Communism

A soldier beneath a photo of Chiang Kai-shek inside the army gymnasium, Taipei, 1950s.

Between China and a Hard Place

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

Bruree Workers Soviet Mills, in Bruree, County Limerick, declared soviet on 26 August 1921. Wiki Commons/Limerick Museum.

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. 

Tractor with Stalin’s portrait, Uzbekistan, c.1940.

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. 

Wang Jingwei, Zhang Tailei and Mikhail Borodin, c.1925. Collection of C. H. Foo and Y. W. Foo. Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol. Wang Jingwei, wearing a white changpao, seated second from the right. Borodin is second from the left. Zhang Tailei sits between them, and was Borodin's interpreter in this period.

Rebels in Rubber Soles

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

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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?

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The Man in Carriage No. 2013

Leo Steveni was a British officer based in St Petersburg at the time of the Russian Revolution. He became an active eyewitness to the chaos of the Civil War that followed.

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Russia's Grassroots Revolution

Underneath the sweeping history of the Russian Revolution is another story, one told through the lesser-known people, moments and objects of a world in transformation.