Soviet Literature

Maxim Gorky

August 1934

Portrait of Maxim Gorky by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky

THE ROLE of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell.

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.

Four Soviet Innovations

POLITSTURM | December 29, 2021

Healthcare Under Socialism: The History of the Soviet Healthcare System

POLITSTURM | September 07, 2021

There are a lot of discussions on the healthcare systems today. Capitalist ideologists try their best to prove that the state healthcare system is too expensive and can not be implemented. But history proved them wrong. How did socialism change the approach to the management of healthcare?

As a result of the October Revolution of 1917, an entirely new state was created in place of the Russian Empire, establishing a proletarian dictatorship. For the first time in history, the country’s resources and means of production were in the hands of the majority of the population, rather than a narrow stratum of the nobility and bourgeoisie. It was a state with different principles of development and a unique communist ideology.

As far back as 1903, Vladimir Lenin outlined the objectives of the state in the sphere of health protection in the 1^st Program of the RSDLP. It stressed the necessity of establishing an 8-hour working day, banning child labor, arrangement of crèches in factories, state insurance for workers, sanitary supervision in factories, etc.  But like any new country, Soviet Russia was faced with many problems in all spheres which had to be solved as effectively and promptly as possible. And one of the most serious problems was the lack of a healthcare system.

The enormous accomplishments of the Soviet Union, despite the fascist encirclement

Caleb Maupin

EDITED BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

An informal chat with Caleb Maupin as your guide to the multitude of news, lies, distortions, rumors, idiocies, hypocrisies, and ideologies that shape our world.