One of the last articles Stalin ever read was A. A. Poletaev’s ‚V. I. Lenin and the American Workers Movement‘, published in a 1952 issue of Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History) devoted to Lenin.

Poletaev’s article seems to have been the only one that Stalin read in that issue of the journal and the first passage he marked was a 1907 citation from Lenin on the characteristics of the ‚Anglo-American workers‘ movement‘. There were four, and Stalin, as he often did, went to the trouble of numbering them: the fact that the proletariats of these two countries had no important social-national democratic tasks to fulfil; the complete subordination of the proletariat to bourgeois policy; the sectarianism and isolation of the socialist movement; and the lack of support for the left in elections.

—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 169-170.

Volodymyr Ishchenko in the New Statesman:

The four years of the Russia-Ukraine war have laid bare a profound crisis of knowledge regarding Ukraine, Russia, the post-Soviet region and the world at large. This epistemological failure is manifest in the way so many experts have been systematically wrong on virtually every major development – not merely military, but socio-political, economic and international. We witnessed the initial shock of invasion and erroneous forecasts of a swift Russian victory, followed by equally flawed expectations of inevitable Ukrainian triumph, internal Russian fragility and unwavering Western support. Analysts systematically overestimated Ukrainian unity and resilience while underestimating Russia’s authoritarian consolidation, blinding themselves to the deep-seated crisis of liberal democracy and the political fragmentation of Western elites.

These were not merely individual misjudgements, collective conformism or the by-product of war propaganda. Rather, they revealed fundamental flaws in our grand narratives of post-Soviet transformation. Neither the teleology of “democratisation” anticipated since 1989, nor the “decolonisation” buzzword embraced since 2022, nor the cyclical models of patronal politics could predict the grim reality looming in early 2026. The war revealed and escalated fundamental national, regional and global crises. It has also shattered our basic interpretive frameworks about what is happening and what to expect next. Ukraine had served as a broken mirror for a disintegrating world sliding into a frightening, unknown future.

In THX 1138 or Logan’s Run we are shown a 1970s depiction of a nightmarish future dystopia, but one from which it is possible to escape, a dystopia with tunnels which lead to some surface. Alas there are no such tunnels in our own 2026.

„But don’t trouble yourself here, Margarita. Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.“

—Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, (Penguin Books, Ltd., 1997), 382.

This is certainly Bulgakov’s sensibility in The Master and Margarita. Was this the experience of Soviet citizens? Would the book have enjoyed such popularity had it not had this core morality? This is not my experience of the world.

Spiegel:

Es sind Augenblicke, in denen deutlich wird: Hier stehen sich zwei Konzepte, zwei politische Ansätze gegenüber.

Then the one walking at the head openly took a black Mauser from under his coat, and another beside him took out the skeleton keys. Generally, those going to apartment no. 50 were properly equipped. Two of them had fine, easily unfolded silk nets in their pockets. Another of them had a lasso, another had gauze masks and ampoules of chloroform.

—Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, (Penguin Books, Ltd., 1997), 342.

Moscow’s finest prepare to arrest Woland.