Islam Karimov has been re-elected as Uzbekistan’s president, according to preliminary results of Sunday’s election.
The widely-predicted outcome saw Islam Karimov, who has led Uzbekistan for more than 25 years, secure 90% of the vote.
However, international observers have criticized the poll, saying that it fell short of international standards.
Uzbek officials said that there was a 91% turnout for the vote.
Islam Karimov, 77, has led Uzbekistan since 1989 when Uzbekistan was still part of the Soviet Union, making him the only leader in the country’s history.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued a statement on March 30 criticizing the election for a “lack of genuine political alternatives” to the incumbent and “persistent legal and organizational shortcomings”.
The OSCE also criticized Islam Karimov for disregarding the two-term limit placed on the presidency by the Uzbek constitution.
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David Greenglass, an American spy who passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in one of the most high-profile espionage scandals of the Cold War, has died at the age of 92.
David Greenglass stole atomic research data while working on the wartime Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
After being arrested he then lied on oath and gave evidence which sent his own sister to the electric chair.
David Greenglass’s death was in July but it has only now been reported.
A native New Yorker, David Greenglass secured a role on the Manhattan Project after being drafted into the army following the outbreak of World War Two.
Manhattan Project was America’s top secret attempt to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon.
David Greenglass was an American spy who passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in one of the most high-profile espionage scandals of the Cold War (phoot Wikipedia)
David Greenglass, a young convert to Communism, began passing highly classified information to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg – a Soviet spy who was married to his sister Ethel.
After being arrested in 1950, David Greenglass testified that during one meeting with Julius Rosenberg he had seen Ethel typing up notes.
Speaking to a reporter years later, David Greenglass admitted that he had lied in order to save the life of his own wife Ruth, who had also been arrested after attending the same meeting.
Over the following years serious doubts began to emerge about Ethel Rosenberg’s execution.
“As a spy who turned his family in… I don’t care. I sleep well,” David Greenglass told the journalist in 2001.
The Rosenbergs were both executed for treason. David Greenglass, meanwhile, served 10 years of a 15-year sentence for espionage and was released in 1960.
David Greenglass died in New York City on July 1, according to the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol.
Michael and Robert Meeropol were aware of the death earlier but did not seek media attention.
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Former US navy sailor John Walker Jr., who led a spy ring for the Soviet Union, has died in a prison medical centre at the age of 77.
Retired Navy Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for passing codes and other sensitive data to the USSR.
John Walker Jr. had recruited his son, his brother and friend to continue spying after he retired. All were convicted.
The breach was considered among the largest leaks of military secrets in US history at the time.
Retired Navy Warrant Officer John Walker Jr. was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for passing codes and other sensitive data to the USSR
John Walker Jr. pleaded guilty in 1985, in a deal to gain a lighter sentence for his son, who was released in 2000 after serving 15 years in prison.
The spy ring began when John Walker Jr. walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington DC in 1967, and offered to hand over secret coded material on a regular basis.
The Soviets used the information John Walker Jr. and others passed to them over the course of 17 years to decode millions of secret US navy messages.
Prosecutors said at the time of his arrest that John Walker Jr. was more motivated by greed than ideology.
John Walker Jr’s cause of death was not immediately released.
Russian dissident from Soviet-era Natalya Gorbanevskaya has died in Paris aged 77.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested for taking part in a 1968 protest in Moscow’s Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
She was held in a psychiatric hospital until 1972 and later emigrated to the West.
Earlier this year Natalya Gorbanevskaya and others held another protest in Red Square making the 45th anniversary of the invasion.
They were briefly detained by authorities for holding an unauthorized protest.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested for taking part in a 1968 protest in Moscow’s Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a poet and translator, was a founding member of the underground publication The Chronicle of Current Events, which documented human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.
In August 1968 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops and tanks poured into Czechoslovakia to crush its government’s liberal reforms known as the “Prague Spring”.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya was one of eight dissidents who took to Red Square in protest at the invasion but they were quickly rounded up by security forces.
A mother of two children, Natalya Gorbanevskaya was later “diagnosed” with schizophrenia and subjected to forcible psychiatric treatment at Moscow’s then-notorious Serbsky Institute, Russian news agency Ria Novosti reported.
