Russian Communists Research Articles

The Historical Policy of the Russian Communists at the Present Stage.

Unified assessments of the past for mass political movements representing the extreme flanks of the political spectrum have become an integral part of party identity in modern society. The activity of political parties can have a significant impact on the memory of society, change collective memories of individual events and even entire historical periods. The author of the article analyzes the attitude of modern Russian communists to the key events of history, identifies the features of their party historical policy, compares approaches with other political parties and narratives of the Soviet era. The main sources were official documents of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the party "Communists of Russia", as well as speeches, interviews and publications of their leaders. The Communist parties turn mainly to the history of Russia, starting with the revolutionary events of 1917. Although Communists actively use formulations from Soviet narratives, their own attitude has been formed to a number of events and processes. The most important differences are related to the assessment of the February Revolution and its results, the perception of the policy of I. V. Stalin. Many historical events (de-Stalinization, the collapse of the USSR) of the party are explained by the presence of international conspiracies, not internal processes. The "Communists of Russia" and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation use their ideas about the past in different ways: the former actively propagandize them during election campaigns and build their election programs on them, the latter weakly use historical politics during electoral battles, making the programs as neutral as possible, but during the inter-election period they actively promote their vision of the past.

The territory of the spread of mass man-made famine of 1921–1923 in Ukraine in the politics of the communist regime

The purpose of our research is to highlight the policy of the communist regimeregarding the official recognition of the limits of the spread of famine in Ukraine in 1921–1923 andan indication of the factors that influenced the correction of the disaster area.The scientific novelty of the publication is a comprehensive analysis of normative-legal acts,according to which the officially recognized limits of the spread of the famine of 1921-1923 werechanged in Ukraine.Conclusions.. The confrontation between Ukrainian and Russian communists on the issueof recognizing the famine in Ukraine is shown, in particular, the definition of the territory of itsdistribution. Moscow’s policy of downplaying the scale of the catastrophe and forming a commonopinion about its locality in certain regions is traced. Several legislative acts are involved, directlyor indirectly pointing to the actual territories covered by the famine of 1921-1923. The connectionbetween determining the scale of famine and Moscow’s plans for Ukrainian bread is proved.

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

М. Бердяєв про національну російську інтерпретацію марксистської концепції революції (досвід герменевтичного аналізу).

In the article was given the N. Berdyaev’s interpretation of Marxism transformation specifics in historical practice of Russian society. The relevance of this study lies in the analyzing of undeniable importance: how Western ideological doctrines are transformed by non-Western societies in accordance with their value orientations, internal attitudes, and needs.The sources for this work writing were, first of all, the numerous works of N. Berdyaev himself, devoted to the problems of history and historical eschatology, personal freedom, and the spiritual determination of social revolutions. The subject of analysis was also the political and philosophical “Silver Age” works, devoted to revolutionary topics of the late XIX – early XX century. A number of provisions from domestic and foreign works on the problems of revolutionary modernity and “post-modernity” were also attracted. This article also includes author’s thoughts published on pages of a number of domestic scientific journals.N. Berdyaev defined the Russian revolution as a revolution of unique conditions and unique content. And only “very changed, transformed Marxism” could respond to these “unique conditions and contents”. The main claim of Leninism was to become the new activist Marxist philosophy of the “ proletarian revolutions era”. He relied on the thesis of Marx and Engels that a "jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom" would necessarily occur.Lenin and the Russian Communists managed to convince themselves that for them this time of the "big jump" had already come. They felt within themselves the strength and ability to change the whole world with the help of "extreme" revolutionary activity,. We observe something similar later on with the example of the Maoist “big jump”.According to this super-activist intention, Bolshevik theory is trying to give a new interpretation to dialectical materialism. The main category here is the category of self-movement. The properties of the spirit are transferred to matter – freedom, activity, mind. The activity of the proletariat forms the economy, processes of the environment in his own way. This is the philosophy of activism and titanism which have to inherent to the proletarian mind.Orthodox and at the same time activist Soviet philosophy, Berdyaev defined as the philosophy of social titanism. Philosophical work should be "built into" labor, in social construction, should serve it. Absolute truth is recognized only in activity, in struggle, in labor efforts. The titanic exaltation of revolutionary will presupposes the existence of a real world.Leninism also claimed a new understanding of freedom. Here, freedom is not understood as freedom of choice, but as an active change of life, as an act that is carried out not by an individual, but by a social person, after he made a choice. Berdyaev indicates that the individual does not have freedom from the social collective, he does not have a personal conscience and personal consciousness. The freedom of the individual lies in exceptional fitness for the collective. But if the personality has adapted and merged with the collective, then he receives tremendous freedom and tremendous power in relation to the rest of the world.Communist moral consciousness is torn by the contradiction between the attitude to the past and the present, on the one hand, and attitude to the future, on the other. There is no one humanity yet. There are classes of exploiters and exploited. Therefore, there can be no single morality. But in the future, after the world communist revolution, when the classes disappear, and a single humanity would be formed – then an integral universal human morality will arise. According to N. Berdyaev, Russian communism, if wee look at it deeper, is a deformation of the Russian idea, which took ugly forms in the atmosphere of World War I and social decay.The general historical conclusion of Berdyaev is quite pessimistic. It is very consonant with our political experience: "A revolutionary myth always contains an unconscious deception, and at the same time it is impossible without a revolutionary myth ... In this sense, it will never be realized within the framework of this world, in the kingdom of Caesar".

