Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Interview with Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen, director of ‘’My favourite War’’ animated film about her life under communism. The premiere in Latvia of ‘’My favourite War’’ is planned in March 2020. Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska: I watched fragments of your almost 80 minute animated documentary based on your life ’’My favourite […]
By Patrick van Schie On February 22, 1946, a telegram arrived from Moscow at the US State Department. The author, the second man at the US embassy, apologized in advance for using the telegraphic channel. The telegram was indeed unusually long: 17 sheets of paper typed out. It would also become unusually influential. The “Long […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Born and spending my childhood and teenage years in occupied by totalitarian communist system Poland I have been researching the subject of communist oppression, communist rule and visiting many places related to it for my various publications both for the European Institute on Communist Oppression as well as for my Central and Eastern […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska ”AMERIKATSI” (meaning “American” in Armenian) has been selected by Armenia as its submission for the Best International Feature Film category for the 2024 Academy Awards. The film tells a story of Charlie who escapes the Armenian genocide as a boy by fleeing to the United States. He returns in 1947 and […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska On September 8, 1968, Ryszard Siwiec committed suicide by public self-immolation in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He set himself on fire during the nationwide harvest festival at the Stadion Dziesięciolecia (stadium) in Warsaw, Poland in the presence of the leaders of the Polish United Workers’ Party, diplomats and 100,000 spectators. […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Born and spending my childhood and teenage years in occupied by totalitarian communist system Poland I have been researching the subject of communist oppression, communist rule and visiting many places related to it for my various publications both for the European Institute on Communist Oppression as well as for my Central and Eastern […]
The first major popular uprising against communist oppression in Central/Eastern Europe by Patrick van Schie Between 1954 and 1990, June 17 was the Tag der deutsche Einheit in West Germany, which is then celebrated on October 3 – the day of reunification. With this, the West Germans commemorated until 1990 that on June 17, 1953, […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska On May 13th at the Nederlands Fotomuseum a launch of the ‘’Siberian Exiles’’ part 2 by a talented documentary photographer Claudia Heinermann took place, a very special project devoted to the oppression of communism, abuse of power and crimes against humanity. In part 2 of the trilogy Claudia Heinermann follows the […]
The Menno van Coehoorn Foundation has started an inventory of Cold War heritage in the Netherlands. The aim of this is to obtain as complete an overview as possible of what has been achieved in this period of 40 years of the Cold War and against which historical backgrounds. The Cold War map, as compiled […]
Book review: Barbara Skarga, ‘’After the liberation. Notes on the Gulag’’, 1944-1956 (Amsterdam, 2022) ISBN 9789403107226; 432 pp., €34.99 by Patrick van Schie In May, the Netherlands and Europe invariably look back at the end of the Second World War. First the stories about the horrors of the time under National Socialism, followed by the […]
Book report: Jasper Becker, Why communism failed (London, 2022) ISBN 9781787388062; price € 28.99 By Patrick van Schie Wherever Communism has been tried, everywhere it has led to impoverishment – except for the party elite and the associated leadership of the “security” apparatuses (army and intelligence services) – and often famine, with many […]
Patrick van Schie After having ruled the Soviet Union for more than a quarter of a century, Josef Stalin died seventy years ago, in the early morning of March 5, 1953. “The news of Comrade Stalin’s passing will cause deep sorrow in the hearts of the workers, collective peasants, intellectuals and the entire working […]
This month it is exactly 75 years ago that the communists finally seized power in Czechoslovakia (at the time, the current Czech Republic and Slovakia formed one country). In all the countries that would disappear behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War, a similar process took place of the elimination of pro-democratic forces and the establishment of the dictatorship of the communist party. In Czechoslovakia, however, this took longer, which is why many people – both among the democratically minded Czechoslovaks and in the West – harbored the illusion for the longest time that the country would be spared an ‘equalisation’.
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