On her release, Natalya Gorbanevskaya emigrated to Paris and worked as a journalist.
In 1976, Joan Baez released a song, Natalia, dedicated to Natalya Gorbanevskaya.
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Sixty-seven years ago, in May 1945, the Nazi regime collapsed being squeezed ever more tightly between two fronts – the Soviet Union on one side and the Western Allies on the other.
But which of these fronts was the most important?
Throughout the Cold War, and ever since, each side has tended to see its own contribution as decisive.
“In the West, for some time… public opinion has taken the view that the Soviet Union played a secondary role,” said the Russian historian Valentin Falin.
On the other hand, opinion polls show that two-thirds of Russians think the Soviet Union could have defeated Hitler without the Allies’ help, and half think the West underestimates the Soviet contribution.
Richard Overy, professor of contemporary history at King’s College London, noted that after the war, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop listed three main reasons for Germany’s defeat:
• Unexpectedly stubborn resistance from the Soviet Union
• The large-scale supply of arms and equipment from the US to the Soviet Union, under the lend-lease agreement
• The success of the Western Allies in the struggle for air supremacy.
Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Russians think the Soviet Union could have defeated Hitler without the Allies' help, and half think the West underestimates the Soviet contribution
Richard Overy said that for decades Soviet historians underplayed the significance of US and UK lend-lease in the Soviet Union’s success, but that Russia has recently shown just appreciation.
Valentin Falin, however, says Russians never forgot the help they received from their allies.
“You ask any Soviet person, whether he remembers what a Dodge or a Willis is!” he said.
“The Americans supplied us with 450,000 lorries. Of course, in the final stages of the war this significantly increased our armed forces’ mobility, decreased our losses and brought us, perhaps, greater success than if we had not such help.”
Richard Overy accepts that the Western powers played a smaller role on the battlefield itself than the Soviet forces but says their bombing campaigns made a huge contribution.
“Bombing diverted a lot of manpower and military equipment from the front in Russia, while it restricted the expansion of the German war economy,” he said.
He also agreed that the West still only has a weak understanding of the Soviet Union’s role.
“Because Britain and the US had to invade Europe by sea [Italy in 1943, and France in 1944] they have more of a sense of <<liberating>> a German-conquered Europe,” he said.
Valentin Falin, meanwhile, argued that the war could have been brought to an end more quickly if the second front, in France, had been opened before 1944.
“How many millions of people would have remained alive?” he asks.
“Many death camps reached full power precisely in the second half of 1943 and in 1944.”
Richard Overy said that the West has a view of the war as a global conflict, because of its fight against Japan, for example, whereas the Soviet view is of a “national crusade to repel the invader”.
Valentin Falin cited figures suggesting that German forces suffered 93% of their casualties on the Soviet front and argued that this shows the Soviet contribution was decisive.
But he added that every single US, UK, Canadian or other Allied soldier who died “made a big, important and necessary contribution to the victory, which was a shared victory”.
Svetlana Peters, the only daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin has died in Wisconsin, aged 85.
Stalin’s daughter, who famously denounced communism and moved to the United States in the late 1960s, died from colon cancer.
Svetlana Peters’ defection in 1967 – partly motivated by the poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, by Soviet authorities – caused an international furor.
Within months, Svetlana Peters published her memoirs about life in Russia, entitled “Twenty Letters to a Friend”, that became a best-seller.
Svetlana Peters, the only daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin has died in Wisconsin, aged 85
Svetlana Peters, who was known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva, said her identity involved more than just switching from one side to the other in the Cold War.
Upon her arrival in New York City in 1967 at 41, she said: “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.”
Stalin’s daughter said she had come to doubt the communism she was taught growing up and believed there weren’t capitalists or communists, just good and bad human beings.
In “Twenty Letters to a Friend”, Svetlana Peters recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man.
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin denounced Svetlana Peters as a “morally unstable” and “sick person”.
“I switched camps from the Marxists to the capitalists,” Svetlana Peters recalled in a 2007 interview. But she said her identity was far more complex than that and never completely understood.
“People say, <<Stalin’s daughter, Stalin’s daughter>>, meaning I’m supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans.
“Or they say, <<No, she came here. She is an American citizen>>. That means I’m with a bomb against the others.
“No, I’m neither one. I’m somewhere in between. That <<somewhere in between>> they can’t understand.”
