This month seventy years ago, the head of the dreaded Soviet NKVD Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria sent a note to the Soviet Politburo, which consisted of Stalin, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Kalinin, Marshal of the Soviet Union Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan, recommending the “elimination” of some twenty-five thousand Polish “Nationalists and Counter-Revolutionaries”.  Upon the approval of the Politburo, the process was set in motion, which would result in the murder of all those people, that would come to be known as the “Katyn Massacre.”     Two days after the Red Army moved into Eastern Poland, Beria, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and First Rank Commissar of State Security, ordered the NKVD to create the Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees.  The Soviets did not consider the Polish soldiers, which they captured, as Prisoner... » Click here for the full story.

    This month, 70 years ago, the overwhelming numbers in men, artillery and armor  of the Red Army, together with the determination and utter disregard for human life of the Soviet Leaders, was beginning to overwhelm the tiny Country of Finland in what has become known as the Winter War.  Although the outcome was never really in doubt, the plucky Finns had managed to exact a terrible toll, in the first three weeks of the war, on the Soviets.     The root causes of the war were twofold. One was the desire of the Soviet Union to reclaim those pieces of the former Russian Empire that had been ripped from it at the conclusion of the Great War.  This included the Grand Duchy of Finland, over which the Russian Czar had ruled since March 29, 1809, when that area had been wrested from Sweden by the armies of Czar Alexander I. During the upheavals created upon Russia’s exit from the Great War, and the ensuing revolution and Civil War, Finland... » Click here for the full story.