Luc Bovens, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
At the height of Reaganism, close to half of Americans believed a phrase popularized by Karl Marx actually derived from the US Constitution. It doesn't, but scholars have traced it to the Bible.
Winston Churchill giving his final address, during the 1945 election campaign, at Walthamstow Stadium, East London.
Wikipedia, the collections of the Imperial War Museums
Klaus W. Larres, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Even a highly popular and respected leader can lose an election, writes a historian – especially if they don't have a plan for the future. Churchill was one of them.
Vladimir Putin opens the wall of sorrow in Moscow in 2018.
EPA
Moscow has invested heavily in remembering the Soviet system of terror, while trying to crush those like historian Yuri Dmitriev who contradict the pro-Stalin narrative.
Targeting the families of protestors is highly effective as a means of control.
A damaged Confederate statue lies on a pallet in a warehouse in Durham, N.C. on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017, after protesters yanked it off its pedestal in front of a government building.
AP Photo/Allen Breed
Where do old Confederate statues go when they die? The former Soviet bloc countries could teach the US something about dealing with monuments from a painful past.
Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not see.
Shutterstock
An old Scottish master has revealed its secret after 430 years. What next from art detectives?
The 1976 memorial at the Babi Yar massacre site only recognised Soviet victims, despite the killing of more than 30,000 Jewish people. In 1991 a Jewish memorial was installed nearby.
Jennifer Boyer/Flickr
On September 29 1941, Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev. Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, Babi Yar, is a damning critique of the Soviet Union's lack of recognition of the massacre, and a condemnation of Stalinism.
Over a period of 30 years, millions of criminals and political prisoners were sent to Soviet labor camps.
Wikimedia Commons
Ian Godwin, The University of Queensland and Yuri Trusov, The University of Queensland
When politics meddles with science, it can lead to tragedy, as was the case with Stalin's favourite agricultural biologist Trofim Lysenko and his rival Nikolai Vavilov.
Loren Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Some Russians are looking back admiringly to a tyrannical scientist from Stalinist times – and using the new field of epigenetics to bolster their case.
This week we have witnessed a plunge in the price of oil and the astonishing demise of the ruble. These events provide the basis for a great series of conspiracy theories, the type that readily find an…