Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Mike Phipps reviews Communist Dissidents in Early Soviet Russia: Five documents translated and introduced by Simon Pirani, published by Matador
The Russian Revolution has probably been more analysed, discussed and argued about than any other social revolution in history. Leon Trotsky’s (...)
This book gives voice to Russian communists who participated in the 1917 revolution, but found themselves at odds with the Communist party as it consolidated its rule in the early 1920s. One Red army veteran demands action against corrupt officials; another mourns the dashed hopes of 1917 and (...)
Given his prominence as a high-ranking Bolshevik, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev is very little known. This is partly because he was cut off early in his career by persecution and ultimate execution in Stalin’s purges and his writings suppressed for decades, but also due to distortion and lack of (...)
Who were the dissident pacifists of the Brezhnev’s “stagnation”? Why did they emerge and what positions did they hold? Historian Irina Gordeeva writes about the independent peace movement in the late USSR
Moral condemnation of war as senseless mass murder, for which the ruling elites are (...)
What should we make of Lenin today? How should he be framed within what Hayden White calls a ‘practical past’ narrative, one that provides an orientation to the past that might usefully illuminate the present? In the century after his death, Lenin fell victim both to a hagiographic approach in (...)
New exhibits at Russia’s military history museum aim to stir patriotic fervour. But will they work?
The view from the half-ruined farmhouse is terrifying. A sobbing girl is being dragged off by a German soldier as Wehrmacht troops advance through her village. The air is filled with the (...)
NEVOINA—We have heard all the oohing and aahing about war and intervention today somewhere else.
Namely, in the State Duma and the right-wing press of a hundred years ago. As the Interpreter writes (https://t.me/tolk_tolk/13725), "War was demanded by this public every year. All factions - (...)
What could unite society split by war and inequality? What are the alternatives to major post-soviet historical narratives? Poet and activist Kirill Medvedev reflects on anti-imperial solidarity and a new idea of a civic consciousness
The conversation about “progressive,” non-state (...)
"Two cutting-edge interpretations from U.S. Marxist scholars – Ronald Suny and Eric Blanc – have recently appeared, providing important insights for scholars and activists alike.”
Stalin : Passage to Revolution, by Ronald Grigor Suny. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2020. 857 pages. (...)
FAS (#natsmen_ok voices)–Prestalinist Soviet nationalities policy A series of brochures entitled “The Working Woman of the East” was published in the second half of the 1920s by the Association of Oriental Studies under the Central Executive Committee, by order of the Workers’ and Peasants’ (...)
Political philosopher Andrey Oleynikov tells a brief history of the concept which has become one of the key elements of Putin’s propaganda
Until recently, only a small group of intellectuals found it pleasant to study the vocabulary of Putin’s regime. Indeed, a rare breed of people is (...)
May 9 has come and gone, and as has been the constant for the past two decades, both Mr. Putin’s enemies and friends have repeated in unison that on May 9 of every year, Russia remembers and honors the 20 or 25 plus million of its dead during World War II. It even seems that in recent years, (...)
Are you still an admirer of the October Revolution in Russia that paved the way for a setting up of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR)? Asked a friend who does no longer believe in a ‘socialist possibility’. Why did I answer to his question in affirmative?
Almost all the gains of (...)
One must go beyond Kronstadt to understand Kronstadt. One must grasp, first of all, the struggle for human liberation and the hope of Communism.i
From revolutionary Russia in October 1917, John Reed, sent a cable back to his socialist comrades in the United States: “The rank and file of the (...)
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky was one of the most recognisable leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution in the international press, alongside Vladimir Lenin. He played a decisive role in the creation and solidification of the new Bolshevik regime in Russia, particularly in his capacity as people’s (...)
Exactly eighty-one years ago, on 20 August 1940, an ice axe was plunged into Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s skull at his residence in Coyoacan, Mexico by Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río who was a Spanish communist and a Soviet agent of Joseph Stalin. Trotsky succumbed to his injuries the (...)
The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin’s own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to (...)
When Alexandra Kollontai, one of the founders of the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Bolshevik Party, wanted to turn her colleagues’ attention toward questions of sexual freedom and what love might look like under socialism, she was met more than once with an eye roll. After the (...)
"Lenin is a thinker of combinations of struggles that can help produce an alternative politics that could not only confront the hegemony of capital over people’s lives, but also undermine the power of the state that uses coercion to separate people from each other.
We must acknowledge that (...)
“The (Russian) state needs a Lenin shorn of his political ideas and real biographies, a Lenin-monument. Whenever he becomes a true Lenin, a rebel and destroyer of the old order, the authorities automatically begin to regard him as a monster.”—says the historian and political theorist Ilya (...)
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