald-spengler-marcus-aurelius-and-pm-dawn/ And in other news, Many attendees of large scholarly gatherings complain that sessions in which long papers are read aloud rarely excite the audience. One solution is the "precirculated paper," in which scholars give out the paper in advance and spend less time reading aloud at the actual meeting, and more ... http://russian-front.com/2011/06/15/dog-bites-man-rain-falls-from-sky-babies-cute/