August 6 and 9 mark the anniversaries of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Numerous historical and personal accounts will emerge in the press, recounting the destructiveness, inhumanity, and long-term misery created by the two U.S. bombs. Nuclear...
The criminal legacy of Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin died on April 23 at the age of 76. He was best known for presiding over the 1991 capitalist counterrevolution in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For that reason, few Russian workers mourned his death. His funeral ceremonies were attended by...
The real lessons of the 1956 uprising in Hungary
On June 22, President Bush traveled to Hungary to join a commemoration of an uprising that occurred there 50 years ago, in October-November 1956. He went there as chief representative of U.S. imperialism presiding over a ceremony marking its greatest victory—the...
Yugoslavia: Nationalist competition opened door to imperialist intervention
Can different nationalities coexist within a single, multinational state? Many people point to the fracturing of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s as evidence that such a project is impossible. But in the years after World War II, the Yugoslav socialist revolution...
Oil, imperialism and national conflict in the Caucasus
The September 3 massacre of at least 360 children and adults in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, in the Caucasus region of Russia, shocked the world and brought the conflict in the area into the public eye again. The Caucasus is the area between the Black and...
Lenin, World War I and the social roots of opportunism
Leninism became fully recognized as an extension of Marxism after the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Throughout the world, the mass socialist parties and working class anarchist trends went through major political convulsions. New revolutionary parties,...