Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

History sanitised Via Michael Roberts "It was Victory in Europe day on Friday 8 May, the 75th anniversary of the day that the 'Allied' powers officially defeated the 'Axis' powers in Europe (but not in Asia). The celebrations in the UK were all about Britain standing alone to defeat the Germans, with a little American help. No mention of the UK's colonial allies in Southern Asia, or the dominions of Australia, Canada etc. And above all, no mention of the role of the Soviet Union and China. But where was the war  won, and who suffered the most casualties?" "The bear that somewhow isn't in the room" Related Every state has its own myths. Here is one of Britain's

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

This is a long radio interview, but it is worth listening to. (You should slide forward to minute 4:00) There is a good argument about why most Russians have been generally passive since the 1991 despite the disaster of the 1990s, and how consent has been gained.  However, it is not clear/elaborated why Russian capitalism remained weak and could not develop a strong competitive capitalist economy or why the Russian capitalist class did not embank on such a project.  Russia Beyond Putin by Tony Wood

Off-the-record Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

A journey into Russia's Muslim heartlands

There were no red banners in Navalny’s largely teenage and twenty-something audience. But if Russia has any revolutionary energy left, it isn’t to be found among Stepakhno’s ‘left patriotic youth’, but here, among Navalny’s supporters. Not that 1917 itself is much of a marker these days: young people are taught next to nothing about the October Revolution, said Violetta Grudina, who heads Navalny’s small but active Murmansk cell. ‘The very word “revolution” has been branded extremist. Better not to talk about it – what if people find out that it’s possible?’   [A Russian] Diary

It is sad but true to say, as Marx Wartofsky has, that "communist politics, as well as anticommunist politics, left the tradition of Marxist scholarship enfeebled."  This is a good piece. Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

What Killed the Promise of Muslim Communism?

The big data revolution can revive the planned economy

In the New York Times, again. When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow

The Life and Death of Yugoslav Socialism

Inside the Gulag

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,"  writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans  suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses  fighting the Red Army. "It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings. Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler (the Washington Post) Yes, that happened despite Stalin's crimes and blunders.

"Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the US government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of US military forces, three by means of CIA-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct US participation, usually through m ilitary coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecede...

I disagree with the writer here in using "socialist states" and "stalinist states" to mean the same thing. The analysis, otherwise, is very interesting. The Anti-colonial Origins of Humanitarian Intervention: NGOs, Human Rights and When Humanitarianism Became Imperialism

"Sisi has never disclosed his plan for the country’s future – assuming he has one. He projects himself as a new Nasser, but his idol had vast resources thanks to the land he confiscated from the rich, the foreign companies he nationalised, and the Soviet Union. Nothing like this is available to Sisi. Since the late 1970s, Egypt’s economy has come under the control of private businessmen able to li quidate their investments and move their funds offshore at the first sign of trouble. And the pockets of Egypt’s supporters in the Gulf are not as deep as those of Communist Russia during the Cold War. Partnership with Egypt’s capitalists in a US-style military-industrial complex might prove useful to the armed forces, but it won’t bring social justice any closer. What will happen when those who currently believe that Sisi’s presidency is the answer to their problems – to unemployment, poverty, inadequate healthcare, under-funded education, shantytowns and all the rest – come to realise...