Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (CWI in Russia). The impression of the press conference on August 19, 1991 as eight aged generals, KGB officers and Stalinist bureaucrats announced “emergency rule” could not have filled those who hoped they would save the Soviet Union with confidence. Nothing could demonstrate better how the junta […]
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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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Niall Mulholland is a member of the Committee for a Workers’ International. Sixty years ago Nikita Khrushchev stunned Communist Party members around the world with a speech attacking Stalin, the then recently deceased dictator deified as the Soviet Union’s ‘great leader’. It sparked revolt against the rotten regimes in Russia and eastern Europe. Ultimately, it […]
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Clare Doyle is a member of the Committee for a Workers’ International. Reprinted from the February 2016 issue of Socialism Today At the beginning of January, the BBC carried a documentary film about the blockade of Leningrad during the second world war – possibly the most tragic siege in history. The programme used eyewitness accounts […]
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