JOHN McINALLY welcomes a rigorous class analysis of the history and exploitation of sectarianism by the Scottish ruling elite
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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]
WILL STONE, JAMES WALSH and MARIA DUARTE review Souleymane’s Story, Sunlight, Good Fortune, and After The Hunt
ALEX HALL recommends an exhaustive investigation of the means by which the Starmer faction assassinated the left
DAVID MORGAN recommends a refreshingly inspiring novel that features encounters with some tremendous women
BOB NEWLAND recommends a political thriller from former anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain
JAMES WALSH speaks to Chris Thorpe-Tracey - among many things, a one-time Morning Star columnist — about songs, cities, politics and prophecy
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.
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Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
RON JACOBS recommends a painstaking study of the communists and revolutionaries who congregated in Moscow after 1917
SAM BROWSE examines how Lenin’s analysis remains relevant for confronting modern challenges of inequality, climate change and rising fascism ahead of an important discussion with the acclaimed historian and activist Paul le Blanc