Communism

Children read lianhuanhua outside the ‘Rental books library of Wang Fu street’, Beijing, 2 September 1966. AFP/Getty Images.

China’s Communist Comic Books

How did the People’s Republic of China cope with a literary canon filled with un-communist ideas? Comics called lianhuanhua were the answer, at least for a while.

The arrest of Aleksandr Podrebinek by plainclothes KGB men during a Baptist prayer meeting in April 1977. Smith Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

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

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?

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.

New Year’s Revolutions

Revisiting 1949, when Mao’s new world beckoned.

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?