It was late in December that the Indian students of the India Military School at Tashkent decided to send this writer and Abdul Majid to Moscow for theoretical training. And Abdul Qadir Sehrai who was neither in our first batch nor in the second—and who had come with Iqbal Shaidai—was made to join us much against the wishes of the… Read more →
Christine Thomas, first published (extracts) in Socialism Today (March 2003), monthly magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales), and fully online at http://www.socialismtoday.org/73/kollontai.html. As a new generation of women in the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements celebrate International Women’s Day (8th March), CHRISTINE THOMAS looks back at the life and ideas of the Russian revolutionary, Alexandra Kollantai, a pioneer of… Read more →
Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution provides many telling eyewitness reports from the then capital of Russia, Petrograd (as St Petersburg was renamed at the start of the first world war) in the revolutionary year of 1917. Most of the accounts come from the memoirs and letters of British, French and US ambassadors and other diplomatic staff, foreign businessmen, Red… Read more →
The Doctor’s Visit by Jan Steen, circa 1660. Mauritshuis. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis / Wikimedia Forget rationing and waiting lists. Socialized medicine delivers comforts and convenience that Americans can only dream about. The standard case for a single-payer health insurance system is pretty well known. Anyone can get care without courting financial ruin. Monumental personal decisions, like when to have… Read more →
Paying the Price: 43 Questions on Demonetisation What Happened to the Economy? Politics of Demonetisation Defining the Black Economy Making Sense of Demonetisation Was it Legal? Does the State Have Complete Power to Define Money? How was this Demonetisation Different from 1978? How does Money Supply work? How do we Apply Classroom Economics to Demonetisation? A Response to the Classroom… Read more →
An interview with Leon Trotsky’s grandson, who lived with the famous revolutionary the last year of his life. Esteban Volkov was thirteen when assassins tried to murder him. Because his grandfather was Leon Trotsky. Now ninety-one, Volkov keeps Trotsky’s memory alive at a museum in Mexico City. The building is one of countless villas in Coyoacán: a house with a garden… Read more →
Jesus Christ walked on water as per certain Christian belief systems. It appears that the local clergy who supported the struggle of the fishing community against Vizhinjam Transit Harbour has finally decided to allow Adani to walk over a globally significant bio-diversity region of an ocean in Kerala. The fisher people were on strike for 12 days. The Communist government… Read more →
The approaching fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution brings to mind many episodes connected with it. This Golden Jubilee of that great historical event of 1917 takes us back to the blessings of our own national liberation struggle which was then intensifying. It is no exaggeration to state that the October Revolution had a great impact on Indian natioinalism and… Read more →
The dominant section of the Indian national leadership of the time was frightened with the on- rush of revolutionary ideas pouring from the other side of the Pamirs. This leadership was all along trying to strike a deal with the British Empire and remain or keep the country as a satellite of Britain under the name of the dominion of India…. Read more →
Indusky Kurs, the military academy for Indian revolutionaries set up at Tashkent, was a symbol of fraternal assistance that the new land of socialism extended to the fighters for Indian freedom against British imperialism. But when one read anything about the Indusky Kurs from the pen of M.N. Roy, one cannot help feeling that he did a… Read more →
Seldom in history do things happen suddenly; they are often years in the making. It is known that during his South Africa years Mahatma Gandhi had corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, described by Lenin in 1908 as the mirror of the Russian Revolution. This correspondence was three or four years prior to Gandhi’s last major agitation in South Africa, in which… Read more →
“The only historian capable of fanning the spark f hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead shall not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” Walter Benjamin, The Concept of History Introduction There is something strangely obsessive and pathological about the manipulation of human memory by the counterrevolutionary forces of… Read more →
The October Revolution was the first revolution in human history that was theoretically conceived, and executed according to a plan. While the February Revolution, like the earlier bourgeois revolutions in England and France, had occurred spontaneously, this was not true of October. At the same time it certainly was not what its detractors often suggest, namely a mere… Read more →
The Petrograd Soviet Assembly meeting in 1917. Wikimedia Over the course of 1917, the Petrograd Soviet transformed from a body willing to negotiate with capital to one ready for revolution. In just a few days, the February Revolution swept away Russian tsarism. After the revolt, the elected Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies stood side by side with the unelected… Read more →
The Melkinov House, former home and workshop of architect KS Melkinov (Sergey Norin) A few years ago, I noticed a change in the way I saw the city of Moscow. I had emigrated from there with my family when I was little, and when I first started going back as a college student in the 1990s, I saw an old… Read more →
Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov, and Alexander Martinov (Wikimedia Commons) This year is the centenary of Russia’s revolutions, the one that overthrew Tsarism and the one that put the Bolsheviks in power. Next year will be the bicentenary of Marx’s birth. It’s a time when not thinking about the left’s history is impossible. These anniversaries arrive when there are positive rumblings… Read more →
An excerpt from ‘October’, China Mieville‘s book revisiting the story of the Russian Revolution ‘This was Russia’s revolution, certainly, but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ The twentieth century opens on a great, sluggard, contradictory power. The Russian empire stretches from the Arctic… Read more →
Logo of The Federation Cuban Women Teachings from the Global South for Revolutionaries in the Global North byHoward Waitzkin Howard Waitzkin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and practices internal medicine part-time in New Mexico and Illinois. He is coauthor,… Read more →
Leadership Was Key in the Making of the Russian Revolution BY AMIYA KUMAR BAGCHI ON 17/11/2017 • 1 COMMENT The story of the October Revolution of 1917 is as much one of the masses of Russia taking their future in their own hands as it is of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.Read More — https://thewire.in/tag/the-soviet-century/ Alternative Dreams of the Russian Revolution BY SHIV VISVANATHAN ON 14/11/2017 • 2 COMMENTS… Read more →