During the trial of the final #Nazi defendant at Nuremberg, Hans Fritzsche, the #Soviet prosecutor brought up Fritzsche's radio broadcast justifying the attack on Poland. Fritzsche responded: it had been "a matter of great satisfaction" that the Soviet press said the same thing.
#pt: from Francine Hirsch's wonderful book, "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" (2020), pp. 322-23.
Hans Fritzsche was only on trial at Nuremberg in the first place because the Soviets demanded it as a substitute for Goebbels. Everyone understood that Fritzsche just did not measure up in terms of responsibility to the other Nazis being tried.
Fritzsche's trial got off to an extremely bad start when the Soviet prosecutor produced an affidavit where Fritzsche had admitted being a confidant of Goebbels', and Frietzsche repudiated it, saying [plausibly] he had signed it under duress at Lubyanka
Having demanded that Hans Fritzsche be on trial at Nuremberg, and then managed to remind everyone that the Soviets jointly started the war with their Nazi allies, the Soviets then made it even worse by trying to bring charges against Fritzsche related to Katyn.
During the #Katyn part of the Nuremberg Trial, to make a long story short, the defence dented the #Soviet case, but were unable to decisively disprove it. The Soviets had briefed well their witnesses - two of them Nazi collaborators whose lives depended on the "right" testimony.
The defence at one point said the #Soviet witness on #Katyn, Boris Bazilevsky, was reading a script, but the US and Britain shut him down.

This continued even later [see excerpt]

The Allied habit developed during the war of keeping Stalin happy endured at Nuremberg.

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More from @KyleWOrton

29 Sep
#Russia's civil war was to all intents and purposes over by autumn 1919, though the main phase of fighting only ended a year later. A pocket of resistance against the Bolsheviks held out until June 1923, however <Thread>
The defeat of #Denikin's offensive on Moscow in the west and #Kolchak's offensive from the east in late 1919 ended any serious threat to the Bolsheviks. Kolchak was murdered in FEB 1920 and the remnants of Denikin's Army, now under #Wrangel, evacuated from Crimea in NOV 1920.
In Sept. 1921, Yakutia rose in revolt and a Volunteer Army commander, Mikhail Korobeinikov took the lead, expanding the pocket, and in March 1922 announced the establishment of an interim administration, the "Provisional Yakut Regional People's Government".
Read 13 tweets
27 Sep
Great piece by @Levitt_Matt: "The Assad Regime’s Business Model for Supporting the Islamic State" lawfareblog.com/assad-regimes-…
One of the first things I wrote in 2014, and kept updated for a while as a rolling compilation of evidence, at a time when it was regarded as something of a conspiracy theory: "The Assad Regime's Collusion With ISIS and al-Qaeda: Assessing The Evidence" kyleorton.co.uk/2014/03/24/ass…
Wrote about this a couple of times since then:

"Provocation and the Islamic State: Why Assad Strengthened the Jihadists" kyleorton.co.uk/2014/09/03/pro…

"Partners in Terror: The Assad Regime and the Islamic State" kyleorton.co.uk/2016/03/10/par…
Read 8 tweets
15 Sep
In Sept. 1971, the KGB's Oleg Lyalin defected from the London Embassy and told the British government about the really alarming (and some quite bizarre) "special actions" the Soviets had been planning on the West, precipitating the mass expulsion Soviet spies in Operation FOOT.
The interesting thing is that this meant the West was quite well aware, from near the beginning of Andropov's renewed campaign, that Soviet terrorism was a very real phenomenon, and yet down to the end most in the West considered it a "conspiracy theory"
The KGB recruitment of Wadi Haddad of the PFLP in 1970 was the turning point: his Palestinian group was given weapons that even Eastern Bloc states hadn't received and given tasks as various as kidnapping CIA officers and assassinating Soviet defectors.
Read 7 tweets
15 Sep
#Pakistan's claim to be a victim of terrorism rests on groups like #TTP ("Pakistani Taliban"), but it was the Army/ISI who created the jihadist emirate in North Waziristan where this group was formed, with the active and ongoing assistance of the ISI's loyal Haqqani Network. ImageImage
#pt: "The Foutainhead of Jihad", pp. 164-5.
The #Haqqani-run enclave in North Waziristan, operating with the full backing of #Pakistan's ISI, not only nurtured the #TTP the Pakistanis would later portray as a mortal foe, it of course supported the "Afghan" #Taliban and was where #Al_Qaeda organised many post-9/11 plots. ImageImage
Read 9 tweets
14 Sep
#IS established itself in "Af-Pak" by building off the Afghan Salafist community that took root in eastern areas via the Arab presence there beginning many decades ago. The Salafis had some second thoughts, but the #Taliban is now pressuring them, too. trtworld.com/opinion/the-dy…
#pt: The Taliban made an approach to IS-Centre in 2015 to ask that ISKP not be used to open another jihadist front, since this would distract from the war with the West. No dice. IS didn't even bother to reply.
#pt: The original Pakistani, mostly TTP, leadership of #ISKP was killed off quite quickly and replaced with Afghan Salafis. The current leader, though, Dr. Shahab al-Muhajir, seems to be a former Haqqani Network operative, and has peeled away other parts of that network.
Read 4 tweets
13 Sep
The lengths the #KGB went to in trying to destroy #Solzhenitsyn even after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union are extraordinary, and not entirely irrational: they understood the danger he posed to them.

<Mini thread drawn from "The Sword and the Shield", pp. 312, 317-21>
Andropov first tried to expel Solzhenitsyn in autumn 1971, but Brezhnev listened to interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, who said the great writer should be co-opted rather than persecuted. Andropov did not forget this, and later witch-hunted Shchelokov until he killed himself.
In late 1973, after Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov wrote an open letter that encouraged Congress to override the Nixon-Kissinger administration by passing Jackson-Vanik that linked Soviet trade privileges to human rights, Brezhnev said the KGB should have cracked down from the start.
Read 9 tweets

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