russia Archives - DJ Wez G

July 10, 2023 wezg

Dance for Ukraine: Marika Rossa – Female Techno DJ Ambassador from Kyiv

This is not a story of a random Ukrainian musician that I have plucked out of the ether. I’ve been following the progress of the female DJ superstar, Marika Rossa, since 2012, before the crisis in Ukraine started. The internet

July 10, 2023 wezg

Review: Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West – by Keir Giles

I am a new member of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London. On a recent visit, I made use of the vast resources of a very well-stocked library at Chatham House and this book is the

June 19, 2023 wezg

Chatham House: How Effective Are The United States’ Sanctions? 19.06.2023

Chatham House is the Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs. It is based in St. James’ Square, Mayfair, London, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. I have been a member of Chatham House for several months but with me being based

June 4, 2023 wezg

Erdoğan’s Third Term as President of Turkey and What It Means

On May 28th 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was giving a victory speech to the excited Turkish masses, who had democratically elected him to a third term as President of Turkey. He achieved 52.2% of the vote in the second round

May 27, 2023 wezg

Happy 100th Birthday Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger is a political heavyweight. Of that there can be no doubt. Even the harshest of this US politician-come-guru, Henry Kissinger’s critics will have to admit that he is just that – a veteran in the ring of international

May 18, 2023 wezg

Review: Defending The Realm – MI5 and The Shayler Affair – by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding

This is just another one of the many books I’ve read on the security services / spies / intelligence agencies in general. I guess I have a morbid fascination. Non-fiction throws up some pretty weird stuff – Life itself is

May 8, 2023 wezg

Review: The Origins of Totalitariansm – by Hannah Arendt

This book is quite old, first published in 1951, it dates from a period when the totalitarian reality of Hitler and Stalin were very much fresh in the mind. Hannah Arendt was a German Jew and this work is both

April 4, 2023 wezg

Zlata’s Diary – A Child’s Life in Sarajevo – by Zlata Filipović

What’s a grown 45 year old male doing reading a little Bosnian girl’s diary you might ask yourself. Well, it cropped up as a recommendation in a documentary on the war in the former Yugoslavia, a subject to which I

April 4, 2023 wezg

Review: Zlata’s Diary – A Child’s Life in Sarajevo – by Zlata Filipović

March 23, 2023 wezg

Review: Red Horizons – The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption – by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite

March 19, 2023 wezg

Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev there was a post-Stalin easing of oppression emerging from the Kremlin and a Cold War ‘Victorian’ Ice Age thaw for writers allowed this remarkable, unique, little tale to unbelievably evade the censor and make

March 19, 2023 wezg

Review: The Master and Margarita – by Mikhail Bulgakov

I read a lot of Russian literature and am becoming a bit of an aficionado. This book was first recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend from Serbia and it’s taken me a while to actually get around to completing it

February 4, 2023 wezg

Review: Our Man in Havana – by Graham Greene

Graham Greene delivers here a classic espionage novel, fiction, set in Cuba around the time of the revolution, Greene writes in his knowledgeable subject area of expertise a comedy account of a chance vacuum salesman being recruited by Mi6 as

February 4, 2023 wezg

Review: War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy

‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other

January 16, 2023 wezg

Review: Cybersecurity: The Beginner’s Guide – by Dr Erdal Ozkaya

I am just about to embark in an online professional cybersecurity course with Masterschool in Tel Aviv, Israel. I am a relative novice in this field and in order to be as prepared as possible for the new academic venture

January 16, 2023 wezg

Review: Cybersecurity: The Beginner’s Guide – by Dr Erdal Ozkaya

January 16, 2023 wezg

Review: Kim – by Rudyard Kipling

‘Kim’ is recognised as the greatest work of famous author Rudyard Kipling. This is a cult novel especially in espionage circles. It is fiction but documents the widely popular Great Game between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia, a clandestine

January 14, 2023 wezg

Review: The Dragons and the Snakes – How The Rest Learned to Fight The West – by David Kilcullen

This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It is up to date material and full of cutting edge military theory and ideas and I believe is critical essential reading for any politician or military personnel,

December 8, 2022 wezg

Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder

There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: The Great Game – On Secret Service in High Asia – by Peter Hopkirk

The Great Game, as immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Kim’ was the nineteenth century adventures in espionage between Russia and the U.K. across Central Asia. Both sides were on the verge of a full on military confrontation and sought advantage.

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: Russians Among Us – Sleeper Cells & The Hunt for Putin’s Agents – by Gordon Correra

I’ve read Gordon Correra’s previous work in espionage literature and for this reason I was drawn to seek out this new offering. In the current climate of the Russian invasion of Ukraine under ex KGB spy, Vladimir Putin, I felt

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: On War – by Carl von Clausewitz

In addition to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this book authored by Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz is the quintessential classic book on military theory. The book (although this edition was only an abridged version) puts forward in detail theory

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: Memoirs – by Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential and critical figures of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in the 1980s he was part os a set of international world leaders that seemingly had much more influence over

November 10, 2022 wezg

Review: Putin’s People – How the KGB took back Russia and then took on The West – by Catherine Belton

The author of this, the best study of Vladimir Putin that I have read to date, is Catherine Belton, a Financial Times journalist that was based in Moscow. It is a comprehensive study of the rise of Putin and how

October 14, 2022 wezg

Review: Behind The Enigma – The Authorised History of GCHQ – Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency – by John Ferris

This is a weighty tome (800 plus pages) and the authoritative history of perhaps the least glamorous of the U.K.’s principal security services. However, the facts illustrated in this book clearly demonstrates the critical role GCHQ plays in national security

October 14, 2022 wezg

Review: A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence – by Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills and David Spencer

David Kilcullen has had a few books included on my shelf recently. As a military expert on Guerrilla Warfare, I was thrilled to find this new book on the Colombian Civil War which he coauthors with a group of specialists

October 14, 2022 wezg

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