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Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Every year, International Women’s Day is celebrated worldwide, often seen as a positive day for women’s rights and equality. For me and many others born under communism, however, March 8 carries a very different, somber meaning: a day shaped by propaganda rather than genuine emancipation. The origin of this day lies in the […]
Publications
Patrick van Schie The story of a Soviet “dissident” during the Brezhnev and Andropov eras Book summary of Alexander Podrabinek, Between Prison and Freedom. Memoir of a Soviet Dissident (Indiana, 2025), 435 pp. On February 25, 1956, party leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the widespread terror of his predecessor Joseph Stalin in a secret – but […]
Photo taken at Patarei Memorial Museum for Victims of Communism ©Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska The Estonian people fought for their independence from the Russian Empire between 1917 and 1920. Following the turmoil of World War I and the collapse of the Russian Empire, Estonia declared its independence on February 23, 1918, in Pärnu, with the manifesto […]
Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Stanisława Falkus and Leopolda Ludwig belonged to the Congregation of the Sisters of the Divine Savior (Salvatorians). On 27 January 1945, they were murdered in a chapel by soldiers of the Red Army after having been sexually assaulted. Their beatification process is currently ongoing. Sister Leopolda Gertruda Ludwig SDS Leopolda Gertruda Ludwig was […]
by Patrick van Schie This year saw the publication of the second book by Lea Ypi, the Albanian author who previously wrote Free, a work about life in Albania as seen through her childhood eyes. Her new book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined, is a novelized account of her search into the life of her paternal […]
Book Review of Alan Philps: The Red Hotel by Patrick van Schie Mr. Jones In the 2019 film Mr. Jones, the Metropol Hotel in Moscow is portrayed as a hotbed of disinformation in the early 1930s. Jones is a recently unemployed British journalist, proud of having interviewed Hitler, and now eager to secure an […]
Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska In the summer of 1968, Czechoslovakia underwent a remarkable period of political liberalization known as the Prague Spring. Initiated under the leadership of Alexander Dubček, who was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) on January 5, 1968, the reforms sought to implement “socialism with a human face,” introducing unprecedented […]
Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Forty years have passed since the death of Enver Hoxha (April 11, 1985, in Tirana, aged 76). For more than four decades, he ruled Albania with an iron hand, isolating the country from the rest of the world, enforcing strict ideological control and plunging Albania into extreme poverty. His 40-year rule made him […]
By Patrick van Schie On August 1, 1975, leaders of 35 states – from Europe, the United States, and Canada – gathered in the modernist new Finlandia Hall in Helsinki. There, they signed a document of roughly 22,000 words: the Helsinki Final Act. This Final Act was intended to establish new, improved relations between East […]
Book Review by Patrick van Schie A fine addition to the comprehensive works on communism was published last year by American historian Sean McMeekin: To Overthrow the World. A fitting title, as communism does not merely mean revolution—though never in the form of a spontaneous uprising, but always involving the violence of either a coup […]
De Militaire Spectator, the military-academic journal of the Netherlands Armed Forces — has published the article written by Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska entitled “De leugen als wapen: Katyn en georganiseerde desinformatie” (“The Lie as a Weapon: Katyn and Organized Disinformation”). Eighty-five years after the Katyn massacre, the subject remains strikingly relevant. What the Soviets once called desinformatsija […]
Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska “What should I live for? For this system to kill me slowly and mercilessly? It would be better to end my life at once… There will never be freedom here. Even the word freedom has been forbidden.” These were the final thoughts of Romas Kalanta, a 19-year-old night-school student from Vilijampolė, Lithuania, before […]
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