The Bond Delusion

Posted on by Red Youth Britain, History, USSR

With a new instalment of the 007 franchise having finally been released after a lengthy covid imposed delay, the fictional spy character became the subject of headlines when it was announced that actor Daniel Craig would be stepping down from the role.

As fans agonised over whether the so called ‘woke’ trend in popular culture would result in the character being recast with a female or black actor in the role, a host of journalists were spurred to pen their own personal affirmations of affection for writer Ian Fleming’s suave, unflappable MI6 agent.

One such article, published in the Times on the 13th November and titled ‘How James Bond beat the Soviet Union’, loosely reviews a recent book by Fleming’s nephew James Fleming, Bond behind the Iron Curtain, which hones in on the role perceived to have been played by the 007 films and books in the ‘culture war’ between the imperialist and socialist camps during the cold war. Continue reading “The Bond Delusion” →

Guardian dusts off Mr Jones for another round of anti-Soviet lies

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

In scandalised tones the Guardian claims on the 15th October 2021 that “a group of masked men stormed the offices of a renowned human rights organisation in Moscow on Thursday to disrupt the screening of Mr Jones, a British co-produced film about the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine that killed millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s.” This disruption, real or imagined, is seized upon by the Guardian to give another box-office puff to this film’s dreary lies.

Never one to spoil a good anti-communist yarn by such tedious journalistic virtues as sticking to facts or checking sources, the Guardian naturally swallows whole the version of Soviet history touted by the flim’s Polish director Agnieszka Holland. After all, what could be more beguiling than the tale of a plucky Welsh reporter risking his life in order to deliver an eye-witness account of a “genocide” engineered by Stalin in Ukraine? Unfortunately for the Guardian, however, the known facts tell a very different story. Continue reading “Guardian dusts off Mr Jones for another round of anti-Soviet lies” →

Soviet statues and the Superstitions of a Class in Terminal Decline

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, Russia, USSR

In the psyche of the modern imperialist mindset, there is often displayed a unique, often morbid fascination with Soviet era statues and monuments, especially when they can be found languishing in derelict or partly dismembered conditions. Writing in the Mail Online, Isabel Baldwin’s August 4th article “Spooky Stalins and Lonesome Lenins” covers a photo documentary exhibition currently being exhibited in Portland, Oregon, by American photographer Matthew Moore which perfectly encapsulates the superstitious and titillating nature of the bourgeois fixation with this theme. Continue reading “Soviet statues and the Superstitions of a Class in Terminal Decline” →

Corporate workplace burn-out culture is no match for Socialist emulation

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

On 29 June 2021 the Conversation website published an essay entitled “How a Soviet miner from the 1930s helped create today’s intense corporate workplace culture”, co-authored by Bogdan Costea and Peter Watt, two academics from Lancaster University. In the essay, the authors strive to draw supposed parallels between the  destructive “corporate workplace culture” of present-day capitalism and the Stakhanov movement of the 1930s. Whilst their depiction of the dehumanising character of social relations under capitalism is spot-on, the attempt to paint social relations in the USSR with the same brush is a grotesque calumny which vanishes in a puff of air when exposed to the historical record. Continue reading “Corporate workplace burn-out culture is no match for Socialist emulation” →

Dynamo engineering workers in Moscow listen to a radio broadcast telling the news of Stalin's death, 1953

Gatekeeper of Western Liberalism Given Nightmares by Archive Footage of Stalin’s Funeral

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

Tasked with the job of reviewing a film about the funeral of JV Stalin in 1953, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw clearly emerged from the viewing in a somewhat nervous frame of mind. He describes the State Funeral, an assembly of contemporary footage now worked up into a film, as a “very disquieting documentary, like a two-hour bad dream” full of “eerily fascinating scenes”. Continue reading “Gatekeeper of Western Liberalism Given Nightmares by Archive Footage of Stalin’s Funeral” →

Author Sean McMeekin and his book Stalin's War

Sympathy for the devil: Another bourgeois historian prefers fascism

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, China, History, USSR

Dominic Sandbrook reviewed a book (Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin) in the Sunday Times 21 March 2021 that was anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin and pro-Nazi in the extreme but, unlike the usual book reviews of such literary offal he disagrees with the book and finishes the review with the words;- “his book reads less like a serious scholarly history than a provocative thought experiment that has got completely out of hand.” If that was all he had said all would be well and good, but, alas, his ire is reserved only for McMeekin’s criticism of British and US imperialism and their policies, you know the type, we should have joined Hitler against the USSR, we should have done a deal with Japan to let them carry on the well documented slaughter of Chinese civilians (not that the UK and US did anything to stop that anyway).

