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On Friday evening, 6 March 2026, our vice-chairman, Patrick van Schie, delivered a lecture on women’s suffrage at the museum of the Maczek Memorial in Breda. This was part of the “Strijdbare vrouwen, weerbare democratie” (“Combative Women, Resilient Democracy”) activities that the Maczek Memorial is organizing in 2026 around International Women’s Day. Patrick van Schie […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska On April 13, 1943, the whole world heard about the crime committed by the Soviets. On that day, the Germans announced the discovery of the graves of Polish officers in the forest near Katyn. Three years earlier, in the spring of 1940, nearly 22,000 prisoners of war captured after the Red Army’s […]
By Patrick van Schie In the Soviet Union, according to official communist doctrine, the dictatorship of the proletariat reigned. However, this dictatorship never actually existed, wrote the dissident Moscow professor Michael Voslensky, who was well-acquainted with the ruling circles of the Soviet Union. The rule of communism certainly meant a dictatorship, but it was the […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Nestled between the villages of Helmstedt in West Germany and Marienborn in East Germany, Checkpoint Alpha stood as one of the most iconic and critical symbols of the Cold War era. From 1945 to 1990, it served as the primary transit point for travelers crossing the inner German border, connecting West Germany […]
Patrick van Schie A century ago, on January 21, 1924, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, died. His embalmed body still lies in the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow. Communists still revere him; and not just the elderly. The British Marxist Student Federation (MSF), for example, states on its site: “Lenin was without […]
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. […]
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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