Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Against "totalitarianism": a conversation with Enzo Traverso

In the-called  "communist" countries, Women Had Better Sex ( The New York Times )

This is an interesting discovery. I have never heard of Leonardo Padura before. His words in this interview are of a very intelligent man, especially what he says about Stalinism and socialism . An interview with the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura

A book review Good Communist Homes

China Miéville's book October "is  very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover." John Medherst: " As someone with a book on the Russian Revolution out later this year (August 17th) with a different and more critical take on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I had to buy and read China Mieville’s October. It is, as you would expect, a great read. Vivid and immersive, it skilfully recreates how kinetic, stressful, confusing and exciting February-October 1917 in Russia must have been. But it is very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover. Although it has a brief prologue and epilogue, 95% of the book sticks tightly to the nine months of February-October. As such it is, surprisingly for a Marxist writer, a rather old-fashioned narrative history. Considering that nearly all the main issues and controversies of the Bolshevik revolution arise from events post-October, the decision to barely address that period prevents wide

Sullenly clenching His embalmed fists, He peered through a crack, Just pretending to be dead. He wanted to remember all those Who carried him out. I turn to our government with a plea: To double, And triple the guard at the grave site So Stalin does not rise again, And with Stalin, the past. And later, the main point of the poem: We removed Him From the mausoleum. But how do we remove Stalin From Stalin’s heirs? — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

" To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." The Russian Revolution: What's Left?

Soviet Lithuania in Pictures (1970s - 1990s)

An exhibition Out with bourgeois crocodiles! How the Soviets rewrote children's books