Section: New Republic (USA)
Vasily Grossman’s Lost Epic
In the Soviet Union, every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR, official and dissident literature were perceived as polar opposites. This stark distinction imbued Soviet-era literature with a gratifyingly Manichaean quality, and...
The Real Stakes of Trump’s Trade War With China
President Donald Trump’s continuing trade war with China will escalate once more on September 1, when his administration plans to impose tariffs of 10 percent on $300 billion of Chinese imports. These new levies follow previously enacted tariffs of 25 percent on a separate basket of imports worth $250 billion, with still more to come later...
Trump’s Reckless New Missile Race
After 32 years, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia is dead. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S.’s final withdrawal from the accord last week, blaming Russian violations for the move and promising “a new chapter by seeking a new era of arms control that moves beyond the...
Svetlana Alexievich’s Child’s-Eye View
Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ukraine, three years after the end of World War II. Shortly afterwards, her father moved the family back to his homeland, Belarus, where Alexievich would grow up to become one of the country’s most celebrated writers, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. These childhood years in a small...
Friday Night Fights With Ukraine’s Far Right
With burgers-and-beer menu in front of me, it doesn’t seem that different at first from a typical American sports bar.The tattooed men nearby, maybe in their twenties, look like they spend every other day at the gym. There’s also a thirty-something wearing khakis and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He’s running...
How to Stage a Successful Revolution
A few months ago, the world lost two long-serving autocrats in quick succession: Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who resigned on April 2, and Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, who was deposed on April 11. In both cases, the end to their tenure came as a direct result of popular uprising, when scattered opposition movements...
Joe Biden: Bruised Over Busing, But Still Standing
It was the great nineteenth-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave this advice to would-be literary upstarts: “Never strike a king unless you are sure that you can kill him.”In presidential debates, Emerson’s truism might be expressed as, “Never strike a frontrunner unless you are sure you can dethrone him.” Thursday night,...
Why Georgia Brings Out Putin’s Insecurities
Emotions are running high in Georgia’s capital, where protesters over the weekend took to the streets for a fifth day in a row. Violence broke out late last week, as citizens unhappy with the ruling of the Georgian Dream party were spurred into action by the appearance of a Russian official in the Georgian parliament. The exceptional...
The Biggest Barrier to a Leftist Foreign Policy: Democrats
In the last six weeks, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has called for President Trump to invade Venezuela. National Security Adviser John Bolton proclaimed that the Monroe Doctrine is “alive and well” as he announced new sanctions on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua in front of a group of Bay of Pigs veterans. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has...
Aleksandar Hemon’s Lost Eden
There are writers who specialize in variety, flitting from genre to genre and reinventing themselves with every book. Then there are those who worry the same subject over and over again, as if every novel, every story, is but a facet of a single, monumental concern. Aleksandar Hemon is the latter kind of writer, and his obsession is exile—a theme...