Postrevolutionary Syndromes

Postrevolutionary Syndromes Éric Aunoble Gianni Haver, Jean-François Fayet, Valérie Gorin, and Emilia Koustova, eds., Le spectacle de la Révolution: La culture visuelle des commémorations d'Octobre( The Spectacle of the Revolution: The Visual Culture of the Commemorations of October). 301 pp. Lausanne: Antipodes, 2017. ISBN-13 978-2889011353. CHF 36. Aleksandr Reznik, Trotskii i tovarischi: Levaia oppozitsiia i politicheskaia kul´tura RKP(b), 1923–1924(Trotskii and Comrades: The Left Opposition and the Political Culture of the RCP[b]). 382 pp. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5943802249. Andy Willimott, Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917–1932. 203 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0198725824. £60.00. The centenary of the Russian Revolution had the welcome effect of bringing the events of 1917 back to the forefront of Western public interest. Yet it reduced an entire process to two dates at best, February and October. The Russian Revolution was not only the history of two insurrections; nor was it the matter of a single year. At the end of 1917, there were still many events to come; and the changes in Russia's political, economic, and social structures were only beginning. It would take at least three more years of turmoil and struggle to shape the new regime. In addition to the country's appalling situation at the end of the Civil War and the concern about the future of its people, there are questions about its supporters' state of mind. A look through the Communist Party's archives for 1920–23 reveals entire folders of documents about sick leaves on physical or mental grounds. Exhaustion was not only the consequence of stress, disease, and poor material condition; it also [End Page 879]reflected acute social and political concerns. How could an activist transcend his/her own heroism and dedication during the Revolution and Civil War? How would he/she build a new set of beliefs and values adapted to the new period of "peaceful socialist construction"? Three recent books give us some enlightening clues about different ways of tackling this issue. One option was to stick to revolutionary ideals in politics as the Left Oppositionists did. A second consisted in transferring communist commitment to everyday life and becoming a communard. Ossifying the past by celebrating the revolution again and again was a third alternative. ________ Lev Trotskii's struggle against Stalin was magnified for a long time as revolutionary romanticism before being vilified as a mere struggle for power between leaders. Yet this crucial episode of early Soviet history is still a new field for academic research. 1The young Russian historian Aleksandr Reznik aims at going beyond "textocentrism" and "Trostkocentrism" (14) and tries to describe the 1923 Left Opposition as a living social group and not only as Trotskii's followers or disembodied bearers of ideology. On the basis of party and state sources from the center and the provinces (mostly Perm´), Reznik delineates the "political culture" (19) of Russian Communists, defined not only as a set of values but also as practices, emotions, and ways of communicating. The chronological framework of his study covers a short period, from August 1923 until January 1924. Two texts were milestones of the crisis: the "Declaration of 46" in October 1923 claimed that "The factional regime must be eliminated and … must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and inner-party democracy." In December, Trotskii published a series of articles in Pravdaarguing for The New Courseand analyzing bureaucratization, which was for him the background of the struggle inside the Party itself. However, the 13th Party Conference ended on 18 January with the defeat of the opposition, three days before Lenin's death became a major reason to close off discussion. In the first chapter, Reznik traces this story in detail. He highlights some particularly sensitive core issues in the conflict, which he develops in later chapters: from Trotskii's role and his relations with other oppositionists to the mechanism of inner-party discussion and the type of [End Page 880]arguments exchanged and to the strategy of both camps to obtain defined...

