Category: Collapse of communism
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How the Morning Star reported the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989
By late December 1989, the revolution sweeping across the Eastern Bloc had reached Romania and in the days before Christmas, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu attempted to shore up his regime by launching a military offensive against those protesting against the dictatorship. On December 21, Ceausescu attempted to give a speech in Bucharest which descended into…
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‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War
Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall,…
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How the Morning Star reported the fall of the Berlin Wall
Two days before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Morning Star (the paper nominally tied to the newly established Communist Party of Britain) had a two page spread celebrating the 72nd anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. Interviewing Yuri Kasin of the Soviet Union’s Social Sciences Institute, the article praised…
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New stuff for those interested in communist history
For those interested in communist history, I just thought I’d flag two new publications. Firstly, there is a new issue (#6) of Twentieth Century Communism journal has just been published by Lawrence & Wishart. Now published twice a year, this journal has some of cutting-edge historical research on communism (particularly communism in the Western world).…
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Feb 25, 1956: Khrushchev gives “Secret Speech” to 20th Congress of the CPSU
In his autobiography Interesting Times, Eric Hobsbawm wrote: There are two ‘ten days that shook the world’ in the history of the revolutionary movement of the last century: the days of the October Revolution,… and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (14-25 February 1956). Both divide it suddenly and irrevocably into…
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Is 2013 the Socialist Workers Party’s 1956?
After the SWP convened its ‘special conference’ in March this year, I posted a blog positing the question whether this was a turning point for the far left in Britain. I wondered whether the number of people turning away from the SWP and its diminishing stature within the wider leftist, labour and progressive circles in…
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Did 1989 matter? British Marxists and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc
November 9 is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (amongst other incidents in modern German history). This is traditionally viewed as a major turning point for the international communist movement, although I would argue that it didn’t ‘shock’ the movement like the events of 1956. I thought I would post a link…
New Historical Express 