Category: VOLUME IV, No. 5

EDITORIAL NOTE – TOTALITARIANISM, TERROR AND THE ABSURD

George Jonas tells a story in our current issue that would be literally unbelievable if it were not corroborated by a good half of twentieth century history. A university professor who had been critical of the regime in a country under post-war Soviet domination was tried and executed for the

TERROR ASYMMETRIC, TERROR TOTALITARIAN

1. FALUDY’S FABLE The Faludy Park near Toronto’s university district is named after the poet George Faludy. The author of My Happy Days in Hell survived terrorists and tyrants in various parts of the world before spending the last 22 years of his exile in an apartment overlooking the small patch of

A VISIT TO WOOLWICH

By the Jubilee Line from Green Park station in central London it takes only fifteen minutes to get to North Greenwich which is the nearest underground station to the Millennium Dome on the Thames, now an O2 stadium for sporting events and pop concerts. From there a taxi will get you to Woolwich in another fifteen minutes. I took this

REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL AUTONOMY IN ROMANIA

Szeklerland (in Hungarian Székelyföld) is a historical region of Transylvania, a Hungarian province given to Romania by the Versailles peace treaties after the First World War. With a population consisting of an overwhelming proportion (80 percent) of Szeklers (Székelys), it constitutes an ethnic enclave within the territory of Romania. The Szeklers are

HUNGARY’S TRANSITION: LIBERALISM FOR THE FEW?

How can we explain the failure of Hungarian liberalism in a country that was expected to be a model of liberalisation? That is the basic question which Umut Korkut, the noted political scientist at Glasgow’s Caledonian University, discusses in his recent book on Hungarian politics. Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism

RADIO TIMES: NOTES AND POEMS – PART II

MY FAVOURITE RECORDS I borrowed this idea from BBC Radio 4 many years ago. Like all the best ideas, it’s very simple. There was no equivalent in Russian for listeners in what was then the USSR, so I adopted the format after I joined the London bureau of Radio Liberty.

A TEARDROP IN THE SEA (‘GOCCIA SCORRE NELLA PIANURA’)

On 15 June 2013 the new wing of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth Library was officially opened. The building now has the capacity for one million printed books, journals, and countless other texts, pictures, drawings and soundtracks, materials with which, between 1983–2000, I had endeavoured to fill this house

A WORKERS’ PARADISE WITHOUT WORKERS – EXCERPT TWO FROM COMRADE BARON

Bucharest, March 2010 On 2 March 1949 a law was adopted under which all estates of fifty hectares or more and all model farms were nationalised. The deportation of the nobility and wealthy farmers in the early morning of 3 March 1949 was no small operation for the Romanian Communist