Category: History
‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
The urban centres are the first to be discovered in the region, challenging archaeological dogma.
Freda Kreier
Nature | May 25, 2022
Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.
Read More »Victory Speech
J.V. Stalin
Date: May 9, 1945
Source: Thirty Years of the Soviet State Calendar, published by Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1947
Transcription/HTML: Mike B. for MIA, 2008
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
COMRADES! FELLOW COUNTRYMEN AND COUNTRYWOMEN! The great day of victory over Germany has arrived. Fascist Germany, forced to her knees by the Red Army and the troops of our Allies, has admitted defeat and has announced her unconditional surrender.
On May 7 a preliminary act of surrender was signed in Rheims. On May 8, in Berlin, representatives of the German High Command, in the presence of representatives of the Supreme Command of the Allied troops and of the Supreme Command of the Soviet troops, signed the final act of surrender, which came into effect at 24 hours on May 8.
Knowing the wolfish habits of the German rulers who regard treaties and agreements as scraps of paper, we have no grounds for accepting their word. However, this morning, the German troops, in conformity with the act of surrender, began en masse to lay down their arms and surrender to our troops. This is not a scrap of paper. It is the actual capitulation of the armed forces of Germany. True, one group of German troops in the region of Czechoslovakia still refuses to surrender, but I hope the Red Army will succeed in bringing it to its senses. We now have full grounds for saying that the historic day of the final defeat of Germany, the day of our people’s great victory over German imperialism, has arrived.
The great sacrifices we have made for the freedom and independence of our country, the incalculable privation and suffering our people have endured during the war, our intense labours in the rear and at the front, laid at the altar of our motherland, have not been in vain; they have been crowned by complete victory over the enemy. The age-long struggle of the Slavonic peoples for their existence and independence has ended in victory over the German aggressors and German tyranny.
Henceforth, the great banner of the freedom of the peoples and peace between the peoples will fly over Europe.
Three years ago Hitler publicly stated that his task included the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the severance from it of the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic and other regions. He definitely said: “We shall destroy Russia so that she shall never be able to rise again.” This was three years ago. But Hitler’s insane ideas were fated to remain unrealized — the course of the war scattered them to the winds like dust. Actually, the very opposite of what the Hitlerites dreamed of in their delirium occurred. Germany is utterly defeated. The German troops are surrendering. The Soviet Union is triumphant, although it has no intention of either dismembering or destroying Germany.
Comrades! Our Great Patriotic War has terminated in our complete victory. The period of war in Europe has closed. A period of peaceful development has been ushered in.
Congratulations on our victory, my dear fellow countrymen and countrywomen!
Glory to our heroic Red Army, which upheld the independence of our country and achieved victory over the enemy!
Glory to our great people, the victor people!
Eternal glory to the heroes who fell fighting the enemy and who gave their lives for the freedom and happiness of our people!
[THIS ARTICLE IS POSTED HERE FOR NON-PROFIT, NON-COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THAT OF ITS AUTHOR(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEW OF THE JOP]
Fate Of The 2 Million Red Army Soldiers – Participants In The Second World War Is Still Unknown
Veronica Kulakova
Izvestia.ru | May 09, 2022
77 years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the fate of 2 million soldiers of the Red Army remains unexplained. In the archives, they are listed as missing, but finding the place of their death or burial is increasingly difficult. Last year, the volunteers of the Search Movement of Russia discovered the remains of more than 21 thousand soldiers, but they were able to identify only 1347 of them: the soldiers’ medallions and books of the Red Army soldier were mostly lost or damaged by time. Each established name and destiny is a contribution to the preservation of the historical memory of both the whole people and specific families.
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“In the Bydgoszcz area, there was a smell of Stalingrad”: What Izvestia wrote years ago, in the days of WWII
Yaroslava Kostenko
Izvstia.Ru | May 09, 2022
February 1945 in the USSR breathed the promise of a victorious spring: the yellowed newspaper pages are full of reports about the successful battles of the Red Army, and the country itself is preparing to celebrate its 27th anniversary. Soviet troops knocked out the enemy from the territories the enemy occupied, but there is no war without losses – the death of the commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, falls like a mourning ribbon on the almost melted snow. The union says goodbye to the hero.
Read More »What does it cost Soviet Union: How Stalingrad was built after the war?
It took 10 years to restore the destroyed city
Sergey Guryanov
Izvestia.Ru | May 09, 2022
Stalingrad was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, and then completely rebuilt. What does it cost to rebuild the city, how much time does it take and by whose hands is it done – in the material of Izvestia.
What was Stalingrad like before the fighting?
