Russia

Obama’s Syria deal with Russia shows the limits of US power

17 September 2013
US president Barack Obama has stepped back from his threat to bomb Syria. The US and Russia signed an accord in Geneva last Saturday.

Putin’s homophobic laws lie behind a wave of violent attacks across Russia

13 August 2013
Russian Nazis are using a social networking site to target young gay men for torture, according to the human rights group Spectrum.

How Victor Serge kept the flame of the Russian Revolution alive

04 December 2012
Victor Serge was a revolutionary anarchist who went to Russia in 1919 and joined the communists. His articles, books and novels capture the revolutionary experience in the first half of the 20th century.

Eyewitness from Russia: Vladimir Putin's war on the new left

13 November 2012
The recent arrests of socialist leaders in Russia, on charges of organising riots, are the latest step in the Vladimir Putin government’s attempts to stifle opposition.

Putin jails Pussy Riot activists and cracks down on opposition protest

17 August 2012
Three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a prison colony by a Moscow court today, Friday.

Russia's first Occupy protest builds opposition to Putin

16 May 2012
Hundreds of anti-government protesters have been camping out in central Moscow for over a week, in Russia’s first occupy protest.

New mood of opposition to Putin in Russia

08 May 2012
Some 100,000 people took part in an angry demonstration in Moscow on Sunday against the inauguration of President Vladimir Putin.

Russia: anger erupts after election

06 March 2012
Around 20,000 people protested in Pushkin Square in central Moscow on Monday against Vladimir Putin’s claim to have won the presidential election.

Alexandra Kollontai: defining International Women's Day

06 March 2012
A celebration of International Women’s Day in February 1917 was the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution.

Determined Russians demand the removal of Putin

07 February 2012
An angry crowd of more than 100,000 people surged through Moscow last Saturday demanding fair elections.

From peasants to workers

17 January 2012
Russia’s revolutionary movement at the turn of the century was shaped by the country’s large peasantry and small and historically young working class.

The birth of the Bolshevik party

17 January 2012
The Bolshevik party—the party that led the 1917 Russian Revolution—was formed a century ago this month. It did not emerge from nowhere. The Bolsheviks split with the Mensheviks, ending a period in which the two groups had been factions inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

Russia rocked by anti-Putin protests

13 December 2011
At least 80,000 people protested in Moscow last Saturday against the falsification of parliamentary election results.

Collaborators

06 December 2011
Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian dramatist, routinely had his plays banned by the Stalinist authorities in Russia.

Taliban had US blessing

04 October 2011
Russian troops killed between 500,000 and a million Afghans between 1979 and 1989—and discredited the left for a generation. The opposition Mujahideen groups that drove them out then collapsed into warring factions.

The Mother

23 August 2011
A mother in Tsarist Russia is drawn into political activism when she sees the state’s treatment of revolutionary workers.

Crisis of capitalism is far from over

09 August 2011
Leon Trotsky paints a brilliant portrait of the last tsar, Nicholas II, in his great History of the Russian Revolution. He treats Nicholas’s weakness, malice, and stupidity as symptoms of a decaying regime.

Lucian Freud – passing of a master

26 July 2011
Lucian Freud, who died last week at the age of 88, was one of the most famous artists in the world in the second half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. He was hugely successful, which in terms of the contemporary art world means hugely successful with the bourgeoisie. In 2008 one of his paintings, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, was bought by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, for £17 million—the largest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist.

Egyptian Revolution: ‘None of us in our wildest dreams could have imagined what happened that day’

28 June 2011
As the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin said, "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen."

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

03 May 2011
The restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film about a naval mutiny in the 1905 Russian Revolution can now be seen on the big screen.