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When the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies drove their tanks into Prague in 1968, crushing the nascent pro democracy movement led by Alexander Dubcek, the last pretense of there being anything emancipatory about Soviet Communism disappeared. Instead, the USSR and its sattelite regimes were shorn of any ideological credibility and now faced sullen and uncooperative populations across the eastern bloc whose only interest in communism was whether it could economically deliver. The next two de
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Reading Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick (one of my favourite social histories of the USSR, as regular listeners will know), one thing becomes abundantly clear about the Soviet view of time and history itself. The historical and social state that the party would describe as communism was always something to be eventually reached and never actually experienced. In the 1920s and 1930s, party members and leaders would make pronouncements about how far of, chronologically, communism was, and give reasons as to why it was not yet attained. Often those explanations were that saboteurs, enemy spies and enemy classes were holding…
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In the summer of 1940 the British faced supply shortages in the Middle East and were vastly outnumbered by Italian forces in Libya. Archibald Wavell, one of Churchill’s least favourite generals, came under intense pressure from his Prime Minister for a swift and impressive victory. HIs opposite number Count Graziani quickly realised the Italian Army was poorly equipped for desert war, and despite its size would struggle to achieve a decisive victory. The Indian Fourth Division was deployed in th
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In the summer of 1940, German successes in Europe had been based on a very particular model of interaction between air and ground forces. The planned invasion of southern England and the seizure of London envisioned by Hitler presented the German airforce with entirely new problems. Some German commanders believed that the Luftwaffe alone could defeat the British, but it was Eric Raeder, the head of Hitler’s navy, who wanted an amphibious invasion to showcase the power of the Kriegsmarine. Hitle
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During the forced programme of industrialisation in the late 1950s in China, known as the Great Leap Forward, China’s peasants came under intense pressure from the violent Maoist state to produce impossible grain quotas. Villages had already undergone the process of communalisation, where the basic structures of communal and even family life were torn apart and peasants were taken from the land in huge numbers to work on poorly planned vanity projects. In villages, kitchens and cooking utensils