Today is an anniversary that is being marked rather somberly in places like the Baltic countries.

Seventy years ago today, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany - Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop - stunned the world by announcing a non-aggression pact between their two (totalitarian) countries.

While there had been a great deal of vituperate invective between the two great socialist powers, the underlying reality was that they had long been de facto allies. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Soviet Union provided training facilities for German pilots as Germany tried to secretly rebuild its air force - something that was forbidden to Germany under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the meantime, the Soviet Union continued to be a very large supplier of raw materials to Germany’s rebuilding industries. And during the 1930s, Nazi Germany’s nascent “security services” learned a great deal from the Soviet Union’s “security agency”….

So on the surface, the agreement of a simple “non-aggression pact” seemed rather anodyne.

But it was the secret protocols that were the real “content” of the agreement.

We’ll look at those details - and why they are suddenly important again - below the fold.

Read More →

When one heads north out of Bucharest (by either road or rail), it takes a considerable amount of time for the city to “fall away.” When that finally does happen, you find yourself out on the Wallachian plain – which is very flat, now nearly treeless, and (in summer) very hot. The cityscape and traffic of Bucharest are replaced by scenes of peasant farmers transporting wood, hay, and other agricultural substances in horse-drawn carts – often doing so while chatting on their mobile phones.

But between Bucharest and the Carpathian foothills, just 35 miles north of Bucharest, the transportation corridor runs just by the western edge of the small city of Ploesti. Just to the west of the road and the rail line looms the large and venerable Ploesti oil-refining complex.

Today, Ploesti and its environs are peaceful – and almost bucolic.

But on this day 66 years ago, Ploesti was anything but peaceful. In the short span of 30 minutes, the Ploesti refinery was engulfed in flames, and the cornfields of the Wallachian plain were littered with the burning remains of aircraft – following one of the most unusual and brutally-courageous air attacks in history.

The tale is told below the fold.

Read More →

The FP has been too quiet for too long.

Hence, let’s have some culinary upliftenment:

(From the lunch menu in Iasi, Romania last Monday.)

Overnight culinary open thread.

This hasn’t gotten much mention here - but when I was in Romania earlier in the week it was big, big news:

The troubled Nabucco pipeline project — designed to diversify Europe’s energy supply and loosen Russia’s grip on the continent’s natural gas market — took a major step forward on July 13 with the signing of a transit agreement between Turkey and five European Union countries involved in the undertaking.

The 2,050-mile-long (3,300 kilometer) Nabucco pipeline is designed to bring gas from the Caspian Basin and the Middle East to European markets via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria. The $10-billion pipeline is scheduled to start operating in 2014. Nabucco’s primary objective is to lessen Europe’s overdependence on Russia for gas. Moscow currently supplies approximately 40 percent of Europe’s gas.

But there’s even more good going on, which we’ll discuss below the fold.

Read More →

Maybe some societies should take their own national anthems to heart.

E.g., excerpt:

Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos battalions!

(Citizens, to arms!
Form your battalions!)

Happy Bastille Day from…. Bucharest.

Bastille Day open thread….

Here in Iasi, the technical university and the “physical sciences” university main buildings appear to be separate - with separate entrances. Once you’re inside though, you can see that a long colonnaded hallway connects them - a hallway known as “The Hall of Lost Steps.”

The first time I came to Iasi, I had no idea that there was more to the hallway than I realized. At some point, one of my colleagues asked me, “Have you seen the paintings in the hall?” “What paintings???” “Let’s go back downstairs for a few minutes.”

There are paintings, but they are well-hidden. Along the colonnaded hallway, there are arched niches that contain many strikingly beautiful (and deeply allegorical) paintings.

More below the fold.

Read More →

My work causes me to travel a great deal. With that kind of load, I don’t seek things out; however, things just happen along the way.

One of the best instances of that occurred several years back when I made my first visit to Iasi, Romania. My hosts insisted that we make some time to visit the nearby Painted Monasteries of Southern Bucovina. This was all new to me, so I was intrigued - and these turned out to be one of the world’s greatest (yet still little-known) cultural gems.

Now, when I’m in Iasi, *I* insist that we make some time to visit the monasteries. So that’s what we did on Saturday - and if you’ve never seen or heard of these monasteries, you are in for a real treat.

I’ll do my best with some words and many photos below the fold.

Read More →

Mr. President, you’ve made quite a thing of late of running around the world “apologizing” for one perceived past sin of America after another.

But it does no credit to a man - nor to his native manliness - to continually apologize for things in which he was not involved.

It’s long past time for you and your Administration to own up to any spur-of-the-moment misunderstandings, and correct what was done wrong.

In 1989, it would have been unfathomable for any American in a position of political leadership to call for the reinstatement in power in Romania of the dreadful Nikolai Ceausescu (and his equally-dreadful wife Elena).

You need to face up to the situation in Honduras - right now - and not inflict that sort of travesty on the Honduran people.

More below the fold.

Read More →