From Madrid to Kyiv
A little more than 85 years ago, on 28 March 1939, the Spanish civil war ended. The fascist forces under the command of General Franco entered the capital, Madrid, and it was all over. Spain…
Articles by admin
Review: Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left, by Richard B. Spence
Writing a biography of a man as complex — and elusive — as Boris Savinkov is not an easy task. But Richard Spence has done an exemplary job of this. HIs 1991 book is comprehensive…
Boris Savinkov: Forgotten revolutionary
While there have been countless books and articles about V.I. Lenin, whose death in 1924 has been marked in this newspaper and elsewhere, there are some Russian revolutionaries of that time who have long been…
Gaza and the Left, Here and There
Something strange is happening in American and British politics this year. According to a report in this week’s Sunday Times, the Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer seems on course not just to…
Review: The Ochrana – The Russian Secret Police, by A.T. Vassilyev
This 1930 book is not about that Russian secret police — the one that comes to mind — but about an earlier one, the one which author A.T. Vassilyev commanded until the collapse of the…
Textile workers strike in Egypt
The 3,700 female workers in the Mahalla textile factories were furious. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had earlier in the month raised the minimum wage to 6,000 Egyptian pounds — the equivalent of just…
Review: Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement – The SR Party, 1902 -14, by Nurit Schleifman
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other groups working in opposition to the autocratic regime that ruled Russia until 1917, was rife with secret police agents. The most famous of these, Ievno Azef, rose to become…
Antisemitism and Israel
For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League has been profiling Americans to try to monitor antisemitic beliefs. For the first half century of doing that, they found a fairly steady and ongoing decline in anti-Jewish sentiment….
Review: Pale Horse, by Boris Savinkov
This novel by Russian terrorist icon Boris Savinkov is remarkably similar to his final work, Black Horse, leading one to believe that he chose the titles deliberately. The format is the same: short, dated entries…
Subversive women, subversive films – rediscovering Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she…