[...] Joseph Stalin's forced 1930's famine against millions of peasants – the majority Ukrainian – a policy of collectivization that led to mass starvation of millions of people. Attempts at reinterpretation were highlighted most recently by the Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet Sputnik News which ran this English-language piece 'Holodomor Hoax: The Anatomy of a Lie Invented by West's Propaganda Machine'.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once described writers as “the engineers of the human soul.”  “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he claimed. Stalin clearly believed that literature was a powerful political tool—and he was willing to execute writers whose works were deemed traitorous to the Soviet Union.

Russia is back, or at least that is what you were supposed to think while watching the 2014 Sochi Olympics over the past two weeks. To prove it, Russia spent 51 billion dollars on the first-ever Winter Olympics staged in a subtropical climate zone and took great pains to showcase Russian culture, diversity, wealth, talent, and swagger during nonstop coverage of the Olympic mega-event.