Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)

In this reprint of the February 1994 “Notes from the Editors,” former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: “The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?”

The worst crime the USSR committed, the one for which it will never be forgiven, was to have been a shared hope for a more just, more dignified and more humane society.

Let’s hope there are more Vasily Arkhipovs out there today—we need them now more than ever.

While Ivy League professors equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, the Soviets fought the Nazis and ended violent anti-Jewish pogroms—which now threaten to return.

When a life is lauded by both Henry Kissinger and Boris Johnson, the deceased must have done something very wrong.

In the following, I will address a few potentially controversial points on the subject of economic development in China and the Soviet Union, as two representative examples of socialist countries, in response to the misconceptions prevailing in the world. – Cheng Enfu

As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended in 1991.

In the strategic vision of the U.S., Russia should be disarmed to become part of Europe as a “sidekick” and a bridgehead to contain China, the “more dangerous enemy” as Kissinger described it.

Kim Philby, born on January 1st, 1912, is one of the best known double agents of the Cold War era.

Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 and the rise of Soviet power reverberated across the world, from Latin America to Africa to Asia, and Middle East – that part of the world that lived under the ravages of colonialism and under-development.

Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent.

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’.