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Yeltsin’s Restoration of Capitalism

The 9th of May was celebrated in the Soviet Union, as it still is in the Russian Federation, as Victory Day – victory against the Germans in the Second World War, that is. It was indeed one of the most important events in modern history. Who knows what the world would have looked like otherwise! The collapse of the USSR – the nation that sacrificed 27 million of its own to liberate the rest – nearly 45 years later has been thought of as inevitable. But was it? Carlos Martinez traces the h[...]

Progress Publishers: A Short History

Progress Publishers lived up to its name. It’s hard to look at one’s bookshelf and not find a title brought out by them. But the reason for its existence was greater than what one would refer to as soft power. Vijay Prashad writes in his introduction to The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, ‘It was because, as Lenin noted, cultural absorption was a good in itself, and that it would help expand the imagination and create a richer, better world. More learning about differe[...]

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[...]

The Revolution of Ordinary People: Russia, 1917

Lenin did not make the Revolution in 1917. Nor did Stalin. Nor Trotsky. They each provided crucial leadership, with Lenin’s role being essential from April 1917 onwards. But they were part of a tidal wave that had first risen in 1905, crested and then rose again during the Great War. This tidal wave was lifted by ordinary people – factory workers, landless peasants, housewives, soldiers, students and those who barely found the means to survive. It is they who made the Revolution happen in [...]