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Mr Varennikov comes from a poor Cossack family in the Krasnodar region near the Black sea, and was among an early generation of working-class people to receive a good education under Stalin, rising to a senior rank in the army. The day of Stalin’s death was very hard, a real shock. A part of my … [Read more…]

The anniversary of Stalingrad has inspired major celebrations in Russia, but a strange silence here Sixty years ago the greatest battle of the second world war reached its climax. The site of that decisive battle was not the windswept sands of north Africa beloved of British war mythology, nor the broad expanses of the Pacific … [Read more…]

A chemistry professor and member of the Russian Academy of Science. He married Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, in spring 1949 when she was 23, and he 29. They divorced five years after Stalin’s death. It is true that Stalin was a modest person. Everyone knows that after his death he did not leave any property, only … [Read more…]

On 2 February this year, the popular government in Venezuela emerged triumphant from yet another attempt by the united forces of domestic and international capital to bring it down. Having surprised the coup-makers by their readiness to defend the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ by force, the people of Venezuela have, since the defeat of the US-backed coup … [Read more…]

Who put Zoran Djindjic in power? The mainstream media tells us that the Serbian people did. In reality, his popularity rating was always close to zero. Especially after he supported NATO while the bombs were raining on his country. Who put Djindjic in power? The West. Thanks to more than nine years of a crushing … [Read more…]

Dear Sir We read with rapt attention the highly stimulating, well-researched and scholarly piece, stuffed full with a wealth of detail of an unprecedentedly original type, by a certain Mr Johann Hari in the Independent of 5 March (‘Stalin died 50 years ago, but his legacy lives on’). On a more serious note, we had … [Read more…]

As we go to press, US and British imperialism are poised to unleash a murderous, predatory and imperialist war of aggression against Iraq on the pretext of Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but actually to monopolise the oil resources of Iraq and other countries in the Middle East, which account for … [Read more…]

On November 5th 1990, the U.S. House and Senate passed Foreign Operations Appropriation Law 101-513 calling for the cut-off of aid and credits to Yugoslavia, knowing full well the destabilising effect that this would have, since conducting trade without credits is virtually impossible in the modern world. At this time there was no civil war, … [Read more…]

[This article is based on a presentation made by Ian Johnson to the SLP Education School in Yorkshire on 31 August /1 September 2002.] In the latter part of his life (1880, three years before he died) Karl Marx gave an interview to an American journalist, John Swinton of the New York Sun, in which … [Read more…]

The imperialist press is forever complaining that the DPRK and, of course, its most representative spokesman at this time, Comrade Kim Jong Il, is “unpredictable”. This word is chosen not as a term of praise, but in order to suggest irrationality and even insanity. Events of recent weeks, however, show that this “unpredictability” is nothing … [Read more…]