This work of a lifetime presents high-octane, high-political drama – and attempts to rehabilitate the ‘bourgeois’ provisional government that preceded the Bolsheviks Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924 – By Robert Service Reviewed by Pratinav Anil This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or… Read More Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution
By Deepanshu Mohan There is a solar flare of deep inter-state conflict, conquest, and siege erupting all over the globe. Russia and Ukraine have been embroiled in a long drawn, painful war for over a year and a half. After a 10-month blockade, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Sept. 19, claiming the enclave in a day and causing nearly the entire… Read More On Justice and Sovereignty: The Limits of International Justice Architecture in a World Marred by Conflict and Conquest
Carole Cadwalladr The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila. A Novaya… Read More Nobel Peace Laureate: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’ (2021)
US oil and gas multinationals are facing fresh questions over their trade with Russia after customs records revealed that more than $7.1m (£5.7m) worth of equipment manufactured by Halliburton has been imported into the country since it announced the end of its Russian operations. Last September Halliburton, one of the world’s largest providers of products and services… Read More Halliburton equipment worth $7.1m imported into Russia in past year
NB: What enables someone who has been a communist all his life become an ultra-chauvinist overnight? What lies beneath the slippery nature of ideology, and what is the difference between political philosophy and ideology? Why do Leninist parties in power enforce single-party dictatorships? What is the communist understanding of law and justice – is it… Read More Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism
Please let’s put much, much more of our future security in the hands of people who treat war and the fallout from invasion like a broadband contract… it remains one of the more pathetic tragedies of our age that Musk is seen as a superhero analogue – but perhaps also an inevitable one, given that… Read More And then Elon Musk said there’ll be no more war – not via his satellite. Aren’t we lucky to have the world in his hands?
Yan Shenkman A few months ago, I received a message from a random social media account in Russia, which asked me to sign an open letter in support of Russian political prisoner Azat Miftakhov. I knew the man behind the account, which has since been deleted; these days, he is ‘deep underground’, trying to stay… Read More Russia wants this young anarchist to stay in prison forever
NB: This is an astonishing declaration, The most outstanding Rusian conservative of the twentieth century, an ex-Red Army officer, imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years for criticising Stalin, expelled from his homeland, and winner of the Nobel Prize, still invoking the democratic spirit of the soviets of 1917; and asking for civil dialogue amongst… Read More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
First posted October 11, 2012 Paper presented to the International Conference: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Course Of His Life In The Context Of Greater Time 5-6 December 2008; Moscow NB: This is a brilliant and thought-provoking essay on the historic, literary and philosophical significance of the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the foremost witnesses of the history of… Read More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival. By Madhavan Palat
First posted March 26, 2014 The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool The Indian Council for Historical Research Foundation Day At the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library / 27 March 2014 at 5.30 pm Dostoevsky was a remarkably modern thinker who may seem to have laboured hard to obscure the fact. He grappled with the… Read More The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
After the truth-shower 