Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)

The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.

As the title reveals, Chukhrov is particularly interested in two aspects of Soviet socialism: desire and boredom. For a libidinally conditioned capitalist subject, socialism as a non-libidinal economy appears boring and unsexy.

Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Meltdowns of capitalism usually come as little surprise to savvy Marxist theorists but economic crises are one thing; economic crisis plus a global pandemic is something else again, beyond an everyday capitalist norm, more akin to the political-economy of wartime. Pandemic, like war, threatens not only life and limb, but also solidarity and tender acts of human togetherness.

As`ad AbuKhalil says Western media never regarded the U.S. involvement for what it really was.

Remarks at the Cold War Truth Commission

A ferocious polemic by Andreas Malm, written as the worldwide lockdown took hold, summons the imagery of Soviet war communism to impress the urgency of our predicament.

Based on important new figures from the Maddison Project Database, it refutes the claim that the countries of Eastern Europe were economic failures when they were still ruled by (ostensibly) communist regimes.

To marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin we’re sharing the latest installment of Paul LeBlanc’s series Revolutionaries Reviewed, on Vladimir Lenin – a central leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew tsarist rule and attempted to bring about a new socialist society.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the Great Lockdown, which has no end date, could very well lead to a loss of $9 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product over the entirety of 2020 and 2021; this number is greater than the combined economies of Japan and Germany. This scenario, the Fund’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva admits, ‘may actually be a more optimistic picture than reality produces’.

A Review of Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin, and Development of Irrigated Agriculture by Boris V. Andrianov, and Soviet Archaeology: Schools, Trends, and History by Leo S. Klejn

These two matters—the battle of ideas and the new intellectual—take up the first two parts of this dossier. The third part enters a brief discussion of our political context and offers a map of our concerns and our research. We look forward to your response to our invitation to a dialogue.

In the five essays presented in October 1917, renowned radical political economist, Samir Amin, pushes far beyond the immediate necessity of emphasizing the historical weight of October, and launches, into an ambitiously broad analysis of the trajectory of twenty first-century socialism.

In Moscow there has been something like a revival of interest in the immortal Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, who called himself Gorky, the Bitter One. Even Gorky’s portrait, which had been removed from the title page of the influential literary magazine Literaturnaja Gazeta, is shining there again next to Pushkin’s.

November 2017 marked the centenary of two of the most decisive events in the twentieth century: the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the Balfour Declaration in Britain.… At loggerheads were two mutually exclusive political objectives: the one to promote worldwide, anti-imperialist revolution; the other, to further British imperial interests in the Middle East.

This post is part of our online forum, “Black October,” on the Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora

With its theme a little-known event of over a century ago, the film was ancient in cinema terms, its rather unsuccessful premiere was way back in 1926 and the performance Monday evening marked an event even earlier than that, one which is rarely discussed and even less celebrated. Yet the theatre was sold out and […]

For those of us dedicated to revolutionary politics, taking control of this history is a crucial step towards building of international solidarity in the fightback against capitalist globalization and emergent neofascism, which is rearing its ugly head across the globe.

In one hurrying day, eighty years ago, in Albacete, a center of Spain’s La Mancha region, a few officers somehow created quarters for five hundred men arriving the following day, then five hundred more, and more.  Soon three or four thousand, somehow organized in units despite a mad variety of languages, were issued a motley […]

Distinguished Venezuelan history and politics professor Steve Ellner visited Caracas from September 26 to October 7 to teach an intensive seminar at the Venezuelan Planning School, titled “The Role of the Venezuelan State in the Transition to Socialism.”  Venezuelanalysis‘s Lucas Koerner sat down with the long-time Universidad de Oriente professor to discuss a range of […]

In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way.  On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]