Anarcho-syndicalism and the Russian Revolution: Towards a political explanation of a fleeting romance, 1917–22

The Russian Revolution cast its spell over many European anarchists who became supportive of Bolshevism. The most salient example of this was the Spanish CNT, which became an enthusiastic champion of the Soviet Republic. The Spanish anarchists’ infatuation with Russia was short lived and by 1922 the CNT had reaffirmed its libertarian traditions. The fleeting romance of the Spanish anarchists and the Russian communists has often been explained as a mere misunderstanding, produced by the dearth of reliable news from Russia in the early years of the revolution. This paper will challenge this empirical argument, and instead focus on a series of political and psychological factors that filtered the anarchists’ appraisal of the Russian Revolution: the experience of opposition to reformist Social Democracy, especially after 1914, which created new affinities between anti-war Marxists and anarchists; the conditions of class odium and revolutionary optimism of these stormy years, which made anarchists receptive to the ruthless methods of the Bolsheviks; and the dynamics of political competition and the opportunities that the association with the victorious Russian Revolution afforded to anarchist organizations. The paper will conclude with some comparative observations on other European anarcho-syndicalist movements.

MANCHUKUO AND BEYOND: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ZHANG MENGSHI

Zhang Mengshi died in late 2014 at the age of ninety-two, shortly after his autobiography was published. He was born into a life of privilege because his father Zhang Jinghui was a close confidant of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. Mengshi was a boy in Harbin in the 1930s when Russian influences dominated the city, then when his father became prime minister of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1935 he lived with his family in Hsinking, the new capital. He studied in Japan in the early 1940s as war in the Pacific intensified. His father upheld the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, while Mengshi secretly worked with the Communist underground to undermine the occupation. When Soviet troops arrived in 1945 to take over from the defeated Japanese, Mengshi was also arrested and sent to Siberia, though he was willing to help the Russian Communists. In 1950 he returned to the new People's Republic of China, to work with the captured Chinese and Japanese from former Manchukuo, including his own father and former emperor Puyi, teaching them about the crimes they had committed. In this article Mengshi's fascinating autobiography is summarized and commented on.

The Finnish Battle for Identity: Finnish Socialism, Nationalism and Russian Ideological Intervention in the Finnish Civil War

The Finnish Civil War, fought from January to May 1918, was one of the many small scale Eastern European conflicts fought in the ideological and ethnic turmoil that followed the Russian Revolution and the First World War. The war was fought between socialist Finnish Reds and conservative Finnish Whites. Despite its class conflict characteristics, the Civil War was manufactured by the Whites as a War of Liberation from Russia. The Whites successfully mobilized Finnish nationalism by exploiting the nature and history of Finnish socialism to reveal contradictions in socialist policies and painting the Reds as puppets of Russian communists.

