ANZAC Day, April 25th is here again and once again Australians are being asked to stand together and declare “Lest we forget”. Every year though, during the avalanche of militaristic imagery and words that marks this “celebration”, I reflect how it hasn’t always been like this in Australia. During my lifetime I have watched ANZAC […]
by Robert Montgomery, 7th September 2019. While there is growing interest in socialism today, there’s much confusion about its meaning. Among theoretically informed socialists there’s also confusion. The word tends to be used impressionistically, a yardstick for classifying states where capitalism has been overturned. Such states are said to be either socialist or capitalist, either […]
Lenin’s Embalmers is the autobiography of Ilya Zbarsky (1913-2007) a chemist in the Soviet Union working on the preservation and display of Lenin’s body in Red Square, Moscow. Reading like a history of the 20th century his autobiography charts the history of his family, first under Tsarism, through the Russian Revolution, the purges and mass […]