Departments

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Communism

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    3/15/2023

    The Victims of Communism Museum is a Propaganda Machine for Normalizing the Hard Right

    by Billie Anania

    The museum, which counts numerous Nazi sympathizers among its founders, peddles a spurious notion of "double genocide" that lets fascists off the hook by promoting the number of 100 million victims of communism. How do they get that tally? Including every German soldier killed on the eastern front and every victim of COVID-19. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    3/12/2023

    Whittaker Chambers's Odyssey from Communist Spy to Conservative Hero

    by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

    Praised by the right and loathed by the left, Whittaker Chambers entered the public eye when he accused State Department worker Alger Hiss of being a Communist. But his story before and after reveals much more about the political history of midcentury America. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    3/7/2023

    Cracking Stasi Puzzles is Key to Some Germans Finding the Truth

    by Katja Hoyer

    With an informant for every 90 citizens, the East German secret police left behind 16,000 sacks of shredded documents. Can information technology help reconstruct a record of what happens when a government commits to spying on its own citizens? 

  • 1/29/2023

    A Portrait of Carlos Franqui

    by Ken Weisbrode

    The autodidact poet, journalist and propagandist Carlos Franqui was instrumental in making the Cuban revolution chic. He was also one of the first of the revolutionary generation to abandon it. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    1/22/2023

    How the Russian Jews Became Soviet

    The novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from the USSR to the US as a child, reviews Sasha Senderovich's "How the Soviet Jew was Made," a work that gives short shrift to neither the "Soviet" nor "Jewish" sides of the question. 

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    11/22/2022

    From Solidarity to Shock Therapy: The AFL-CIO and the End of the Cold War

    by Jeff Schuhrke

    The AFL-CIO's leadership saw the emergence of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 as an opportunity to advance their anticommunist agenda. Did they also undermine the ability of a post-Soviet left to protect workers' interests against global capitalism? 

  • 9/11/2022

    Russians' Disapproval of Gorbachev Shouldn't Dominate How He is Remembered

    by Walter G. Moss

    The combination of post-Soviet hardship, resurgent nationalism, and the destructiveness of the Ukraine war have led many Americans to embrace Russians' dim view of Mikhail Gorbachev. A historian of Russia says the leader had his faults, but his furtherance of humane values has been underrated. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    8/31/2022

    Gorbachev Never Understood What He Set in Motion

    by Anne Applebaum

    Sometimes seen as a visionary reformer, Gorbachev may have started the USSR's economic death spiral by restricting the sale of vodka to increase worker productivity. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    8/31/2022

    Gorbachev's Greatness Was in His Failure

    by Tom Nichols

    Gorbachev's personal decency made him the wrong man for his chosen task of saving Soviet Communism from collapse; today his reputation is far higher in the west than in the former USSR. 

  • SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
    8/31/2022

    Gorbachev's Vacuum: His Legacy and Russia's Wars

    by Michael Kimmage

    The last Soviet leader failed to intuit the ultimate consequences of the changes he unleashed, from the collapse of the USSR to the revival of Russian imperialsm. 

  • 3/27/2022

    Putin is Carrying on Stalin's War on Self-Determination

    by Uriel Abulof

    Before Woodrow Wilson, Lenin advanced the ideal of national self-determination as part of communist revolution. Stalin made the term a cynical tool of Russian imperialism, a move Putin's approach to Ukraine emulates.