Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has spent her career documenting the history of the USSR. She tells Jacobin about her latest project, which looks at the Soviet citizens who migrated to Australia and their complicated relationship with their homeland.
For all the Soviet Union’s faults, by traversing its vast architectural landscape, we can get a glimpse of what a built environment for the many, not the few, could look like.
Mike Davis forced himself to look at the very worst of our society and world. What he found wasn’t pretty. Yet he never abandoned the search for seeds of positive change — and for socialism.
Svetlana Kana Radević was one of the great architects of socialist Yugoslavia — her emphasis on public space showed what architecture can achieve when liberated from the constraints of the property market.
For many years, Charles Windsor has foisted his opinions about urban design on the British public. The bizarre projects that the new monarch has sponsored, from Dorset to Transylvania, speak volumes about his cloistered and conservative worldview.
Pulp’s 1995 hit “Common People” isn’t just a Britpop classic — it’s a more honest and brutal analysis of class than you’ll hear in the media today.
Soviet architecture had diverse and ambitious ideas for transforming the spaces people live, work, and travel in.
Socialists’ first task in Vladimir Putin’s appalling war on Ukraine: provide unconditional solidarity with its victims.
Though easy targets for fiscal hawks, public architecture that’s luxurious and dramatic — even excessive — should be ours as a right.
British television has increasingly become an arm of the Conservative Party — yet many on the Left nostalgically remember an earlier, more open media landscape. Was the BBC ever ours?
Early Soviet filmmakers took great inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, but his critique of mass production put him at odds with them.
We will not go into the socialist city blindly, but with lessons from a century of experiments.
Going to the movies feels fundamentally different from simply streaming videos: it's a collective experience, and often inspires discussion and argument. In 2021, when the pandemic finally recedes, we should build socialist film clubs.
Elite arguments against tower blocks aren't about safety — they're about contempt for public housing.
The architect Philip Johnson had some good qualities. He was also talentless, a fascist, and a liar.
Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died last week at the age of 85, wasn’t just a sonic genius — he was also a politicized producer whose work was full of demands for justice.
In the twentieth century, socialists and communists used municipal power in Paris to build some of Europe's most ambitious social housing projects — housing that was not only beautiful but made for and by the city's working class.
In the 1920s and ’30s, German publisher Willi Münzenberg built a network of magazines, newspapers, and film studios that terrified big business interests. It became the largest left-wing media operation in history.
This year's Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, went to French architects who rejected the demolition of public housing. Instead, the architects insisted on renovating and expanding public units to make working-class residents' homes more modern, humane, and attractive.
During the Vietnam War, the city of Vinh was almost destroyed by US bombing. Socialists around the world helped rebuild it. Today, Vinh's architecture stands as a monument to that internationalist solidarity.