RKP (RUSYA KOMÜNİST PARTİSİ) B (BOLŞEVİK) MÜSLÜMANLARI BÜROSUNUN TÜRKİSTAN BÖLGESİNDEKİ YEREL HALKIN HAKLARINI KORUMADAKİ ROLÜ

Colonialist policy of Soviet power in Turkestan and actions aimed at a strong centralization of all branches of power has led to greater dissatisfaction among representatives of local population in ruling bodies of TASR. When Russian communists carried out a policy of oppression and disregard towards local people, many representatives of local ethnicities in Turkestan began to implement the ideas of October among their own people in order to adapt them to peculiarities of this region. In this regard, Muslim Bureau of RCP (B), which is composed of such national Communists as Turor Riskulov, Kaygusiz Otaboev, Abdullah Rahimboev, Sanjar Isfandiyarov, Nazir Turakulov, Inomjon Hidiraliev, Sultonbek Hujanov, Nizomiddin Huja and Abdullah Avloniy, played a crucial role. Actions supporters of idea of unity of Turkestan - Muslim Bureau were

Между традицией и утопией: левый консерватизм в России

It is generally accepted that socialism and conservatism have nothing in common. In Russia however the large political organization, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the CPRF), exists whose ideology includes both left-wing (soviet, communist) and right-wing (traditionalist) values. That’s why we may treat the CPRF as left-wing conservative party. But why is such a combination of left-wing and conservative concepts possible? In search of explanation, the author analyses the mutual relations between conservatism and socialism in 19th and 20th centuries. He stresses that already in 19th century conservatism and socialism possessed some contact points. Both socialists and conservatives denied liberal civilization based on individualism and rationalism. In tsarist Russia Slavophiles and radical populists (narodniki) contrasted the values of Russian peasant community with the individualism of bourgeois Europe. After the 1917 October revolution some intellectual trends emerged which regarded the revolution and communism as a continuation of Russian tradition (“national bolshevism”, Eurasianism, communist “neo-slavophilisme” of 1970s). In the author’s view they were spiritual forerunners of modern Russian left-wing conservatism. After the Russian Communist party’s restoration in 1993 left-wing conservatism became the dominant trend in its leadership. In the midst of 1990s the leader of the CPRF Gennadyi Zyuganov revised ideology of the party combining communism with Russian patriotism, Marxism with the views of Russian conservative philosophers. Zyuganov asserted that Russian tradition had communitarian, collectivist and statist nature, and socialism therefore was its organic product. In his opinion the main task of the CPRF was to carry out the synthesis of “red” ideal of social justice and “white” ideal of powerful national state. Analyzing the worldview of the CPRF the author draws a conclusion that Russian communists’ left-wing conservatism has some common points with authentic conservatism but at the same time it possesses certain reactionary features.

The “War on Terror” Narrative: Discourse and Intertextuality in the Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality - By Adam Hodges

The on Narrative: Discourse and Intertextuality in the Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality. By Adam Hodges. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 180 pp. Just about every book written on the George W. Bush administration and its War on Terror has quoted Bush's speeches, highlighting a few rhetorical flares and strategies to make specific points. However, most such works are not empirically and systematically focused on the linguistic aspect of the administration's conduct. The works that are linguistically focused tend to be published in the form of journal articles, so they typically examine only a few particular dimensions of the discourse. Adam Hodges' book stands out as a systematic, longitudinal, and empirical investigation that uses an integrative approach to analyze an administration's use of language. The book begins by analyzing the different kinds of discursive practices used by Bush to construct the War on Terror Narrative. Chapter 2 focuses on the systematic use of metaphors and analogies according to established frames. Chapter 3 describes the particulars of a political narrative that consists of events, characters, and settings. Chapter 4 shows how political speakers build causal links between political enemies, agents, and organizations. They do so by depicting a mutual complementariness among the enemies and by erasing important differences among them. Readers thus come to recognize common rhetorical strategies utilized by many U.S. presidents to instigate wars. They will also be impressed by how much content within political realities is produced in language. The second part of the book centers on how the narrative was circulated, reiterated, and adapted by the supporters, opponents, and discussants of the president's policies. Chapter 5 describes the characteristics of discursive sound bites and talking points. Hodges argues that because the general public rarely hears presidential speeches in their entirety, an important purpose of the speeches is to present sound bites and talking points that can be easily quoted and repeated. Writers, anchors, and commentators participate in this circulation as they reiterate the president's language. By contrast, opponents attempt to reshape the memorable phrases in creative ways--notably from weapons of terror and of mass destruction to weapons of misdirection and of mass distraction. Chapters 6 and 7 enliven the previous discussion. They are based on focus group interview data with 26 college students, all members of College Democrats or College Republicans at an unnamed U.S. college. Readers will see the synonymy of the phrases Islamo-facism, terrorism, totalitarianism, evil Islamic radicalism, and militant Jihadism in the linguistic and cognitive framework of the war supporters in the sample--as well as perceived equivalences among Hitler, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, and bin Laden. They will also see how these linguistic and cognitive links took the form of a spontaneous flow. This spontaneity is not surprising given a president who had repetitively equated Chinese communists, Russian communists, Nazi fascists, the Khmer Rouge, and Pearl-Harbor-attacking Japanese imperialists with socialists and terrorists of all kinds in history. …

