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…Read more…
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….Read more…
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…Read more…
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…Read more…
Review: The Black Horse, by Boris Savinkov
Boris Savinkov was possibly the most dangerous man in Russia. A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organisation, he was the scourge of the Romanovs in their final years. When the tsarist regime…Read more…
“Putin has murdered Navalny”
When I studied at university, I had access to reprinted editions of many American left publications. Among them was Labor Action, the weekly newspaper of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. I have never forgotten the headline…Read more…
“Someday this war’s gonna end”
One of the great speeches in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” is made by Robert Duvall, playing a somewhat insane U.S. Army colonel in Vietnam. After delivering his oft-quoted “I love the smell of napalm…Read more…
Review: Aseff: The Russian Judas, by Boris Nicolaievsky
By the time this book was published in 1934, the name of Ievno Azef had already faded from popular memory. But a quarter century earlier, he had achieved infamy as the most dangerous man in…Read more…
Stalin and the angels
Keke would have been so proud. When her son Joseph was growing up in the small, dusty town of Gori, she dreamed that one day he would be a priest. He did eventually study at…Read more…
Review: Comrade Valentine, by Richard E. Rubenstein
Sixty years after Boris Nicolaevsky wrote his account of the notorious Ievno Azef — the most infamous police agent to ever infiltrate a revolutionary organisation — Richard E. Rubenstein took a crack at the same…Read more…
Review: The Rumor Game, by Thomas Mullen
Last year, I read Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, a novel set in the near future with an intriguing premise. I enjoyed it, and looked forward to reading The Rumor Game. This book is set in…Read more…
What “Rustin” leaves out
Colman Domingo has just been nominated to win an Oscar for best actor. I hope he wins — and not just because he did an excellent job playing American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in…Read more…
1924: When Socialists, trade unionists and progressives came together
The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his…Read more…
Review: Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature’s Secrets to Longevity, by Nicklas Brendborg
I admit it: I like reading books about ageing, life extension, and immortality. These seem to fall into two categories. Some authors expect to live forever because of the vitamin cocktails they drink every morning…Read more…
Myanmar: A challenge for the world’s unions
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) exists to certify that products coming from the world’s forests are produced responsibly. You may never had heard about the FSC, but if you look around your home, you’ll see…Read more…
Review: Some Service to the State, by Aidan McQuade
Aidan McQuade’s first novel, The Undiscovered Country (2020), was a bit of a hybrid — part crime novel, part history of Ireland in the period just after Partition. It was terrific because McQuade is both…Read more…
Review: The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin
I read this book, the first in the series of 13 novels about the late 19th century Russian detective Erast Fandorin, when it first appeared some twenty years ago. I remember little about the plot,…Read more…
Review: Letter of an Old Bolshevik
This is one of those books where saying who the writer was is contentious. It was initially published anonymously. Later, the exiled Russian Menshevik writer Boris Nicolaevsky was listed as the author. Nicolaevsky always claimed…Read more…
Review: Stalin’s Library – A Dictator and His Books, by Geoffrey Roberts
Geoffrey Roberts is a leading expert on Soviet history and chose a really interesting take on Stalin’s life with this book. His starting principle seems to be that whatever else Stalin was (e.g., a monster)…Read more…
Review: Fake History – 101 Things that Never Happened, by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse
I heard this author interviewed on the Professor Buzzkill podcast recently and loved what she had to say, especially about medieval Europe. Her book is good and entertaining. But she avoids controversy, not really dealing…Read more…