Communism

The KGB After Stalin

In 1954 a new agency was founded: the KGB. While less violent and arbitrary than what it replaced, its insidious reach soon permeated Soviet society.

Beginning at the End

A childhood world of fallen heroes and shattered certainties experienced during the fall of communism in Albania.

A History of China’s Claim to Taiwan

Mao Zedong once said that Taiwan should be independent, but the Chinese Communist Party has since changed its mind on the ‘renegade province’. How Chinese is Taiwan?

The First Soviet in Ireland

Striking for better working conditions and equal pay, the attendants and patients of Monaghan asylum took over the hospital and hoisted a red flag. 

The ‘Stans’ Turn 30

Is Kazakhstan 30 or 556 years old? As the five states of Central Asia celebrate three decades of independence, they prefer the glories of the ancient past to the legacy of Soviet rule. 

Rebels in Rubber Soles

The denizens of an Asian underground who waged a clandestine struggle against European colonial powers.

The Forging of a Communist

The historian Eric Hobsbawm kept faith with the Marxist orthodoxies of his youth even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956, of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Why?