socialist russia

Grateful for Progress Publishers

The bookshelf in my mother's apartment in Kolkata is weighed down by an old history. There are books in the familiar blue and white spine, the old Progress Publishers volumes that include my volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, bought in 1981. Russian classics jostle for space, a bit of Lermontov here and a bit of Gogol there. There used to be children's books, but in the move from one apartment to the other, these might have been slipped into the bags of the kabariwallah. Running my hands over these[...]

Liberate the Colonies! Voices from the Global Struggle for Freedom

‘I come from the Indies; I have travelled forty days.’ These words were addressed by Tan Malaka of the Communist Party of the Dutch East Indies to the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East—convened by the Comintern. He had been asked to conclude his speech as his time was up. He was in no mood to comply. Fighters for justice are not easily silenced, even by their comrades! The speaker hadn’t travelled forty days to discuss the political situation back home with foreigners. Divided by [...]

An excerpt from ‘The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse’

Although a distance of more than a quarter-century separates us from that fateful day in December 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist, understanding of the Soviet collapse remains unsatisfactory and incomplete. The global working class is still reeling from the blows of that two-year period from 1989 to 1991 – when socialism was dismantled from Berlin to Khabarovsk. Yet, we still haven’t fully understood the nature of those blows. Such a situation must b[...]