Eastern Europe

Reviews: Rushdie, Kowalewski, Heffer, Bornstein and Richardson, Parisot, Badayev and Cliff

Jim Denham reviews "The Jaguar Smile", by Salman Rushdie. Martin Thomas reviews "Rendez-nous nos usines", by Zbigniew Kowalewski. Stan Crooke reviews "Labour's Future: socialism or SDP mark II", by Eric Heffer. Bruce Robinson reviews "War and the International", by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson. Jane Ashworth reviews "Johnny Come Lately: a short history of the condom", by Jeanette Parisot. Jack Cleary reviews "Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma", by A Y Badayev with an introduction by Tony Cliff. Click here to download pdf .

Triumph of the bourgeoisie?

Click here to download pdf. The fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe brought a triumph for the bourgeoisie. But with what contradictions, and for how long?

The new left opposition in Eastern Europe

Click here to download pdf. Describing and discussing the beginnings of socialist organisation in Eastern Europe after the fall of Stalinist rule there.

Poland: A Polish Petrograd

Zbigniew Kowalewski, a former leader of the left-wing in Solidarnosc, describes how Solidarnosc fought for workers' control in Lodz in 1980-1. This is an abridged translation of a chapter from his book, 'Rendez-nous nos usines'. Click here to download pdf .

Gorbachev Through Polish Eyes

A former leader of the left wing of Solidarnosc, now living in France, talks to Martin Thomas about Gorbachev's reforms in the light of the Polish experience, and about the basic problems of the Stalinist societies. Click here to download pdf .

Class struggle in Poland

On 27 November Ed Maltby attended a small protest in front of the Polish Embassy in London in solidarity with workers and trade union activists who have been sacked from the Cegielski factory in Poznan. The Cegielski plant is one of the best known factories in Poland. It produces various types of engines. This summer 20 per cent of workers of the factory were sacked. On 23 October four thousand of workers demonstrated in Poznan against the layoffs in Cegielski. The protest was organised by the Industrial Workers of the World. Bartek, a Polish comrade who is a member of the IWW and the Polish...

Timeline

Chronology 1979 December: USSR invades Afghanistan, where it fears that the pro-USSR government is about to be defeated by traditionalist and Islamist rebellion. The invasion becomes “Russia’s Vietnam war”. 1980–1 Mass workers’ movement, Solidarnosc, erupts in Poland. It is banned after a military coup in December 1981, but continues to exist underground. 1985 March: After two brief periods of office for elderly conservatives following the death of Leonid Brezhnev (in 1982, after 18 years of rule), Mikhail Gorbachev is appointed General Secretary of the USSR’s ruling party, with a mandate to...

Introduction

It is 20 years since the destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of then divided Germany signalled that Russia’s control over Eastern Europe was collapsing. Russia had held Eastern Europe in a brutal grip for four and a half decades, since the end of the Second World War. It had used the most brutal and bloody methods of imperialist control to maintain that grip. In East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 it used as much military force as was required to beat down revolt against old-style Stalinist, and Russian, rule. The threat of Russian invasion and re...

The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions

We have seen a tremendous series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, the latest in Romania during Christmas week [1989]. At the beginning of the week the Ceaucescus were in full control. By its end they lay crumpled like rag dolls, dead beside a bullet-marked wall. People after people has risen in revolt against the dictatorship of Stalinist bureaucrats — Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians — and sloughed off the dictators like so much dead and putrid skin. Millions of people rallied in streets and squares all across Eastern Europe, in the countries that have been held in...

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