8/12 Tito's autographed portrait for "Comrade Stalin". April 14, 1945 [Source: RGASPI]. Soon Tito and Stalin fell out, and Stalin would scheme to kill Tito but never managed.
8/4 That’s not completely accurate tbf. Plenty of Koreans in Sakhalin spoke Korean and Japanese well into the 1990s but, yeah, they were gradually Russified for reasons I mentioned, and the younger generation no longer speaks Korean, which is too bad./
笑うわ Just to translate: the headline refers to the watermelon as "neither a fruit nor a vegetable," which, under Medvedev's photo can only mean that Medvedev is being described as being "neither here nor there", a waverer, or perhaps an opportunist.
7/26 Re-watching Russia's 1995 V-Day parade. youtube.com/watch?v=uZqx9V…. Recognise this trio? Alexei II, now dead, Clinton, and Jiang Zemin. Yeltsin is on top of Lenin's mausoleum. The times!
7/12 Gorbachev tells Abe's father Abe Shintaro in Jan. 1990 what a great world we'd all live in in a few years or maybe decades. Oh boy did they not see it. [This is from my forthcoming book].
7/5 /* Didn't quite translate correctly: Khrushchev is talking here about either an Uighur state *or* a Kazakh state with Uighurs and Kazakhs from China joining those from the USSR.
Nikita Khrushchev asks his assistants to draft a document, then calls them in for a discussion. It quickly transpires he hadn't read it. Khrushchev: "I decided not to read it, because I thought if I began reading it, I'd start swearing, because it's the wrong thing."
This explanation by Kim Il Sung about how his invasion of South Korea would last three days still strikes me as one of the greatest miscalculations ever in military history. Almost beats Putin's atrocious decision to invade Ukraine.