17 February 2021

Film Review: Dear Comrades!

The film 'Dear Comrades', produced by the Russian film-maker Andrei Konchalevsky, came out last year and won the Special Jury Prize at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

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19 August 2020

75 years since the publication of Animal Farm: From 'two legs bad' to 'two legs better'

What does Orwell's fable actually say about revolution?

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26 June 2019

Opinion: capitalism's Fukushima showed same recklessness as Stalinism's Chernobyl

While lauding the marvellous TV series Chernobyl, the capitalist press has gleefully criticised 'socialism', and even Corbyn, for the Ukrainian nuclear disaster

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12 June 2019

TV Review: Chernobyl - Workers' heroism vs sclerotic Stalinism

This five-part docudrama focuses on the disaster in 1986 that took place at the Chernobyl (now part of Ukraine) nuclear facility in the Soviet Union.

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6 March 2019

Leon Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism

Ninety years ago this January, Leon Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin and his increasingly powerful bureaucracy gave the command.

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2 May 2018

200 years of Karl Marx: Marxist ideas more relevant than ever

Marx was born 200 years ago on 5 May. Together with Engels, he formulated the ideas of scientific socialism which were to shake the world

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28 February 2018

Corbyn didn't collaborate with Stalinism - but with Trotskyists against it

Sun 'commie spy' smear: Jeremy Corbyn stands accused of collaborating with Czechoslovak Stalinism - but his backing of a Trotskyist call for workers' democracy shows the opposite

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14 February 2018

Czechoslovakia 1968: 'Prague Spring' challenges Stalinism

Frustrated workers and youth took the removal of their hardline Stalinist president as the cue

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15 November 2017

The Socialist Inbox

Letters to the Socialist's editors including cancer treatment privatisation, The Death of Stalin, mental health cuts and Arriva profits.

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25 October 2017

Well-deserved ridicule of Stalinism is impressive, funny but flawed

Film - The Death of Stalin: Fans of The Thick of It's lampooning of New Labour will notice parallels. The Stalinists, like the Blairites, are egotistical buffoons, completely isolated from the working class

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18 October 2017

Russia, October 1917: When workers took power

The centenary of the Russian revolution has led to an outpouring of bile - not mainly aimed at the February revolution, but at October

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22 March 2017

Precise, visceral account of working class heroism

Non-fiction review - 'Spain in our hearts': Left-leaning academic Adam Hochschild's remarkable latest work collects the visceral stories of Americans and Canadians who fought fascism as part of the 'International Brigades' in Spain's 1936-9 civil war

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1 March 2017

Lessons of Russia 1917 for women's struggle today

The 1917 Russian revolution was a momentous moment in working class history, in which women played a pivotal and active role

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8 February 2017

Smearing socialism by attacking the arts

The Russian revolution a hundred years ago is still a terrifying calamity - for billionaire thieves, warmongers and their political defenders. But for the working class, it meant a boom in living standards, freedom and imagination.

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27 September 2016

Leon Trotsky's living legacy

Review by Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe of "The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky", published in the latest issue of Socialism Today.

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Leon Trotsky

11 August 2016

Trotskyism: what is it?

Trotskyism has been in the news since Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, accused some new members of the Labour Party of being supporters of Trotsky.

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24 February 2016

Khrushchev: the Stalinist who denounced Stalin

60 years ago, at the 20th conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956, first secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced the dictatorial crimes of Joseph Stalin who had died in 1953.

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24 February 2016

Hong Kong: new year riot

Police violence must be condemned: Brutal policing caused a riot in the downtown district of Mong Kok on the first night of the Chinese New Year, 8 February. Socialists on the ground give an eyewitness report.

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2 September 2015

Zimmerwald Conference 1915: lessons for the socialist movement

100 years ago, during the carnage of World War One, a small number of socialist delegates assembled at an anti-war conference in Zimmerwald, Switzerland.

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French resistance fighters liberated Paris from Nazi occupation

27 May 2015

VE Day: When 'liberation' meant socialism

Commemorations marking the 70th anniversary 'victory in Europe' (VE) day recently took place in Britain (and throughout the world) with establishment dignitaries saluting veteran service men and women who liberated Europe from the clutches of fascism

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