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Fifty years ago, on March 5 1953, Joseph Stalin, the architect of socialism and the inspirer of the victory against the mighty Nazi war machine, breathed his last. Just as during his life, so in his death, he continued to be hated as no-one else by the ideologues of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its agents … [Read more…]

“Stalin – The man who really believed in the working class and evoked from it all that creative genius and energy which has astounded the world for over 30 years and will do more so in the future.” Today, countless millions of people in every country in the world are plunged into the deepest grief … [Read more…]

“Man’s dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once, he must so live as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose; so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past; so live, that dying he can say: All my … [Read more…]

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…]

[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…]

Having cancelled several planned 48-hour strikes in an effort to reach agreement with employers, the first industrial action by firefighters in a generation started at 1800 on Wednesday 13 November with a 48-hour walkout over pay and conditions. In the biggest mobilisation of troops since the Gulf War, 19,000 armed forces, a mixture of army, … [Read more…]