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STEPHEN GOWANS—The Stone and Kuznick view is, really, rather quite silly. They believe that Mao and Kim decided to become guerrillas, and Stalin, a Bolshevik, because these were routes to the acquisition of personal power, self-aggrandizement, and iron-fisted control. Yet, at the time, guerrilla and underground revolutionary were hardly the most promising career paths for people who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement. If Stalin really lusted after these things, why didn’t he link up with Tsarist forces, rather than the Bolsheviks, which until mid-1917 were a minor political force that no one (including many Bolsheviks) expected to take power?

As the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia rages, the imperialist establishment is increasingly united behind a strategy of escalation. Brian and Eugene Puryear trace the development of this increasingly hostile approach over the years and decades; and review the most important recent military, economic and political developments in the conflict. Eugene Puryear is the host of the BreakThrough News podcast The Punch Out, and co-host of the BT live video show The Freedom Side.

S. JONAS—”Many critics of the Soviet Union conveniently forget that the Soviet experience was shaped in a significant part by what someday will come to be known as ‘The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union, 1917-1992.'”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.

Since then YouTube has announced that it has suppressed videos by Russian state media channels so that they’ll be seen by fewer people in accordance with its openly acknowledged policy of algorithmically censoring unauthorized content, as well as de-monetizing all such videos on the platform. Google and Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta both banned Russian state media from running ads and monetizing on their platforms in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Twitter announced a pause on ads in both Russia and Ukraine.

“Glad to see action from tech companies to reign in Russian propaganda and disinformation after my letter to their CEOs yesterday,” Warner tweeted on Saturday. “These are important first steps, but I’ll keep pushing for more.”

Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press, which described the event as an uprising by “political dissidents” against an “oppressive bureaucratic regime” in the pursuit of democracy and freedom of expression. The definition of “freedom” pursued and the political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the tales spun by the New York Times and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents.