Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (CWI in Russia). November the 7th was the 140th anniversary of the birth of Lev Davidovich Trotsky, with Lenin, leader of the Russian revolution. In this article from the Russian section of the CWI, Rob Jones looks at Trotsky’s life. On 20th August 1940, the Stalinist agent […]
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Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (ISA in Russia). Revolutionary movement with counter-revolutionary consequences This article is the first in a series to commemorate the events of 1989 In Poland, on the 13th September 1989, the ‘Solidarnosc’ trade union, after winning an overwhelming majority in an election, formed the first ‘non-communist’ government in […]
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Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (ISA in Russia). Twenty years since he was first appointed Premier by the outgoing Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin in a provocative interview in the Financial Times recently declared that “Liberalism is dead”. His manifesto challenged the liberal capitalist elite currently dominating the European Union and rallied right-wing […]
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Per-Åke Westerlund is a member of Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (CWI in Sweden). Leon Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism is a book every Marxist needs to study. It’s a collection of letters and key documents from a sharp debate within the Socialist Workers Party in the US in 1939-40. It’s a very rich book, on application of […]
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Per-Åke Westerlund is a member of Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (CWI in Sweden). After two and a half years of the First World War, Russia exploded in February 1917 in a revolution that overthrew the Tsar’s dictatorship. The capitalist provisional governments that took over did not at all fulfill the expectations of the masses of an end […]
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Peter Taaffe is a member of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales). Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, left a truly historical legacy. Aiming to reform bureaucratic rule he helped unleash forces that led to the complete collapse of Stalinism in Russia and eastern Europe. That then fed capitalist globalisation, opening up […]
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This is the final part of our series on the 1917 revolution – this one including some key events in subsequent years. Dates are given in the old style Julian calendar (13 days earlier than the Gregorian calendar) up to the point it was replaced in Russia (1/14 February 1918). December 1917 2: An armistice […]
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Lynn Walsh is a member of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales). Within months of the victorious October revolution British forces landed in northern Russia, the start of a counter-revolutionary armed intervention. In an article that first appeared in Militant, No.511, 11 July 1980, reviewed When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia (The Journeyman Press, […]
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Dates are given in the old style Julian calendar used in Russia at the time. This was 13 days earlier than the Gregorian calendar (adopted in Russia in 1918). The world’s first workers’ state had been set up on 25/26 October, when workers and soldiers led by the Bolshevik Party took power – ratified by […]
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Per Olsson is a member of Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (ISA in Sweden). The October socialist Revolution in Russia was met with enthusiasm from workers and the oppressed around the world. Not least in neighbouring Finland which was under Russian control since 1809. It was a large principality of the Tsarist Empire, an empire which the Bolsheviks […]
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