Having ridiculed McMeekin for his attacks on western imperialism, though not his obvious preference for fascism, Sandbrook accepts every anti-Stalin slur without question, so, we thought, perhaps we should ask for some evidence, perhaps we should point out the stupidity that McMeekin (backed up by Sandbrook) is asking us to believe. Continue reading “Sympathy for the devil: Another bourgeois historian prefers fascism” →

Kalashnikov: The designer of the weapon of uprisings and revolutions.

Posted on by Red Youth History, USSR

Translated from an article originally written in Greek by Dimitris Patelis

(Associate Professor of Philosophy, Technical University of Crete, member of the Association of Revolutionary Theory) 

Young comrades have asked me to write something about Kalashnikov, who passed away on the 23rd December 2013. I had the good fortune to meet the legendary engineer-gunsmith Mikhail Kalashnikov in April 1998 in Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Urals. At 81 then, he impressed me with his incredible vitality, good-natured smile and the sparkle in his eyes. “Speak loudly to me, my son” – he would tell me, “I have been shooting all my life, working in shooting ranges and factories. I am hard of hearing… ”.

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was the seventeenth child of a rural family (eight out of the eighteen children survived). His biography provides a unique and at the same time illustrative picture of the history of the Soviet people, of the triumph and tragedy of the first country of early socialism (see: Patelis’ “Lessons from history. October Revolution: the contradictions of early socialism and the prospects of humanity”), but also the development of military technology (see: “Armed forces and war technique in history. Militarisation of science and technology”). Continue reading “Kalashnikov: The designer of the weapon of uprisings and revolutions.” →

Art in the service of anti-communism? Anything goes.

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

Expose this foul slander of the Red Army

Mark Kermode’s Guardian review of the latest Soviet-bashing film, ‘Dear Comrades!’, is nothing if not tasteful. (Dear Comrades! review – dreams and disillusionment of a Communist party stalwart, Mark Kermode, Guardian 17 January 2021)

The film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, is praised for this “disturbingly handsome feature” which “presents its bleakly crisp black-and-white images in a retro 4×3 frame”, whilst the cinematographer, Andrey Naydenov, is congratulated on his achievement of “an utterly convincing air of mounting chaos, brilliantly captured on multiple cameras”. But all this obsession with aesthetic form is merely to sugar  the pill of yet more bitter anti-communism. It is like complimenting Leni Riefenstal on her artful camera angles in “Triumph of the Will”. Continue reading “Art in the service of anti-communism? Anything goes.” →

Memorials of Bourgeois Fantasy

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

On the 23 February, one Andrew Roth, put pen to paper to write an article by the title of; “A lifetime sentence’: children of the gulag fight to return from exile.” The story he tells is of families with a “German heritage” being ‘rounded up’ during WW2 and sent to a closed village in the Kirov region, a gulag if you will. The name Gulag instantly throws up images of ragged prisoners being beaten, starved and worked to death because, over many years that is the picture that has been painted for us by people like Mr Roth. In reality, gulags were penal work camps, usually centred around a farm where prisoners could help to grow extra food for themselves and live out their sentences in homes rather than prison cells. The gulags were for criminals where the end goal was for them to be put back into society as useful members. This was a million miles from the chain gangs of the USA or the three men in a cell made for one in Britain. Continue reading “Memorials of Bourgeois Fantasy” →

Tatar Club, Arabic and Latin script, Moscow, 1935

“Soviet Union-Style” Decolonisation Means True Historical Emancipation

Posted on by Red Youth Britain, Education, History, USSR

The Universities minister and conservative MP for Chippenham, Michelle Donelan, compared recent widespread campaigns by universities to ‘decolonise’ their curricula to “Soviet Union style censorship.” (Universities minister compares ‘decolonisation’ of history to ‘Soviet Union-style’ censorship, The Independent, 28/02/2021)

Speaking to a Daily Telegraph podcast, Ms Donelan said: “It just doesn’t work when governments try to remove elements of history. Look at the Soviet Union, look at China. There are multiple examples where it’s been tried. It doesn’t work.”

The Minister’s words come in response to calls by some of the more vocal IDPOL students scattered across the country to remove certain study materials from the curriculum that are considered “triggering” to ethnic minorities for their glorification of the empire and white-washing of Britain’s blood-soaked history.

Continue reading ““Soviet Union-Style” Decolonisation Means True Historical Emancipation” →