JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
Latest editorial
The political advantage of an anti-war position
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a uniquely nuanced people’s history of the revolutionary period, told from below
BLOODBATH: Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), July 17 1917 - July 4, 1917 (Julian calendar) troops of the Provisional Government fired machine guns at the 500,000 protestors - 700 people were killed, most of them Bolsheviks or Bolshevik sympathisers
[Pic: Viktor Bulla/Public domain]
The bard joins the Carnival Against Fascism, which summer fun sends him down Memory Lane
FIONA O’CONNOR is bowled over by a stunning Welsh language drama
MARIA DUARTE and MICHAL BONCZA review Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, Familiar Touch, Nino, and Toy Story 5
MATTHEW HAWKINS explores the initiatives proposed by HEALING ARTS SCOTLAND
ALEX HALL welcomes an analysis of how modern capitalism is deeply intertwined with emotions, and their manipulation
Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924
Robert Service, Picador, £30
REFERENCES abound to similarities between the current geopolitical context — a combustible mixture of warmongering by corrupt elites, resentful nationalism, and brooding popular discontent — and circumstances on the eve of WWI.
Bellicose politicians today banging the war drums as a distraction would, therefore, do well to revisit the starkest lesson to emerge from a period during which a gasping Europe was drowned in a cauldron of blood.
The defining event of that era was not the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the separate peace agreed between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.
Similar stories
JOHN REES replies to Claudia Webbe
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
STEPHEN BELL reports from a delegation that traced the steps of China’s socialist revolution from its first modest meetings to the Red Army’s epic 9,000km battle to create the modern nation that today defies every capitalist assumption
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY