In the days since Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his “coup” and turned his column of Wagner Group fighters back from the road to Moscow, the experts have worked overtime to offer their explanations of the event and its baffling denouement:…

Vladimir Putin was right when he said that the Wagner Group mutiny was akin to the 1917 mutiny of the Russian army — part of the revolution that ended the rule of the czars — but it is not clear…

Russia is a state led by a gangster whose criminal enterprise engages in genocide, murder, corruption, massive theft, and blackmail. Its kingpin is called “president” and is aided by capos with titles like “prime minister,” “defense minister,” “foreign minister,” and…

Wars, especially unpopular wars, breed revolutions. And revolutions are unpredictable. News reports indicate that the Wagner Group mercenaries under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin took control of military headquarters in Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, and are headed toward Moscow in an…

“That little son of a bitch.” That was how President Harry Truman referred to Joseph Stalin. Truman was right on two counts — that is, on Stalin’s height and his character. “Stalin was only five foot four inches tall, thin,…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. There is a new arms race in the Indo-Pacific, including a nuclear arms race, and American academics — including Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Kennedy School — call upon the United…

The Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre, writing to his Russian counterpart Prince Pyotr Borisovich Kozlovsky in the autumn of 1815, could not help but express his profound displeasure with the amoral nature of the czarist bureaucracy. “Some strange spirit of…

The head of the executed man thought, saw, suffered. And I saw what he saw, understood what he thought, and felt what he suffered. How long did it last? Three minutes, they told me. The executed man must have thought:…

“I feel only sympathy for the Russians. No people have suffered as much death.” That was the response of a colleague of mine, Jan, a Polish professor and adviser to the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. I had hosted Jan…

I “The wicked are estranged from the womb,” so the Psalms tell us, “they go astray from birth.” King David’s aetiology of crime was perhaps the first, and remains the most concise, prefiguring later theories of biological positivism. If criminality…