Foreigners in the defence of South Africa

South Africa and the rest of the Free World is presently engaged in a concerted struggle against the Russian communists who seek to gain world power. The Soviet Union is striving to subject South Africa to a communist regime which would enable it to gain access to the country's geostrategic facilities as well as its mineral wealth. The physical assault against the Republic is conducted by Russian supported revolutionary and terrorist organizations whose aim it is to cause anarchy, chaos, dislocation and wide-spread violence. Additionally, Cuban and East German surrogate forces are operating in neighbouring countries to the north. These threats against South Africa are escalating in scope and intensity by the day and for this reason, it is obliged to muster the support of everyone in the country. including that of non- South Africans. In the past the defence of the Republic rested exclusively on the shoulders of South African-born young men whose selfless service was often sacrificed at the cost of their academic, professional and personal ambitions. Their military commitments. moreover. placed them at a disadvantage against non-citizens who, exempted from duty, could pursue their tertiary educational careers unhindered. However, the newly-promulgated amendment to the Defence Act, which makes provision for the acquisition of South African citizenship by virtue of residence in this country, seeks to spread the defence burden more justly. New South African citizens have therefore been called upon since October 1984 to accept co-responsibility for military duty in the country.

How happy to call oneself a Turk: provincial newspapers and the negotiation of a Muslim national identity

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Imagining the Secular Nation: Mustafa Kemal and the Creation of Modern Turkey 2. Narrating the Nation: Print Culture and the Nationalist Historical Narrative 3. Provincial Newspapers and the Emergence of a National Print Culture 4. Religious Print Media and the National Print Culture 5. Muslim Turks against Russian Communists: The Turkish Nation in the Emerging Cold War World 6. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Mehmed the Conqueror: Negotiating a National Historical Narrative 7. Religious Reactionaries or Muslim Turks?: Print Culture and the Negotiation of National Identity Conclusion. A Muslim National Identity in Modern Turkey Notes Bibliography Index

Cinema, Local Power and the Central State: Agencies in Early Anti-Religious Propaganda in Uzbekistan

AbstractLenin, Stalin or Trotsky took early measures to control the cinema in order to transform and enlighten the masses and to implement a proletarian and atheist culture that could replace former norms and homogenize beliefs and values. However, the use of theatre or cinema as a vector for cultural changes was also praised—in a less conceptualised manner—by some Muslim Turkestani élites, who had come to consider, at least as early as 1913, performing and visual arts a mirror that could help society to understand its illnesses and thus to overcome them. The early Soviet period radicalized these conceptions of power and enlightenment toward cinema, which proved a locus for political debates, modernization and agencies that were contended, throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, by Russian Communists and vernacular political or cultural élites in power. Examples of early anti-religious policy as well as film propaganda shed light on this process. In the Soviet context, the analysis of film production permits us to ascertain a complex set of dependencies and agencies between central and local powers, between artists and politics. This article will first focus on a brief institutional history and on the way vernacular élite and ordinary people welcomed the cinématographe in order to underline its peculiar position for our understanding of the cultural changes in the inter-war period. Second, it will examine how officials organised antireligious policy in Uzbekistan, using film in particular. Finally, the article will discuss anti-religious films and their ambivalence until 1937.

