Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was beaten by medieval prince Alexander Nevsky in a poll held by a TV station to find the greatest Russian.
Stalin came third, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets in labour camps and purges.
Alexander Nevsky fought off European invaders in the 13th century to preserve a united Russia. - BBC
The third greatest Russian killed 20 million people.
Russia has thrown down a new gauntlet to Barack Obama with an announcement that it will sharply increase production of strategic nuclear missiles.In the latest of a series of combative moves by the Kremlin, a senior government official in Moscow said the Russian military would commission 70 strategic missiles over the next three years, as part of a massive rearmament programme which will also include short-range missiles, 300 tanks, 14 warships and 50 planes.
Military experts said the planned new arsenal was presumed to consist of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) rather than submarine-launched missiles. If this is the case, the plans represent a fourfold increase in the rate of ICBM deployment. The arsenal will include a new-generation, multiple-warhead ICBM called the RS-24. It was first test-fired in 2007, with first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov boasting it was "capable of overcoming any existing or future missile defence systems". - Guardian
Dumb.
MOSCOW (AP) - New legislation backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would allow Russian authorities to label any government critic a traitor—a move that rights activists said Wednesday was a chilling throwback to times of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
The bill, which is expected to become law, would expanded the definition of treason to include damaging Russia’s constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That, rights activists said, would essentially let authorities interpret any act against state as treason—a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Activists said that would catapult Russia’s justice system back to the times of Stalin’s purges, calling it “legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler.”
“It returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s,” the activists, which included Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Civic Assistance director Svetlana Gannushkina, said in a joint statement. - Alex Jones Infowars
I don't think rights activists should be the only ones upset. All people should realize how incredibly wrong this is.
DZHAVA, Georgia - Russia dispatched an armored column into the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia on Friday after Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally, launched a surprise offensive to crush separatists. Witnesses said hundreds of civilians were killed. Fighting reportedly raged well into the night with Georgia's interior ministry saying early Saturday that warplanes attacked three Georgian military bases and key facilities for shipping oil to the West.
The fighting, which devastated the capital of Tskhinvali, threatened to ignite a wider war between Georgia and Russia, and escalate tensions between Moscow and Washington. Georgia said it was forced to launch the assault because of rebel attacks; the separatists alleged Georgia violated a cease-fire. - Yahoo! News
The U.S has called for a cease-fire.
Russian novelist and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose works detailed the horrors of Stalin's Soviet labor camps, has died at 89, Russian news agencies reported Monday.Sounds like a good man. He ended up fleeing to Vermont for some time.
His son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press his father died of heart failure late Sunday at his home near Moscow, Russia.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for "The First Circle," Alexander Solzhenitsyn was considered a moral voice for Russia. His works centered on issues of good and evil, materialism and salvation.
His three-volume "Gulag Archipelago" unveiled the horrors of the Soviet labor camps, where he himself was imprisoned for eight years. - CNN
