Author: eclaybrook
Comrades of the Traveling Pants
Imagine a world where the bare necessities like water, shampoo, or even jeans were beyond your grasp. What lengths would you go to obtain these simple consumer goods that we have come to take for granted? In the image above, Russian poet Smirnovskii sums it up …
Showdown at Damanskii!
On March 1969, two red behemoths stood on the brink of war. On the Soviet side, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were amassed along the southern border and over a million Chinese faced them. The Communist states of China and Russia, allegedly allies against the global “bourgeoisie” order, were now massed along the border of …
From Stalin with Love: The Victor’s Plight
In its heyday, the Soviets rarely had issues with drumming up “volunteers” for their political and social needs. By 1945, the Red Army was 11 million strong and had proved itself to be the true victors in the European front. Faced with a starving, war torn nation, it was obvious that tanks and bullets were …
Continue reading “From Stalin with Love: The Victor’s Plight”
An Unorthodox Approach
To the average Russian, it must have seemed that in the summer of 1941 there was no salvation from tide of war. Within the first month of Germany’s “Operation Barbarossa”, Russian defenses had been obliterated and 84% of the Soviet’s pre-war active forces had been captured or killed by the end of the year (Freeze, …
Food Fight!
Universal suffering was the hallmark of trench warfare during World War I. As millions died from the innovations in warfare and technology, a more subtle affliction plagued the overwhelmingly peasant population of Russia: food shortage. While the roaring machine guns needed only to be fed yet more bullets to the carnage it produced, the millions …
Tea with a Splash of Vodka
What is it that makes an empire? The ruler may argue that government and order define one’s realm; however, these are all institutions of the people. Before the troubles that would bring about the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia was an immensely diverse spread of land that was called home to many different ethnicities, …
Blog Portfolio_Ethan Claybrook #1,2,3,5,7,9,10
Blog Post #1 Ethan Claybrook: Seizing Nationality
Fighting through Peace
Nuclear Surgery: Post-War Japan
Reconstruction Europe: The Victor’s Burden
Capitalizing on the Holocaust
Post-Empire Morality
Selective Amnesia
Selective Amnesia
A Holocaust and a massacre are ideas that have been intrinsically imbued into the social conscious of our society. No serious conversation about these topics can be had without emotionally charged rhetoric emerging and for good reason. The 1900s produced some of the most horrific displays of human violence and destruction that the world has …
Post-Empire Morality
Since the Gunpowder Revolution, Europeans had surpassed the constraints of the feudal system. The ever rising cost of war and managing the state became the impetus for the Age of Exploration which saw the rapid global domination of European powers and the start of a hegemony which began to unravel at the climax of these …
Capitalizing on the Holocaust
World War II brought out the worst characteristics that humanity had to offer, and no event was more notorious than the Holocaust. With millions of Jews massacred and many more displaced across Europe, the setting was ripe for the advancement of the Jewish national imperative. Zionism, the ideology which had driven Jewish state-building since the …
