Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
"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. (...)
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 the (...)
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 (...)
In February 1918, the repudiation of the debt by the Soviet government shocked international finance and sparked off unanimous condemnation by the governments of the great powers.
This decision of repudiation was intrinsic to this first big movement for social emancipation which rattled the (...)
When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. In the very moment of revolution, these sentiments were put to the test as antisemitic pogroms swept across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. The pogroms reached a (...)
More than one friend has expressed the hope that I would write a report on my experience in attending an international conference on Leon Trotsky to be held in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 – so I have felt even more compulsion to craft such a report than I would have otherwise. Since I have come down (...)
Remarks prepared for the Havana Conference, May 6th-8th, on the occasion of the centennial of the founding of the Third International, on the topic of “Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism”.
Any discussion that has Trotsky’s ideas as a subject, and which at the same time commemorates the one hundredth (...)
We publish below a longer version, with footnotes, of Paul Le Blanc’s presentation at the Trotsky conference held in Cuba [See his report on that conference, ESSF (article 48872), International conference: Trotsky in Cuba, 2019.].
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The title of this talk – “the darker the night, the (...)
An internationally respected revolutionary leader since the 1880s and a close collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) became part of the newly formed Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 . In 1921, she joined with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky in helping to win (...)
Netflix’s Trotsky miniseries demonizes its namesake with antisemitic themes and rank nationalism.
Since its December 2018 debut on Netflix, historians have cataloged the inaccuracies of the Russian miniseries Trotsky [[https://www.timesofisrael.com/russian-tv-series-claims-jewish-trotsky-mastermind
Netflix’s ’Trotsky’ is a sinister and reactionary rewriting of history, intended to benefit the right-wingers who dominate modern Russian politics.
Watching the miniseries Trotsky, made by Russia’s Channel One in 2017, it is hard not be reminded of Christopher Nolan’s entries into the Batman (...)
The 1954 classic study of the Ukrainian Revolution, Borotbism by Ivan Maistrenko has just been republished in a new edition. It was one of the first significant accounts of the revolution in English.
The Borotbists were the left faction of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Revolutionaries, (...)
Today is the 140th birthday of Ioseb Jughashvili, also known as Koba, but best known as Joseph Stalin: figurehead of the Soviet bureaucracy that seized control of Russia following the degeneration of the Bolshevik regime. We publish here a review (first released on John Riddell’s blog) of the (...)
The histories of the revolutionary anti-colonial movements in South Asia and their engagement with the October Revolution are reflected upon, in this article. Accompanying these reflections is a sensitivity to contemporary problems of Islamophobia, the manipulation of popular protests by (...)
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