Cuba to distribute 200 million doses of its homegrown Covid vaccine to poor countries

by Steve Sweeny

Morning Star | January 26, 2022

Cuban plans to distribute 200 million doses of its homegrown Covid vaccine to lower-income countries were said to have reached a “historic turning point” on Tuesday.

David Adler, who headed a Progressive International delegation to the socialist island, said the “lifesaving package” was an example of vaccine internationalism that saw public health “placed above private profit and petty nationalism.”

On the Death of Lenin

by Joseph V. Stalin

Speech by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin at the beginning of the Second All-union Congress of Soviets (26 January-2 February 1924) just a few days after the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The speech was published in “Pravda” on January 30, 1924:

“Comrades, 

we Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of a special stuff. We are those who form the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin. It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party. It is the sons of the working class, the sons of want and struggle, the sons of incredible privation and heroic effort who before all should be members of such a party. That is why the Party of the Leninists, the Party of the Communists, is also called the Party of the working class.DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO HOLD HIGH AND GUARD THE PURITY OF THE GREAT TITLE OF MEMBER OF THE PARTY, WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, WE SHALL FULFILL YOUR BEHEST WITH HONOUR!

Tales of invasions past: The facts about Russia’s ‘annexation’ of Crimea

By Kate Clark

PEOPLE’S WORLD | January 27, 2022

In this Sunday, March 16, 2014 photo, Crimeans with Russian flags celebrate a referendum on seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia, in Lenin Square in Simferopol, Crimea. | Vadim Ghirda / AP

Kate Clark is the former Moscow correspondent for Britain’s Morning Star newspaper. She was stationed there from 1985-90, during the Soviet Union’s final years. As part of her work, she spent time in Crimea, whose people voted in 2014 to return to Russian administration rather than Ukrainian. With the hype around a possible Russian “invasion” of Ukraine, many commentators are now reviving stories of Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea as an example of the supposed fate that awaits Ukraine. In the following article, Clark looks at the history of Crimea and subverts the mainstream media’s tales of a Russian takeover of the region. It includes excerpts from a forthcoming book on her years in Moscow.

In June 1985, as the Morning Star’s Moscow correspondent, I had the chance to visit the Crimean peninsula, for centuries a holiday and recuperation favorite for Russian leaders and famous writers like Mikhail Lermontov, Anton Chekhov (whose famous short story The Lady with the Little Dog was set in Yalta), Leo Tolstoy (whose family lived for nearly a year in an old mansion in Gaspra), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and many other prominent Russians of pre-revolutionary times.