Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)

In commemoration of the Nazi surrender ending the second world war on May 8, 1945.

Eight decades ago, communist prisoners organised and liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, where they were held. As the far right of a special type rises across Europe, these heroic victories of anti-fascist resistance are under attack.

The ghost of “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy is haunting the U.S. Congress.

[Britannica’s revisionist] distortions of the history of the Vietnamese struggle are just as radical and just as misleading [as those about the Soviet Union]. Here we may draw some valuable lessons about the hidden content of form: how apparently neutral principles of organization may shape meaning.

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, based in Berlin, recently issued a bulletin entitled, “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies.” This was intriguing because Rosa was one of Lenin’s sternest critics, and during the Cold War era, her works found print in the United States as vindication of current U.S. policies against the Soviet Union.

The Left has tossed Lenin’s corpse to the victors of history—both the Stalinists and their liberal opponents.

The land of the October revolution: a country of women walking on the road to emancipation

The myth that Lenin led to Stalin is exposed by Lenin’s Last Testament which argues for more democracy and removing Stalin from power, writes John Westmoreland.

Lenin’s understanding of the workers state must also take into account the adjustments that had to be made in the post-revolutionary period, when it became clear that emphasis had to be put on developing the productive forces and an efficient state that could guide the process of destroying the global inequalities between imperialist and imperialized nations.

Among the many seminal theoretical contributions made by Lenin to Marxism was his pioneering of the concept of the worker-peasant alliance for a socialist revolution.

What does Lenin say to us in today’s post-Soviet world and what is his legacy, asks VIJAY PRASHAD. VLADIMIR ILYICH ULANOV

One hundred years since Lenin’s death, Nigerian socialist Abiodun Olamosu describes of the revolutionary on his own political development. As the preeminent organiser of the Russian revolution, Lenin helped to determine the course of Olamosu’s life in Nigeria. Olamosu explores the development of Lenin’s work and legacy. He regards Stalin’s rise to power, and the Soviet Union, as an abomination to the body of ideas of Marxism and socialist internationalism.

This is an extract from the introduction to Alex Snowdon’s forthcoming book on Lenin, to be published by Counterfire, where he outlines the key stages of Lenin’s life as a revolutionary.

We must redefine Soviet Georgia beyond mere nostalgia—not to consign it to the past but to invigorate it, making it a dynamic force in shaping new visions for the world.

In a post on X, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken accuses Russia of manipulating history by actually twisting facts himself.

U.S. government documents admit the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union.

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.