Svetlana Peters’ defection came at a high personal cost. She left two children behind in Russia – Josef and Yekaterina – from previous marriages.
Both her children were upset by her departure, and she was never close to either again.
Svetlana Peters was Stalin’s only daughter. She had two legitimate brothers, Vasili and Jacob.
When Svetlana, also known as Lana in US, was six years old, her mother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, shot herself after a row over his philandering. Thereafter, Lana was raised by a beloved nanny.
At 17, Stalin’s daughter fell in love for the first time, with a film-maker and writer 22 years her senior named Aleksei Kapler.
But Stalin did not approve of Aleksei Kapler, whom he dismissed as a “Bohemian artist” and a Jew, and banished him to Siberia for ten years.
Incensed that her boyfriend had influenced her to apply for a university fine arts course, Stalin also insisted she study history and become “an educated Marxist”.
Svetlana Peters graduated from Moscow University in 1949, worked as a teacher and translator and travelled in Moscow’s literary circles before leaving the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s daughter was married four times – the last time to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice to the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She took the name Lana Peters.
They had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973.
Svetlana Peters wrote three more books, including “Only One Year”, an autobiography published in 1969. The book made more than $3 million.
Stalin’s legacy appeared to haunt her throughout her life.
Stalin’s daughter denounced his policies, which included sending millions into labor camps.
“Over me my father’s shadow hovers, no matter what I do or say,” Svetlana Peters lamented in a 1983 interview with the Chicago Tribune.
After living in Britain for two years, Svetlana Peters returned to the Soviet Union with Olga in 1984, saying she wanted to be reunited with her children.
Svetlana Peters’ Soviet citizenship was restored, and she denounced her time in the U.S. and Britain, saying she never really had freedom.
But more than a year later, Svetlana Peters asked for and was given permission to leave after feuding with relatives. She returned to the U.S. and vowed never to go back to Russia.
By her later life, Svetlana Peters was fully immersed in American culture, admitted that she enjoyed American food, particularly hamburgers, and American films, and preferred to speak her adopted language.
Svetlana Peters later lived in Cornwall, England for a brief period in the mid 1990s.
A documentary, “Svetlana About Svetlana”, aired at the Madison Film Festival, Wisconsin in 2010. But Svetlana Peters, who did not attend the airing, later expressed regret at taking part, claiming the film-maker Lana Parshina had tricked her.
“This girl (Parshina) told me she was a college film student and she had to present something different,” she said.
“She was young, and I always like to help young people, so I let her in. But she only came to see me twice and she didn’t say she was making a film about my father.
“She just said it was going to be about the way I live now. I wish I didn’t do it. I won’t even make any money out of it. She will make all the money.”
Svetlana Peters went into seclusion in the last decades of her life in Richland Centre, Wisconsin, and relied on a cane after she developing scoliosis – a condition which twists the spine.
Stalin’s daughter survivors include her daughter Olga, who now goes by Chrese Evans and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she manages a clothes shop.
Her second daughter, who was born in 1950, goes by Katya, and is a scientist who studies an active volcano in eastern Siberia.
A son, Josef, died in 2008 at age 63 in Moscow, according to media reports in Russia.
Stalin’s other children:
Yakov Dzhugashvili, born in 1907, was Stalin’s eldest child and was raised by his aunt in Tbilisi, Georgia. During WWII, Yakov fought in Russia’s Red Army and was captured by the Nazis in 1941. He died in a concentration camp in 1943, aged 35. It has been suggested that he ran into an electric fence to kill himself.
Konstantin Kuzakov, born in 1911, was Stalin’s illegitimate second child, whose mother was Stalin’s landlady while he was in exile. In 1932, the Soviet secret police forced him to sign a statement promising he would not reveal Stalin was his father.
He was later a colonel in WWII. After he was accused of being a spy, he was dismissed from the Communist party. He died in 1996.
Vasili Dzhugashvili, born in 1921, was the son of Stalin and his second wife. After her death, Stalin rarely visited Vasili and Lana, and they were raised by nannies.
Vasili served in the Red Air Force, but was dismissed after allowing planes to fly in bad weather. He was imprisoned for giving away secret information to foreign diplomats. He died in 1962, aged 40, from alcoholism.
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