Author Archives: Michael Wehle

Onward, comrades!

Joni Mitchell – Woodstock, Celebration at Big Sur September 1969

Yanis Varoufakis, UnHerd: The broader tragedy, however, is that this war-as-wealth-transfer mechanism only works so well because the rest of the Western world has lost its capacity to resist. And nowhere is this more painfully evident than in Europe, which … Continue reading →

2026

Also, for the Kazakhs in the novel, China looms as a more menacing and extremist alternative to Soviet power; that is the land of mind control. —Katerina Clark, Foreword to Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, (Bloomington: … Continue reading →

Perestroika wasn’t created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals . . . —Speaker in Svetlanta Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, (New York: Random House, 2017), 21.