Now the length of Volgograd, stretching along the right bank of the Volga, is more than 80 km, and in some places it is only a few kilometers wide. In 1940, the city was smaller, but the general proportions were preserved. The fighting took place on a narrow patch of land, on which from July 1942 to February 1943 a monstrous number of bombs and shells fell, on which hundreds of thousands of people died.
Before the war, the city grew rapidly and in 1925 turned from the county Tsaritsyn into the provincial Stalingrad. In the early 1930s, a state district power station, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the Shipyard, a hardware plant were built and started operating, enterprises opened before the revolution continued to work – the Krasny Oktyabr metallurgical plant, the Barrikady plant.
The infrastructure was also actively developed, new houses were built. For example, in 1938, a residential building was built on Penzenskaya Street, now known as Pavlov’s House – the legendary battlefield of the Battle of Stalingrad. Grandiose plans appeared to rebuild the city named after Stalin according to the idealistic image of the pre-war USSR – it was supposed to be a city of the future, a garden city. But the plans were not destined to come true.
According to the city statistical office, on August 23, 1942, the population of Stalingrad was 494 thousand people. The Stalingrad regional commission for accounting for the damage caused by the Nazi invaders names an even larger number – 551.5 thousand people.
European Communist Initiative: 9th May, a milestone of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples
In Defense of Communism | May 08, 2022
In a statement about the 77th anniversary of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples, the 9th of May, the Secretariat of the Initiative of Communist and Workers’ Parties issued the following statement:
We proudly commemorate 9 May, a milestone of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples. We pay tribute to the millions of people who sacrificed their lives, fought with guns in their hands, and struggled against the fascist imperialist Axis of Germany–Italy–Japan and their allies.
We honour the decisive contribution of the Soviet Union and the glorious Red Army, which suffered 20 million casualties, and the invaluable contribution of the Communist Parties that led the national liberation and anti-fascist movements around the world.
We are inspired by the Antifascist Victory of the Peoples and strengthen our daily struggle against the EU and bourgeois governments, against all those who provocatively attempt to distort 9 May and turn it into “EU Day”. We continue in defiance of those who try to turn black into white by equating communism with the monster of fascism and falsifying History so that the peoples, especially the youth, forget the Antifascist Victory of the peoples and its historical lessons.
Read More »Monuments Evoke Tragic Memories of NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
Balkan Transitional Justice | March 24, 2021
There are memorials across Serbia and Kosovo to commemorate hundreds of people who died during NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which began on March 24, 1999 and is being marked with an official commemoration in Belgrade on Wednesday evening.
Some of them are huge monuments, like the ‘Eternal Flame’ column in the Serbian capital; others are much more modest, like the engraved stone slab in the Kosovo village of Bishtazhin commemorating 41 ethnic Albanians who were mistakenly killed by a NATO air strike.
The Western military alliance launched its air strikes in an attempt to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to end his military campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which involved widespread ethnic cleansing. But as the bombing continued, Milosevic’s army and police force intensified their war and committed a series of massacres of ethnic Albanian civilians.
Read More »Berlin: Thousands marched in honor of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
In Defense of Communism | January 10, 2022
Members and supporters of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), alongside members of the German Communist Party (DKP) and the Socialist Workers Youth (SDAJ), participated on Sunday 9 January in a large rally in honor of slained communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin.
Read More »India’s Revolutionary Spiritual Urge: Bhagat Singh and the Naxalites
Bernard D’Mello
Monthly Review | 2021, Volume 73, Number 7 (December 2021)
Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), the subject of Chris Moffat’s India’s Revolutionary Inheritance and Chaman Lal’s (edited and introduced) The Bhagat Singh Reader, is an iconic figure of the radical left tradition in India. In a trial by a special tribunal that chose to violate basic principles of law and criminal procedure for colonial-political ends, he was convicted of murdering an assistant superintendent of police in 1928. Singh, along with his comrades Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, was executed in Lahore (now in Pakistan) on March 23, 1931, when he was just 23 years old, in the prime of his life.
Having come from the revolutionary strand of India’s struggle for independence, the elite nationalist leadership, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, remained ambivalent about Singh, and nationalist historiography has marginalized his political contributions. His substitution of the slogan “Vande Mataram!” (Salutations to Mother India!) with the rallying cries “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long Live the Revolution!) and “Samrajyawad Ka Nash Ho!” (Death to Imperialism!) was alien to the political sense of India’s elite nationalist leaders. They were apprehensive of Singh’s brand of revolutionary politics appealing to the masses and displacing their own variety of a reformist nationalist mass movement. Indeed, “a confidential Intelligence Bureau account, Terrorism in India (1917–1936) went so far as to declare that ‘for a time, he [Bhagat Singh] bade fair to oust Mr. Gandhi as the foremost political figure of the day.’”1
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