I just heard that the great Yuri Maltsev has passed away this week–a huge loss for the world of liberty. Yuri was among the last to defect from the ailing Soviet Union, and the stories he told about doing research under the Iron Curtain are poignant reminders of the strangling effect that socialism and all forms of totalitarianism have on not just the economy, but free thought itself.
Tag: communism
The Russian Revolution is one of the darkest moments in recent history. It led to millions and millions of deaths, and even more impoverished and horribly oppressed by communist governments in the twentieth century. Richard Pipes is one of the most renowned scholars of the Russian Revolution, with two long books, The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, that describe in gory detail the monstrosities of Russia around the time of its red revolution.
One of the issues people often underestimate is the state’s tenacity at finding and punishing its critics. In this video, I discuss two cases, in Quebec and Minnesota, where a Chinese student made statements on the internet about the corruption of the Chinese government while living abroad, only to discover upon returning to China that they were in significant legal trouble.
Links to the two articles are:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/09/18/a-chinese-student-in-canada-had-two-followers-on-twitter-he-still-didnt-escape-beijings-threats-over-online-activity.html
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/31/prosecution-china-student-tweets-he-posted-while-studying-us-raises-free-speech