Outline History of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Independentists): An Emancipatory Communism 1918–1925

This article examines an aspect of the Russian and East European Revolutions that has been largely overlooked by historians. That of the Independentist Ukrainian Marxists who challenged both the Russian Communists and the Ukrainian nationalists in their quest for an independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Originating in Ukrainian Social-Democracy, the Nezalezhnyky (Independentists) anticipated many of the ideas of the communist oppositions' who sought to reassert the libertarian goals of the revolution. Struggling first within the Ukrainian Peoples Republic then the Ukrainian SSR, their campaign had international ramifications and gained the support Bela Kun's Soviet Hungary. In 1919, commanding a section of the Red Army the Nezalezhnyky led a pro-soviet rebellion larger and far more serious than the Kronstadt uprising. Organised as the Ukrainian Communist Party, between 1919–1925 they were the last legal-opposition party in the USSR. In the face of harassment they were the only communists to exp...

FRIENDSHIP IN TIMES OF FACTIONALISM AND TERROR: ALEKSANDR SHLIAPNIKOV AND SERGEI MEDVEDEV

Personal relationships both responded to and affected the course of political change in early Soviet history. Friendships belonged to the web of connections between personalities of early Soviet political history; therefore, studying friendships can aid our understanding of how politics changed over time. The friendship between the Russian Communists and trade union leaders Aleksandr Shliapnikov and Sergei Medvedev was inseparable from their political partnership as leaders of the Workers’ Opposition. Their friendship arose through work, was strengthened through political alliance and under fire from Communist Party leaders, and was challenged by Stalinist terror but not destroyed. It provided the framework for their resistance to Stalinist political repression. Nevertheless, during Stalin’s terror, the intimacy of friendship was cast as subversive.

The Moscow workers' movement in 1921 and the role of non-partyism

THE THEME OF THIS ARTICLE is the upsurge of the workers' movement in Russia in 1921 following the end of the civil war, with specific reference to Moscow. There were two main aspects to this movement: first, the wave of protests triggered in February 1921 by supply shortages, and second, the resurgence of working-class political activity in March-April 1921, during the Moscow soviet elections that immediately followed the tenth Communist Party congress and the adoption of measures that formed the basis of the new economic policy (NEP). The article will argue, first, that the protests over supply were less political, and less united against the Bolshevik government, than has been presumed, and that, in terms of the resurgence of working-class politics, the soviet election campaign was more significant. Second, it will argue that the principal form this political resurgence took was not support for the Mensheviks and SRs but the development of a non-partyist tendency among workers that has received less attention than it deserves. This non-partyist tendency included elements close to SR and Menshevik ideas, but also egalitarian and workerist strands that in October 1917 had sided with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks' refusal to co-operate with this tendency was an important blow against post-civil war hopes of reviving participatory democracy and reversing progress towards a one-party state.

Russian neo-communism: G. Zyuganov and the quest for a third way

The study analyzes the phenomenon of the Russian 'neo-communism', i.e. provides an interpretation of the basic ideological and theoretical views of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Starting from the idea of the disappearance of the political significance of Marxism ('the end of utopia'), the phenomenon of the unexpected revival of the CPRF is thematized in party-institutional and ideological terms. Without going into the complex social and economic preconditions for CPRF's success in Russian political life, the author limits his analysis to an interpretation of the ideology of the 'new Russian communists', examining its relation to the classical 'Marxist-Leninist' legacy. On the basis of an analysis of the works by Genadij Zyuganov it is suggested that the political influence exerted by the CPRF cannot be taken as evidence of the revival of this legacy, since Russian neo-communism is a peculiar synthesis of 'leftist' and 'rightist' traditions. In the opinion of the author, at the core of this synthesis lies a quest for a specific 'third way' which historically has often characterized Russian intellectual and political tradition.

