At the turn of the last century, Ukraine’s labor movement was subject to tsarist domination and divided along linguistic lines. The revolutions of 1917 inspired calls for self-determination and the formation of a common Ukrainian identity.
Go ahead and laugh: newly declassified sections of a Justice Department report suggest that the Russiagate conspiracy theory may itself have been part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign.
Generations of left-wing thinkers have fundamentally misunderstood the young Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy.
The risk of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is low but rising. It’s deeply concerning. But we should also resist the kind of alarmism that is counterproductive to both principled internationalism and winning a world free of nuclear weapons.
A Chinese proposal for peace in Ukraine has been gaining traction, including from the two warring sides. The question is whether the Biden administration will lend its support — a prospect that will likely require antiwar organizing in the United States.
After a Ukrainian missile mishap in Poland, misinformation blaming Russia quickly spread. The lie came from precisely the “authoritative sources” now being treated as the arbiters of truth by social media platforms.
Trump’s inauguration set off an unprecedented dirty war from the Washington establishment. A President Sanders would face even worse.
Sweden’s left has historically been opposed to joining NATO. But as the war in Ukraine made joining the alliance popular, Sweden’s Social Democrats changed tack, alienating many of their supporters and exposing deep divisions among the Left in the process.
Ronald Suny has given us the best picture to date of Stalin’s path to the October Revolution. But the story of the future dictator’s early life doesn’t explain the rise of Stalinism. The key developments and choices that produced that system came after the Bolsheviks took power.
There’s good reason to speculate that the Pandora Papers, the massive leak exposing the tax-dodging practices of the global superrich — which includes plenty of Russians and Chinese, but almost no Americans — is a CIA plant. Nevertheless, it’s a newsworthy story that deserves the attention it’s gotten.
Developmentalist nationalism is a poor substitute for socialism.
The Soviet Union’s collapse created opportunities for nationalist elites. Azerbaijan's current campaign of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh has been enabled by both this instability and regional jostling for influence by Russia, Turkey, and others.
Qatar’s World Cup is the culmination of decades of football capitalism — a victory for big corporations and repressive governments, and a tragedy for the fans and workers who make the game.
Netflix’s Trotsky miniseries demonizes its namesake with antisemitic themes and rank nationalism.
The borders of Ukraine are no more arbitrary than those of Poland, Greece, Italy, or Germany.
The antiwar movement was right to challenge the lies used to justify the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We should be equally willing to denounce Vladimir Putin’s fake pretexts for war against Ukraine.
This morning, Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to a cease-fire after almost two weeks of fighting over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. But like after the last truce in 1994, there can be no enduring peace without a political solution — one that overcomes the violent legacy of the Soviet collapse in the Caucasus.
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
A diplomatic settlement to bring the war in Ukraine to a close won’t be easy. But it’s not impossible.
Democrats like to think of themselves as “reality-based” people who “follow the science.” But lately, they have been engaged in irrational fearmongering over Russia and China that is reminiscent of their disastrous Cold War–era paranoia about the Soviets.