The affinities of Lenin and Gramsci: implications for radical adult education theory and practice

The Russian communists are a first-class ruling elite. As all those who have dealt with him have attested, Lenin has revealed himself as the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe. He is a man who radiates prestige, a man who can enflame and discipline whole populaces; a man whose vast brain can dominate all those social energies, throughout the world, which can be turned to the benefit of the revolution; a man who can check and even checkmate, the most wily and refined statesman of the bourgeois political routine. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1919]: 92) One of the most striking characteristics of Leninism is its formidable coherence and consistency. Leninism is a unified system of thought and practical action, in which everything hangs together and everything confirms everything else, from the general conception of the world right down to the most minute problems of organization. The fundamental nucleus of Leninism, where practical action is concerned, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and all the tactical and organizational problems of Leninism are linked to the question of how best to prepare and organize for the proletarian dictatorship. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1925]: 281-282) And let no-one say that the Leninist criteria for Party organization are peculiar to the Russian situation and that it is a purely mechanical approach to try to apply them to Western Europe. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1925]: 285)

Lessons from the New History of the Cold War

INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE NEW HISTORY OF THE COLD WARTHE END OF THE COLD WAR HAS BROUGHT A WEALTH OF MEMOIRS, materials, and revelations from the former Soviet empire that has opened a world that Westerners thought might be closed from view forever. As more of the 'missing pages' of cold war history are found, important questions have been resolved, startling secrets have been revealed, and vexing debates have been settled. What we have found has been on occasion amusing: Leonid Brezhnev's diaries, for example, show that he thought a great deal about his weight, the number of animals he hunted, his naps - and precious little about running a nuclear superpower. Too often, we have encountered the bizarre and tragic: the suspicions about steroid use by the hulking women of the East German Olympic teams turned out not only to be true, but sadly to be only a small part of a larger programme in which innocent children were routinely marinated in dangerous drugs simply for the greater glory of the German Democratic Republic. And at times stories have emerged that are terrifying in their implications: the previously censored pages of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs tell us that even as he was trying to extricare himself from the Cuban crisis in 1962, Fidel Castro was urging him to launch an all-out nuclear attack on American cities.We now have answers - to borrow a phrase from John Gaddis, 'we now know' - but what have we learned? To judge by the reaction of some, particularly in the academic community, we've learned little indeed. While these new revelations have led some to a final overcoming of denial about the dangerous and aggressive nature of Soviet communism, for others they have led to a revisionist retrenchment, in which East and West are somehow both at fault, and that in the end 'we all lost' the cold war. (Obviously, very few Russian communists would accept this relativistic formulation; much of their anger at the regime of Boris Yeltsin is grounded in a distinct feeling that the United States inflicted a humiliating defeat on their Soviet motherland.) Whatever one makes of them, the archival materials pouring out of eastern Europe tell stories of terrible brutality and paranoia behind the former Iron Curtain. Most people seem to have accepted them as establishing beyond doubt the terrible nature of Soviet communism. Those who have not are probably beyond convincing.But there is more to the new history of the cold war than a simple catalogue of Soviet crimes. As morally satisfying as it might be to traditional cold warriors, it is time to forgo debate with the remaining revisionists - who, like the last barricaded Japanese soldiers of World War II, refuse to accept the undeniable - and move on to consider what we might learn, and what lessons we might apply in the future, from the Soviet-American conflict of 1945-91. The end of the cold war does not mean the end of 'cold wars': where conflicting ideologies make confrontation inevitable and nuclear weapons make global war unthinkable, a new cold war can emerge. An obvious possibility is with the People's Republic of China, but there are many other states whose beliefs, combined with the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, could present the West with the need to 'fight' yet another cold war in the near future. It is, therefore, imperative for policy-makers and academic specialists alike to pause at this point in history and to reflect on the origins of the most dangerous struggle in human history and how the West eventually achieved victory in it.LESSONS OF THE COLD WARThree propositions about fighting and prevailing in a 'cold war' emerge from the Soviet-American experience. First, revelations about social and political life, within the Soviet bloc, taken in light of its eventual collapse, suggest that these closed regimes were not only more odious than we knew, but less stable than we assumed. The West, when faced with such opponents, should not miss opportunities to exploit a clear internal weakness: the relationship between the state and society. …